Healing is hard because it is a constant battle between your inner child, who is scared and just wants safety; your inner teenager, who is angry and just wants justice; and your current self, who is tired and just wants peace. In my experience, the only true solution to that battle is to surrender it to God and allow Him to work in your life, on His terms and in His time.
I know that can sound simple – maybe even dismissive, depending on where you are right now. Maybe it even sounds impossible. Maybe you’ve already tried this, and haven’t found it helpful. So let me back up, because I don’t mean it lightly, and I don’t think the path to that surrender is as short or as simple as it sounds. This is one of those “easier said than done” experiences in life, but it is absolutely doable, with the right tools and understanding.
We are whole people – not just bodies moving through a physical world, not just minds processing experience, not just souls longing for something beyond ourselves. We are all three, always, at the same time. Every level of that experience is real. Every level carries weight. Every level is asking to be seen.
Psychology has given us genuinely good tools for understanding why we are the way we are. The inner child framework, parts work, ego states – these reflect something true about the way trauma gets lodged in us, the way unfinished emotional business from earlier stages of life keeps showing up in the present. The scared child who never felt safe doesn’t just disappear when you turn thirty or forty or fifty. The angry teenager who never got justice doesn’t quietly retire. They surface. Usually at the worst possible moments.
But, a lot of healing frameworks, even they are very good ones, hit a wall. They stop at what they can measure. The problem with that is that not every important and real thing in our lived experience is tangible or measurable.
We live in a world that privileges the visible – what you can see, touch, quantify, replicate in a study. I understand that pull. I have a strong psychology background. I have worked in research, and research is built into the core of who I am. I value evidence. But the evidence of our own lived experience, if we’re honest about all of it, points somewhere beyond what the visible world can explain.
While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal. (2 Corinthians 4:18)
The problem isn’t that the invisible is hard to believe in. The problem is that most of us were never taught to trust it. We were taught to shut down or shut out the unseen; to trust what we could hold. And when you’ve been hurt by things you could hold – people, situations, your own body, your own memory – trusting something you cannot see can feel like one more risk you can’t afford.
This puts us in a risky position, because dismissing the spiritual dimension of your life doesn’t protect you from anything at all. In fact, it shuts out so much good, positivity and healing when we shut out or shut down the spiritual dimension of our lived realities. Doing so ultimately just means you’re fighting a battle you can’t fully see, with only a single part of who you are.
Reconnecting with the Spiritual
If we want to truly reconnect with ourselves and find solid ground again, we need more than insight. We need more than therapy, more than journaling, more than affirmations. We need spiritual energy. We need a source that is actually bigger than the battle – especially in those times when we are struggling to feel anything but invisible and alone.
I know that can sound like something off a wellness blog, so let me be clear about what I mean – and what I don’t mean:
This is not about crystals, although I do love their beauty, see them as creations of God and believe in their ability to inspire and effect us, and surround myself with many of them. This isn’t about vibrations alone, or aligning your chakras. What I’m talking about is something that science itself has been quietly confirming for decades. Energy is real.
Energetic exchange between people is real. Mirror neurons mean your nervous system literally absorbs the emotional states of those around you. Research on emotional contagion shows that feelings pass between people the way a cold does – often without either person realizing it. Epigenetics is now demonstrating that we can carry the weight of trauma from generations before us, encoded in our very biology. The HeartMath Institute has documented that the human heart generates an electromagnetic field that extends beyond the body and measurably affects the people in proximity to it. I find the research around the relationships and energy exchanges between humans and their pets to be especially fascinating and inspiring, and can say that in my experience, it is one hundred percent reality.
The point here is that we are not closed systems. We never were, and we never will be. That is not how we were created, and there is a purpose in how we were created.
This means that a significant portion of what you are carrying – the fear, the anger, the exhaustion – may not have originated with you at all. You do not have to have had a terrible childhood, or experienced a terrible personal trauma, to experience the weight of fear, anger, or exhaution – though obviously, having had those experiences it all the more consciously real. No, that weight can come in through connection you aren’t even consciously aware of – through proximity, through deep entanglement with people, environments, and spiritual realities that were not meant to be your load to bear.
Scripturally, this is about yokes.
Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. (Matthew 11:28-30)
A brief note: If you are not a Christian, or you are not sure what you believe right now, I am not writing you out of this conversation. My own foundation is Christ, and I hold firmly to the belief that He is the only way to the God I know has yielded true higher connection in my life. But I also believe – from scripture and from years of watching real lives, including my own – that genuine spiritual seeking has a way of arriving somewhere real. I have explored many, many paths and belief systems to find what has proven itself to me to be the ultimate truth in my life. The reaching is never wasted.
That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us. (Acts 17:27)
Wherever you are starting from, the door is not closed to you here.
A yoke connects two things. It distributes weight between them. The sobering reality is this: you are always yoked to something. The question is never whether you carry a yoke. The question is what you are yoked to, and whether that thing has any business being attached to you.
Wrong yokes are exhausting in a specific way. They pull you in directions you weren’t made to go. They ask you to carry weight that isn’t yours. They entangle your energy with energies that don’t resonate with who God made you to be or where He is trying to take you. And the longer you stay yoked to them, the harder it becomes to even remember what it felt like to move freely.
This is why healing requires the spiritual dimension. Not as a shortcut. Not as a bypass. But because some of what you are carrying can only be lifted by something greater than human effort. And because the only yoke that is actually designed for you – the only one that will not crush you under its weight – belongs to Christ.
The Difference Between Spiritual Bypass and Surrender
So what does it actually look like to bring the spiritual dimension back in? And why doesn’t it always seem to work when we try?
It’s important to talk about something called spiritual bypass, because while it is rarely noted, I think it explains a lot of frustrated “I tried that” experiences. Spiritual bypass is when we use faith, prayer, or spiritual practice as a way to skip over the real emotional work rather than go through it. It can look like faith from the outside. It can even feel like faith in the moment. But what it actually is, is avoidance with a spiritual label on it.
“I gave it to God.” “I forgave them.” “I’m not going to let the past have power over me.” These are true and good things, and there is a version of each of them that is genuinely healing. But there is also a more common version of each of them that is just the adult self hushing the inner child and the inner teenager, telling them to be quiet because we are tired of the noise. And those two younger parts of us – the scared one and the angry one – know the difference.
The scared child doesn’t need to be told to trust God before anyone has acknowledged that she was hurt. The angry teenager doesn’t need to be told to forgive before anyone has agreed that what happened wasn’t right. When we bypass those steps, we don’t get healing. We get a temporary quiet that eventually breaks open again, usually under stress, usually at the worst possible moments.
They always know, even if our conscious minds don’t, and that is the root of a lot of what feels like “battle” to us.
Genuine surrender is different, and the difference is the whole thing. Genuine surrender doesn’t ask you to pretend you aren’t wounded. It asks you to bring the wounds, every one of them, and lay them down. Genuine surrender includes the ones that feel too ugly, too old, or too embarrassing to say out loud. God already knows. He is not waiting for you to clean yourself up before He will receive you. He is not standing at a distance, watching to see if you can pull yourself together first.
Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. (Matthew 11:28-29)
Through Christ, God has invited us all – including all ye that labour and are heavy laden, to come to Him, and he will give us rest. He doesn’t say “all ye who have it together.” Not “all ye who have finished grieving.” Not “all ye who aren’t angry anymore.”
Just, “All ye.” That includes all of you. It includes your inner child, your furious, justice-seeking inner teenager, and the exhausted present version of you who is just trying to make it through the week.
Genuine surrender looks less like “I’m fine, I gave it to God” and more like “Lord, here is the part of me that is still terrified. Here is the part of me that is still furious. Here is the part of me that is bone tired. I cannot hold all of this, and I am not going to pretend I can. I trust you with all of it.”
That is not weakness. That is the bravest thing a person can do, and it is the only kind of surrender that actually works, because it is the only kind that brings your whole self to the table.
Pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us. (Psalm 62:8)
Pour out, not tidy up or summarize, or present Him with the cleaned-up version of what we are dealing with. God doesn’t clutch His pearls or roll His eyes and huff when He receives what would be the equivalent of a long, drawn out text or rant to human beings with little patience. He knows what’s already there – He requires us to pour it out before Him not because He doesn’t know but because it is that process of pouring it out that activates true surrender. It is an act of our faith, and that makes it genuine.
Coming to the Table Whole
What does this actually look like in practice? Well, it starts with honesty – not the cleaned-up, appropriately spiritual kind, but the real kind. It starts with sitting still long enough to notice which version of you is loudest right now. Is it the child who is scared and just needs to feel safe? Is it the teenager who is furious and needs someone to acknowledge that it wasn’t okay? Is it the exhausted present-day self who just needs to put something down for five minutes?
Name them. Acknowledge them. Don’t hush them. Don’t just allow, but invite, them in. You don’t have to have the right words. You don’t have to feel ready. You don’t have to understand them – that’s the point of sitting with them in the first place. You don’t even have to feel faith in the moment you reach. The reaching is the faith. You just have to begin, and beginning happens the moment you open the door. If you are reaching in faith, then you are not alone. The Spirit is with you, and is your helper.
Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. (Romans 8:26)
When you genuinely don’t have words – when what you are carrying is too old or too tangled or too heavy to even articulate – the Spirit carries it for you. That is not just a metaphor. That is a promise, and not a human one. That is God’s promise.
Healing is not linear. It will not happen all at once, and it will not always feel like progress when it is happening. But every time you choose to bring your whole self – the scared part, the angry part, the tired part – instead of just the parts you think are acceptable, you are doing something real, something valuable, and something that will yield real results. You are dismantling the wrong yokes. You are choosing the one that was designed for you.
That is how the battle begins, slowly and honestly, to quiet. That is how you begin to find, slowly and honestly, one surrendered moment at a time, that His yoke really is easy, and His burden really is light.
Closing Thoughts
I have sat in every room this post describes. I have been the scared child who couldn’t find safety anywhere. I have been the furious teenager who needed someone to say “that wasn’t right” and never heard it. I have been the exhausted adult, bone tired, carrying weight I didn’t fully understand, fighting a battle I couldn’t entirely see. I have bypassed. I have distracted myself from God’s path with all number of New Age and worldly ones, and when I decided to return to the Source, at first I tidied myself up and presented God with the “appropriate” version of my pain, and wondered why nothing shifted.
I say all of that to say that I have looked for connection in the wrong places and come back empty. That’s how I learned the reality – not just the theory – of everything I have written here.
I learned because I have also, in the most honest moments of my life, taken my own, divinely inspired advice – the advice I have laid out in this post. I have poured it out. All of it. The ugly parts, the old parts, the parts I was most ashamed of. The parts too complicated to name. I have brought the child and the teenager and the tired woman to the same table and surrendered all three. Not just one time, and not perfectly, but surrendered nonetheless.
Surrender is something I return to, almost daily. But I can tell you from the other side of some very dark seasons that the rest God promised is real. The yoke that fits is real. The God who receives you whole – not cleaned up, not performing, not pretending – He is real.
Whatever battle you are carrying today, whatever parts of yourself you have been hushing because you weren’t sure they were welcome – they are welcome here, and more importantly, they are welcome there. You don’t have to have it figured out. You don’t have to come with the right words, the right beliefs, or the right amount of faith. You just have to come.
If you are ready to begin, or to begin again, here is a place to start:
Lord God, here I am. All of me – the part that is scared, the part that is angry, the part that is just tired. I don’t have it together, and I am done pretending that I do. I bring you the weight I was never meant to carry alone, the wounds I have tried to bypass instead of bring to you. I don’t have the right words for all of it, but you already know what is there. Receive me as I am. Help me trust you with the parts of me that feel untrusting. Give me your strength where I feel so weak and your confidence where I feel so incapable. Teach me, and help me, to pour it out instead of tidy it up. I choose your yoke today. I choose You not because I have this figured out, but because I don’t, and I know what I do not know, and I believe yours is the only yoke made for me. Thank you for the “all ye.” I am one of them.
Amen.
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