In Pete Walker's book Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, he talks about the benefits of having severe wounding. Most people who have significant wounding don't have the tools or capacities to learn how to operate healthily. They just didn't learn healthy emotional functioning from their parent(s). They don't know how to cope with basic stressors.
To learn how to cope healthily, they can turn into getting help from a mentor. This is someone who has a similar past and learned them themselves. Through working with someone who has experienced similar challenges, they can heal and eventually grow past the pain. When they continue to get help and work on their wounding, they eventually surpass what people with normal emotional childhood learn.
This means severe wounding can turn someone into a much stronger person than the majority of others if they continue with the work. It also means the limitations of their past do not have to keep them down or define them. It can allow them to become emotionally stronger than most people.
This is important to realize because the majority of the severely wounded people feel victimized by their childhood. They may feel trapped by their past and don't know how, or if they can get out of their pain. They possibly feel like they don't have power or control over their lives.
Walker's point about how this wounding can turn into a strength is something I don't hear or see people talking about. People need to know that their wounding can become a strength. The skill they have to learn with a mentor can eventually become a strength because they are actively developing themselves. This may take a year or longer for that to happen. If someone consistently works on their challenges, they will leave so many limiting beliefs behind.
Because those with deep wounding didn't have healthy life skills growing up, they might value learning them more than those who learned it as a child. They are also possibly more interested in learning about developing healthy skills than others who were given all the tools from their parents. They know what life is like without those skills, so they can empathize with people who didn't learn them growing up.
So yes, they might have had a rough childhood. Yes, they might have been abused in one or more fashions. But they don't have to keep that with them. Just like they learned certain behaviors, they can learn new ones. There will be pain and setbacks. There will be failures in this process. But it's all part of the process.
Without failure, there are no learning new skills. Those new skills bring so much freedom to their lives. People have so much more power than the majority of those with severe wounding believe. But the beauty is there is a huge amount of power in one own's self if one allows it.
One way to start achieving that freedom is by joining the Find Freedom Facebook group! We would love to have you!
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Matthew Smith on Unsplash