The last massage I got was a year ago for my birthday - I was 35 weeks pregnant, so I figured I deserved a professional massage. It was short but relaxing, good for my aching body weighed down by a growing baby inside. As I was leaving, the massage therapist informed me she had worked out the built-up lactic acid from my knotted muscles, and warned me that I might feel achy later that day. The irony struck me: getting a massage could make you sore, not just fix the soreness. There might be uncomfortable after-effects of even a good thing.
I was reminded of that massage recently, due to my August birthday, and then of the warning after a particularly tearful counseling session. For those of you who don't know, I started going to counseling at the beginning of this summer. I felt that I was not handling the stress and anxiety in my life and that it was significantly affecting my personal relationships. Thankfully, God led me to a female counselor in my small town, who both accepts my insurance and has been a good fit.
So it's been a couple months of counseling now, and my counselor and I just uncovered a painful childhood memory that many negative emotions have wrapped themselves around. We began to untangle these old feelings, and for the first time I truly grieved the pain I'd felt back then. It was validating and cathartic. It helped to mentally summon my current self as a sort of stand-in sibling to comfort my younger self in that difficult moment. I left the session emotionally raw but hopeful for beginning a path toward healing.
Later that day, I surveyed the mountains while walking baby girl in the stroller and reflected on my progress in counseling so far. Per my counselor's suggestion, I listened to the song "Dear Younger Me" by MercyMe on my phone, stroller wheels clicking over the sidewalk.
"Sometimes I wish it were a smoother ride..."
...And my heart began to ache. It was that post-massage ache I'd been warned about. My knots were doing better, I knew, but sadness that I ever had to experience that memory in the first place now I began to surface. Why must childhoods hurt at all, Lord? Oh, how I long for a day when no more innocence will be lost! I grieved the sum pain that my past had shaped Me Today into, for better and often for worse.
"If I could tell you everything that I have learned so far /
then you could be / one step ahead /
of all the painful memories still running through my head"
It's a powerful perspective, to imagine myself putting an arm around my younger self and comforting her with loving yet wise words: "That hurt. That matters. But you're gonna be okay."
"If I knew then what I know now / Condemnation would've had no power"
Truly, I'm gonna be okay. My childhood was not deeply traumatic, unlike so many others', and I am grateful for that. But it's time for me to stop waving away the hurts that I experienced back then. They shaped me. Many of them still have their claws in my nearly-30-year-old heart because I never learned to listen non-judgmentally to them, to work through them, then forgive and heal. What's encouraging, however, is that I know I'm in the process of healing because I'm experiencing this delayed soreness of sorrow.
I love how that song quietly climaxes, and it moved me to tears as I walked on:
"Dear younger me / it's not your fault /
you were never meant to carry this beyond the cross...
You are holy, you are righteous, you are one of the redeeemed...
You are free indeed."
This is a mournful ache right now, but it will fade. Then I'll simply be left with good tools for dealing and a healing heart. Ultimately my goal with counseling is freedom. I want to release the talons of negative self-identity planted in tender childhood.
I want to be more in control of my stress.
Way more content in Jesus and in who I am.
More free indeed...
...do you?
--Ellen H.
Dear Younger Me: Listen to the whole song. Really. It's good.
