Vulnerability and Being Held

Shadow work of any kind, be it therapy, spiritual direction, self-inquiry etc, means that one uncovers vulnerabilities that feel painful. I have thoughts, and feelings, about this.

Sep 21, 2025

Recently, I began to meet once a month with a spiritual director. My first meeting was tentative at first. I really didn’t know what we were going to talk about. I simply blurted out something about feeling triggered that week when I didn’t feel seen or heard, and that this has been a lifelong issue that I wasn’t sure would ever be fully healed.

The question my spiritual director asked next blew me out of the water. She simply asked what kind of God I was in relationship with, that I had no expectation of being healed.

We spoke a little further and I received a Lectio Divina assignment to work on for next month, but in the back of my mind I keep thinking about her question, and how I got to this place at 60 years old.

As someone who has been meditating two thirds of my life, I tend to feel that I have a close relationship with a loving and caring God.

And of course in some, perhaps even many ways, that’s true.

But at certain points when I was very young and up to much more recently, I decided that I could not trust in first father, who abandoned me before my birth, then mother, who disappeared from the time I was one to when I was three, then my sisters, who teased and tormented me from when I was three to when I was ten, telling me I had been dropped off by the police and was not part of the family, and then they left home and stopped talking to me.

Later, the trust issues continued through my relationships, which of course were complicated by the father wound. Friendships also were places of pain, as I was feeling for decades like I was the one chasing friends and doing the heavy lifting.

Really, looking at my life, how was I going to have a deep and abiding trust in God?

Intellectually, I have, I hope, a good understanding of why and how I can trust God.

It still has a ways to go to sink through my heart and gut, which were not coincidentally the two places I reported during my spiritual direction session that I felt the pain of not being seen and heard the most.

So every day since, I have been meditating and contemplating and thinking on how much hurt comes up in every close relationship I have, and why it is coming up, and attempting to stay open to God’s healing.

And every time I open up my heart, the pain eases and I am comforted. It is not always instantaneous. But I don’t have to shut the pain down, as I would do automatically before, or turn toward something to distract or soothe me. I can feel it completely and let the pain go.