Healing Deepest Hurts: When God Feels Distant and Hope Seems Lost

By Karen Bartlett

We may live disconnected from our authentic selves because of past hurts and alienation from God. Sometimes the hurt stems from childhood or from trauma in our life or through the actions of people in the church. Karen Bartlett understands the hurts and gently leads the reader to the presence of God and to hope.

Healing Dee

• Language: English
• Publisher: Invite Press
• Release date: Jun 25, 2024
• ISBN: 9781963265132

Karen Bartlett

Karen Barlett lives in Wichita, Kansas. She is married to Rick Bartlett and has two young adult children. Karen is a Licensed Master of Social Work, has a Masters Certificate in Theology, an M.Ed. in Neuroscience and Trauma, and a certificate in Spiritual Direction. She currently works as a school social worker during the day and as a spiritual director in the evenings. Her belief is that the holistic approach of mind, body, and spirit is essential in spiritual formation and trauma healing.

Book preview

Introduction

I have always had a love for the ocean. Something mysterious pulls at my core, inviting me to sit on the beach with a blanket, books, and my travel mug. The waves and the sound of the ocean soothe me and calm my restless spirit. I can sit on the warm sand for hours at a time, reading or simply watching the ebb and flow of the waves as they bring in seashells tumbling about helplessly in the water, or the sand crabs as they dig their way to safety through the receding froth. In quieter moments, I have heard the echo of my own inhalation and exhalation in the ocean’s rhythm of the water washing up on the sand and then washing back out to sea. It is mysterious, magical, and transforming.

In these moments, I can let my mind wander and explore questions or doubts about life, relationships, faith, and God. Here I can allow my soul deeply to feel the sorrows that perhaps I have held hostage in my everyday life, in order to accomplish quotidian tasks at hand or keep my focus on work and family. In the stillness of the moment, repressed emotions of sadness, disappointment, or fear begin to emerge, seeking permission to come above ground to be examined and acknowledged. Nature allows me to get in touch with my human nature in all its beauty and ugliness. I feel a sense of safety sitting there on the sand, surrounded by seagulls and sea life. The nonthreatening environment beckons me to lay my burdens down in solitude and silence.

Those ocean days were a luxury, one of the perks of living in California, just two and a half hours away from the Pacific Ocean. I currently live in Wichita, Kansas, and the ocean is nowhere near. The pond just beyond my back deck offers a small consolation; it provides the water I need to reflect and return to a contemplative state of mind. Ducks, geese, turtles, and rabbits replace seagulls and sand crabs, and the reflection of water shimmers on my living room ceiling at the right time of day. For these small blessings I am thankful. I have had to search for the beauty in Middle America that offers the same tranquility and peace the coastal ocean evokes within my heart. Here in Kansas, I have found grasslands, fields, lakes, and hills, and although different, their wild nature has allowed me to experience a new sense of awakening in my soul. The vastness that I find here alerts me to the spaciousness within my own spirit and invites me to continue exploring what internal freedom looks and feels like in my heart.

Whether it is fields or oceans, I have found that nature has become the place where I can face my biggest fears, where I can challenge myself to go deeper into discovering who I really am. This process, what I call soul archeology, continues to this day, as I navigate life.

My journey of soul archeology started many years ago. I did not know what was happening to me at the time, but I knew something was wrong. Childhood wounds, false narratives, and negative thinking embedded deep within my soul and psyche were wreaking havoc in my life. I had fallen into an abyss emotionally and spiritually and could not find my way out. God was far from me. I had lost my life’s purpose and any sense of value I held as an individual. The questions of why I was created and why life mattered haunted me. Books, lectures, and friendships were helpful, but they did not provide the answers I needed. It has only been in my willingness to become vulnerable and take an honest look at my desperate needs and longings that I have discovered who I am, a valuable person created by a God who delights in me. I have found that seeking answers requires intentionality and asking hard questions about if God is present in difficult circumstances, past or current.

Through exploring issues of faith, neuroscience, attachment patterns, and childhood experiences, life has taken on new meaning and purpose. In my search for answers, I found my mother to be a helpful guide. I have included illustrations drawn by her, depicting the struggle she had with depression around spiritual teaching, God’s love and grace, purpose, and healing. Her pictures are meant to help provide a visual aid for the topics discussed in this book, and although she is no longer on this earth, her vivid imagination lives on through her artwork. I hope her pictures speak to you even louder than the words I’ve written.

While I’ve included some experiences from my own journey toward wholeness, this book is written for you, as a source of wisdom and guidance for your personal path of discovery. It not only speaks to trauma and childhood attachment but also wrestles with the question of where God is in the middle of our life and faith crises. I hope this book will help you to uncover the wounded areas in your life that you may have dismissed as unworthy of your attention or that you may have buried under the catchphrase That’s just life. I offer you not a therapeutic book with quick answers but rather one that will cause you to pause and consider life events that have shaped you into who you are as an adult and where you might find healing to become the unique and amazing person you were created to be.

Each chapter examines significant areas to explore within your life. You will find questions after every chapter that will help you to reflect on your unique life experiences, wounds, and thoughts. Note, the stories presented are true, but details have been altered to protect confidentiality.

This is a book of hope for all on the road to renewal, God, and light. May you find solace in these pages, your faith, and your own sacred journey toward healing and wholeness.

Prayer

May you find inner wisdom and faith in the sacred space of soul discovery about who you are uniquely created to be.

CHAPTER 1

A Plate of Spaghetti

I don’t understand why I’m here on this earth. Everything seems so pointless. I’m very lonely. No one notices my existence; no one asks me questions or talks to me like a human being. A voice in my head keeps telling me that it is worthless to be on this planet. Tell me why I should stay here! He expected an answer from me, but I could only look at him with compassion in my eyes and let the silence hold his question. He was seventeen years old but spoke words from what seemed like an old soul. He had given voice to the woundedness many individuals feel but dare not express. His honesty hung in the air as if daring me to embrace it. My heart ached as I saw the sadness and despair reflected in his gaze. All I could do in that heavy moment was slowly nod my head in solidarity with his deep questions and let him know he had been heard and seen at the deepest level of his soul. The answers he sought would need to come from within him, which meant he would have to explore his core beliefs, inner narratives, childhood experiences, and soul woundings.

Does Our Past Affect Our Present? Yes!

In my work over the past thirty-eight years as a social worker and recently as a spiritual director, I have had the amazing privilege of walking with individuals on their journey toward wholeness in mind, body, and spirit. These journeys can feel arduous, compelling, hopeful, confusing, and freeing, often many of these emotions at the same time.

Where do we even start the healing process? A visual image that helps me explain the complexity of our emotions and life experiences is to liken our lives to a plate of spaghetti that needs to be sorted out noodle by noodle. Each noodle represents something that brings a memory and emotion with it, and when thrown all together, it looks messy and entangled. Trying to pull one noodle out at a time seems a daunting and formidable task. But this is the image I present to others when talking about life issues that complicate our understanding of what is happening to us or what has impacted us from earlier in our childhood, including issues of spirituality.

We may think that our growing-up years weren’t so bad, and that we have little to no childhood wounds. We might dismiss events or relationships that caused distress or pain and consider them to be no big deal. Our family may have been seen as idyllic and almost perfect by those on the outside. But even seemingly small things can stay with us and affect us well into adulthood. The young man I mentioned above had ignored deeply painful events from childhood, and as we talked further, it was apparent that his upbringing created genuine pain and shame.

Chronic parental discord; enduring low-dose humiliation or blame and shame; chronic teasing; the quiet divorce between two secretly seething parents; a parent’s premature exit from a child’s life; the emotional scars of growing up with a hypercritical, unsteady, narcissistic, bipolar, alcoholic, addicted, or depressed parent; physical or emotional abuse or neglect: these happen in all too many families.¹

It may have happened in yours. You might say, But that was so long ago, and I have moved on. That might be true . . . or it might not be.

That Was a Long Time Ago

Life experiences, small or large, shape us from the day we are born, even in utero, and most of the time we are largely unaware of the impact or formation of these incidents and how they have shaped us to become the person we are currently. Our self-perception starts when we are young and impressionable. Some of us grew up with healthy interactions and positive feedback as children. For others of us, the story is not so pretty, and the unhealthy, painful wounding we experienced as children is as real today as it was when we were little.

We sometimes divorce our current-day thinking from what happened to us in childhood and bury the pain and wounding in order to function as people who carry on with our jobs, families, relationships, and life. The coping strategies of ignoring our past and focusing on our present might feel necessary to manage the demands of daily life. We think to ourselves that what happened was so long ago, it can’t really affect us now. This is a normal human response to trauma, defined as feeling trapped or helpless in response to a situation, or painful narratives that developed as we grew up. Stepping back or stepping closer to examining these wounded areas might be too hard and take up too much emotional space. In fact, we may not even feel we are allowed to take up that kind of time and space! A voice inside our head might be saying to keep our head down, don’t go too deep, keep up the façade because it isn’t worth revisiting such old wounds.

These narratives hold us hostage from experiencing internal freedom and life as it could be, with value and worth. As stated in the introduction, when I took time at the beach to let pain bubble up and really feel it, I realized that my pretty good life as a child had wounded spaces that needed to be healed with respect, care, and compassion. Keeping those memories buried only created unhealthy beliefs and behaviors.

I once brought up the notion of inner healing in a conversation with several friends. One friend indicated that she didn’t have time for navel-gazing when so many people were suffering in the world and needed her assistance. While I respect her viewpoint, I also believe it is essential to know ourselves intimately so that we can be aware of how we might be interacting with others from a place of woundedness or an unconscious need for validation or worth. My