Wednesdays With Watson: Faith & Trauma Amy Watson- PTSD Patient-Trauma Survivor
Welcome to "Wednesdays With Watson," a compassionate and insightful podcast dedicated to exploring the complex journey of healing from PTSD, the role of faith in recovery, and the profound impact of trauma on our lives. Hosted by Amy Watson, a passionate advocate for mental health and a trauma survivor, this podcast aims to provide a safe and empathetic space for listeners to learn, share, and find hope.In each episode, we delve deep into the multifaceted aspects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and its far-reaching effects. We bring you riveting personal stories of resilience, recovery, and transformation and expert interviews with psychologists, therapists, faith leaders, and individuals who have walked the path of healing.Our mission is to break mental health stigma and encourage open dialogue about PTSD and trauma. We explore the profound connection between faith, spirituality, and mental well-being, offering insights into how one's faith can be a powerful source of strength and healing.Whether PTSD, faith, or trauma has touched you or someone you know, "Wednesdays With Watson" is here to inspire, educate, and provide practical tools for navigating the healing journey. Join us on this empowering quest towards reclaiming peace, resilience, and a renewed sense of purpose.Today, subscribe to our community of survivors, advocates, and compassionate listeners. Together, we can heal our hearts and find the path to recovery, one episode at a time.
Wednesdays With Watson: Faith & Trauma Amy Watson- PTSD Patient-Trauma Survivor
Family Dysfunction and Boundaries
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A family fracture can start before you’re even old enough to name it, then follow you for decades like a script you never agreed to read. We sit with the story of Jacob and Esau, not as a distant Bible lesson, but as a painfully current picture of family estrangement, favoritism, deception, and what happens when years of silence stack into missed holidays, missed milestones, and relationships that feel impossible to recover. The question underneath it all is simple and brutal: what do we do with the original wound when we’re still bleeding from it today?
I talk about trauma and the nervous system, the way hypervigilance trains us to prepare for danger that hasn’t happened yet, and how those survival skills can quietly sabotage relationships with non-offending family members. We dig into Jacob’s wrestling match and the limp he carries afterward, because healing doesn’t mean we walk away untouched. It often means we tell the truth about who we are, take responsibility for our part, and refuse to let the wound determine what happens next.
Then we name a disturbing trend: being proudly “no contact” without acknowledging the generational trauma and relational fallout it can create. I’m not telling you to give an abuser access to you. I am asking whether you built a wall and called it a boundary, or whether you can build a guarded bridge where it’s safe and right. We define peace as the absence of striving, explore forgiveness and reconciliation with guardrails, and offer simple words that can open a door: “Thank you, I love you, I’m sorry, and please forgive me.”
If you’re tired of trauma taking a toll on your family relationships, come walk with us. Subscribe, share this with someone who’s living through estrangement, and leave a review so more people can find this conversation.
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Jacob And Esau Family System
SPEAKER_01Two brothers, Jacob and Esau. If you know their story, you know that this was not simply a case of two brothers who grew up and stopped getting along. This was an entire family system. Before Jacob and Esau were even born, Genesis tells us that they struggled together in their mother's womb. They were born into a house divided, divided by human brokenness, divided by histories of trauma and war and toiling. They were born into a house divided by favoritism. Isaac loved Esau. Rebecca loved Jacob. They were two sons, two parents, two favorites. And somewhere along the way, the relationship between these brothers became tangled up in the mire of the history of war and unsafety, competition, manipulation, deception, and the dysfunction of their entire family around them, descendants of Abraham. Esau sold Jacob his birthright for a bowl of food. Later, when Isaac was old and preparing to give Esau the blessing, Rebecca overheard that conversation and decided to take things into her own hands and intervened. She helped Jacob deceive Isaac, his own father. Jacob dressed himself in Esau's clothing, he covered his arms so that his nearly blind father would believe he was his hairy older brother. And Jacob received the blessing that his dad, Isaac, intended to give to Esau, the older brother. When Esau discovered what had happened, that pain was enormous. The book of Genesis tells us that he cried out with exceedingly great and bitter cry. And eventually that pain turned into rage. Esau planned to kill his brother, so Jacob ran. And he stayed gone for many, many years. There is something about this story that matters because Jacob left one dysfunctional family system and walked directly into another one. That's what happens when these things make the rules. He went to live with his uncle Laban, and the man who had participated in deceiving his father suddenly found himself deceived. You see, Jacob worked seven years to marry Rachel, the woman he loved, and on his wedding night, Laban gave him Leah instead. So Jacob worked seven more years for Rachel. The deceiver experienced deception. The family dysfunction continued, as it does when we are left to our own devices, and years went by, years and years and years of estrangement. Jacob built a life. He married, he had children, he accumulated livestock and wealth, he became a different man in so many ways, he went on with his life estranged from his family. But God eventually told Jacob to go home. And going home meant something Jacob could no longer avoid. Conflict. Esau was there, the brother he had hurt, the brother who once wanted him dead. That relationship that Jacob had escaped all of those years earlier was now standing somewhere on the road in front of him. And when Jacob learned that Esau was coming to meet him with four hundred men, he was terrified. He divided his family and possessions into groups, he sent gifts ahead of himself, he planned, he strategized, he tried to control every possible outcome. If this sounds familiar to you, familial fractures and conflict and years and years and years go by without connection, if that sounds familiar to you, it does to me too. Because when you have lived through trauma, as Jacob and Esau had done in the biblical times, sometimes you get very good at preparing for the danger that hasn't happened yet. Jacob was preparing
Deception And Years Of Estrangement
SPEAKER_01war for war, but before Jacob saw Esau, something happened. Something strange, something set apart. Jacob was all alone. And one of my favorite passages in the Bible, Genesis 32, tells us that Jacob wrestled with the angel. All night long he wrestled. Wonder what he was wrestling with. We know, you know the pain of family estrangement. At some point during that struggle, the angel touched Jacob's hip and put it out a joint, but Jacob will not let go. He said to the angel, I will not let go until you bless me. And then came the question, and you see this question was a big deal in these times. What is your name? Jacob. That mattered because names mattered, families mattered, connections mattered because years earlier, when this blind father had asked him who he was, Jacob had lied. He said he was Esau. But this time, in the middle of the night, while wrestling with God, Jacob told the truth about who he was. Jacob. God redeemed it and gave him a new name, Israel. Jacob walked away from the encounter with a limp. But he walked away from the encounter, changed because he decided to fight those things that broke up his family, those things that served to fracture relationships. But he walked away with a limp, as we often do when we're in these situations. I can't get past that. It's always been one of my favorite parts of this story. And Jacob walked away with a limp, evidence that he had wrestled with God. The next morning Jacob went to go face his brother. But he did not walk towards Esau in the same cocky way that he had been before. Because you see, he had wrestled with the angel, he had wrestled with God, he had confronted himself and the part that he had and the family fracture. He had encountered God, he had been changed, and he walked away towards his brother, carrying both that blessing and a limp. Maybe that's what healing looks like sometimes, not pretending that we were never wounded, not erasing what happened, not walking away without scars, but refusing to allow the wound to determine what happens next. Are you operating from that wound of broken familial relationships? Jacob looks up and sees Esau coming, four hundred men with him. Everything in Jacob probably expects the old story to finish itself. He's pretty sure he's probably going to die. He had deceived his brother. His brother had wanted him dead. Jacob had run, so many years had passed. And now they were here. But Genesis 33 says Esau ran towards Jacob. And he embraced him. He threw his arms around his neck, he kissed him, and these two grown men wept. Very different from the story that we see in the New Testament when the older brother comes back and the younger brother is not welcoming. The stark difference between those two stories is fascinating. I wonder how many years of pain were in those tears that they shed. No contact, no Christmases, no birthdays. How many conversations do they never have? How many holidays and births and deaths and ordinary days passed while these two brothers lived separate lives. They could not go backwards, they could not undo the favoritism of their parents, they could not take away the trauma of Abraham, Isaac, and Ishmael. Jacob could not get those years back. He could not make that deception disappear. He could not undo what he had done. Esau could not erase the rage that he once carried. What happened actually, seriously, happened. But what happened did not have to dictate what happened next. And I think there is something important in their story, and I think there's something important in the story of the prodigal son. There are two different responses to sibling potential potentially fractures. But Jacob and Asaul did not suddenly become inseparable, they made peace. I've been studying this word peace a lot, and I'll use this definition a lot in this episode. Peace, the absence of striving. The absence. It is not the absence of war, but it is the absence of striving. They went on with their lives and they made the best of the brokenness. That matters to me because this is something that I want to talk about on today's
Wrestling For A New Name
SPEAKER_01episode. These familial fractures that happen because of things that we didn't do that happened before us, but yet we carry the imprint of its effects into our lives. Sometimes we do confuse reconciliation with returning to exactly what a relationship used to be. Sometimes peace, most of the time, peace does not mean unlimited, untethered access to you. Forgiveness does not mean pretending that nothing happened. Reconciliation may simply mean that the war is over, but the work begins. Because this is where Jacob and Esau begin to feel very personal to some of us. Sometimes family estrangement does not begin with silence. Sometimes silence simply where years, maybe even generations, of pain has landed for us. Sometimes somebody else caused, and usually somebody else caused the original wound. But years later, people who never made that wound are still bleeding from it. Siblings, right? Children, grandchildren, people who may have been standing in the same foxhole with us trying to survive the same things that show that threatened to take us down. Somebody else who cut us, and maybe somebody else who cut them, and somehow we end up bleeding on each other. I know a lot about this. I know something about running. I know something about walls. I know something about preparing for war because your nervous system learned to expect the striving. And I know something about having to wrestle before you can walk towards something differently, like reconciliation and healing. Maybe that's one of the things that the story of Jacob and Esau teaches us. Jacob teaches us before he can face Esau. Jacob had to wrestle. And sometimes before we can address the relationships, trauma has fractured, there is a wrestling that has to happen in us with God, with ourselves, with what happened, with what we did because of what happened. And that's painful because we have to take responsibility for our part in fractured relationships, even in the history, in the presence of a history of trauma. With the survival skills that once kept us alive, now keeping us disconnected. And we may walk away from this wrestling match that I'm encouraging you to go into with a limp, one like I had between the deaths of my two trauma makers, my mom and John Watson. Because healing doesn't mean we walked away untouched. I still have plenty of scars from both of them, but maybe it means that we walk differently. We might have a limp, and that's okay. And that's what I want to talk about today. I'm not here to tell you to give an abuser access to you. I am not here to tell you that every broken family relationship should be reconciled. And I'm certainly not here to tell you that peace requires that you put yourself back in danger. I want to talk about what happens after the original wounds, the wounds that happened way before Jacob and Esau, the wounds that happened way before you and me. What happens when trauma follows us into relationships with people who did not cause the original trauma? What happens when the wall that once protected us becomes the only way that we know how to live? And what happens if we're willing to wrestle with all of that before another generation inherits it, as the Bible tells us the sins are passed down from generation to generation. Because you see, maybe the goal is not getting everybody back together, maybe the goal is freedom. Freedom from allowing somebody else's choices to continue to control ours, that original wound, not your choice. Your response to it now, though, is freedom from spending the rest of our lives preparing for wars that are no longer happening. What if the war is over? Freedom from believing that we can stop bleeding on people who never cut us. Jacob walked towards his brother with that limp that was evident of that wrestling match. But he walked towards him, he did not walk away from him. And on the other side of all of that fear was something Jacob had not expected. Peace. Not the absence of war, but the absence of striving. And maybe, guys, there is something in this story of familial fracture for us. Because what happened matters, the original wound matters, the wounds matter, the
Reunion And Redefining Peace
SPEAKER_01scars matter, but trauma does not get the final word. My name is Dr. Amy Watson. I am your trauma doc, and this is the Wednesdays with Watson podcast. Hey everybody, and welcome back to the Wednesdays with Watson podcast. It is August of 2026, and you have landed on the Wednesdays with Watson podcast. As I mentioned, my name is Dr. Amy Watson. I am your trauma doc. Today I want to talk about something that is a disturbing trend. It has taken me almost a full three weeks to write this episode because I wanted to get it right. As always, this is coming from a place of deep personal experience. Today I want to talk about how in recent years a disturbing trend that has emerged, this trend in particular, has caused me pain that is hard to explain because sometimes there doesn't seem to be a resolution, but we can maybe find it in the story of Jacob and Esau and the commitment to wrestle with the things that fracture us. But this trend, every single day of my life, I think about it, and some days it still makes me cry. It started with silence and unanswered texts, stacked holidays and birthdays without communication, and then time did what it does, and now there have been multiple missed holidays, significant missed events, births, deaths, graduations, promotions, all the sad things. Multiple years have gone by painstakingly slow, and people that were once an integral part of my life are strangers to me now. There are literally three and even four generations of people being affected by things that happened 50, 70, or even a hundred years ago. The wound, the original wound. It's devastating. As your trauma doc, I will tell you perhaps the saddest thing about trauma is what it cost us relationally. It starts with a broken relationship by a trauma maker in Jacob and Esau's case, people that came before them and even their own mom and dad who were scarred by that. And if we let that original wound, it will it will, the rest of our relationships will be affected by those things that happened to us for the rest of our lives. As someone who has been a boxer in that trauma ring a bunch, that this ill of trauma is my least favorite, and it threatens for me to be the knockout punch. Today I want to start the conversation, and we're going to have it on this podcast. I don't know how long, but I'm going to get other voices in this. Today I want to start the conversation about going no contact with family, as Jacob and Esau had done. Specifically, I want to address this when there has been this history of trauma. I am not here to tell you how to process your trauma with your trauma makers if they're still here. That is not that a podcast is not the right place to do that. But I will share with you two different ways I navigated relationships with my trauma makers, one with my mom, one with my ex-husband who was abusive. We have to consider the way we navigate the deep hurt from our trauma makers because those events are a threat to our relationships with these non-offending family members. And for some of us,
When Trauma Makes Us Bleed
SPEAKER_01maybe they were even our trench mates. Maybe they were in that foxhole with us. Those relationships may be at most peril, to be honest with you, because if you're in no contact with someone who did not cut you, you know the pain. That's what this podcast is about, helping you know that you are not alone. That someone on the other side of this is willing to share the pain, even the current pain of having no contact with significant family members. Because I am tired of watching trauma destroyed lives and relationships, including my own, or at least trying to destroy my life and my relationships. This no contact thing that Oprah made a little bit famous is gut-wrenching as it relates to those of you who did not provide the original wound, yet you have a broken relationship. It is devastating. And there are people on that Oprah episode that are very proud, walking around proud that they are no contact with their family. And I say that is so unbelievably sad to me, and operating out of a new wound that threatens to imprint itself on the generations even below you. This is a tough topic for sure. There are some nuanced conversations to be had. You will never hear me ever say that you should provide untethered access to people who hurt or abused you, especially in the context of unrepentant behavior. You see, this is a podcast about trauma and how fractured familial relationships is one of the most expensive costs of trauma. I submit to you that there are those of us on the wrong side of abuse that have the opportunity to break generational curses by choosing to heal, get in that wrestling match like Jacob did with the angel, whatever that looks like. Maybe it means re-establishing contact with a non-offending family member. Maybe it doesn't. And when I say non-offending, I mean the person that did not provide the original wound, or at least you are a generation separated from it like I am. A refusal to consider that fractured familiar relationships is another cause of trauma, guys, is so short-sighted and has the potential to perpetuate pain. More wrestling matches, more limps, because the pain just continues from generation to generation. And I don't know about you, but I've had enough pain. You see, as I've gotten older and I've been trained in the effects of trauma, I am convinced that fractured families in this way can be a result of generational trauma, just like the Bible tells us that the sins of the fathers are passed down from generation to generation. And even heroic temps to overcome trauma are met with resistance when it comes to unresolved relational familial contact with non-offending family members. You see, this is where I find myself having chosen to seek healing from so much of it. I am met with the brick walls in familial relationships instead of bridges that are open for reconciliation. And while on this podcast, I will talk about your abuser a little bit. And so when you go no contact with a non-offending family member, my question to you is did you build a wall and call it a boundary? Or did you build a bridge that would allow for safeguards to potential reconciliation with your non-offending family members? Is the trauma still winning? As I already mentioned, this is not a podcast telling you how to allow untethered access to abusers, period. In so many ways, this is a completely different conversation because no contact in those situations is usually appropriate. So let's lay the foundation for those who have gone no contact with abusive people because I don't want you to stop listening. Unless there
A Growing No Contact Trend
SPEAKER_01has been repentance, your distance from them is healthy, good, and right. Even in the presence of repentance, relationships with people who abused you need all kinds of guardrails. So as we navigate through this podcast, I want to focus on healing from those situations so that your current life isn't being robbed by your past trauma. My question To you is do you want to beat trauma up together? Today is about learning from the trauma and refusing to let it affect your life in real time, especially related to your relationships with non-offending family members, the one the family members that did not provide the original wound. You deserve a peaceful life absent from the continued ills of trauma and all forms of abuse. Choosing to heal, and in some cases, restored relationships are a fruit of that. Restored relationships with non-offending family members are the fruit of choosing to heal. Sometimes healing is an invitation to understand how your trauma may still be harming you in real time. What relationships, broken or not, are being affected by the incorrect messages of your past trauma? How is your current relationship with your non-offending family members? Maybe you're like me, and your fractured relationship with is with someone who was in that trench with you. Maybe you protected each other. But now you can't find your way back to each other because you're both operating from new wounds that have deep roots in the original wound. This is the cost of trauma. There is no different way to slice it. It isn't fair, it sucks. But like gravity, we can't change it. I've spent almost six years now telling you that healing is for you. Even if you're like me and have a lifetime of trauma. Suffice it to say that you know pain. I don't want you to continue in that pain because trauma does what it does. I say it all the time. If you do not pay attention to trauma, it will pay attention to you. For me, broken familial relationships is a whole new kind of pain. It festers all the wounds. I am at a place in life where I don't want to live in that war zone anymore. I want to step up on that hill, put the white flag of surrender, and tell trauma it may not continue to have me or my relationships. I heard something several months ago, and I love it if I was able to say to those people with whom I have fractured relationships, there is there are a series of things that we can say that go a long way to entering reconciliation. Thank you, I love you, I'm sorry, and please forgive me. Thank you, I love you, I'm sorry, and please forgive me because none of us are perfect in these relationships. But if you're tired of fractured relationships, you are not alone. Are you confused about what fractured them? You are not alone. Do you lay in bed at night when nobody else sees the tears about those fractured relationships and wonder Does anybody understand? You are not alone. Are you ready to move towards healing? Because if you are, welcome to the journey that we're going to take on the next several episodes of this podcast. Because this is for a journey, at times a brutal one, with things being asked and even required feeling unfair in the highest order. But I am so tired of trauma taking its toll on so many aspects of my life, and I'm tired of hanging on to the pain because thinking that hanging on to the pain means that it didn't matter, letting go of the pain meaning it matters, and it made me a different person. These broken relationships become a significant catalyst for me to seek more healing. And while that did not mean providing untethered access to me, it did mean turning a brick wall into a guarded bridge, at least on my side. In a different way, the decision to build bridges instead of walls is a lesson I learned from my trauma. I firmly believe that pain is the greatest teacher of them all, and so I am going to tell you two stories regarding my trauma makers and how I decided to deal with them both differently and why I may be in a position of wanting to battle with the angel today because I did I
Walls Versus Guarded Bridges
SPEAKER_01handled both of these differently and it affected the way I lived the rest of my life. But as I always tell you, we do not compare trauma, so please do not superimpose my stories on your situation. But I want to tell you two different ways that I decided to handle people who were just carrying on the original wound of generation to generation to generation. But your journey does have to be your own. But I learned about bri building walls and not bridges the hard way. That is perhaps why this is so painful to me. Because I had an opportunity when it mattered to build a guarded bridge and I built a wall. What I will share with you are two stories. One is my last moments with my mom who never protected me and carried that original wound and caused more wounds. And she was abusive by neglect. The other is my ex-husband of twelve years from domestic violence. I do not think that the way I handled either of them mattered for them and my relationships with them, but it did influence how I show up in the world after each situation. And that is what this is about. The acknowledgement that trauma has consequences and that the hope that we can alleviate the effect on non-offending relationships, get in that wrestling match, walk away with a limp with evidence that we are fighting. Because you deserve better relationships, and so do they. We get used to building brick walls and suddenly decades go by. And that is our normal behavior. We see that in the story of Jacob and Esau so many years that we're lost. These stories are about people that did hurt me, I am telling them because the way I learned to protect myself did not disappear when they died. I carried those survival strategies into relationships through people who had never caused the original wound. I tell you these stories because when I think of one of these people, the sting of regret is there. When I think of the other, I know that I did all that I could do. One of those experiences reinforced maladaptive bad ways of being in relationships. The other taught me how to do life in a broken world and helped strengthen my relationship skills. I had a brick wall in place as my mom laid in bed in a coma on a ventilator in 1991. I stood in her room in the middle of the night, zoned out, and I can hear the machines beeping in the distance. I wouldn't even stand by her bed. I stood across the room and stared out the window at the familiar skyline of my hometown of Jacksonville, Florida. It was 1991 and cutting off people wasn't a thing, and my mom only had my sister and me to make medical decisions for her. But that is effectively what I had done. I was there because it was my responsibility. I stood at her bedside, unable to even grab her hand. I stood there all night, and at 5 a.m. one cold day in October, I needed to go back to school. I left her room from being there all night, and I had a brick wall firmly in place. That was the last time I saw her, but I kept adding bricks to my heart. Regardless of it all, that was my mom laying in that bed. The person laying under all the wires and all the beeping machines and laying underneath all of that gave birth to me, gave me life. She was my favorite human. But instead of teaching me how to live in healthy relationships, everything she taught me from her wound that was an original wound from generations back was the opposite of that. Ironically, I should have learned from her how to create healthy boundaries, but that never happened because the trauma was louder. She is still the source of my greatest hurt. Even though she was in a coma, I regret not trying to make peace with her in that moment. In that hospital room in the middle of the night when it was just us. It is truly one of my life's greatest regrets. I don't know what a safe, appropriate, boundaried life would have looked like with her in it, but I do wish that I would have tried in that moment. Because she would not have benefited at all from me trying to make peace with the things that she did not protect us from, but I would have... a guarded bridge. But as I mentioned, this episode is not being in contact with your abusers, but it's about being in contact with a wounded part of you that is affecting real-time relationships. And so my question to those of you who have cut off those who abused you, is there work that you need to do that has nothing to do with them? Because you see, it was that experience with her that taught me to live life without regrets. Because it never would have been about her. She was leaving the planet. I was 19 years old with lots of life to live. The effects of her abuse by way of neglect continued long after she took her last breath because her actions meant I didn't learn a lot about how to be in healthy relationships, a price I am still paying today. I don't know what would be different had I found a way to make peace with her, but I know that the performance driven Amy Watson, because I was always performing to make her happy, that so often struggles in relationships would not be affecting me today had I understood in that moment that trauma was trying to win. The wall, though some say that she might have deserved it, only serves to hurt me. If she was still on this planet, I would need professional help to help me navigate life with her, and that is what I would say to you as if this is your story. Again, this is not a podcast preaching reconciliation with your abuser. This is a cautionary tale of how not finding peace affects you until you do make peace, like Jacob did with the angel, and until the work necessary is done to bring your best to relationships. You can be better even in your brokenness. And while your behavior may have explanations, those who did not hurt you don't deserve this version of you. Those of you who are in your life who have nothing to do except for maybe sharing that original wound. This is how we stop the madness. As Romans twelve eighteen says, making every effort as much as it depends on you to live at peace, not the absence of war, but the absence of striving with all men. A few short years
Two Trauma Maker Stories
SPEAKER_01later after my mom passed away, I met John Watson. And after twelve years of an abusing relationship, I left him. He was dangerous, and speaking of boundaries and all the things, I had a lifetime restraining order against him, so I understood the necessity of healthy, good, and appropriate boundaries. When it came to make the decision as to whether to change my last name, I did not. Somewhere deep inside of me I remember that experience with my mom, how she stepped into eternity without my forgiveness, and how I stepped into the rest of the world trying to navigate that original wound, and I was not willing to do that again because John Watson also had an original wound that had nothing to do with him, and his cut pled on everybody around him. So every day and sometimes hundreds of times a day I decided to forgive him with the truth buried deep inside of me that if he ever sought forgiveness, I would give it to him. I would let him walk over a gated bridge of reconciliation, not marriage, but at least peace between us. And when I got the call that he was found dead in a hotel room, I was immensely sad, but I had no regrets. See, I want that kind of peace for you because then you're not operating at a relational deficit. Choosing peace in relationships, peace, not the absence of war, but the absence of striving will affect the way you move around in life. I'm gonna say that again. When you choose peace, the absence not the absence of war, but the absence of striving. When you choose peace, then those that are in your life relationally will not get stained by blood from wounds that did not cut them. And you need to heal as Jacob did in that wrestling match with the angel. Again, this is not a podcast about uh forgiveness and reconciliation per se. I've done a whole episode on forgiving trauma makers. Forgiveness is a journey and still required of us, even in the midst of this pain. I believe that God extends grace in these situations. I pray that you can seek peace for your present and the future, you too. Because even though I chose to handle both of those relationships differently and both of those traumas differently, I did not understand the experiences alone would influence every subsequent relationship. And so I would never tell you to be in an unsafe reconciliation of abuse of an abusive relationship. That work that you do on yourself may stop the madness and other relationships in your families can have proper boundaries, bridges, guarded bridges and not walls. But perhaps we can avoid joining this growing trend of cutting off family members, especially non-offending family members of people that not cut us and maybe bleeding from the same original wound. Because these broken relationships in my life are the result of someone else who cut us. Yet we are the ones still bleeding. Broken relationships can heal in these situations because so much of that trauma is shared. We're the only people in the trenches that's gonna say, I was there too. And so I stand on the idea that trauma is not our fault, but healing is our responsibility. It seems unfair and maybe it is, but living a life adversely affected by trauma is catastrophic when we keep letting it win. My healing, your healing, is our responsibility. And while I do not have control over walls that I cannot climb, I do have control over the decision to build a bridge. Albeit guarded to reconciliation with broken relationships from non-offending family members. I will lay down my pride as Jacob did in that wrestling match, and he had created so much of that wound. And I will say, I love you. I am sorry. Thank you. And please forgive me. Healing is a choice. I choose it. Will you? Hey everybody, thank you for listening. I hope that this episode that took me so long to write and record finds a way to a healing part of your heart. Where we can say no more trauma, you're not going to provide blood from that original wound on my relationships now. Are you willing to say to those non-offending family members from whom you are estranged? I love you, thank you, I'm sorry, and please forgive me. We will be back in two weeks as we continue to talk about reconciliation and healing and choosing to not operate from our original wound in our relationships. Remember, as always, you are seen, you are known, you are heard, you are loved, and you are valued as much as it depends on you.
SPEAKER_00Live peaceably with all the
Choosing Peace And The Closing Charge
SPEAKER_00channel.