Ezekiel Ministry

Sharing the Light and Love of God to a Dark World
 

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Healing the Lost

There was a man who was so disturbed by the sight of his own shadow and so displeased with his own footsteps that he was determined to get rid of both. The method he hit upon was to run away from them.

So he got up and ran. But every time he put his foot down there was another step, while his shadow kept up with him without the slightest difficulty.

He attributed his failure to the fact that he was not running fast enough. So he ran faster and faster, without stopping, until he finally dropped dead.

He failed to realize that if he merely stepped into the shade, his shadow would vanish, and if he sat down and stayed still, there would be no more footsteps.

Like footsteps or shadows, losses don’t go away. Healing only comes
when they are acknowledged and assimilated.

  • What do you fear losing the most?
  • Do you run faster to get away from yourself?

Everyone has attachments that they do not want to lose. Some of these losses are:

  • Important Persons
  • Parts of ourselves
  • External Objects
  • Our pain

What have you lost that you need to grieve?

A trauma is a loss, whether a real loss or a threatened one. We experience a loss when we are deprived of or have to go without something that we needed, wanted or expected.

A loss may be sudden, gradual, or prolonged. It can be partial, complete or uncertain or unending. It can occur singularly or be multiple and cumulative.

Past losses and separations have an impact on current losses, separations and attachments. And all of these factors bear on fear of future losses and our capacity to make future attachments.

Identifying an ungrieved loss is a beginning of getting free of its often-painful hold on us.

As we start healing, we are going to have to grieve the loss of our self-will. If we do not, the healing process will stop until we deal with this loss.

Have you lost your self-will yet?

To work through the pain of our grieving, we experience our feelings as they come up for us, without trying to change them. Grief is active work. It is mental and emotional labor, exhaustive and exhausting. It is so painful that we often try to avoid the pain around it. Some ways that we try to avoid grieving include:

  • Continuing to deny the loss.
  • Intellectualizing about it.
  • Stuffing our feelings.
  • Macho mentality (I’m strong; I can handle it by myself.)
  • Using alcohol and other drugs.

Even through we may experience temporary relief by such methods, not feeling our grief only prolongs our pain. Overall, we consume as much energy in avoiding grieving as we would if we went ahead and grieved our loss. When we feel something, we decrease its power over us. When we experience a loss or trauma, it stirs up energy within us that needs to be discharged. When we do not discharge this energy, the stress builds up to a state of chronic distress. With no release this chronic distress is stored within us as discomfort or tension that may at first be difficult for us to recognize. We feel it or experience it through a wide range of manifestations, such as chronic anxiety, tension, fear or nervousness, anger or resentment, sadness, emptiness, unfulfillment, confusion, guilt, shame.

To complete our grief work takes time. The bigger the loss, the longer the time generally required.

As we start to grieve our loss, there are some basics that we must look at before we can be healed.

  • Identify the losses.
  • Identify our needs.
  • Identify our feelings and share them.
  • Work on core issues.

 

If we are to continue with our healing, we must come to terms with the losses. Without this, we cannot find the new self that God promised.

“Only people who avoid love can avoid grief. The point is to learn from it and remain vulnerable to love.” John Brantner