Jesus tells us repeatedly that we are to live a life of grace, a life of healing, and a life of abundance. Jesus wants to heal us emotionally and heal our deepest wounds and memories.
One of the most important areas of healing, and also one of the biggest obstacles, is the healing of our memories. Our woundedness in this area prevents us from receiving the grace that God wants to give us. It often leads to an attitude of not wanting to forgive because of our deep wounds and pain.
God must grant it
Think about a memory that is particularly difficult to forget and has caused pain and challenges for you emotionally. Don’t know what it is? Ask God to reveal it to you. For me it was my inability to express myself as a small child and having my father and a room full of adults laughing at me.
When you recall your painful memory, put Jesus at the center of it. Picture His face smiling at you. Look at the entire room and what is happening around you. When the pain gets too severe, continue to focus on Jesus. Receive the comfort of His love. Walk over to Him and have Him hug you and reassure you of His love for you. Then ask God to heal that negative memory in you.
In order to be healed, we need help to get beyond the pain. Often that can mean getting professional help. It is critical that we understand that God’s miracles sometimes flow through trained healing professionals such as psychologists and psychiatrists. Burying our memories is never the right solution. We can’t continue to do the same thing and expect to get a different result.
My family and I spent a lot of time in therapy. I am not ashamed of it. In fact, I highly recommend therapy for many if not most people. If you find yourself engaging in addictive behaviors and feel stuck, seek professional help. Look at it this way: if you had a medical issue, wouldn’t you go to a medical doctor? If you have an issue of dealing with painful memories, you also need professional help.
No quick-fix solutions
The healing of memories is a process. It is not going to happen without prayer. Ask the Lord in contemplative prayer to show you what memories are causing negative behaviors in your life. For most of us, these memories are lodged deep within our unconscious mind. They are too painful to deal with emotionally, so we bury them. The problem? They eventually come out in our behavior without us realizing it. They cause anger and we don’t know why. They may cause addictive behaviors we can’t seem to control.
Once we have identified the painful memory and the emotions connected to it, it is critical that we go to Mass on a regular basis to get the grace needed to get past the memory and heal the wound. The Eucharist is the single best solution for healing of any kind, especially healing of memories. Why do we not realize that? Most of us wouldn’t want to miss eating and drinking, but we don’t think we need to receive the Body and Blood of Jesus on a regular basis. Wrong! Without the grace of the Eucharist we are too weak to overcome emotional trauma in our lives.
Mass is not the only critical sacrament. Frequent reconciliation is necessary for God’s miracles to flow through us and heal our memories and addictions. We need to look with spiritual eyes on the importance of reconciliation. To make a good reconciliation, it takes a lot of upfront prayer asking God to reveal to you what is blocking you from achieving the healing required. We prepare for reconciliation by opening ourselves up, by reflecting on sin and darkness in our lives, and by asking for the light of Christ.
What do we need?
One simple question to ask is this: what does God want to give me in respect to forgiveness and healing? Often our answer is “I don’t have a clue.” That only means we haven’t spent enough time in prayer. Some priests recommend an extensive reconciliation that encompasses our entire life (sometimes called a general confession). While this might not be the right solution for you, it is helpful for looking at patterns in our lives that are blocking memories that need to be healed by Jesus.
Many of us have deep trauma in our lives from childhood. Often this leads to shame and not feeling good about ourselves. Many people feel that if there is anything which makes us feel bad about ourselves it should be avoided at all costs. Our prayer to God should be to overcome our shame and even guilt for our part in whatever happened and ask for it to come to the surface.
It is common that we have deep guilt for what we have done but have not forgiven ourselves. Perhaps we have been unfaithful to a spouse or in a relationship, lied in order to achieve personal gain, or cheated in some endeavor. Whatever we did, we feel bad about ourselves and just want to forget it. Now is the time to get past the guilt and pain. Yes, only God can cause that to happen.
Trust is the key
In being healed of our painful memories, we must trust in His love. God’s love is unconditional and eternal. We are precious in His eyes because He made us in His image and has given us every spiritual blessing. His desire is for us to be holy, in order for us to achieve the purpose of our lives. God wants to break our bondage to our painful memories. He desires us to have complete freedom. He knows what truly needs to be healed in our lives. Just let God in and watch the miracles flow!
In today’s world, many of the painful memories involve sexual issues. Pornography use is a rampant sin and a crisis today. Many people don’t want to deal with the reasons why they let pornography, sexual immorality, or masturbation into their lives. It is a huge problem that has invaded our Church and other denominations as well.
A call to honesty
Do you live a double life? Do you, on the surface, look like a strong Catholic, but in reality, are you leading a secret life? This secret behavior has led to sinful habitual behavior that you can’t control. You tell yourself that this is the last time, but it is not. You fall back into the sinful behavior time and time again. What must change? You must let God heal you of the root cause of the sinful behavior. Usually it is something that happened to us, often from our childhood. This has to be healed.
In order to be healed we need to understand how much God wants to forgive us and heal us. The moment that we feel sorrow for our part in our own sinful behavior and desire forgiveness and healing, we begin the process of reconciliation with God. We begin to experience the tremendous compassion, love, forgiveness, and mercy of God. We are in the process of being transformed into the son or daughter of God who is fully healed of emotional wounds.
Deacon Steve Greco goes more deeply into the healing of memories and related topics in his 2019 book Miracles through Forgiveness available through his Spirit Filled Hearts Ministry website www.spiritfilledhearts.org.
13 thoughts on “The Healing of Memories”
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Today is death anniv. of S.G.Luisa , of the Divine Will revelations . Our times as the Holy Father has mentioned – rampant in the flood waters of the evils of our rebellious self will , esp. through sins against life and purity .
https://www.queenofthedivinewill.org/divine-will-resource-audio-library/ – one related source of the means for healing , in focusing on efforts to return the love we owe God ..
meditation on the 24 hours of Passion and all ..its fruits to accompany the upcoming trip of the Holy Father to Iraq too , that The Precious Blood as New Life in holiness be for all , for all moments .
God bless !
Mushkin, I think your comment was really harsh. People receive healing in many different ways. There is not just one way. And Jesus is the ultimate healer. Of course, some people will still need help from a therapist and may require medication. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be helped through prayer too.
There is nothing that people can do that God can’t undo. There is no pain on earth that is worse than spiritual pain. Be careful where you tread.
I think the final stage of healing from potential abuse is when one is strong enough to talk about the abuser by name to close family, friends, husband, etc. You might be surprised that others also had a problem too with the abuser. There is strength in numbers. And if the abuser is gone/dead, there is empowerment in having the last word. However, there is a final judgement for that person. I believe that we all get what we deserve in the end and that God will have the final say.
The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit do not abandon “the sheep”. One has to pray, seek answers and believe. Even a four year old can pray. Even a four year old can say “NO” and “that is not right” to their abuser. Even a four year old can say “I am going to tell my mother (father. etc.) about the intended/abuse. Or find some one else who will believe them. Even a badly frightened teenage can hold up an iron frying pan and say “You touch me and you are going to get this over the head. Been there, done that. What dictates right and wrong goes back to the moral foundation found in The Ten Commandments. It is unfortunate that you did not or could not fight back. I think you truly need to forgive yourself to find peace.
I loved this article and I believe the author did suggest professional help. With clerical abuse of course modifying imagery would be necessary at first. Educating people that wolfs in sheep’s clothing are working against Christ’s salific mission would be paramount. I myself had healing of suppressed memories through an art therapy class, confession and Eucharist without a therapist. I think that included time alone. Point is healing is a lot quicker with those sacraments then without which I feel fully confident.
I know you Myshkin & you have been an anti-catholic your whole life. Maybe you should tell us about the indoctrination that turned you into a Jesus-Hater and the painful memories that live on from it.
Myshkin, I don’t believe Deacon Greco is saying that all you need to do to overcome painful memories and trauma is picture Jesus smiling at you and then everything will be alright. I believe he’s saying that these painful memories can pop up frequently and using the image of Jesus in your mind smiling can help alleviate them. The painful memories can pop up often and a person is not going to be able to immediately access treatment each time so the imaging of our smiling Lord can help. He also highly recommends that a person with painful memories/trauma seeks out professional help such as therapy. I didn’t find anything hurtful in what the Deacon wrote. His intentions appear pure to me.
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i waited a day to say this, but it has to be said. I would ask you to hear me charitably and think about this: i’m taking my time to do this because i am presuming the best of your intentions.
but here goes. You say the following:
“When you recall your painful memory, put Jesus at the center of it. Picture His face smiling at you. Look at the entire room and what is happening around you. When the pain gets too severe, continue to focus on Jesus. Receive the comfort of His love. Walk over to Him and have Him hug you and reassure you of His love for you. Then ask God to heal that negative memory in you.”
brother, i don’t know your story, but i know mine, i’ve got 20 years of working with traumatized and addicted people and the masters degree in clinical counseling that allows me to do that work. I believe CBT and in vivo / imagining techniques, which is essentially what you are describing here, though with a really weird twist, can be helpful to traumatized individuals in a proper setting with adequate preparation and recognition that these techniques can have unexpected results in the face of trauma. You have essentially told people to Climb Mt Everest without any gear.
ok, look at a couple specifics, should my sibling and i really slowly imagine the rooms we were assaulted in day after day and the attendant smells, feeling, terror, and panic. Do you know what intrusive thoughts are and the role they play in trauma? if you don’t, then why would you offer this advice
now to the victim of abuse at the hands of a priest, a hugging Jesus, really? Do you not understand that the teaching of the Church is that the priest acts in persona Christi, did you not bother to consider what the implications are. Trust me when i tell you that for many survivors of trauma at the hands of religious figures, a twisted, monstrous Jesus was already there, and you actually asked your sister and brother to imagine being hugged.
I’m going to say something very serious here. You either have no direct experience of trauma, in which case you need to offer an apology and take this post down or you have been traumatized and you have not yet found proper healing. Why would i say this? because what you’ve offered here is magical thinking, plain and simple. who engages in magical thinking? people who don’t know what they are talking about or people who aren’t ready to deal with the trauma they’ve experienced. I’m sorry to say this so forthrightly, but you have inadvertently done something here that is wrong and corrupts the true image of Jesus.
i do not care that your example of embarrassment is what you meant not the kind of trauma i’ve referenced here. i don’t care because you certainly didn’t communicate any limits to the nonsense you prescribed.
finally i have a question for you? When i read sentences like this:
Our woundedness in this area prevents us from receiving the grace that God wants to give us. It often leads to an attitude of not wanting to forgive because of our deep wounds and pain.
i have to wonder, have you never known the One whose desire is for us (Song of Song 7:10), the One who will not abandon His lost sheep, the one who in the Gospels calls us to His yoke, see, not the freedom from burden and pain, but the truth that hear in Adams lament we find One who walks in solidarity with us? I know, you think that’s what you were offering here, well, i’m sorry to be so direct, but you werent, no one can be right all the time, so consider this the one time in your life that you erred.
a couple data points
you don’t know me and have no reason to hear me as i haven’t established any rapport, but i’d offer the following for your consideration:
i waited a day to calm down before writing this
I have no need for you to declare me right
I’m speaking from a place of professional and personal experience, and you just told a pregnant woman to take thalydamide, worked great for most mom’s but that doesn’t really matter does it. I presume the best of intentions on your part, but don’t have the luxury of caring because you just put people in danger.
in a perfect world this comment wouldn’t even post because you just took this article down, please do something.
peace
I have been ministering to those in emotional pain for over forty years. As I mentioned, I highly recommend professional therapy. However, there is also a spiritual dimension that is critical. Jesus is the healer. With his love, emotional pain is given new hope.
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