When Healing Means Remembering Who You Are
When years of bullying have shaped the way you see yourself, healing can begin by separating other people’s voices from God’s truth.
Scripture Focus: Isaiah 43:1
“I have called you by name; you are mine.”
Some voices stay with us long after the people who spoke them are gone.
I know because bullying wasn’t one isolated experience in my life. I was bullied from Grade 2 through Grade 8. Years later, I experienced bullying again in different workplaces.
Different people. Different places. Different stages of my life.
But eventually the same painful question began to surface:
Why does this keep happening to me?
And underneath that question was another one that was much more damaging:
Is there something about me that makes people treat me this way?
It has taken me years to recognize what repeated bullying can do. It doesn’t only leave memories of what happened. It can influence the way we see ourselves long after the bullying ends.
Part of my healing has been learning to separate what other people made me believe about myself from what is actually true.
And perhaps most importantly, I am realizing something I wish I had understood years ago:
They never had the authority to tell me who I was.
When Bullying Begins Before You Know Who You Are
I was bullied from Grade 2 through Grade 8.
When I look at that now, I realize how significant those years were.
Childhood is when we’re beginning to discover who we are. We’re learning about friendship, belonging, acceptance, confidence, and where we fit.
When you’re repeatedly picked on, excluded, laughed at, criticized, or made to feel different during those years, you don’t necessarily have the emotional distance to think, Their behaviour says something about them.
Instead, you may begin wondering:
What is wrong with me?
At that age, I didn’t understand how much of what was happening around me could eventually become part of the conversation happening inside me.
The bullying stopped.
But some of its messages stayed.
I Thought Bullying Was Something Children Did
Growing up should have meant leaving bullying behind.
That wasn’t my experience.
Years later, I encountered bullying again in different workplaces.
The people were different. The circumstances were different. I was an adult now.
Yet some of the feelings were painfully familiar.
Being criticized or undermined.
Feeling singled out.
Questioning interactions afterward.
Wondering what I had done.
Wondering whether I should have said something differently, acted differently, or somehow been different.
And because bullying had already been part of my childhood, experiencing it again as an adult raised an uncomfortable question:
Why me again?
When similar experiences happen in different places with different people, it is very easy to look for the common denominator.
And there I was.
Maybe I’m the problem.
Maybe I’m too sensitive.
Maybe there really is something about me.
Maybe if I were different, people would treat me differently.
That is where bullying can become something more than another person’s behaviour.
It can become part of your identity.
When Their Voice Becomes Your Inner Voice
People don’t have to remain in our lives for their voices to remain with us.
Someone criticizes us often enough, and eventually we criticize ourselves.
Someone makes us feel unwanted, and we enter new situations expecting rejection.
Someone repeatedly questions our abilities, and eventually we begin questioning them too.
Someone treats us as though we are difficult, strange, incompetent, too sensitive, or not good enough, and eventually we stop hearing those messages in their voice.
We start hearing them in our own.
That realization has become important to my healing.
Because if I learned to see myself through other people’s treatment of me, then part of healing is learning to question that view.
Where did I learn to believe this about myself?
Whose voice am I actually hearing?
Is it true?
And most importantly:
Is this what God says about me?
What Does Isaiah 43:1 Mean?
Isaiah 43 begins with God speaking to Israel during a difficult period in their history.
God reminds His people that He created them, formed them, redeemed them, and called them by name.
This Scripture doesn’t promise a life without suffering.
In fact, the verses that follow speak about passing through waters and walking through fire.
That distinction matters.
I cannot take Isaiah 43:1 and claim that belonging to God means nobody will hurt me.
My own life tells me that isn’t true.
Instead, I hear something different in this passage.
Their circumstances had not erased who they were in relationship with God.
And that speaks deeply into my own healing.
Before anyone at school formed an opinion of me, God knew my name.
Before a coworker decided what they thought of me, God knew my name.
Before another person’s treatment became a voice inside my head, God knew my name.
And He still does.
Pain Does Not Have the Authority to Rename Me
Bullying can leave us carrying names God never gave us.
Rejected.
Different.
Weak.
Difficult.
Too sensitive.
Not good enough.
Unwanted.
Failure.
Sometimes someone actually called us those things.
Sometimes their behaviour communicated the message without ever saying the words.
And sometimes we created the label ourselves because we were desperately trying to understand why we were being treated that way.
But another person’s treatment of me is not reliable evidence of my worth.
Pain does not have the authority to rename me.
Neither does a schoolyard bully.
Neither does a coworker.
Neither does rejection.
Neither does my own fear.
God knows me more completely than any person who has ever formed an opinion about me.
I am learning that their voices never deserved the authority I gave them.
Walking Through Healing Too?
If you’ve been carrying words, rejection, or painful experiences that still affect how you see yourself, you don’t have to walk through those reflections alone.
I share new Healing Journey with Christ devotionals centred on Scripture, honest reflection, and finding Christ in the places where healing is still happening.
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Scripture, encouragement, and gentle resources for the journey.
Why Did This Keep Happening to Me?
This may be one of the hardest questions for me.
I experienced bullying for years as a child and then encountered it again in different workplaces as an adult.
It would be easy to look backward and ask:
Why did this keep happening?
I don’t have a neat Christian answer.
And I don’t want to manufacture one.
I don’t believe every painful experience comes with an explanation that God expects us to discover.
What I am beginning to understand is that another person’s decision to mistreat me is not proof that something is wrong with me.
Their behaviour belongs to them.
For years, I could turn the question inward:
What should I have done differently?
What is it about me?
How do I stop this from happening again?
There is another question I can ask now:
What did those experiences teach me to believe about myself that God never said?
That question leads somewhere very different.
Healing Does Not Mean Pretending It Didn’t Hurt
I don’t need to minimize what happened in order to heal.
I don’t have to say it didn’t bother me.
I don’t have to call bullying a blessing.
I don’t have to pretend everything happened for some easily understood reason.
And I don’t have to convince myself that none of it affected me.
It did.
Being bullied during childhood affected me.
Experiencing bullying again in adulthood affected me.
Acknowledging that doesn’t give those experiences control over my future.
It simply allows me to tell the truth.
I can acknowledge what hurt.
I can grieve what I lost.
I can recognize the ways those experiences shaped me.
And still say:
What happened to me is part of my story. It is not the whole truth about me.
I Finally Realized I Am Better Than What They Made Me Believe
There has been another realization in my healing.
For a long time, the bullies seemed to hold the power.
They were the ones judging me, criticizing me, excluding me, or deciding there was something about me they didn’t like.
Without realizing it, I gave their opinions authority they never deserved.
I don’t see myself that way anymore.
I know I am better than what they tried to make me believe about myself.
That doesn’t mean I need to declare myself more valuable than another human being. Every person has worth before God, including people who make harmful choices.
But their behaviour does not become the standard by which I measure myself.
I am better than the labels I carried.
I am better than believing I have to make myself smaller so someone else can feel bigger.
I am better than spending my life trying to earn acceptance from people determined not to give it.
And I can choose something better than the behaviour I experienced.
I don’t have to become like the people who hurt me.
I can choose kindness because I know what cruelty feels like.
I can choose compassion because I know what exclusion feels like.
I can notice someone standing alone because I remember what standing alone felt like.
I can refuse to tear someone else down simply because someone once did that to me.
The bullying may be part of my story.
It doesn’t get to determine the person I become.
Remembering Who I Am in Christ
The phrase identity in Christ can sound abstract until something has shaken our identity.
Then it becomes very practical.
For me, remembering who I am in Christ means I don’t have to measure myself by the opinions of people who misunderstood me.
I don’t have to prove my worth to someone who refuses to see it.
I don’t have to become quieter, smaller, less sensitive, less different, or less myself in hopes that nobody will target me again.
And I don’t have to accept every negative thought about myself simply because I have believed it for years.
Some beliefs need to be challenged.
Where did this come from?
Whose voice is this?
Is this actually true?
Does this agree with what God says about me?
That is becoming part of healing for me.
Faith Does Not Mean Silently Accepting Bullying
There is something else I believe Christians need permission to hear.
Remembering who we are in Christ does not mean quietly accepting mistreatment.
Forgiveness doesn’t make harmful behaviour acceptable.
Grace doesn’t require pretending something isn’t happening.
Being Christlike doesn’t mean giving another person unlimited opportunities to hurt us.
Depending on the circumstances, responding to bullying can include setting boundaries, speaking up, documenting what is happening, asking for help, reporting inappropriate behaviour, seeking support, or leaving an environment when that becomes necessary and possible.
Faithfulness does not require us to call mistreatment good.
We can bring the spiritual wounds bullying creates to Christ while also taking practical steps to protect ourselves.
Finding Myself Again After Years of Bullying
Healing isn’t about returning to the little girl I was before Grade 2.
I can’t undo those years.
I can’t rewrite the workplaces where I experienced bullying.
And I don’t need to become a version of myself who was somehow untouched by everything she experienced.
Instead, I am learning to recognize the difference between what belongs to my story and what belongs to my identity.
I was bullied.
But bullied is not my identity.
I experienced rejection.
But rejected is not my name.
I was made to question my worth.
But other people’s treatment of me never determined my worth.
People misunderstood me.
But I am known by God.
People formed opinions about me.
But their opinions do not determine who I am.
And perhaps this is what healing looks like for me right now.
Not forgetting.
Not pretending.
Not erasing.
Remembering.
Remembering who I am underneath the labels.
Remembering that I don’t have to become what other people said I was.
Remembering that I can choose what kind of person I want to be despite what I experienced.
And above everything else, remembering the One who has always known me.
When the Old Voices Return
I don’t expect every old message to disappear because I finally recognized where it came from.
There may still be moments when those voices return.
But now I can recognize them.
And when they surface, I can return to Isaiah 43.
God created me.
God knows me.
God calls me by name.
I belong to Him.
I don’t have to untangle every wound today.
I can simply notice when an old voice begins speaking and ask:
Is this what God says about me?
If the answer is no, I don’t have to keep giving that voice authority.
The bullies don’t get the final word in my story.
God does.
Questions for Reflection
- What words, labels, or messages from school, work, relationships, or other painful experiences am I still carrying?
- When I criticize myself, whose voice do I hear? Is it truly mine, or have I learned to repeat something someone else once communicated to me?
- Have I interpreted repeated rejection or mistreatment as evidence that something must be wrong with me?
- What parts of myself have I hidden or changed because I was afraid of being rejected again?
- What might change if I genuinely believed that God’s knowledge of me carries more authority than another person’s opinion of me?
A Prayer for the Words I Still Carry
Jesus,
There are words I still remember.
There are moments I can still picture.
There are experiences from childhood and adulthood that affected the way I learned to see myself.
You know every one of them.
You also know how easily another person’s voice can become my own.
Help me recognize the difference.
Show me the labels I have carried for so long that I stopped questioning whether they were true.
Where bullying taught me to expect rejection, bring healing.
Where criticism made me doubt myself, bring truth.
Where I learned to make myself smaller so I wouldn’t be noticed, give me courage to take up the space You have given me.
Where I still wonder what was wrong with me, remind me that another person’s treatment was never a trustworthy measure of my worth.
And Jesus, don’t allow what I experienced to harden my heart.
Help me become someone who notices the excluded person, welcomes the person standing alone, and chooses kindness when cruelty would be easier.
I don’t want the people who hurt me to determine the person I become.
You knew my name before anyone else tried to give me another one.
Help me remember that.
Help me remember who I am.
And when the old voices return, help me recognize Yours.
Amen.
Continue Your Journey
If this reflection touched something you have been carrying, When God Invites You to Let Go of Who You Thought You Had to Be continues the journey of releasing identities and expectations we were never meant to carry.
You may also find encouragement in When I Forget I’m Not Alone, particularly if rejection or exclusion has left you feeling isolated.
And When God Builds Strength Before He Changes the Situation speaks to those seasons when the circumstances around us remain difficult even while God is strengthening something within us.
Continue the Reflection
Healing from words we’ve carried for years can take time. Sometimes it helps to slow down with Scripture and give ourselves space to notice what we’ve been believing and bring those thoughts honestly before God.
Visit the Healing Journey with Christ Resource Library for free Scripture reflections, journaling pages, prayers, and Bible reading plans designed to help you continue that journey with Christ.
It is available free inside the Healing Journey with Christ Resource Library.
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