Let’s Talk About Inner Healing

“Inner Healing” is a term used for the emotional healing of old traumatic memories. Inner healing as opposed to physical or “outer” healing.

Scripture references the “inner man,” and the “secret places” of the heart throughout the old and new testaments. Inner healing attempts to find those secret places that are holding our painful memories and heal them through different means. What all inner healing models have in common is the assumption that our current symptoms are at least fueled and usually caused by old traumatic memories.

For instance, if I fell off of the bunk bed when I was 5 years old, I might feel intense emotions of fear, powerlessness, vulnerability, or even shame. When I feel those intense emotions, the body experiences a corresponding flush of neuropeptides and the whole experience is cataloged/remembered by the emotional body and the subconscious mind.

From that point forward, whenever I see height (like looking down a 10-story window), my mind automatically asks, “What do we have cataloged on height?” It is as if the visual stimulus of the height double-clicks my “height file” and up to my screen comes all of those intense emotions that were stored from the early emotional memory. I may end up having a panic attack while looking down the 10-story window even though my adult, conscious mind knows that it is an irrational reaction. I know, logically that I’m safe to look down through that window, but no amount of talking myself out of it can stop the automatic emotional reaction.

Inner healing models aim at disconnecting the strong emotional charge from original traumas in our lives so that our current symptoms lose their fuel.