Exit Wounds: Overcoming Unprocessed Pain

West

Introduction

Socrates said, The unexamined life is not worth living. I could not write to you persuasively or eloquently about something I have not experienced. For example, the ecstasy of rising to the top of your tribe, and/or the agony of discovering that the top is really the bottom are things that I have not experienced. I am a third generation preacher/pastor with an eclectic denominational background, called by God, not by legacy. Most of my 20 years of pastoral ministry and 24 years of preaching, I have been addicted to the adrenaline of being driven, ruled by impulse, coupled with impatience and unchallenged success. An unexamined inner core, along with the insatiable appetite for approval and acceptance led to a recipe for disaster. As a result, unaddressed pain that led to unacceptable behavior was the reason for my voluntary and involuntary relocation from the first church I was assigned to pastor. Thus, I became a thinkaholic and workaholic; burning the candle at both ends.

This workaholic lifestyle I created was filled with ambition and zeal that led to Bell’s Palsy—an illness with stroke-like symptoms. The day I checked into the ER they wanted to know my parents’ history of health challenges. I could not reveal the information because from the time I was able to comprehend, I was told that I had been adopted. I knew my biological mother, brothers, aunts, uncles and cousins, but I did not know my biological father, so I had no way of knowing their inherited health challenges. In the meantime, I began to ask questions:

Who is my father?

Why doesn’t he want to know who I am?

Why isn’t he looking for me?

I eventually made a self-determination that I was going to be successful and make my biological father wish that he had some involvement in my life.

I was raised in a loving, blended Christian family. There was no physical or verbal abuse. Therefore, this book is not written to criticize my parents or the church for how I did not process my pain. For 34 years, I lived under the guise that my parents adopted me at three months. This gave me a sense of uniqueness. In fact, when I first started preaching, my theological center was founded on adoption. My family and the faith community accepted and applauded me as being the adopted child.

One year after my father died, I discovered that the father who I was told adopted me was actually my biological father. I was the product of an outside relationship/affair.

Several members of my family and the faith community were already aware, but I did not know. I began to interpret adoption as abandonment. Whether I was conceived in sin or in love, my biological father and my mother that nurtured me, chose to love me.

Before the truth was revealed to me, I lived my life to be the model husband, father, teacher, preacher, pastor, mentor, son, brother and friend – just like my father. When people would say you look and act just like your father, it fueled my confidence that my development was about nurture and not nature.

Then, that confidence was diluted by the rejection others thought of me: the black sheep, the adopted one, and you know that’s really his son. My mother exuded courage when she chose to preserve my father’s reputation as a minister and protect my self-esteem with her knowledge that I was his biological son. She allowed me into their home, accepted me, and they raised me as their own.

I was not born into financial wealth; the material things I possessed, I purchased so I could be accepted. During my transition from invincibility to fragileness, I realized I had only made those purchases to minimize being rejected. It wasn’t the world that was rejecting me, I was rejecting myself. That was my father’s challenge; he did not want to be rejected by the faith community and be denied the access to exercise what God had called him to do. He could be honest with his wife but not the church. How much more effective his ministry would have been and what longevity of life he could have experienced if he had overcome the fear of rejection!

There was this hollowness in my heart that kept expanding. One that no career, degree, car, wardrobe, accomplishment or compliment could fulfill.

John 10:10 says, "A thief is only there to steal and kill and destroy. I came so they can have real and eternal life, more and better life than they ever dreamed of."¹

Jesus had literally come to fill every empty space, but I left Him at the door of my heart knocking, waiting to come in while I held my spiritual inheritance at gunpoint like a thief who has to shoplift in order to survive.

The title of this book, Exit Wounds, was birthed out of the heartbreak of encountering my own reality. But why Exit Wounds? A bullet or other projectile creates a larger hole where it exits than where it entered. When the pain and poison leaves the body, the exit wound is often larger than the entrance wound. Sometimes you cannot see an entrance wound because the skin closes behind the bullet. The bullet moves through the body like a propeller, creating an empty space. The pressure from the bullet changes the shape of things internally and externally. Whatever exits with the bullet, the force of the bullet pushes tissue and fluids outward. Everything that exits with the bullet causes the skin to tear.

When you have bad experiences you do not always remember when or where it started but you have the evidence of how it tore you up inside. The force and pressure of the painful encounter tore you up internally, creating an empty space within, distorting what’s vital and valuable, leaving you with a hole in your life that cannot be filled by possessions, positions or people.

This book is about the steps to processing the pain of fear, abandonment and rejection. We will start where you are because it is easier for some to remember the comfortable confines of the present. We disassociate ourselves with the pain of the past, not understanding that our past, whether productive or painful, has shaped and formed our character. It will help us to interpret why we perceive and respond to change, challenges and opportunities the way we do. The reader will be introduced to the ecstasy of concentration; where we must reallocate every bad remembrance into a character building experience.

You are not alone in your struggle of unprocessed pain. At one point or another, we have all been held hostage by someone or something that caused us to suppress, avoid or bury the pain. In our cave of disappointment and struggle, it makes one wonder; who can I share the unedited version of my fear, rejection, and abandonment with? It can be a miserable feeling trying to muster up the coping skills to aggravating cadence of unrest.

This book is not written to blame my parents or the faith community for the misinterpretation of my experiences. Neither is this book designed to serve as a panacea or cure all for seemingly insoluble challenges. This book will expose the vicious cycle of deception and betrayal of trust that can destroy confidence in ministry and commitment in personal relationships.

You do not have to live a life of self-deception. I want to give you the responsibility to be human and embrace your humanity.

My life theme, The Wounded Healer is the constellation of my life personal experiences from birth to present. I did not choose my life theme; it is obvious that my theme chose me. This reflection has been an initiation into the process of unfolding layers of suppressed positive and negative experiences that caused me to lose passion for preaching and compassion for people. It was like excavating dead things that had been buried on the surface of my soul with no real spiritual productiveness or fruitfulness that brings glory to God.

Writing this book has given me a fresh interpretation of the alarming habits and behaviors that contributed to my ineffectiveness as a leader, a father, husband, pastor, teacher, preacher, brother, friend and son. It has forced me to press beyond pretentiousness and engage with my past pain, while waltzing through the deep levels of healing.

Spiritual reading or holy reading is an ancient prayer practice that allows us to encounter the Living God through His written Word. When we practice, spiritual reading or holy reading, we are saying to God, Here I am. I am listening. I want You to speak into my life, for I know that when You do, I will be helped, healed and changed.

God has given us prayer, fasting, praise and worship as a way of removing emotional baggage in order to make room for Him. At the end of Chapters 3 through 10 you will be introduced to the perpetual process of self-emptying and spiritual reading, so as we pursue and seek God for clarity, peace and revelation, the invisible walls that separate earth from eternity will collapse, and the reader can experience the uninterrupted presence and power of God. There must be a consistent intentional practice of self- emptying through spiritual reading or holy reading in order to experience the presence and power of God that provokes transformation and healing.

Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist wrote, The greatest and most important problems in life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They can never be solved, but only outgrown.

¹ Peterson, E. H. (2005). The Message: The Bible in contemporary language (Jn 10:10). Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress.

CHAPTER 1

The Invisible Father

The greatest disease in the world is the disease of being unloved.

-Princess Diana of Wales

The walls of our life are often lying in ruin because of neglect to our spiritual, social and economic life. Whether it is a blended or binuclear family with an ambiguous status, where roles are not clearly defined; a young adult, divorcee, a single family or empty nester; they need spiritual, social and economic support that transcends the negative influence of our culture.

My story did not begin this way, but this is what it has evolved into. I was born to a teenage mother on July 29, 1971 in Houston, Texas, Harris County. I was her second of three sons. My biological mother and her family lived across the street from my father’s mother and sister. My biological mother kept me from July 1971 to January 1972, when my biological father asked my biological mother if he could take me and raise me. As I was told, one day my biological father went to his sister’s house, next door to my biological father’s mothers house, and across the street from my biological mother’s family’s house picked me up from my father’s only sister’s house, while my biological mother never made an appearance outside my father’s sister’s house to get one last look, give me a final kiss or bid me farewell. The Hartwell family drove me to their home and began raising me as their adopted son.

Later, I would wonder things like why they gave me away and left my brother, since he was a toddler. To me, it made more sense to give him away instead. I also wondered things like Why doesn’t she want me? Is it that she didn’t love me?

In reflection, I misinterpreted the transfer as abandonment and rejection.

My adoptive parents brought me into a blended family. My father had a son and a daughter, and his wife had a son. All of their children were old enough to be my parents. My mother and father were both Christians and served in a church in the inner city. After they took me in on January 1972, they planted a church in August 1972. They fellowshipped with a plethora of other churches in the community that were all aware that I was their adopted son. The schools I attended neighbored the churches we fellowshipped with. I was an average student, not an athlete, just a preacher’s kid that always went to church and had no time for extracurricular activities on the field, court or track.

I did not graduate from high school at the top of my class and when I went away to college, I did not have a sense of purpose. I was leaving to escape my life being dominated by Christendom.

After leaving college as an undergraduate and reluctantly relocating back to Houston, I accepted my calling and assignment to preach the gospel. After announcing my call, being licensed and preaching my trial sermon, I began dating my best friend from high school. I reconnected with her because she was safe and I was broken.

Well, she had been praying for a boyfriend she could marry, I called and she answered. Two years after dating, we were married August 14th, 1993 at my father’s church. He and my grandfather performed the ceremony. My motivation for marrying my best friend from high school was because it was familiar and in our church tradition, if you were going to be a pastor you had to be married. God took my motivation for leaving and going away to school, returning and marrying a familiar friend as His will. Bernadette Devlin, an Irish socialist and political activist said it best, The will of God will never take you where the grace of God cannot protect you.

I am a third generation preacher/pastor.