There’s an old adage that says what you love about your spouse before marriage is the same thing that you’ll eventually hate after getting married. I cringe at the harshness of the word ‘hate’, so would use despise or loathe as slightly more nuanced words. For anyone who’s been married more than a few years, and who has a modicum of self-awareness, you know the truth of that adage.

I think a similar thing happens regarding the growing up process. What science has learned over the last century from back around Freud’s time is that the internal, unconscious survival skills we learned as children become the internal straightjackets of our lives as adults. For example, If I had an angry, volatile father I learn to shut down my body and thoughts to survive and become a quiet, unassuming person who’s afraid to express him or herself. Or if I grow up with emotionally remote parents, I might never learn to express myself and then am unable to feel, let alone express my emotions as an adult. Or I grow up overwhelmed by highly emotionally and unrestrained parents, I might never learn how to control my own emotions, thus pushing people away as an adult with my erratic emoting. Or my parents are cold and distant and I’ve grown up to be a people-pleaser.

Thankfully in the last half century, we’ve gained the knowledge to understand many of those internal dynamics and how they shape us and have developed ways to become free from and heal their undue influence, let alone the deep scars that may have disfigured us internally. Yet even with the right resources, the learned behaviors are difficult to undo, especially if they began at a very early age or resulted from trying to overcome serious trauma. They are like deeply etched tattoo’s, covering our bodies, some cut and inked so deep that you’d have to lose a limb to get rid of them. 

I distinctly remember a lightbulb that suddenly shone in my head in 2001 when I first dove into a deeper level of counseling. I had finished sharing some of my life’s story with a counselor, acknowledging several unhealthy aspects of myself, even then feeling the deep shame and cutting pain from those behaviors and thoughts. The counselor then shared an unexpected revelation, one that no one had ever told me. It was this: I didn’t need to beat myself up about those behaviors and thoughts because they were necessary, God-given skills that helped me survive childhood until my adult was strong enough to take charge. If I hadn’t learned those behaviors and coping mechanisms – like stuffing down hurts, hiding angry feeling, retreating into an interior life, being hypervigilant around people, becoming a people-pleaser, and conversely, taking on a mantle of self-righteousness, since no one else offered me positive validation – then I would have died, not physically, but psychely. Those behaviors and choices were the necessary tools that allowed me to survive.

That was the good news.

The bad news? When I became an adult, there was no checkpoint or rite of passage that told me it was ok to set those potent tools aside, that their usefulness was outlived and they weren’t needed any longer. Heck, I didn’t even recognize them as tools and learned behaviors that I could put aside! They’d become part of me. They also became an invisible barrier that locked me in a prison of my own making. It took several years and dedicated effort with counseling to identify and deconstruct them such that I could make healthier choices about my behaviors and choices, especially with my family.

Despite the healing work, the ragged scars and the deeply etched tattoos on body and soul did not disappear. Their power over me had, but their disfiguring still influenced my responses. Giving up the survival tools did not make them vanish, it only eliminated their power over me. The automatic reactions remained just that, requiring a choice of will to behave differently. For instance, I now choose to share hurts for the sake of restoration. My hypervigilance is automatic, but I now quickly let the protective vetting drop away. Self-righteous judgement is still my first reaction, though I see it quickly and let it go.

My experience is that the scars and tattoos of life, when healed over and faded, are a still-visible record of disfigurement from those experiences. I don’t think that’s bad news. They help me to strive to make better choices, ones that engage myself and others in positive ways.

I think they’ll finally disappear when we cross over to be with God in a new world with a restored body and soul. I say that as a believer in God, where life is not an end in itself, but a journey where full healing and restoration will not happen until we pass through the veil.