Your Scars…The Ones Others Can’t See

Experience is a great teacher; unfortunately, experience leaves mental scars, and scar tissue contracts.

William James Mayo

I hope everyone had a great Easter and was able to make the best out of it. Hopefully if you were in any of the areas where some tornadoes struck, I hope that your all right and your friends and loved ones are all right. If you or anyone you know was injured, I hope you have a speedy recovery. Injuries heal with time. The are injuries that will heal and it will be like the injury was never there. Sometimes there will be injuries that will leave a scar. It might be a noticeable scar and it might not be. Those are just physical scars though. There are those scars that no one sees or knows about except you. Maybe a few select number of people know about them or maybe everyone in your circle of friends and loved ones know. There are people out there who have more mental and emotional scars then they do physical ones. Your not the only person who is like this. I also have more mental scars and emotional scars than physical ones. Your not alone.

The View on Scars

Scars over the course of history have been seen as an imperfection, a symbol of weakness, guilt, shame, and mistakes we have made for example. We do things to cover them up and act like they aren’t there. People will go to great lengths hide them. This isn’t just physical scars, but also the mental and emotional ones as well. We get the idea in our head that we need to be perfect for this situation, perfect to be friends with this person, perfect in our marriage, relationship, and to our parents. So we interpret scars as being a bad and negative thing. We also try to hide our scars with an “I’m fine”. As time goes on, we can get better at saying that and meaning it. Yet the scars are still there and they still may be bleeding metaphorically. Outside we look happy and all right, but on the inside we are hurting. We’re afraid to say something to anyone even our friends and loved ones or especially them. We don’t them to see us as someone who is damaged and broken. So we close ourselves up and put walls around us as another way of hiding our scars. These are some of the things we do as a way of not being vulnerable to others. If we are hurting, we fear that will be hurt again, so we do different things as a way of not getting hurt again.

Here it’s some advice on how to deal with your scars:

• Your scars don’t make you less of a person. Some people have more scars than others, but that doesn’t mean that these people are weaker. Some people go through tough experiences in their life, sometimes one after another where some people don’t. The ones with more scars may have more life experience to offer to others. These people who go through rough times and come out on top have great mental strength.

• Embrace your scars because even though they represent a hurtful or rough time of your life, they show that you survived defeats in your life. They show that you’re one of a kind. This reinforces the idea that you are unique in this world.
• Your scars can also be seen as lessons you learned in life. These lessons are most of the time tough lessons. They show that you fought when you could have given up. You went through a tough experience, but you got a great life lesson out of it and that’s a plus.
• A scar could have also have come from a lie you were told that took root and maybe you didn’t realize it. You first have to find that lie. Then see if anything in your life supports it. If you can’t find anything, then you have to work on dismissing it. These kind of scars can take time to work through because maybe you believed in it for an extended period of time and you have to train your mind to not think like negative anymore.

Here is a video of a young woman named Shayla. In this video she talks about overcoming her mental scars in regards to her skin and learning to love herself through acceptance.

Wrapping Up

None of your scars make you less worthy or lovable. Your scars make you who you are. You can say that you are alive. When it comes to embracing your scars there is a period of acceptance that you have to go through which can take time. When your done, you can hold your head up high and not feel ashamed of that scar anymore. Hopefully this brings some clarity some scars you have, scars you’re working through, and you can begin to not feel ashamed of them and embrace them.