Scars

Scars, we all have them, and a lot of times the scar comes with a good or maybe even a great story.  Like the time in third grade you fell of off the monkey bars and banged up your elbow and knee, or the wipe out you took on your skateboard showing off to your friends in high school. There is the wrist that you broke that still has a plate and screws in it, or the time you thought for sure you were dying only to find out that you had to have your appendix removed. The point is every scar has a story.  Good, bad, funny, or sad.

It is the same with the scars on our heart, they all have a story, some are good. You think about the story and you cannot help but smile because the people involved, and circumstances bring you back to that place and time.  Unfortunately, the same can be said with our sad or hurtful memories. They have left a scar on our heart that when we think of the memory it hurts. Sometimes it hurts so bad that our whole-body hurts, and we cannot for the life of us figure out why we are in so much pain. Nothing has happened, we didn’t do anything out of the ordinary, and in a few hours or a day it is gone, until the next time that you encounter, that same memory and this time the reaction is even more intense, and again you are not sure why this is happening.

Most of the time it is the smallest thing that can trigger the memories without us even realizing it. It is a song, or smell, or even a laugh.  Maybe their son or daughter has their laugh, or smile. You are used to looking at them and seeing that person’s face, but you forget that their child inherited other traits from them.  Was it a song? The same song that 99% of time can bring a smile to your face this time brings you tears. Is it the smell of something baking or cooking that takes you back?  All of these are powerful triggers for our memories and thus our heart and the scars on the heart.

When we lose someone close to us, I think that puts one of the biggest scars on our heart. Whether it is a parent, a spouse, a friend, that scar is real, and it is deep, and it hurts. It can hurt at times that you least expect it. That same song that has brought a smile to your face for the last 100 plays and this time you hear it differently. Might just be healing a scar completely unrelated to the memory that you attribute to that song. Maybe it the smell of perfume or cologne that reminds you of them, or the smell of a flower, that finally brings you peace.

There is no time limit on scars, if you talk to amputee, they will tell you that they feel pain in a limb for years after it is gone.  The same can be said for the scars on our heart.  We have no idea what is trigging these scars to cause pain, or to open a wound that we long thought healed.  But like an infection that lives in the wound  that you got skateboarding, scars in our heart are an infection that we must heal for if we leave it untreated we will eventually be consumed by that infection.

How do we fix this? well contrary to the old saying, time does not heal all wounds. It is something that you have to work at. Just like you might do physical therapy after you’ve injured your arm to fully heal it you have to work heal the scars that pile up on your heart. If you don’t work to heal them, to fix them, to let the scab fall off you will never heal and eventually your scars will take over your life.  Those scars will come out in a variety of different ways, depression, stress, drinking, eating, by doing anything we can to forget that they are there.

Some of those scars happened innocently, someone said something that hurt your feelings and rather than acknowledge it, you buried it.  Unfortunately for some those scars happened to you from someone abusing you and no one was there to stop it.  You have every right and reason to be hurt and have scars. For others it is a list of should of, would of, could of, or if only. What ever the reason for the scar, the time comes when we have to heal it. 

Healing comes in so many ways. Talk to a friend, listen to that song, paint that picture, write it down, look for that sign.  But for the deeper hurts, figure out how to walk through it.  Find a support group that understands what you went through. Find someone you can trust to talk to, really talk to where you feel safe to share your story and remember that it is your story.  

No one else has had this experience so, no one can say do this and it will be fixed, unfortunately scars of the heart don’t work that way; it would be so much easier if it did or the doctor could say hey remember that time that you broke your wrist and took a little longer to heal then we thought, well this is like that. They don’t, because it does take time, but how much time no one knows all we know is that the only way to heal the scar is to fix what broke it the first place and that means talking about it, sharing it, taking away the power and pain that it causes you. 

It is so odd how giving voice to something that you have held so tight, so close for so long, can finally lose its scab. That is not to say that there is not more infection under that scab its ok, sometimes you must take the scab off so the healing can really begin.

Until next time,

Juli