Putting Up Walls vs. Protecting Priorities

My husband and I recently decided to focus on a word at the start of a new year. We’ve never done that, but we wanted to preserve our ability to pause and focus on something during a season of toddler life that affords neither pausing nor focusing. He chose the word “personhood.”

At first, I thought I should focus on the aspect of my personhood as a mother. It’s a new identity I’d taken on and was trying to navigate, so it made sense. But my thoughts kept coming back to a part of my life I thought I’d handled but had buried instead to move on quickly from the pain.

This pain caused me to distrust other people. It led me to look over my shoulder in relationships and wonder, “When are you going to betray me too? When are you going to make me feel worthless because of your rejection... of my personhood?” And I felt God kept bringing up the pain and stirring things up.

I got irritated. My focus was on motherhood, but now old pains were being dug up. I began to realize that my distrust could damage my most meaningful relationships, and it needed to be dealt with. I needed to uproot what I’d buried, so I could be healed. 

While distrust can protect you from being hurt again, it can also prevent you from being close again.

Only when something or someone starts to stir up that place of pain again do you realize, “there’s more healing to be done here.” It’s much easier to blame-shift. It’s much easier to cut off relationships. And it can be easy to do it under the guise of health. Don’t get me wrong, healthy boundaries are both important and necessary.

But I sometimes wonder if we spend more time putting up walls rather than protecting our priorities.

How many times have I cut out the very things that were meant to move me towards healing? I found myself needing to reconcile: am I going to process through the pain or continue cutting off what’s triggering it? That’s the unsolicited lesson I’ve been learning from our word for the year. And yet, I know it’s for my healing. I know peace and redemption are on the other side of the process of uprooting. And even when the pain points resurface, I can be thankful they remind me there’s more healing to be done.