We are not meant to stay wounded. We are supposed to move through our tragedies and challenges and to help each other move through the many painful episodes of our lives. By remaining stuck in the power of our wounds, we block our own transformation. We overlook the greater gifts inherent in our wounds — the strength to overcome them and the lessons that we are meant to receive through them. Wounds are the means through which we enter the hearts of other people. They are meant to teach us to become compassionate and wise.

Trauma shapes all our lives, in so many ways. We are walking wounds, but I am not sure any of us know quite how to talk about it.

All of us have been wounded in some way, whether by violence, disease or other personal tragedy. But though we can never pretend we have not been touched by adversity, we can refuse to be held by it.

I have since become convinced that when we define ourselves by our wounds, we burden and lose our physical and spiritual energy and open ourselves to the risk of illness.

How strange that we should ordinarily feel compelled to hide our wounds when we are all wounded! Community requires the ability to expose our wounds and weaknesses to our fellow creatures. It also requires the ability to be affected by the wounds of others... But even more important is the love that arises among us when we share, both ways, our woundedness.

As more people have found the courage to break through shame and speak about woundedness in their lives, we are now subjected to a mean-spirited cultural response, where all talk of woundedness is mocked. The belittling of anyone's attempt to name a context within which they were wounded, were made a victim, is a form of shaming. It is psychological terrorism. Shaming breaks our hearts. All individuals who are genuinely seeking well-being within a healing context realize that it is important to that process not to make being a victim a stance of pride or a location from which to simply blame others. We need to speak our shame and our pain courageously in order to recover. Addressing woundedness is not about blaming others; however, it does allow individuals who have been, and are, hurt to insist on accountability and responsibility both from themselves and from those who were the agents of their suffering as well as those who bore witness. Constructive confrontation aids our healing.

Trauma feeds the fearful, wounded aspect of the ego and drives us to make decisions based on that pain. In contrast, when intuition guides our decisions and communication, we act from a place of love and steadiness.

If a man does not know the wounds of his own soul, he can deny not just his own pain, but also be unmoved by the suffering of other people. More than that, he will tend to put his wound onto others. He may only be able to see the wound that secretly troubles him when he forcefully projects it into someone else, in forms of abuse or violence.

This is important because our behavior is affected by our assumptions or our perceived truths. We make decisions based on what we think we know.

Do you know what it feels like to be wounded
and told that you caused the
wound to yourself by choosing to be
where
the harm landed?

In our own woundedness, we can become sources of life for others.

There is no weapon more dangerous than a wound, and being wounded there are things we have all done that we would almost would rather die that face into, but no one heals what they refuse to look at. So when asked if I believe in “good people”, I say I believe in people who are committed to knowing their own wounds intimately. People who read their wound’s diaries, who follow their wounds out windows, down ladders asking “Where are you going? What do you need? How can I intervene before a cruel thing is done or said?

Without your wounds where would your power be? It is your melancholy that makes your low voice tremble into the hearts of men and women. The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children of this earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. In love’s service only wounded soldiers can serve.

The reflection of the current social paradigm tells us we are largely determined by conditioning and conditions.