What are the stories behind your scars?

There’s a great scene in the movie Jaws where three men are sitting around late at night on the boat comparing scars and the story each scar represents, and eventually, one of the men points to his chest and says, broken heart.

While the scene in the movie is funny, it does beg the question, why do emotional wounds take longer to heal than physical ones? My best guess is that a physical wound carries a simpler perhaps more factual story, while an emotional wound is much more complicated.

Your body is a magnificent machine and will go to work immediately to heal a physical wound, but your mind, on the other hand might decide to keep an emotional wound open as long as you are benefiting from it. I use the word benefit intentionally because as long as you can use the story about the emotional wound to justify your behavior, you will.

But what happens once an emotional wound no longer serves you? Do you let it heal and carry on with an emotional scar, or do you keep picking at the scab to ensure the wound stays open?

Although it might sound difficult or almost impossible, it is possible to let emotional wounds heal themselves, and of course, the time it takes to heal will vary with each one. But you must want to let them heal.

If you’ve really lived then the chances of you getting through life without any emotional or physical wounds are very slim, but hopefully, you’ll let them both heal and use your scars to tell your story.

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