When dealing with trauma, shame, past sins, etc, it’s important to remember that there is a difference between exorcising something and burying something within yourself. The term exorcising can bring to mind actual demons, for us human beings and for the sake of our psychology it may be more helpful to show the aforementioned experiences themselves the door rather than pretend they never happened. If the body is a temple, what do we allow to stay there? Let’s take the analogy as far as it goes: Are we hiding things in the janitor’s closet so the sanctuary looks nice and presentable? Did we forget it’s there? It can grow mold.

Any clinical psychologist is correct in their discipline to address hidden traumas if they appear to be harming someone in the present. But Philippians 3:13-14 states “Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, 14 I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.” So what’s a Christian to do or think?

It can make sense this way: St. Paul had plenty of time to think through his life while he was blind (Acts 9:1-9). He neither ate nor drank as well (I don’t think we’ll know for sure if this was intentional, but if it was it would no doubt be influenced by his revelation; for young Christians, this story is about a vision St. Paul had where Jesus acknowledged and forgave him for persecuting Christians before he was converted in this moment by contact/a vision of the risen Jesus). St. Paul during this event would have been no doubt filled with The Spirit of God and therefore felt emboldened to confront the horror of what he’d done, presumably his horror would have been tempered by the presence of God.

So us being Christians have access to something when we confront our past: The Spirit of God. Jesus being the Shepard can guide us through confronting our past (and sometimes things we didn’t know were there but brought to mind through conviction) in a safe way which bares all. This conviction is a gift which gives us a negligible understanding of our offense, or the nature thereof compared to God’s understanding. Basically, and in line with Love Don’t Play’s philosophy, I don’t think God expects us to sit on our hands in regard to the work of a secular psychologist, but I also believe that in terms of The Spirit we’ve been given access to Boldness; we have privilege to acknowledge and then disregard any past hurts or acts, which eliminates the associated shame.

In the Bible it’s thematic for individuals (including Paul) to immediately forget the past and “walk away praising God” upon being healed. This is an unearthly situation. I believe that while again, not to judge a secularist, God is addressing the ties that bind us to this world. It’s profoundly important to remember that Jesus bares all of our shame and that the light is scarier than the dark. When he says come to him this immediately bares the conflict of a world that tells you to allow your past to haunt you and a God that simply forgets it. God is keen to make us brave enough to confront and forget our past in order to make us brave. As well, accountability groups in Church go a long way to disallowing any current sin to reside in us (for young Christians, such a group exists for us to be able to tell one another of a sin that no one would ever know about, thereby disallowing the sin, shame or any darkness to reside within our temple).   

We cannot choose our past, but this is good news because that means we’d no chance of understanding what we were doing. I like to say that regret is like looking at you penmanship now and wishing you wrote like this in the 5th grade…How? You would not and could not know any better, so it’s important to forgive yourself.

Until next time, take care.

Gregory Longmore, LMHC is an online-only Christian Professional Mental Health therapist based in NYC.