Some wounds don’t start and end with a single moment. Some start in childhood, before we even have the words for what is happening, before we understand boundaries, before we know how to protect ourselves, and sometimes they carry into adulthood.
Something I learned the hard way, is that unhealed wounds don’t just disappear with age, they can’t be buried with time, denial, or tequila. They follow us into relationships, marriages, parenting, life decisions, and patterns we don’t always understand.
Those wounds then shape us, how we see ourselves, how we see others, and how we see the world.
I was probably five years old when I first had exposure to an adult in an inappropriate way, and it continued in subtle ways, well into adulthood.
It took me escaping the grip of those people for the veil to be torn, and the truth to be revealed to me by a therapist.
While I wasn’t exactly walking with the Lord at this time, my therapist was a Christian, and she never got off a call without praying for me, and giving me tools to help process.
She pointed me to scripture, and God’s truth, but ultimately, she cared about my safety.
Through her expertise, the Lord, His word, and some amazingly godly friends, there was healing and forgiveness.
For a long time, I thought my struggle was with people. With abusers. With broken relationships. With betrayal. With abandonment.
However, the deeper truth the Lord revealed to me during my healing journey, was that the real battle was never flesh and blood.
My enemy was not the people who laid hands on me, but the spiritual enemy of evil.
Scripture tells us in Ephesians 6:12 that “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” When you begin to believe that truth, it changes absolutely everything.
Abuse is not just an act, it is a weapon.
It is meant to steal our identity, kill our trust, and destroy our understanding of God’s love.
The enemy doesn’t just want to hurt us.
He wants to define us by what hurt us.
When I started seeing my abusers as pawns in the enemies schemes, it shifted my heart.
Not overnight, but deeply shifted.
I started to consider what they might have been exposed to at five years old, or ten, or sixteen, and suddenly it was no longer a flesh issue to me, but one of pure evil. One that had magnified itself and built itself on someone who lacked faith in a God who could protect and love them as well.
I heard sermon after sermon, and testimony after testimony, about forgiveness, and I could tell they genuinely had forgiven their abusers.
While I knew it was what the Lord ultimately wanted from me, there was no part of my flesh that could say the words and mean them.
That is when I realized, for many of us, forgiveness begins in the rubble, in the confusion, in the memories that still ache.
I was assured that forgiveness is not about pretending pain didn’t happen, it’s about choosing freedom from and through the pain.
Forgiveness is not excusing, minimizing, or forgetting one’s actions. It does not mean what happened was okay. The biggest one for me, was that it also does not mean that reconciliation is required, and it does not mean the offender escapes accountability.
What I learned forgiveness does mean: is that I refuse to let the enemy keep a foothold on my life and my soul. Forgiveness frees me from being a victim and it allows for my identity to be in Christ!
For me, forgiveness wasn’t a feeling I felt immediately, it was obedience to the Lord before it was true relief.
Forgiveness for me was not a one-time decision either. Sometimes it is daily. Sometimes hourly. Sometimes breath by breath.
There are days I forgive with tears.
Days I forgive through clenched teeth.
Days I forgive simply because God asked me to, and I trust Him.
I knew I was in a more genuine place of forgiving when the things that used to trigger a desire in me for justice and revenge, turned into a desire for repentance and salvation FOR my enemies.
Forgiveness hasn’t erased my memories, but it has removed their authority over me and my life.
The pain no longer dictates my identity. The past no longer defines my future.
What the enemy meant for destruction, God began to redeem and turned for good.
I am not healed because I forgot.
I am healed because I surrendered the battle to God.
If you’re reading this and forgiveness feels impossible, I want you to know this:
God is not asking you to deny your pain.
He is asking you to let Him fight for you.
Forgiveness is not weakness.
It is spiritual warfare.
Freedom is not found in holding onto the hurt, it is found in placing it in the hands of the one who sees, knows, and restores.
Dear Lord,
First, I want to thank you for the refining you have done in my life, my heart, my mind, and my spirit. Thank you for your deliverance from a life of sin I lived for thirty-three years as an atheist. Thank you for your forgiveness for the wrongs I have done in my life, so that I can truly see and live out that forgiveness for myself and others.
Lord I pray that you release the strongholds that pain may have on your children, that you comfort them in their pain and make sure they know it was not their fault. Lord I pray for healing of their hearts and their flesh. I pray that when flashbacks show up, you rebuke them before they can get a stronghold. I pray any evil that is lingering over your children flees right now in the name of Christ Jesus!!!
We love you and are so grateful for you.
Amen
–Shila Marie
KINGDOM LIFE AZ 
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