Episode 40: Our Wounds & Our Healer

Apr 30

An interview with Kia Stephens

Kia shares her in-process story of hope, healing, and the decision to exchange her father wounds for God's perfect love.

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The Seeds

Name: Kia Stephens

Age: 40 Something

Where do you call home: Fort Worth, TX

Relationship Status: Married

Season of Work: Entrepreneur, Writing, Speaker, Small Business Owner, Busy Mom of Teens

Hobbies: Reading, Hanging out with Friends, Walking, Listening to Podcasts, Writing

Jesus Journey: I accepted Jesus at 8 so I could eat crackers and grape juice with my friends. I later rededicated myself a bunch because I wasn’t sure I was saved or that my conversion at 8 was good enough. I credit my mom, grandfather, grandmother and aunt for making church nonnegotiable for me. Eventually I developed a relationship with God on my own but they laid the foundation.

The Branches

Kia, how would you define a “Father Wound?”

If you look up the term “father wound” it is synonymous with “father absenteeism.” A father can be absent in a myriad of ways. Divorce, abuse, abandonment, incarceration, drug addiction, alcoholism, maybe there was an affair, a premature death, or a physically present father but an emotionally absent one. Women can know father wounds in many different ways and many different seasons.

After doing a survey on your blog concerning father wounds, over 900 women responded and you were able to capture some staggering statistics. Can you share a few with the Olive Us community that might be the most surprising?

I asked women if they had been able to heal and most of them said “no.” Several of them mentioned their mothers and fathers who had also experienced father wounds. Initially, I was gathering data, but then began to realize this is not just data these are actual lives that have been impacted. 1 in 4 children grows up in father-absent homes. The byproduct of the statistics is that they are more likely to be involved in crime, live in poverty, and have their own children young. At the heart of the father-wound epidemic is the family. If you impact the father you impact the wife, then the child. There is a generational impact. We have a very real enemy, why would he not target the fathers? By targeting the fathers you take out the family, but then you impact our relationship with God.

So we hear those statistics, we sit inside stories like yours and it IS HEAVY and can feel overwhelming and just downright sad. God is grieved over the father wounds ‘olive us’ have experienced. But we HAVE this HOPE that is an anchor for our soul. Kia, talk to us about “the uneven exchange” that you were pointed to and invite ‘olive us’ who have experienced father wounds into this idea.

Isaiah 53:3-4 says “He was a man of many sorrows. Aquainted with our grief.” When you keep reading it says “He carries our sorrows.” We have a vivid picture in our mind of what Christ has done on the cross, but we sometimes forget He carries our sorrows. The beauty of Jesus is that those sorrows that have gone undiscussed or hidden can still be brought to Jesus. God wants to give us joy for our mourning. He wants to give us beauty for our ashes, hope for our despair, and healing for our wounds. God bandages our wounds in the supernatural. What Jesus went through on the cross on our behalf is far more weighty than the pain we’ve walked through.

At what point did you decide you were going to “exchange your pain for God’s perfect love” and pursue health and wholeness? I

It has been an evolution. It’s never been linear. For me, sometimes I’ve gone around in circles. I wrote a forgiveness letter to my dad and then I used an “empty chair” tool that I got from therapy and read my letter out loud. This was a mark in the sand for me. The reality is that forgiveness is practical and supernatural. We hold people accountable for what they’ve done wrong to us, but then we need the Holy Spirit to help our minds and hearts follow suit. Triggers happen due to trauma, so we need the Holy Spirit to forgive over and over and over.

Your book does such a great job of bringing us along in your story and at the same time, taking us through scripture and highlighting wounded women who were transformed by the love and compassion of God. What are some practical ways/tools you can share for the one who knows that they have some wounds to address, are overwhelmed by the idea of having to engage with their past, but wants to move into a life of wholeness and healing with God?

My book is a Pandora’s box of tools. I wanted to help women process by succinctly capturing 20 + years that God did on me and with the help of others in 200 pages. I want women to process in their own time and in their own way.

If we choose to not address our wounding, what happens Kia?

The cost is that the wounds will most likely impact us whether we choose to acknowledge them or not. If you don’t address the wounds anger, bitterness, and more will impact your marriages and families. Get curious about how father wounds can impact every single area of your life.

You reference the woman with the issue of blood found in Matthew 9 and Mark 5. You said that “year after year she continued to believe healing was within her reach, even though she repeatedly experienced setbacks.” There might be someone today that thought they were “healed” from their father wounds, but something happened and they’re triggered, they’re beating themselves up because they thought they were “over” their father wounds. How would you encourage them today?

There are times I still cry. I have a relationship with my biological father, it is not perfect, but somethings will never change. On this side of eternity I still weep, but not without hope. I have hope that one day I’ll be changed, my dad will be changed, and we will be up in Glory with our Heavenly Father. God wants to heal us and make us whole. We are all wounded and God wants us to experience His uneven exchange.

A friend of mine and phenomenal writer, author, poet, and editor Grace P.Cho wrote a post on Instagram on April 4th saying this about our wounds:

“We cannot teach/preach/parent/lead from our wounds — even our healed wounds. Instead, we must do so prophetically, with a vision to create the world we hope for for the generations that come after us.”

Kia, what’s your prophetic vision…your hope for generations of families…particularly young girls and their fathers?

My prophetic vision is for women to pick up this book and find deep generational healing. For many of us that are wounded, we have mothers and fathers that have been wounded. We have been replicating the cycle of a wounded generation in our family. My prophetic hope is that we would not only find hope and healing for our present day wounds, but for the subsequent generations that are coming from our wounds. That there would be healing that would go back and grab the previous generations.