Overcoming Fear: Healing the Parts of Me That Learned to Hide

For a long time, I thought fear was something I needed to rebuke.

What I’ve learned through my own healing and through walking with other women is that fear is often a messenger. It shows us where pain once entered and where our heart learned to protect itself.

At some point in my life, being open cost me something. My honesty wasn’t always held with care. My vulnerability wasn’t always understood. And trust once broken taught me to be careful.

So I didn’t stop being vulnerable because I lacked faith. I stopped because my nervous system learned survival. I learned how to smile while staying guarded.

How to love God deeply while keeping people at a distance. How to serve, show up, and pour out without ever fully being seen. And if I’m honest, isolation felt safer than risk.

What inner healing has taught me is this: fear doesn’t usually shout. It whispers. It quietly convinces us that distance is wisdom, that self-protection equals strength, and that needing others is dangerous.

Yet the greatest paradox I’ve discovered is that the very thing fear tells us to avoid genuineness and vulnerability is often the doorway God uses to bring healing.

We know this in our heads. We know authenticity brings freedom. We know being seen and known heals the soul. But knowing something and trusting it again are two very different things.

Many of us tried to be open before we had the language for boundaries. Before we understood discernment. Before we knew how to recognize safe people. And when that openness led to hurt, our hearts did what they were designed to do they adapted.

So let me say this gently and clearly:

Vulnerability is not the problem. The problem is where and with whom we practiced it. Inner healing doesn’t mean opening your heart to everyone. It doesn’t mean oversharing or reliving wounds in unsafe spaces. God never asks us to abandon wisdom in the name of healing. In fact, Scripture tells us to guard our hearts not close them, but steward them.

Healing requires safe environments. Safe relationships. Spaces where your story is honored, not rushed. Where your emotions are welcomed, not spiritualized away. Where you don’t have to perform strength to belong.

I’ve learned that when a woman finally feels safe, her body tells the truth before her words ever do. Shoulders relax. Breathing deepens. Tears come not because she’s weak, but because she no longer has to hold it all together.

This is where fear begins to lose its power. In safe community, walls don’t crash down they come down slowly. Gently. At the pace of trust. And what once felt terrifying starts to feel freeing. Vulnerability stops feeling like exposure and begins to feel like strength.

This is the heart behind the inner healing work I do. Not fixing women. Not forcing breakthrough. But creating space for God to meet us in the places we learned to hide.

You don’t have to heal everywhere.

You don’t have to share everything.

You don’t have to rush the process.

You just need one safe place to begin.

And sometimes, that first brave step taken slowly, prayerfully, and with discernment, becomes the moment everything starts to change.

So my prayer is that you ask the Lord who and what can become your safe place to heal, process and heal. Trust that the Lord has the right individuals with a heart posture of humility that will be willing to hold your pain. 

With love, 

Coach and Minister 

Lisandra Garcia