Healing Back to Your True Self

I like words.

I like looking them up, turning them over, tracing their meanings until something deeper reveals itself. Recently, a word that has stayed with me is liberate.

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, to liberate means “to set at liberty: to free.” A strong definition, but not surprising. What caught my attention, though, was the secondary meaning: “to free from combination.”

That phrasing stopped me.

To free from combination.

It suggests two things that have become so intertwined they are experienced as one—and that liberation is the act of separating them.

My mind went first to chemistry. Take water: hydrogen and oxygen, bonded together. To liberate hydrogen from oxygen would mean breaking that bond. But to what end? Hydrogen doesn’t sit inside water dreaming of its independence. The combination isn’t experienced as oppression.

But humans are not elements.

And that’s where the definition began to feel personal.

What happens when two conscious beings become so combined that one—or both—loses a sense of self? We see this in relationships sometimes. Two people intertwine their lives so completely that separation feels less like a choice and more like a tearing apart. Ideally, liberation is mutual—a shared recognition that both individuals need space to be fully themselves.

But what if it isn’t mutual?

What if one person has become so fused with the other that they no longer know who they are on their own?

That kind of liberation is not clean. It’s disorienting. It can feel like losing yourself, even though, paradoxically, it is the beginning of finding yourself.

That realization led me somewhere even closer to home.

What if the “combination” isn’t between two people—but between a person and a belief system?

If you know my story, you know I was raised in a Christian home. I didn’t consciously choose that faith. It was simply the environment I grew up in—the air I breathed, the water I drank. Over time, it became more than something I believed. It became who I was.

Jim and Christianity became a single entity.

As I tried to live up to what I thought was expected—especially after my father became a minister when I was ten—my own identity began to recede. The question guiding my life became, “What would Jesus do?”

It rarely occurred to me to ask, “What do I want to do?”

That combination was so complete that when I eventually chose to step away from the faith, I discovered something unsettling: I didn’t know how to separate the two. Even after leaving, the beliefs, patterns, and reflexes remained deeply embedded.

I wasn’t just leaving a belief system.

I was trying to liberate myself from it.

Over time, I began to understand these lingering influences as what I now call spiritual wounds. That understanding became the foundation for my work, Healing Your Spiritual Wounds.

I’ve come to define spiritual wounds this way:

Learned behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs formed by outside influences that go against our true nature—our True Self—and which we accepted, often for the sake of belonging. They are born in environments that teach us what to think, what to feel, what to want, and even who we are allowed to be. And they can remain long after the outer structure is gone.

When I look back, I can see clearly what I learned:

• To always put others first
• To look outside myself for answers, leading to indecision and passivity
• To feel shame about my “sinful” nature
• To bury so-called negative emotions
• To adopt prescribed beliefs about sexuality, money, and gender roles
• 
  

Piece by piece, these teachings shaped me. Or perhaps more accurately, they covered me.

Jim became buried beneath them.

At some point, I realized I couldn’t clearly identify my own opinions, desires, hopes, or dreams. I had become so practiced at being who I thought I should be that I had lost connection with who I actually was.

That’s what made liberation necessary.

And liberation, I’ve learned, is not a single moment. It’s a process.

It’s the slow, sometimes uncomfortable work of separating what is truly you from what has been layered onto you. It’s questioning inherited beliefs. It’s noticing automatic responses and asking where they came from. It’s allowing yourself, perhaps for the first time, to consider what you genuinely feel, want, and value.

It’s not always easy.

Sometimes it feels like loss. Sometimes it feels like standing in unfamiliar territory without a map. But gradually, something else begins to emerge.

Clarity.

Presence.

A sense of self that isn’t constructed from expectation but discovered from within.

My liberation from the “Jim/Christianity” combination has taken years, and it’s still unfolding. 

I continue to uncover subtle ways those old patterns show up. But with each insight, something loosens.

With each awareness, something separates.

And in that separation, I feel more… myself.

More grounded. More honest. More whole.

Liberation, it turns out, isn’t just about freedom from something.

It’s about returning to  something. In this case to myself.

Have you been liberated from a Faith Tradition? Do you resonate with any or all of what you have read here? Schedule a free informational call (on the “Moving Forward” page) and let’s see if you feel like you might benefit from a longer conversation about your liberation.