God yearns to mend the broken places in your heart.

He will touch the places where trauma entered and patiently dress each unhealed wound from your past. Trauma tends to stifle our identity and cause gifted people to refrain from using their gifts. Pain quiets voices that differ from the status quo and halts pioneers and innovators in their tracks. The pain screams louder than positive affirmations, good intentions, and sometimes even faith.

In a post-traumatic state, our inadequate attempts at self-protection often create greater dysfunction by suppressing our identity and initiating an assault against being fully known.

Healing requires your participation, your yielded yes. Yes to the process. Yes to the messiness. Yes to the stretching. Yes to the unknown. Yes to help. Yes to support. Yes to beholding God’s intervention.

The healing begins with your yes. As you yield your need to understand and have all the answers, you open the door for God to enter the situation.

This is an unraveling process as God gently unties the knots and removes the bandages—insufficient coping mechanisms—that helped you survive. It invites the question, “Who am I now?”

You cannot return to the person you were before. You have flipped the page to a new chapter of your life. However, the trauma has not disappeared. You still experienced it. Even after you reach a place of freedom, there will be times when the memory of your enslaved self comes rushing to the forefront of your mind.

Triggers will set off a battery of neurophysiological responses in your body. A smell will remind you of the place where you were violated. A name will cause the hairs on your arm to stand at attention. A memory will leave you crying in the corner. 

There will be times when the pain comes back and crashes over you. 

And yet, you will stand, rooted in the process of healing and clinging to the knowledge that you are not the trauma. 

The pain is not your identity. And in this new place of becoming, you will become familiar with the parts of your identity that have been hiding behind the walls you have erected to protect your heart. These emerging parts of your identity are stronger than you know and more capable than you can imagine.

They have been waiting to ascend out of darkness and learn how to walk in the light. For most of us, healing comes in waves and splashes—big breakthroughs followed by calm seasons that give way to tiny heart stirrings that ignite personal revival. 

Each healing journey is an adventure. Resist the trap of shame and feelings of failure that will try to stop you. 

God can heal you overnight, but my experience has been He often takes a gentler, slower approach. He gives you opportunities to practice healthy boundaries and self-disclosure with others over time. He lets you see the scars behind the bandages. He gives you time to appreciate the beauty of your healing heart. He extends the grace you need to see yourself scarred yet utterly lovely.

He provides you with the freedom to explore, imagine, erase, and allow Him to rewrite the story of your trauma identity. 

Not on the other side of trauma—there is no other side. It is a part of you. But He endows you with a new narrative in which you openly share who you are now—scars and all. This new sense of identity adds rather than subtracts.

Let all of it come through—your natural experiences, your pain, and your redeemed spiritual understanding. Welcome the truth of the trauma and the truth of who you are in Christ. The only way to be free is to allow it to become a redeemed part of your identity.

I’ve observed this in the life of a woman who, for years, lived the trauma of domestic violence. Once free from her abuser, she found it difficult to acclimate back into a normal way of living. Her experience affected every aspect of her life and her identity.

With the help of some caring friends, who took her in and patiently cared for her physical, emotional, and spiritual needs, she was able to be restored. By beholding God and accepting His healing process, she gained an understanding of her identity in Christ and her identity as a voice for the voiceless. Her new narrative allows her to offer inside knowledge about domestic violence to help organizations desiring to be a part of the solution.

Her new story includes both the trauma and the healing.

Your story matters, your healing matters, and the One who began this good work in you promises to see it through: “And I am certain that God, who began the good work within you, will continue His work until it is finally finished on the day when Christ Jesus returns” (Philippians 1:6).

Adapted from Being Fully Known © 2025 Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith. Used by permission of David C Cook. May not be further reproduced. All rights reserved.

*For deeper reflection, listen to Philippians 4 today!

Enjoy this powerful conversation with Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith on true rest and beholding God!!