Poisoned Stitches: When Pain Meets False Healing

There are moments when the mind gives you an image so vivid it feels like truth wrapped in metaphor. For me, it came during a long run, an image of a blood-soaked wound entangled in chaotic stitches, so messy I couldn’t tell where the stitches began and where the wound ended.

And then the realization came:

This is what happens when you try to stitch your pain together with the allure of sin, when you attempt to hold yourself together using what ultimately harms you.

Those stitches were soaked in poison.

The kind that seeps slowly.

The kind that infects relationships, steals joy, and corrodes peace.

Every new stitch, another hidden secret, another numbing behavior, another piece of pain buried, adds another drop of poison to the soul.

As I’ve reflected on my own pain and the hurt I’ve experienced through others, I’ve realized that sometimes the wounds we carry are the result of poisonous stitches left unchecked in someone else for years, even decades. That realization brings both grief and clarity because naming the poison is the first step toward healing.

And as I sit with that pain, feeling both numb and raw, I’m reminded of this simple, ancient truths from scripture:

“He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.” — Psalm 147:3

“I sought the Lord, and He answered me and delivered me from all my fears.” — Psalm 34:4–5

There is a Healer.

In counseling work, and in spiritual life, healing is rarely immediate. It’s a process of unlearning unhealthy coping and choosing instead to face the pain honestly. Real healing often requires:

    •    Transparency instead of secrecy

    •    Healthy rhythms instead of quick fixes

    •    Safe, supportive relationships instead of isolation

    •    Faith and surrender instead of self-reliance

God’s healing often happens in the ordinary spaces, in honest conversations, meaningful work, quiet prayer, and the hard moments where we choose to stay present rather than numb.

Yet even knowing that, the temptation remains to reach for the “medicine cabinet” of false comfort: the distractions, the addictions, the emotional shortcuts that promise temporary relief. But those are just new stitches soaked in the same poison.

So instead, what if we learned to sit in the ache.

To let ourselves feel the pull between wanting to feel everything and wanting to feel nothing at all.

To let God’s healing work slowly, through the pain rather than around it.

As a wise friend reminded me recently:

“We live in a valley of tears.”

There will always be wounds: in us, in those we love, in the world around us. But we do not have to pick our poison.

We can choose healing.

We can choose connection.

We can choose to trust the Healer who binds up even the deepest wounds.

Questions to consider:

    1.    What “stitches” have you used to hold yourself together that may actually be keeping you from healing?

    2.    What would it look like to let God and trusted people into those places instead of trying to go around them?

    3.    Where might healing be quietly at work in your life even in the pain?