Tracing Your Heart Wound (eBook)

How to journey back in order to move forward

Laura Bradshaw (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
130 Seiten
Dunham+Company (Verlag)
979-8-3509-9010-2 (ISBN)

Infos

'Everyone has wounds. Everyone endures trauma. Whatever the details, your story is real, and it has had seen and unseen consequences in your life...' 'This book invites you to begin your journey of inner healing.'

Laura Bradshaw has a passion to see people heal from the trauma and hurts holding them back from the full life God offers. As President of Journey U since 2017, her Trace Modeling curriculum has helped many people gain clarity on their past so they can journey forward into their God-given calling. An author, speaker, life coach, and prayer minister, Laura resides in Spring, Texas with her husband Austin. She has two grown daughters, a son-in-law, and a sweet grandbaby who has stolen her heart. If they're not travelling, you can often find her and her family enjoying a good meal together and solving world problems with hilarious, off-the-wall solutions.

Textauszug

Chapter One

Your Story

It’s not the most traumatic story in the world—but it’s my story.

A five-year-old girl forgotten at school, confused and afraid, told not to cry, rescued a few hours later. Not the stuff of a Lifetime movie. But enough to wound a vulnerable young heart? Absolutely.

Then there’s Allison.

Growing up with an abusive mother, Allison describes her childhood as “a flurry of fists, bruises, and baseless accusations.” Cut to the heart by the very person a child should trust most, Allison internalized every hateful word as truth—and received every strike as deserved. Yet for her, too, healing was possible.

What about you?

Your story may sound like mine. It may sound more like Allison’s. Chances are it’s somewhere in between. Everyone has wounds. Everyone endures trauma. Whatever the details, your story is real, and it has had seen and unseen consequences in your life.

I can trace my anorexia all the way back to the lies I believed in my heart in that moment as a five-year-old. I can pinpoint fears that plagued me for decades. I can see patterns of control, people-pleasing, shame, and distrust that took root that afternoon.

Don’t get me wrong. My experience as a five-year-old can’t account for every wound in my life, but that day set in motion beliefs and agreements that I affirmed again and again until they functioned like well-worn grooves for my behavior.

If you think of your initial trauma like a seed, the rest of your experiences act like sun and water, growing and strengthening what’s already planted. By the time I’d reached adulthood, my little plant had become a jungle. I needed help. Maybe you do too.

That’s why I’m so glad you’ve picked up this book—because my story is about so much more than trauma and heart wounds. It’s about healing. After decades of operating out of the effects of trauma, I found healing as I learned to trace my wounds back through my life, and then journey forward with Jesus. You can do the same thing! And that’s what this book is about.

I found healing as I learned to trace my wounds back through my life, and then journey forward with Jesus.

Based on an 8-part curriculum I developed called Trace Modeling, this book invites you to begin your journey of inner healing by first recognizing how your heart has been wounded, what negative patterns have taken root in your life, and how, with God’s help, you can move forward in freedom. Each chapter includes reflection questions to help you process each step along the way, as well as a prayer prompt to help you lay hold of the healing power of heaven.

Because at their core, the wounds we carry are emotional; they affect us both physically and spiritually, and healing must begin in the heart.

Now, about that seed planted in my little heart all those years ago. To understand how it took root, we need to start at the beginning.

I grew up in Missouri as part of a family of eight. You read that right, eight! My parents had a strong marriage. My dad had a great job. And my family attended church every Sunday. We were a good family.

I point all that out so you don’t exclude yourself from this journey. Pleasant circumstances don’t disqualify you from heart wounds. I had a pretty normal, fairly stable upbringing, but life still wounded me. I needed healing, and the Lord wanted to give it to me. He wants to do the same for you.

Back to my story.

My family moved towns when I was in kindergarten. I don’t know how you feel about moving, but five-year-old me was thrilled. And why not? When you’re a kid, moving day takes on a whole new meaning. You don’t have to worry about boxes, packing tape, or U-Hauls. It’s all about a new house with undiscovered nooks for hide-and-seek and new trees in the backyard for a tire swing. You get to order pizza, eat on paper plates, and maybe, just maybe, sleep in a sleeping bag! Moving is an adventure.

So the morning of our move, I woke up bursting with excitement. The plan was for my brother and me to go to school while the grown-ups moved, no doubt eager to have us out of the way. That was fine with me because I couldn’t wait to get to school and tell everyone about my moving adventure. I picked out the prettiest play dress I had and set off.

Let me tell you… I was the belle of the ball!

Everyone wanted to talk with me. Everyone wanted to play with me. Everyone wanted to hear more about my new house. In my young little heart, it was the best day of my life. Until pick-up time rolled around.

As my brother Charles and I stood together in the carpool line, I rehearsed all the things I wanted to tell my parents. I could not wait until they drove up… but they never did.

One by one, all the other kids got picked up until only Charles and I were left. This was in the ’70s, so you couldn’t just ring someone up on their iPhone. We weren’t even to pagers yet! On top of all that, we had no clue what our new phone number or address was; we were stuck.

When all the kids were gone, the administration put us outside the fence to wait and locked it up. You probably can’t imagine a school doing that today, but like I said, it was the ’70s. So there we sat, a kindergartner and a first grader, alone, confused, afraid, and increasingly hungry.

After a little bit, my brother asked me, “Are you hungry?” I was starving, but I’d already eaten my lunch. Not Charles, though. He’d saved part of his sandwich and offered to share it with me. I remember thinking how smart of him to think ahead. Here we were in an emergency. No parents. No help. No food. Our circumstances were serious, but Charles had planned ahead so he could control his circumstances. Right then and there I pledged to always do the same.

As great as it tasted, the sandwich wasn’t enough to keep our tummies full. Then an aroma hit our noses that made us even hungrier. Burgers! A nearby fast-food joint was kicking into high gear for the evening dinner rush. Our mouths watered. That’s when my brother pulled out a crumpled dollar bill he had in his pocket and said, “I’m going to take care of you.”

Once again, he was prepared. I wasn’t. It’s funny to think of a kindergartner making introspective decisions about the changes she wanted to make to her life, but that was me. In my little mind, I’d been caught completely off guard. I’d already decided that our parents had just moved without us, and now we were on our own. How could I have been so unprepared? Come on, Laura, get it together!

That’s when I started to cry.

The tears ran and ran down my cheeks. We’d already been there for hours, and who knows how long I cried. Suddenly, my big brother, who’d made me feel so safe and cared for, looked at me and said, “That’s very annoying. You’re going to have to stop.” Thinking back, I can’t blame Charles. After all, he was just a six-year-old brother, but at the time, his words crushed me. They can do that you know. Words have immense power.

Proverbs 18:21 teaches that the power of life and death resides in the tongue. The words my brother spoke over me that day rang in my head for years to come. Picking up on their tune, I spoke words over myself that rang even louder for even longer. Every decision I made, every relationship I had, filtered through those words of death: You are annoying… you are not wanted.

Charles’ words made me doubt who I could trust. He’d shared his food with me. He said he would take care of me. Now he seemed irritated by my very presence. Maybe he would leave too.

Before I could sink any deeper, our grandparents pulled up. Turns out the grownups had simply forgotten the kiddos. I get it. Life gets crazy. Moving is hectic. There were a lot of us, after all. But the damage was done. Driving to our house, I ran a few scenarios through my head. Maybe there just weren’t enough rooms in our new house for me. If that were true, then obviously my parents had forgotten us on purpose. They didn’t want me. I was a burden. Scenario two, my parents did want me. I was just on thin ice. If that were the case, then I was going to be the best little girl they ever had. I would never cause a problem, never disappoint, never come up short. I never wanted to give them a reason to get rid of me again.

Of course, when we pulled up, my parents were all apologies. They said they missed me and were sorry they’d forgotten me, but even then, I remember having trouble believing it to be true. Then I found out I’d be sharing a room with my sister Ann, and that sealed the deal. I convinced myself that my parents did not really want me. At this point, though, they had to keep me. After all, there were...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 6.1.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Christentum
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3509-9010-2 / 9798350990102