The Whole Hearted Woman: When the Pain Became Too Much

Welcome back to the Whole Hearted Woman Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Ray, and this is your heart room. It's a place where your story is safe, your pain is welcome, and you never have to pretend to be okay. Last week I made you a promise. I told you we were going back, back to the moment when the pain became too much. And I don't break promises in this room. So here we are. Before I go there though, I would like to say something to the women who are just finding this podcast for the first time. You found this place for a reason, and I want you to know what we talk about in this space is real. It's honest, and it's here for you exactly as you are. For those of you who were here last week, thank you for coming back. Thank you for trusting me with your time and your heart. What we are building here together matters deeply to me. So now let's go back. I would like to take you somewhere with me today, not to the hospital room, not yet. I want to take you further back from that. I want to take you to a little girl. She's young, she's quiet, and she's already learned something that no child should ever have to learn. She has to learn to listen. Not the way children listen to their favorite song or their name being called at the dinner table. No, she listens differently. She listens the way someone listens when their safety depends on it. She listens for footsteps. She listens for the sound of a door, for the tone of a voice coming down the hallway, for the emotional temperature of a room before she ever walks into it. She's become an expert at reading atmospheres, at sensing what is coming before it arrives, at making herself very small, very quiet, very careful, because in her world, the wrong move changes everything. That little girl was me. I grew up in a home where alcoholism was present, where instability was present, where fear was present. But underneath all of it, deeper than the fear, deeper than the chaos, was something else. I wasn't safe. Not physically, not emotionally. I never knew what version of life was coming next. I was always in a state of anxiety. I couldn't relax. I couldn't exhale. I couldn't simply be a child and discover who I was in peace and in safety. I was learning to survive before I learned who I was. And here is what I want you to hear, because I know some of you are nodding right now, some of you know exactly what that little girl felt like. Maybe your home looked different on the outside, maybe nobody would have guessed, but inside you were doing the same thing, reading the room, managing the atmosphere, holding your breath, and waiting for the next thing. That's not how a child is supposed to live, and yet so many of us did. Then came school. And I'd like to be honest with you about what those years felt like, because I think we often talk about bullying as if it simply is a social problem. Kids are just being unkind, phrases like that. But what bullying actually does, what it did to me anyway, goes much deeper than that. The word that keeps coming to me when I think about those years is not invisible. The word that keeps coming to me is wrong. Not nobody sees me, but something is wrong with me. That's a very different feeling, and it's a much more dangerous one. I was surrounded by voices that confirmed it. Children at school who may be the target of their cruelty. And I didn't understand then what I know now, of course, that wounded people wound people, that the ones doing the hurting were hurting too. All I knew was that it kept happening to me. And when something keeps happening to you, you stop blaming the circumstances and you start blaming yourself. And it wasn't only school, even in places that were supposed to be safe, like after-school activities that were meant to build confidence and joy. Those were also voices that tore me down instead of building me up. There was an instructor who used to degrade us thinking she was motivating us, an adult who should have known better. I was surrounded at home, at school, in almost every room I walked into, and the only place I felt free was outside alone in my own imagination, creating a world where I could simply exist without performing or surviving or managing. And in that accumulation of voices, a lie got planted. Something is wrong with me. And once that lie takes root, it does not stay quiet. It starts attaching itself to everything. Every rejection becomes evidence, every failure becomes proof, every disappointment becomes confirmation. You see? I knew there was something wrong with me. That lie became the lens through which I saw my entire life. And then came the relationship. And I want to be careful here because this episode is not actually about him. It was never about him. The relationship ending was not the cause of what happened next. It was the crack in the dam. The moment the accumulated weight of everything, the little girl listening for footsteps, the lie that said something was wrong with me, the years of managing and performing and surviving could no longer be contained. And here's what I know now that I couldn't understand then. Most people don't break because of one thing. They break because a hundred things were already sitting on their shoulders. And then one more thing gets added. Sometimes something that might seem small to an outsider, and the structure finally gives way. The fear underneath that final breaking wasn't about losing a relationship. It was something much deeper. It was, I am not worth staying for. And when that fear got activated, it reached back through everything, through every room I had ever tried to make myself small in, through every voice that had confirmed the lie. Through every moment I had held my breath and waited for safety that never came. The entire structure collapsed. And that is how a 22-year-old young woman ends up in a hospital. Not because of one moment, but because of a lifetime of moments that had never been named, never been seen, never been given a place to go. So I'm going to pause here for a moment because I think some of you are sitting with something right now. Maybe your story doesn't look exactly like mine and it doesn't and it won't. But maybe something in what I've shared today stirred something in you. Maybe you're still carrying the weight of something that was done to you or said to you before you were old enough to understand it. Maybe you've spent years explaining it away, minimizing it, telling yourself you should be over it by now, telling yourself others had it worse, telling yourself it wasn't that bad. But I want to give you permission today to call it what it was and what it is. What happened to you mattered. The home you grew up in shaped you. The voices you heard formed you. The things that were done to you left a mark. But that's not weakness. That's not a failure of faith. You see, that's what I always say is needing healing is not a failure of faith. That is what it means to be a human being who lived through something real. You're allowed to name it. You're allowed to stop minimizing it. You're allowed to say, this happened to me and it hurt and it shaped who I have become. That's not self-pity. That is the beginning of healing. Because when we carry it around all the time, it weighs us down because that's all we see and it goes with us wherever we go. But that's going to end today. And I want to leave you with one more thing before we close today: a thread of light. Because here is what I know now. Looking back at that little girl in the hallway, listening for footsteps, at that teenager surrounded by voices that confirm the lie, at that twenty-two-year-old young woman whose entire world had finally collapsed. God was there. In every single moment, in every hallway, in every classroom, in the hospital room, in the silence, he was there. I couldn't feel him. I didn't know how to find him. He seemed distant and hard to reach and maybe even hard to please. I know that feeling. We're going to talk about that in the next coming weeks. The long winding road of searching for him in all the wrong places before finally finding the real thing. Some of you grew up in homes where God was taught to you, where you supposedly knew God. But because it wasn't rooted in you, he wasn't anchored in you, he wasn't displayed in those around us the way we needed, we needed to search for him. But here is what I want you to hold on to today. The fact that you couldn't feel him doesn't mean he wasn't there. He was in the room. He was always in the room. And he's been waiting patiently, tenderly, without giving up for this very moment. The moment you finally stop and say, I need help. I can't carry this alone anymore. If that is where you are today, you are in exactly the right place. This journey is just beginning, and I'm so honored to walk it with you. Bring your journal next week. We're going to talk about searching. The years I've spent looking for healing in every place except the one that I couldn't actually give it. And I think you might recognize some of those places too. So until then, I want you to know and take this with you. You are seen. You are not too broken. And healing is not just for other women, it's for you. I love you, and I'll see you next week.