How to transform our ‘wounds’ into a privileged place of encounter with God and of solidarity with others.

1.  Seeing ourselves as wounded people Our history, especially our infancy, has left us elements of power, resources and possibilities for which we are grateful to our parents and other people who meant a lot to us.  However, the past has also left in us a negative mark whose consequences are present in our daily lives.  In this sense, as a consequence of our past, we all bear some ‘wounds’, understood as elements of vulnerability and fragility, especially to our self-esteem – which defines the quality of our relationship with ourselves – and to our emotions – understood as our ability to love and to be loved.
Our being wounded shows itself in the divisions we have inside ourselves.  On the one hand, we experience a power that moves us to go out of ourselves and to be open to others in seeking the good, on the other hand, it is a power that tends to close us within ourselves in seeking that which gratifies us, a self-centred well-being.
We are all wounded somehow, though not in the same way or to the same degree.  We also live with these wounds in different ways.  The depth and the perception we have of these wounds may be different such as the degree to which we are conscious of them and how they condition us, whether we accept them as part of our humanity and to what extent we succeed in living with them in a non-destructive way.
In my own personal journey I am aware that it is possible to integrate them; this requires a process that is long and demanding but, at the same time, beautiful and gratifying in so far as we experience in ourselves growth in interior freedom, in serenity, in our ability to live with and welcome our brothers in their diversity and in their difficulties.