When Survival Follows You Inside.

PRISON DIDN'T CREATE THE WOMEN WE HAD BECOME.

It simply put walls around the survival

we had already been living.

When I first entered prison, it would have been easy to look around and see inmates.

Numbers.

Uniforms.

Sentences.

Women who had done something wrong.

But the longer I lived among them,

the harder it became to see them that way.

I began seeing mothers.

Daughters.

Aunties.

Wives.

Women who missed their children.

Women who still needed their mothers.

Women who wanted somebody to choose them.

Women who were lonely.

Women who were afraid.

Women who had learned how to survive long before a prison gate ever closed behind them.

And survival doesn't stop needing what it needed just because your address changes.

The woman who spent her life looking for love still wanted love.

The woman who survived by becoming hard still needed her armor.

The woman who learned to please people still wanted approval.

The woman who couldn't stand being alone still searched for somebody to fill the empty space.

The surroundings changed.

The survival patterns didn't.

And that is where this story reaches beyond prison walls.

Because some of us have never spent one night in a prison cell...

and we're still living according to rules we learned in captivity.

Don't trust anybody.

Don't let them see you cry.

Keep everybody happy.

Never need anyone.

Stay ready to fight.

Take whatever love you can get.

Leave before they leave you.

Keep moving so you never have to feel.

Those rules may have helped us survive something once.

But survival has a strange way of overstaying its assignment.

Eventually, what protected us can begin imprisoning us.

And maybe that's why healing can feel so uncomfortable.

God isn't only asking us to walk away from what hurt us.

Sometimes He is asking us to put down the very things that helped us survive it.

And that leaves a frightening question:

WHO AM I WITHOUT THE THINGS I USED TO SURVIVE?

Without the armor.

Without the pleasing.

Without the running.

Without the numbing.

Without needing someone else to tell me I'm worth loving.

Maybe we don't know yet.

Maybe that's the gap.

The space between the person survival required us to become...

and the person God created us to be.

And maybe healing isn't about hating the person who survived.

Maybe we can thank her.

She got us here.

But she doesn't have to lead us forever.

Some prisons have gates.

Some have bars.

And some are made from survival patterns we no longer realize we're obeying.

The door may already be open.

Now we have to learn how to walk out.

— Closing the Gap

Where Healing Began

www.wherehealingbegan.com