The Beginning of My Healing from Trauma
By Anh Lin
I was rendered hopeless and helpless by the cyclical trauma I endured throughout my life. Even if I knew there were options to leave my miserable state of being, I couldn’t bring myself to escape the trauma. I was so intimately familiar with my pain that the idea of anything different felt scarier than the pain itself.
Have you ever felt that way? Perhaps you’ve only recently realized that something in your past was not okay, but at the time, you didn’t know any better. You were not equipped to protect yourself from ongoing abuse. You keep replaying the same questions in your head: How did I let this happen to me? Why can’t I just get over this? Am I the only one who feels this way? These sentiments are often shared by those who have been rendered helpless by their situations.
You are not crazy for feeling the ever-compounding tension of regret, anger, and sorrow because of your painful past. It is okay to grieve the unjust scenarios that never should have happened. If you have trouble moving forward from the anger and grief, however, and find yourself fearing the same scenarios replaying in different relationships, you may be traumatized.
What Is Trauma?
The term trauma refers to an emotional response to a distressful experience, usually one that has overwhelmed our ability to cope. Typically, our nervous system only floods our bodies with adrenaline when it detects danger, and then it goes back to normal when the danger goes away. However, if we are unable to cope with the distress, the effects of our fear can be lodged inside our bodies and resurface whenever we sense a similar threat. This is what is known as a “trigger.” Chronic exposure to situations that render us fearful and helpless can change our brain chemistry to be on a continual high-alert mode. Our nervous system becomes overly sensitive and causes us to react to triggers in disproportionate ways.
Unfortunately, if our bodies are stuck in survival mode and have a higher baseline of anxiety, we can suffer from insomnia, depression, irritation, and feelings of helplessness, as well as a plethora of other negative impacts. Each person responds to trauma differently, depending on the type of trauma we endured, the age at which we experienced the trauma, and a combination of nature and nurture (our genetic dispositions and how we were raised). Some people get violently triggered by their trauma, while others shut down.
When I was in high school, my body knew I couldn’t fight back against the people who hurt me, so in a subconscious effort to survive, I engaged in countless dissociative activities. Believe it or not, even self-destructive tendencies are the body’s vain efforts to protect itself. I continued to self-sabotage to numb the pain. I even had moments when I thought I would shut down completely.
My Escape
One Saturday night, I was so intoxicated at a house party that I lost all sense of where I was and couldn’t even sense the temperature around me. Toward the end of the party, I remember stumbling into the back seat of a stranger’s car. The car quickly filled up with my friends, all of whom were just as intoxicated as I was. The driver turned up the techno music and took off into the night. I was suddenly overwhelmed by the emptiness in my life and began sobbing in the back seat. The music blasted right over me as though I had no voice at all.
Then a very clear, poignant thought entered my mind: Nobody truly loves you. I had never felt more terrified of loneliness than at that very moment. I cried harder for help, in much the same way as an infant wailing. Miraculously, someone responded to my cries.
In my mind’s eye, I saw the painting of Jesus that my mother had hung in my childhood home. I had never really thought about that altar before because I didn’t share my mother’s Catholic faith. Although I was forced to take catechism classes as a child, I was too young to understand the religious teachings and sermons—especially because they were in formal Vietnamese, of which I had only a very elementary grasp. I stopped attending my Catholic church altogether when my relationship with my mother fell apart and adopted the agnostic worldview. Yet when I was in my darkest place, I felt that Jesus had met me through that vision.
My cries were calmed when I saw this painting in my mind. I then noticed a feeling of comfort washing over me, from the top of my head down to my shoulders, cloaking my arms and waist, and continuing all the way down to my toes. It felt like a warm, all-encompassing, full-body hug. I was swaddled in it for what felt like the longest, most soothing minute of my life. I had never experienced that kind of comfort before.
After that divine hug was lifted, I completely snapped out of my intoxicated mess and asked the driver to take me home. That following school day, I approached the only Christian friend I knew and told her about my experience in that car. Her eyes lit up when I mentioned the painting of Jesus, and she invited me to her family’s church to learn more about him. It was nothing short of an act of grace that I was led to this specific friend, who shouldered my story without judgment and kindly invited me into her spiritual home.
That Sunday, I attended my very first Protestant church service, heard the gospel preached in a way I could understand for the first time, and accepted Christ as my Lord and Savior. To meet Jesus felt like I was given a second chance at life. He empowered me to break out of my self-sabotaging cage and start building a life that felt more like a sanctuary than a sinkhole. This experience marked the beginning of my journey back to wholeness.
No Longer Enslaved by Trauma
Sometimes God allows us to reach our lowest point so we can finally look up toward him. I had no intentions of turning to religion for help, let alone becoming a devout Christian. Yet when I was at my lowest point, Jesus heard my agonizing cries and came to my rescue. He was attuned to my needs and comforted me when I was at my most difficult to console. His compassion gave me hope and allowed me to live in true freedom.
Jesus essentially led me away from learned helplessness and victimhood, just like what the researchers had to do with the dogs in a cruel experiment noted by Bessel van der Kolk in his book The Body Keeps Score. He explained, “The only way to teach traumatized dogs to get off the electric grids when the doors were open was to repeatedly drag them out of their cages so they could physically experience how they could get away.”
And that was exactly what happened when I encountered Jesus in the back seat of that car. I had a visceral experience of freedom—the comforting, spiritual hug—that opened my mind to the possibility of healing. Without that life-changing encounter with Jesus, I wouldn’t have known how to break the cycle of trauma in my life. I would have behaved just like the helpless dogs, whimpering in my own fear while staring at a cage door that was swinging wide open.
Although my life wasn’t instantly fixed after I came to believe in Jesus, my faith in him helped me endure through the heartbreaks that ensued. My redeeming relationship with Jesus allowed me to reflect on past events in a healthier way and make sense of the difficult relationships that pained me.
I slowly discovered what it meant to feel worthy and cared for rather than worthless and burdensome. I learned that my worth was not based on what my mother thought about me or the way my first love had treated me, but that I had intrinsic worth because God had created me out of his great love. I was created by love and for love—what a thought!
As I journeyed with Jesus through the difficult seasons thereafter, I became increasingly more secure in my relationship with him, myself, and others. Perhaps this is what healing is all about, at least on this side of heaven. A life with Jesus doesn’t mean a trouble-free path, but one filled with obstacles that I can bravely overcome without giving in to fear.
My encounter with Jesus marked the start of a new journey toward building a solid foundation of love. I learned so many beautiful lessons along the way about humanity and healing that I’m eager to share with you. I’m not here to diagnose you, but rather to disrupt the dysfunctional norm of what you’re experiencing and help you find a life-giving pathway forward. I pray that this will be the beginning of your healing journey too.
May the God of compassion meet you right here and now and cover you with his reassuring embrace. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” —Matthew 11:28
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Adapted from Forever Home: Moving Beyond Brokenness to Build a Strong and Beautiful Life by Costi W. Hinn. Click here to learn more about this book.
From the creator of The Abundant Life Devotional Journal and the popular YouTube channel Girl and The Word, Anh Lin's unique blend of biblical teaching and personal storytelling helps you build the strong, peaceful, abundant life you've always dreamed of—inside and out.
Many of us long for lasting peace and stability, whether we are healing from painful memories, grieving a recent loss, or simply trying to find a quiet path in a chaotic world. In Forever Home, you can get to the root of "why does this keep happening to me?" by learning the truth behind your thoughts and the role they play in your current reality.
As Anh vulnerably shares how she rebuilt her own "safe house" after the trauma of her early life, you will discover the five powerful steps to rebuilding your forever home:
- How to remove the unsafe patterns of your past
- How to renew the foundation of your life
- How to rebuild the framework of your resilience
- How to reinforce the integrity of your boundaries
- How to restore the beauty that God promised you
It's time to uproot the things from your past, live free from the pain that's holding you back, and experience the abundant life that God designed just for you. Welcome home.
Anh Lin is an interior stylist and the founder of TheHoogaShop.com. She created the faith and lifestyle blog Girl and The Word in 2014 while studying English at UC Berkeley. Anh lives with her husband and corgi in a renovated 1940s fixer-upper.
