When the Wounds Go Deep: Trusting God With the Places That Still Hurt

Some wounds didn't start in your marriage.

They started years earlier.

Childhood rejection, abandonment, criticism, betrayal, disappointment, neglect—and then marriage has a way of exposing what was already there.

In this episode, Chelsey shares why deep wounds often create deep patterns of self-protection, how God uses marriage to reveal what He intends to heal, and why healing is less about trying harder and more about surrendering the deepest places of your heart to Christ.

Because your wound may explain your reaction.

But it doesn't determine your future.

God is still in the business of making all things new.

Transcript

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Welcome back to the High Level Wife podcast. I am Chelsea Holm, your hostess, and we do marriage God's way here. That means right order and living that out in actually how we spend our time, energy, resources, and capacity every single day as stewards and not as owners. All right. So let's talk about the deep, deep wounds that are in marriage. So there's a lot, right? And it can come all the way from childhood and on. But are we actually willing and are we able to address them, to get to the deeper thing, the thing that are the thing that's actually the thing, the thing, the receipt that is interpreting the data that we're receiving today, the things that our husband says to us, our spouse says to us or or does what's happening around us. Some hurts, some hurts are paper cuts. You know what's funny about hurts and cuts. They look like they would rhyme, but they don't. I don't know why my brain went that way, but it did. So some hurts are like paper cuts where other wounds go really deep. It could be childhood rejection, abandonment, neglect, criticism, betrayal, years of disappointment. And marries layered on top of childhood hurts. And suddenly a spouse says one thing and it touches a wound that was already there. Let me give you an example of this. So I am the one and only of my mom and dad. They were married young and they divorced pretty quickly after I was born. And both parents remarried shortly thereafter. Um, and so I have a lot of siblings, but none of them are full blood from my mom and my dad. And so from early on, I had this belief that, or this wound that I didn't belong, right? It was a lie that I in an identity that I was in agreement with that I was functioning from. And so that then I interpreted all of the information and things going around me through that wound, right? And so there was this time where I had two of my own kids at the time, and I went to King's Island with my dad and my stepmom and my three brothers, and we were getting food um at Chick-fil-A, which is astronomically expensive inside the park. Um, but we were ordering food, and you know, my parents they ordered for all their kids uh and my kids, um, but in the chaos, you know, they didn't order for me. And I interpreted that as, well, of course, because I don't actually belong here, right? Like I'm part of everything, but don't actually go anywhere. Um, and that like led to a whole string of just lies that I was feeding on at the time. And so that's where these deep wounds they they they inform everything. And until we're aware of where they came from and identifying them and handing them over to the Lord, we will continue to stay stuck in these patterns. But here's the core truth that I want you to understand today is that the depth of the wound does not determine God's ability to heal it. Because what we usually do is we either ignore it, saying that was years ago, we justify it by saying, Well, anyone would react this way, or we build a life around protecting it, and that's where many marriages get stuck. Marriage becomes the revealer, and this is why it's so uncomfortable because marriage did not create every wound, but it often reveals them. And a husband cannot heal your childhood wound, and a wife cannot heal your husband's childhood wound. Only Christ can. But marriage has a way of exposing, shining a light on the areas that God wants to do a deeper work of healing and freedom in. So God exposed what was in Israel's heart in Deuteronomy. I'm reading Deuteronomy right now, so you know you guys are gonna get a lot of references to Deuteronomy. But He did this not to shame them, but to refine them. The test revealed what needed healing, right? Or needed addressing those deep roots, because deep wounds create deeper seats, and deeper seats create powerful reactions. Sometimes your spouse says something today, and your body reacts to something from 20 years ago, okay, and nobody knows what's going on, right? You you can feel that overreaction to what's right in front of you. And your husband can recognize that what just happened, right? But but nobody knows what to do about it. It's where self-protection becomes identity because many people stop saying, I was hurt, and start saying, This is who I am. No, that is where you learn to survive, not who God created you to be. This is why inside high-level wife, you will never hear me say, Become the better version of yourself. No, no, no, no. We don't do that. We actually take off all the things by the power of the Holy Spirit and are willing surrender and full surrender to the work he's doing in us to return to the deepest self that he created us to be, who he designed you to be, with the specific talents, and qualities and traits and personality. Okay, God never asks us to be someone else. Okay, he never he never asks us to be someone else in the sense of like on our own power of trying to become someone else. No, what are we what are we we told to do in scripture time and time again? Colossians 3. Put off the old self, be renewed, put on the new self. Notice that God never asks us to pretend the wound isn't there, or he doesn't ask us to pretend to be somebody we're not, he asks us not to live from it, from the wound or from the old self. And understand that healing is not forgetting, it's not pretending or minimizing or excusing, right? Or just forcing right past it. No, that's how we get wives who are completely disassociated and disconnected. Healing is bringing the wound into the light again and again and again and again until God has fully healed that hurt, that wound, until God's truth becomes louder than the pain. And there's a reason why why healing takes time. It's because God is not just healing thoughts, He's healing beliefs, emotions, reactions, patterns, memories, and identity at its deepest core root. Right? These are like the weeds in your garden where you pull up everything you can see, but then if you've ever pulled out that one weed where it like comes up with a long string of roots that all the other weeds were attached to, that's the healing that God is doing here. He's not just pulling out what we see, though that's the discomfort that we're experiencing in marriage. That most people will just go to another marriage before they actually willingly sit with that discomfort to be healed. Right? So this is where vulnerability matters because every act of obedience, every act of trust, every act of openness, what that does is it creates a new receipt. I was just on high-level wife Bible study this morning, and one of the gals was sharing about, you know, for the hurts that she and her husband have experienced, they had a moment where she was asked about something that had caused hurts in the past, but was happening again in the present, and her husband wanted to ask her about it rather than just dwelling on it, right? It was a lie, and so he wanted to get to the truth. And she could have also reacted the same way to hide or to withdraw or to be offended, but she didn't. She willingly went forward and created a new receipt, more evidence of her walking in the new self. And guess what happened? Oneness was restored. He actually came and said, I'm so sorry for asking you about that. You know, I know we're rebuilding trust right now, and I need to honor and trust that you are a new creation, right? This is creating a new receipt, and so much good came from that. That's another episode for another day. Um, but the goal isn't to never get triggered again. This is why the world falls short. The world always falls short, is always gonna fall short, okay? It can't tell us how to live our lives because it has no idea. Um because it says cut off anything that triggers you, right? This is where we got safe spaces on campuses. That's ridiculous. That's not real life, that's not reality. The goal is that the trigger no longer controls you because you take ownership of it and you put on a spirit of willingness to live fully surrendered and vulnerable at the deepest level, so God can do what only God can do. Your wound may explain your reaction 100%, right? Your body is telling you something, your body is giving you information, but it does not excuse remaining there forever because Christ came to make all things new. So if you're staying stuck in the wound, you're allowing yourself to stay stuck there in these frustrating cycles. You're not allowing the transformative power of the gospel, the finished work of Christ on the cross, to do a mighty work in and through you. So let me say that again. Your wound may explain your reaction, but it does not excuse remaining there forever. And you need to know this Christ came to make all things new. So maybe the reason God keeps highlighting that same area isn't because he's disappointed in right, the power of the cross, what Jesus did, put to shame and disarmed the demonic powers of this world, right? That shame disarmed it unless we give it the power back. Okay, so maybe God keeps highlighting the same area because he loves you too much to leave it unhealed. Unity is the goal, oneness is the goal, intimacy is the goal, not just for us in marriage, but it's a reflection of God's ultimate goal for all of us, his children, the body of Christ, his temple to be restored and reconciled to him in heaven. So the wound may go deep, but God's healing goes deeper. And the places you keep wanting to hide may be the very places that Jesus wants to restore. I'll see you on the next episode.