Alters, emotional healing, emotional trauma, Healing, Healing Instruction, inner healing, PTSD
Emotional Healing Made Simple
The Holy Spirit is teaching the body of Christ new things that are helping to heal mental illness and emotional trauma. Over the last few years, I’ve read a lot of books and reviewed many different approaches to emotional healing. I’ve also spoken with friends who have had decent success in healing mental illness and emotional trauma.
After going through my own emotional healing, and after looking at what others are doing that seems to work well, I developed an approach to emotional healing that’s simple, but effective. It’s one that I believe just about anyone can use and it doesn’t require special training. It doesn’t even require the person needing healing to be with you. I’ve used it often over internet chat and Skype. It’s so easy and quick that Michael King refers to it as the “one minute healing prayer.” Below is a brief explanation of the process I use and a step-by-step guide. If you need healing, you might ask a trusted friend to help you with this exercise or you can do it yourself:
Note:
I’ve seen excellent success with this approach, but it may not be completely effective with every kind of mental illness and emotional trauma. Some people have complex issues that require several different approaches to be used together. I believe this approach may help people with complex trauma, but they may require other methods in order to be completely healed. This approach seems to be most effective with the kind of emotional trauma typically seen in the average person.
Receiving healing of painful emotions and memories can be a fairly straight-forward process that consists of three simple steps:
- Identify the painful emotion associated with a particular event
- Ask Jesus to take the painful emotion from you
- Ask Him to heal the wound in your soul caused by it
For many people, emotional healing really can be that simple. Emotions simply need to be felt. Once you’ve felt them, you no longer need to carry them around, if they are painful.
The main problem I’ve found with emotional healing is that people who are extremely rational by nature may ask a lot of “why” questions in the middle of the healing process, which causes distractions and impedes the healing process. It doesn’t matter why something happened to you; the only thing that matters with regard to healing is how it affected you. If you focus on the emotions you’re feeling, and identify them one-by-one and allow Jesus to heal them, it’s likely that you’ll be able to receive healing fairly easily.
One of the things Jesus purchased for us on the cross is healing of our painful emotions. The Bible says that Jesus has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows (Is 53:4). If He has borne our painful emotions for us then we do not need to carry them any longer.
Healing painful emotions usually requires you to go back to events in your life where you can feel an emotion that is troubling you. Once you’ve accessed the memory of a particular event and you feel the emotion associated with it, ask Jesus to come to you.
- If the emotion you’re feeling is sinful, confess it as a sin and ask Him to forgive you of it. Say that you believe His blood has taken away the penalty and consequences of your sin.
- Tell Him you want the emotion removed from your soul.
- Ask Him to heal the wound in your soul caused by the emotion.
- Tell Him you receive His healing.
An optional step that some people find helpful is to ask Him to give you something positive to replace the negative emotion that He is removing. If you ask Him to take away sadness, you might ask Him to give you joy. If you ask Him to take away anger, you might ask Him to give you peace. If the emotion is there because you believed a lie about that situation, ask Him to show you the truth about it.
When you are done with this, bring the memory of the painful event to your mind again. If the emotion was healed, you should not be able to feel that emotion any longer, but there may be a different negative emotion that you can feel. Determine what negative emotion is strongest and do the same thing with it that you did with the first emotion:
- Tell Jesus you want the emotion removed from your soul.
- Ask Him to heal the wound in your soul caused by it.
- Tell Him you receive His healing.
When you’re done, bring the memory of the event to your mind again. Once more, try to determine if there are any negative emotions. If there are, repeat this process until you can bring the event to your memory and you feel no negative emotions. This process can be used on any memories that are associated with negative emotions.
If you suffer from amnesia concerning the events from your past, you can ask the Holy Spirit to bring to your memory the things you’ve forgotten. As He brings the events to mind, ask Jesus to heal them.
If you’d like to be healed of all the emotional trauma you’ve received over your lifetime, you might consider beginning with the earliest memories you have that are troublesome to you. Use this process to receive healing of the emotions of that event, then go to the next event from your past that stirs up negative emotions when you think about it. You can go year-by-year if you’d like from early childhood to the present.
If you apply this process to all the emotionally traumatic events you can think of, you will probably find a great deal of freedom afterward. I’ve seen a number of people receive healing of physical symptoms of illness and injury after going through this process.
After you’ve had your soul healed, you might consider keeping it healed. This approach also works well in the moment. It can be used to heal those minute-by-minute hurts, wounds and offenses we run into every day. Just give the painful emotion you’re feeling to Jesus and ask Him to heal the wound caused by it.
If you’ve received healing using this method, I’d love to hear your story. I’m gathering testimonies for the book I’m writing on emotional healing and I’d be happy to consider sharing your testimony in the book.
I'd love to hear your thoughts
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9 Comments
Gary kline
I once asked a pastor if mental illnesses such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder could be healed by prayer. He stated that if we could do that we would not need mental hospitals any longer. Since we still have them, I assumed he meant that MI could not be overcome with prayer. What are your thoughts on this important issue? Thank you.
Praying Medic
Thanks for dropping by Gary. I always use Jesus as my example. The Bible says he healed entire villages of all their diseases and illness. To me, “all” means all, with no exceptions. I have to conclude He healed the mentally ill. I know of many people today who have been healed of everything from schizophrenia , bipolar and other disorders. God is willing and able and He is teaching us how to do it. I’ve been finding more people with testimonies of healing of mental illness. I’ll share their testimonies in future messages.
Gary kline
And thanks for the rapid reply. Although I am currently retired, I have worked for 25 years with the seriously mentally ill (SMI) population at the local VAMC. I am thrilled to hear your encouraging response to my question.
Paula
I so need this in my life! Thank you!
Carol
One day I was being emotionally tormented about a person and situation that had been occurring for several years. I cried out to God and said “Lord, I thought I had forgiven this person.” He spoke back to me so clearly and said “you did, but you haven’t been healed yet.” This started me on a two year season of soul healing. I did just what you said. I would just sit before God and memories would begin coming up. I would present them to Him and invite Jesus into the memory, the pain it caused, any habits or responses that I formed because of it, and lots of repentance for my wrong responses and attitudes. I found that some of the most intense emotional instances needed more than one session of healing. Sometimes there are layers that He needs to go through and peel off one at a time in order to get to the root. Then I would ask Him to pour His glory into the wound. Sometimes I would see the blood of Jesus covering it, sometimes I would see myself laying it at His feet, and sometimes He would walk me through the memory and give it a different outcome. I strongly believe this has been a missing element in Christianity that has not been taught. I am a different person after going through this season. Things that would have really upset me or sent me into depression before, I now walk through with such a great amount of peace and grace that sometimes I am astounded. And it really is such a simple process that anyone is capable of doing. I encourage anyone with any kind of mental or emotional torment to do this and I know that God will be faithful to bring them healing. He needs His sons and daughters free and this word is right on time.
Fuzzy
I am greatly saddened once again this ‘method’ has not worked for me I tried the process on my own and with a trusted pastor friend….Can you also quote me what passage you used for ‘The Bible says he healed entire villages of all their diseases and illness.’
I would like to share that with my regular pastor as well
thanks for your books i enjoy them very much
Praying Medic
“Then His fame went throughout all Syria; and they brought to Him all sick people who were afflicted with various diseases and torments, and those who were demon-possessed, epileptics, and paralytics; and He healed them.” ~ Matt 4:24
“But when Jesus knew it, He withdrew from there. And great multitudes followed Him, and He healed them all.” ~ Matt 12:15
“When the sun was setting, all those who had any that were sick with various diseases brought them to Him; and He laid His hands on every one of them and healed them.” ~ Luke 4:40
David Burnet
Before following your directions/suggestions here, the most reliable, fastest and easiest prayer for emotional healing, including trauma, was Immanuel Prayer.
What you recommended seemed far too simple and easy to work. So, naturally, I had to try this out, and test against my assumptions.
Much to my surprise and delight the few times I’ve done this so far have resulted in emotional healing that was fast, simple, and easy.
I’ve also tested this on physical pain I’ve had, several times. Each time a layer of pain disappears. I then feel the next layer, repeat the process – it’s a simple, iterative process, that results, so far, in clearing up layer after layer of physical pain in real time.
I am surprised and delighted.
The process you suggest also follows a counter-intuitive approach to generalizing results that I came across elsewhere. Something I’d like to go into a bit more with you, just as one of those “back of the mind” things that may prove to be useful in future, larger insights.
The only problem with your suggested process I can see, so far, is that I cannot imagine how you can make a whole book about such a simple and effective process. So, as a result, I’m looking forward to discovering how that assumption of mine is wrong, too, and especially looking forward to learning more.
Thank you for your good work, and for sharing!
-David B.
Praying Medic
David – thank you for your thoughtful comments. I’m so glad you gave the method a try. The simplicity of this approach is due to the fact that it incorporates the few principles that are common to sozo, theophostic, Immanuel prayer, lie-busting, etc. Once I realized that all these approaches had a couple of things in common, I just used the common elements and disregarded the things that were not common to them.
The book I plan to write is going to cover both inner healing and deliverance. I plan to present testimonies as case studies and discuss the process used to get each person healed.