The following material has been adapted from the teaching of Ps. Alex Leo

The purpose of this page

Before we begin...

Begin with the good news of God’s promise: God promises to be a healer, and he keeps his promises.

In 2 Chronicles 7:14, God promises: “if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”

1. Humility: Healing cannot be forced upon us. Only we can know we need healing. Only we can admit that we have a problem, that we have sin, that we have unresolvable issues. If we don't feel that this is a currently need of ours, there's no need to keep reading.

So don't compare ourselves to others as superior or inferior. Instead, we are all humbled in the fact that we are fellow wounded people. We are here not to condemn, but to help each other with the mistakes we make.

2. Seek God's face: But there is hope: regarding all healing, everything will be done by Jesus, who loves us very much. He longs to free us and to bring us to healing; we only have to trust that he will (and that he has already begun to do so).

The healer is Jesus. We are all his patients. In group therapy, patients become the tools Jesus will use, but he does the healing. We must seriously seek his face and trust him, not any kind of technique.

3. Turn from wicked ways: Healing and transformation is possible. In the cave of Adullam, the men who gathered around David were in distress, in debt, and hopeless. God made them into mighty warriors. It is possible for us, in Christ, to have our lives turn around.

We must courageously be prepared to “take off our armour,” to turn away from the (harmful) coping mechanisms which have been protecting us all this time, and to step into the new life God wants to give. Are we ready for a new morning, or will we stay in the dark?

What is woundedness (and how can I tell if I'm wounded?)

Emotional wound / Soul injury:

1. A wound is pain from our past which persists when we didn't have what we needed to process the original injury.

2. Wounds can be thought of as a subconscious memory of a wounded "inner child" part of us that didn't have the opportunity to heal.

3. Living with a persisting wound can hinder our development or maturation (e.g., an injured leg will change how we walk).

To cope with wounds, we develop beliefs and behaviours that may hold us back from reaching our full potential as God intended for us.

To heal woundedness, we must reconcile with our emotions from our past in order to be able to move forward.

"It's impossible to be spiritually mature, while remaining emotionally immature." -Pete Scazzero

Personal assessment of woundedness / emotional health

1. We can know that we're wounded through these tell-tale consequences in our life:

2. "Emotionally Healthy Discipleship Personal Assessment" (click here to download a printable version of the Personal Assessment)

Note: It may be good to go through these assessments before proceeding, just to have a clearer point of reference for yourself

The wounded subconscious

To heal the wound, we need to undo the conditions that led to its formation.

To undo these conditions, we need to understand how wounds form in the first place.

And to understand how wounds form, we must understand the subconscious.

Analogy #1: You are like a grown elephant who has been held by a rope since you were small. Even though you are fully grown now, your body remains captive only because your thoughts and mindset are captive. You think: “I will never be free.” In reality, you are no longer bound.

We are in actuality a new creation, freed by God. We remain bound not by our sin (God is more powerful than our sin), but because of false beliefs that we hold. We are held captive by shame and disappointment in our mind. These beliefs and feelings can be hard to change because they live in our subconscious.

Analogy #2: an abused bear named Ina who was kept in a small cage for twenty years continued to circle endlessly even after being released. Some part of her has not fully comprehended that the bars are gone. She is free, but her mind is captive in an imaginary cage created by the suffering she experienced.

Trauma is real, and its effects on us and our mindset are real. In short, Ina isn't stupid. She needs help, not shame. Just like Ina, within our subconscious, we can still be trapped in a painful past even if our external circumstances have changed.

Click the thumbnail or click this link to watch the video.

As we may know, leaving behind our false thinking and our unhelpful emotions are rarely just a matter of changing our mind and thinking something else. Why can’t we change our mind? Why is it that, often, we fail to understand our own behaviour (e.g., we say to others: “Sorry, I wasn’t myself”)?

The subconscious:

The great majority of our mind is subconscious (literally, below awareness). There are many parts of our mind that operate automatically (beyond our control), or are forgotten by our conscious mind, but still continue to influence our actions, thoughts, and feelings.

In other words, much of our lives are driven by our subconscious mind.

1. The subconscious is where forgotten things, repressed things, and the things we would rather not think about reside: it is where trauma and pain hide beyond our conscious awareness and our memory.

2. The subconscious also hides the connection between our hidden wounds and our current behaviour, so that we cannot consciously see the connection. Thus, we often don’t understand our own behaviour. We commit the same actions over and over again, and don’t understand the reasons why.

3. More dramatically, our conscious mind and our subconscious mind can be at odds with one another, without our knowing.

A case study

While they were slaves in Egypt, the Israelites expressed a conscious desire for freedom from slavery (Exodus 2:23-25).

However, unbeknownst to themselves, they were also carrying a subconscious desire to remain enslaved (Exodus 14:10-12).

Part of them did not want to be free. Maybe, in their subconscious, "slave" is how they saw themselves (i.e., a damaged self-image). Or, maybe, subconsciously, slavery felt safer than freedom.

In any case, their trauma from generations of slavery has wounded their subconscious, even though they have been freed.

If we have not faced our subconscious desires and beliefs, whenever we are under pressure and stress, what was subconscious will come out—and we fall under its control (Exodus 17:1-3). We are held back from growing into the people God knows we are made to be.

So long as we are ruled by a traumatized subconscious, we will never reach the Promised Land—that is, our God-given destiny. We will only wander the wilderness until we die, despite God’s good plan for us (Numbers 14:29-30).

Worse, we often misunderstand the issue.

We get disappointed in ourselves for how we behave under stress, not understanding the root of the issue.

We go from epiphany to epiphany, realization to realization, but never really seem to change.

This is because we try to manage the symptom rather than addressing the wound.

In summary:

To heal and to grow, we cannot stay stuck at the surface; we must go deeper and get to the root of the issues.

The root lies in the wounds and the past pain we want to turn away from, hidden in the subconscious mind.

These wounds form a cage of false beliefs within our subconscious that keep us trapped, even though we are free.

Understanding the root of emotional wounds / soul injuries

Our issues in the present

⤷ stem from damaged father-image (inability to trust God as good) + damaged self-image (inability to love oneself and trust in how God sees you)

⤷ which stem from emotional wounds in our pasts (especially in our childhoods)

⤷ But where do emotional wounds come from?

The primary cause of emotional wounds is unmet emotional needs within the context of our relationship with others. The same way that unmet physical needs lead to a damaged body, unmet emotional needs will lead to a damaged soul.

We subconsciously are not able to fully trust God our Father (and we turn away from him), leading to many issues.

In this fallen world, we can only understand our Father as reflected through our parents and other human "father figures."

But damaged father figures in turn damage our subconscious by failing to meet our needs.

We cannot obey someone whom, deep down, we believe is not good. Our conscious mind wants to trust and obey God because He is good, but our wounded subconscious cries out that “No, He is a father. He is bad.”

Our relationship with God is limited by false subconscious beliefs, rooted in wounds caused by a lack of key emotional needs.

Four main emotional needs

The good news: the same way a physical body can heal from damage when it has what it needs, your soul also has the capacity to heal from damage when it has what it needs.

The issue: our soul may fail to receive what it needs to grow. When these needs are threatened, our soul is vulnerable to injury.

Three main ways these needs can go unmet:

Note: If you'd like to, try to ask yourself which of these four needs you feel is missing the most, and how did that need go unmet?


Heidi Priebe, MSc on how our compulsive behaviours and self-sabotaging habits are often 1. rooted in unmet needs, as well as 2. signals that there are wounded parts of us which need healing.

An excellent video that can supplement the material in the preceding and following sections.

Click the thumbnail or click this link to watch the video.

How wounds form

1.

Something unpleasant (a saddening, angering, or frightening event) happens to us, maybe repeatedly. An emotional need goes unmet or is threatened. This event itself is not the wound, but has the potential to become a wound if we cannot "metabolize" it.

"Trauma is not what happens to you, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness." -Dr. Gabor Maté

2.

For one reason or another, we are unable to express/process our negative feelings or to regain the unmet emotional need in a healthy manner. Our soul ends up missing one of the things that are vital for us to be able to recover.

Perhaps our parents were not able to create the ideal conditions for us to be able to express our difficult and negative feelings, or they could not make us feel valued, accepted, secure, or connected. Perhaps they were the source of the distressing event.

We learned that our guardians are not able to help us with our pain, and we would have to keep this pain to ourselves.

3.

It would be intolerable to keep this pain within our conscious awareness at all times. So, we learn to suppress our painful feelings or the unmet need into our subconscious, beyond the reach of our conscious mind.

The pain persists, and an emotional wound / soul injury forms.

Note: This is why we have the idea of a wounded inner child within us.

If a child is not able to process the distressing experience, when the negative emotions and/or the experience of the pain is exiled into the subconscious, it's as if the subconscious now holds this childhood memory and pain that is frozen in time—stuck at the moment of pain.

In some sense, part of our subconscious is frozen in childhood and doesn't grow up.

4.

Analogy: imagine walking with an injured leg. In order to avoid the pain, your body automatically changes the way you walk. In the same way, your body develops coping mechanisms to cover up the pain of soul wounds.

In order for us to live with the pain of the persisting wound and unmet need, our soul automatically or subconsciously develops coping mechanisms which allow us to go through with our lives. These mechanisms allow us to "cover" our wounds and negative emotions and to feel somewhat okay.

Note that coping mechanisms are not inherently bad; they can protect us from pain. However, some of these strategies that partially help us could also be bad strategies that harm us and others, create difficulties, or hinder our maturation.

In the end, coping mechanisms cover the wound but cannot heal it at the root.

Here are some coping mechanisms we develop when we are unable to process and heal our pain:

These examples may help us see how certain coping mechanisms resulting from wounds can keep us emotionally immature.

Unresolved wounds may also give rise to trauma-based narratives or beliefs about ourselves and others, for example:

These beliefs are also what we call the damaged self-image.

When these beliefs relate to God, we call them a damaged father-image, for example:

1. Heidi Priebe, MSc on a. how defense mechanisms form (which we've been calling coping mechanisms), and b. how they are often strategies we learned to avoid feeling hurt (and that's why they're often so difficult to let go of)

Click the thumbnail or click this link to watch the video.

2. Click here for a list of common unhealthy coping mechanisms by Anna Katharina Schaffner, PhD.

5.

We remain controlled by the wounds in our subconscious, and we behave in ways which are incomprehensible to our conscious selves.

We can see this especially in our compulsive behaviour and self-sabotaging habits that seem impossible to change, even though we believe they are wrong. We don't realize that this is because deep parts of us are still wounded and in pain, and lashing out.

Our coping mechanisms leads to harmful consequences in our lives. For example, we wear a mask in order to convince ourselves and others that we are okay, when in fact we are not. In the long run, masking our problems is likely to only set us up for bigger problems.

Some consequences or symptoms of unresolved soul injuries:

Reminder: Not all emotional wounds lead to these same issues, and not all issues are caused by emotional wounds.

In summary:

The need for the healing of soul injuries is the reason for group therapy. In group therapy, all patients will aim to:

Ideal conditions to prevent the formation of a wound

Remember, trauma is not what happens to us; it's what happens inside us (Dr. Gabor Maté)

A person should be able to metabolize difficult emotions and experiences through these avenues:

The purpose of #2 and #3 is to facilitate #1, but we need #2 to be able to develop #3.

Our relationships are meant to be support systems where we find what our soul needs to be well—places where empathetic witnesses support us in processing difficult experiences that we might not be able to on our own. Unfortunately, conditions are not always ideal.

Ideal conditions in childhood

Ideally, the child has parents who do not chide or belittle them, but instead understands the child and gives the child the necessary time and love to be able to process and express their feelings.

1.

When something unpleasant happens to a child, the child is ideally allowed to express their emotions in a healthy manner, is listened to with full empathy and no judgement, and is not given advice too early. The parent supports the child in feeling their feelings.

The child is given time and space to feel and express whatever it is that they feel. Their negative emotions are released.

2.

Afterwards, the parent embraces the child in love, reaffirming the child’s value, the fact that they are accepted, safe, and connected.

In other words, the child’s emotional needs are reaffirmed and met by the parent.

The unpleasant event is redeemed by the parent’s love for their child. The difficult emotion is metabolized.

3.

Once the negative emotion has fully passed, and only when this process is fully over, should the time come for the parent to start giving advice and guidance. The principle here is that connection comes prior to correction.

4.

Over time, the parent then supports the child to be able to carry out the above process on their own.

This allows the child to grow resilient in their ability to face wounding events as well as to love God, love themselves, and others. Maturation is able to occur.

5.

If the child fails or an unpleasant or distressing event occurs again, repeat the process again.

Under these ideal conditions, no persisting wound is formed; the child heals.

In summary:

In this context, group therapy serves in theory to help to reconstruct these ideal conditions for patients, creating environments that support the healing of wounds.

Group therapy serves to help and support members to:

The hope is that we would be able to release what we should have been able to release originally.

We were originally wounded through relationships, and we need relationships to help us heal.

Group therapy (or: healing in community)

Reminder: Group therapy is not a cure-all for all our issues (especially our most serious ones).

Purpose: to help each other remember, re-feel, and re-enact the original unpleasant and traumatizing incident, creating an ideal condition to allow wounded patients to release the negative feelings (sadness, anger, fear) that they should have been able to express.

Note: the role of the other members is not primarily to lead the patient through the process to any kind of conclusion, but rather to be an empathetic witness and to simply be present with the patient as they face their wounds.

The model:

1.

One member of the group (i.e., the patient) brings a memory concerning a distressing incident during their childhood where they felt wounded (or experienced a very difficult emotion, e.g., anger, sadness, fear, shame).

They may use a visual aid such as a drawing, if they would like.

The patient retells this memory to the others.

2.

The other members of the group help the patient retrieve and re-feel the negative emotions and pain that they were not able to process at the time. They will do this by asking the patient open-ended questions that will helping the patient venture deeper into their subconscious.

The intention is that this process will allow the patient to be able to return to the original incident, return to their state of mind and feelings at the time, and emotionally connect with their wounded inner child.

3.

The group helps the patient discover and identify their coping mechanisms.

The patient must try to connect the dots of their story, from memory to present.

Recognize: which behaviours and beliefs serve to cover over the emotional pain or unmet needs that resulted from the incident?

4.

The group helps the patient discover and identify the consequences of their wounds in their present.

The patient must try to recognize how their unresolved pain and their coping mechanisms result in harmful consequences, whether to themselves or to others.

5.

Invite the patient to close their eyes and ask them to return to the incident, as if it were real, as much as possible.

The group gives the opportunity for the patient to express any negative emotions that need to be released.

They may need to cry out and scream, or weep, shake violently, etc.

They may need to say whatever it is they've been keeping inside or whatever else they need to say openly.

If there is something constraining the patient from remembering or expressing their negative emotions, invite the patient to return to and connect with the mindset of their inner child as much as possible (i.e., see the memory from the perspective of their inner child).

You can also try inviting the patient to speak to their inner child within them. Give an opportunity for the patient to "be there" for their past self, to accompany and support their inner child in expressing their feelings, and maybe to say something reassuring.

The adult self can reassure the child self that they will be okay; they are safe now, they are loved, they are not powerless anymore.

While the inner child is feeling safe and supported, the adult self can let them know all the things that they know and believe in their conscious mind but the inner child self couldn't previously believe. This is how the subconscious is healed.

Once the patient has finished expressing their negative emotions, make sure the negative emotions have been processed.

Click here for a list of some possible signs that you've processed an emotion

6.

For Christians, many emotional wounds are associated with a wound or negative emotions relating to God.

If we were injured in our childhood, we may develop a wound wondering why God didn't care about us, or a wound from seeing our flawed parents in the face of God our Father.

As such, group therapy is also a place for patients to process, express, and release their negative emotions towards God.

Invite the patient to close their eyes and ask them to return to the incident, as if it were real, as much as possible.

The group gives the opportunity for the patient to express any pain they feel towards God. They may say whatever it is they need to say.

The group has the responsibility to embody and point the patient to the unconditional loving embrace of God.

7.

The final step of healing from emotional wounds / soul injuries is forgiveness, which represents the process of fully allowing our past pain to move on from our subconscious.

The group helps the patient go through a full process of forgiveness (not a shallow, surface-level, "should"-based forgiveness), but truly healing forgiveness

This should come later than sooner. Forgiveness is often the very last step.

Steps to forgiveness:

Self-healing (or: healing while on your own)

Note: Group therapy is most effective when all members are participating in group therapy in conjunction with practicing the “self-healing” process in their daily lives. Both are important.

Without group therapy, it would be difficult for our wounds to heal because it is difficult to have our needs met and feel supported without a community of people ready to support you unconditionally. Relationships hurt us, but good relationships heal us.

Without self-healing, it would be difficult to heal not only because it may take time for healing to integrate into our subconscious, but because part of our healing is the process of learning to be supportive and to be a good friend to yourself when things are hard.

Self-healing:

1. The process of applying the principles behind group therapy in our daily lives when unpleasant experiences, difficult feelings, or distressing memories arise. We provide an ideal conditions for our soul to metabolize negative emotions, allowing us to grow more resilient.

2. Self-healing means learning to understand and go deeper into our emotions. If we wish not to be ruled by our emotions, we must learn how to bring them to our conscious awareness instead of allowing our emotions to be driven entirely by our subconscious wounds.

The model:

Self-healing, in general, means supporting ourselves through our self-talk (i.e. inner monologue). However, many of us can find it challenging to think or talk to ourselves in a way that is constructive (especially when we are experiencing difficult and negative emotions.)

As such, self-healing can look like journaling our emotions (generally, negative ones).

1.

Identify what you’re feeling as clearly as you can.

In the past, we may not have had ideal conditions to learn how to identify and process painful feelings. So, it can be helpful to look at maps as a starting point if our inner emotional landscape feels overwhelming or unknowable to us.

Here are some tools designed to help people name what they're feeling:

1. The Feelings Wheel. This tool can help you expand your understanding of what's happening inside you, as it's designed to guide you from the most basic sense of what you're feeling (e.g., bad, afraid, angry) to more nuanced emotions (e.g., unfocused, helpless, betrayed)

2. The Atlas of Emotions. An interactive tool designed to build your emotional vocabulary and awareness of what you're feeling (and why).

3. The Emotion Sensation Feeling Wheel. Designed by Lindsay Braman, this adaptation of the feelings wheel includes the bodily sensations that may accompany our emotions (helping us to connect sensation to emotion).

2.

Feel the feeling.

If you feel like you can do it, invite yourself to sit with the emotional pain and the difficult emotion.

Without trying to flee or fight it or fix it, try to just actually feel the anger or the sadness or the fear.

3.

Ask: "Why do I feel that way? Why does this situation make me feel that?"

Once you feel ready, come up with as many detailed reasons for the emotion as possible (e.g., explanations or justifications for why you feel that way). Keep being curious and asking why. Try to get to the root of the story you tell yourself.

Remember: the emotion is still in you. Don’t run from it or fight it or analyze it to death.

Accept it, face it, and go deeper. What is this feeling?

Try to treat your emotion with compassion and curiosity. Listen to it. What is it saying?

5.

Evaluate. For each explanation or justification you can think of, ask ourselves: is this true? Is this a fact or an assumption?

Is there evidence to support how I feel, or does this feeling point to a distorted pattern of thinking (i.e. a false belief)?

Don’t be afraid, don’t judge yourself. Feelings are natural.

Heidi Priebe, MSc on how to actually process emotional pain and difficult emotions (i.e., practical advice on self-healing in daily life)

Click the thumbnail or click this link to watch the video.


Psychologist Susan David on how to (and how valuable it is to) experience all our emotions, including those we consider negative or bad or wrong.

Click the thumbnail or click this link to watch the video.

In summary

The essence of Christianity is to follow in Christ’s footsteps; he leads us to overcome evil with good (Romans 12:21). We overcome fear with love (1 John 4:18). It is kindness that leads us to repentance (Romans 2:4).

Group therapy and self-healing are one way to apply this essence when we face our emotional pain.

Relax and rest. Don’t stress. God loves us very much.

Don't be discouraged by failure; we can always try again. Tomorrow is a new opportunity; every day we’re alive is another opportunity.

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet