Kingdom Mothers Rise Up

From Trauma To Maturity: Healing The Stuck Places #108

• Mukkove - The Mom Mentor • Season 4 • Episode 2

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The simple phrase—“put away childish things”—can feel like a mountain when your emotional growth froze at a moment when life overwhelmed you. We explore how trauma, both the big events that shatter safety and the quiet absences of affirmation or validation, shapes our thinking, our nervous systems, and our relationships long after the moment has passed. I share how childish patterns like people-pleasing, always being alert to others, and self-blame often began as smart survival strategies, and why real change requires  more than “think different.”

Together we map the difference between Big T trauma and little t trauma and why comparing pain keeps us stuck. We talk about the lies we often agree to in hard moments—beliefs about God, ourselves, and others that promise quick safety but cost us freedom—and how to unwind them with honesty, compassion, and, for those with a faith lens, prayer and repentance. I walk through a layered approach to healing: addressing the body’s stored survival energy, reframing unhelpful mental rules, and letting trustworthy relationships provide the missing nutrients of affirmation, validation, and care.

If you’ve ever wondered why “no” feels dangerous, why you over-function in relationships, or why old stories still run the show, this conversation offers hope. For next steps, I share community resources and a creative practice that helps surface lies, receive truth, and translate belief into daily behavior. Subscribe, share this with someone who needs it, and tell us: which old rule are you ready to rewrite?

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SPEAKER_01:

I put childish ways behind me. That phrase struck me this summer as like put childish ways behind me. It sounds so simple, but it's not. And it's like, okay, Paul, could you like have written a book on that? Like, how did you put these childish ways behind you? Because what the Lord was showing me is there's childish ways of, you know, children are naturally self-centered. They're just naturally selfish. They also have like that egocentric view of the world that everything that happens is because of them. And that can be, you know, good or bad. It's not really good or bad. Like they can interpret the bad things that are their fault or good things being their fault. That from an adult perspective, we can see, like, no, that wasn't what happened. So I've seen those things of like just natural maturity, that you need to mature and you need to stop being childish, you need to stop being immature. And what the Lord was showing me this summer is that when trauma happens to a child, whether it is big T trauma or little T trauma, the emotional development gets stuck. And like I knew that before, but it hit me in a different way with this. Like Paul said, when I grew to be a man, I put childish ways behind me. Just as simple as that. That's all the information he gives us. And that is not that simple when it got stuck in trauma. As a disclaimer, I don't have any professional licensing to diagnose or treat anyone with trauma. I just have my own journey of trauma and learning how to recover from that and how the Lord has ministered to me in that big T trauma is bad things that happen. And we often try and put trauma on a scale of like, well, this happened, but it wasn't that bad. That's irrelevant, really, because something was traumatic to you if it was more than you could handle, more than you had the emotional capacity or resources to handle the situation. It was traumatic. And it doesn't matter if somebody else went through the same thing and they're like, nah, no big deal. They're resourced differently than you. And so there's no there's no benefit in judging or comparing if your trauma was not that bad or whatever. So big T trauma is bad things that happened to you. And that can be what we might want to call small things to huge things. It doesn't matter. If it was overwhelming to you, and your response was to freeze or fight or, you know, to shut down, to dissociate, whatever, it was traumatic to you. And that's what matters for your healing, is how it impacted you. Then the little tea trauma are the things that are easier to dismiss because unfortunately they're so normal. Um, but the little tea trauma is good things that you needed that you didn't get. So not like I wish we could have had more vacations as a family, but I needed to be told I was loved and valuable and people liked being around me. I needed to know that my ideas mattered, that I could have good ideas, that making mistakes is a normal part of learning and growing. So not getting those kinds of things is the little tea trauma. And depending on how that happened, like I think that line blurs between like what was neglect and what's abuse. Um the important thing with the two different types of trauma is for the big T trauma, those bad things that happened, we can minister to that in a different way. The Lord can meet you there and help you. Some people talk about him, like rewriting the memory, but he can meet you there and bring healing to that place where those bad things happened. And with the little T trauma, there are good things that we should have gotten from people in our lives. And so we still need those things, and we need those things from people. So I think people are an important part of healing, no matter what. We need people to love us because God built us to be in community. We're part of one body. We are supposed to care about each other and meet each other's needs.

SPEAKER_00:

And so the relationships matter.

SPEAKER_01:

I guess the point is that those skills, those things that you should have gotten, you still need to get. So you still need affirmation, you still need validation, you still need to be appreciated and valued and all of those things. So what he was showing me about where we get stuck in those childish ways and that childish thinking is when that trauma happens when we're young, the enemy takes advantage of those moments to lie to us. He'll lie to us about God, he'll lie to us about ourselves and the people in our lives. He'll offer us a quick fix, he'll offer us something that seems like it's the answer in the moment. And we're children, we don't have discernment, we don't have understanding, we don't have adult ways of thinking, we have childish ways of thinking. So the things the enemy offers us make sense. And we believe him and we agree with him. And so there adds another layer to putting those childish ways behind you, isn't a matter of like, oh, I need to think different. There might be a spiritual level of repenting that needs to be done and breaking agreements that you made and confessing those sins to the Lord. Oh, I see you were offering to keep me safe, but it looked too scary. And the enemy told me if I lied or if I took the responsibility or whatever it was that he would keep me safe, and I took his offer instead. And I'm sorry for that. Forgive me for that. Now I receive your truth. I see that you're you're good and you're protecting me. I'm just giving it a general example of how like the enemy comes in and tells you that you can't trust people. You're the only, you have to take care of yourself. Or he tells you that you're responsible for how the other people around you feel. And so you need to be sure to always be good and always be on the alert to make sure that you anticipate what they need so you can do that before anything goes wrong and you get in trouble. So there's multiple layers to putting away this childish thinking. It's not a matter of saying, oh, I'm just gonna think something different. You're thinking what you're thinking for a reason. And there could be stuff and say, like stuck in your body, like your body remembers what happens to you and it holds those feelings that didn't get to voice themselves, to be expressed. It holds on to those. And so there's a physiological level of dealing with it. There's a spiritual level, there's the mental level. All these different parts need to be addressed to put away the childish thinking. And like I said, some of the things that just naturally outgrow, it's not a big deal. It's where these things got stuck, where there was trauma that the enemy planted his lies and planted the seeds in there. That part needs to be addressed to be able to really put those childish ways behind you. And it's not only the way of thinking like a child, but how does that thinking make you behave? So if you were a people pleaser, most likely when you were young, the enemy planted that seed that it was your job to keep everybody around you happy. And that was the way that you were going to be safe or loved, have your needs met. And so if you still struggle to tell people no, if you still dismiss what you want for what somebody else wants unreasonably, like part of living in relationship is we compromise and we don't always get what we want. But if it's imbalanced in your relationships and you don't even know what you want or what you would prefer because all of your focus is on what other people want and what they would prefer, then there's a whole, you know, behavior set and like muscle memory of this is what I do and this is how I show up and this is why I'm here, that needs to be unraveled and ministered to. And oh, if I don't automatically give everybody else what they want, now how do I show up? If you have questions about what I'm talking about, I would love to hear from you on that. Um yeah, just this idea of the childhood trauma, of um the enemy coming in and speaking those lies and agreeing with them. And if you want to know more about like how do I unho do I undo this, um, there's uh other episodes where I cover that. You can join the Healing Generations community on school and ask me questions there. Um, the heartdoodling with Jesus is by far my favorite tool for exploring those things and seeing where the enemy came in and what he said and why we believed him, and then being able to receive from the Lord and have the forgiveness, have the truth, have direction on how do I behave when I believe this truth versus how I was behaving when I believed the lie.

SPEAKER_00:

Thanks for being here, and I will see you next time.