Have you ever been hard on yourself? Have you been guilty of beating yourself up because you didn’t get it right the first time? Have a habit that’s hard to break?

It didn’t take overnight to create it, so it probably won’t take overnight to break it. Give yourself grace. Give yourself time. Exercise the fruit of patience on yourself.   
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Often, we feel like if we’re not hard on ourselves we give ourselves permission to fall short, but perfection is not the aim. Consistency is the goal. We don’t leap to the finish line. We get there one step at a time. 

Trauma has a way of seeping into every aspect of our lives if we allow it to. It’s an intruder. It’s rude, violating, and invasive. It doesn’t care what new relationships or new opportunities we’re engaged in currently. It doesn’t care what God says about us. Trauma’s responsibility is to give us another identity as well as a mentality that is not led by Holy Spirit.

A sobering thought I’ve been pondering and meditating on here lately is that I choose to receive the grace given to me through Christ to isolate the trauma to the incident and the person(s) it involved. I choose not to drag my past into my present. I choose to see people in my life for who they really are and not view them through the lenses of pain. It’s not fair to the beautiful people who are in my life right now; nor is it fair to myself. How would you feel if you were mistreated for a wound you never caused? This is how we can do others if we allow the pain of the past to show up in our present and lead our decisions.
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This, by no means, is easy, but it’s doable because of Holy Spirit. We have been given the power to overcome and conquer all thoughts that are contrary to the knowledge of God. We don’t conquer bad thoughts with good ones; we conquer them with the Word of God. The more we do this, it sounds the alarm on the intruder called Trauma and serves it notice that it can no longer live comfortable in our space, our present moment, our relationships, or our decisions. It will not rule us nor steal our joy. Let’s take authority over the mentality of trauma today.