Ego: The Greatest Obstacle to Healing the 5 Wounds from Lise Bourbeau
The Five Core Wounds
According to Lise Bourbeau, human beings carry five fundamental emotional wounds:
Rejection
Abandonment
Humiliation
Betrayal
Injustice
In French, these wounds form the acrostic “trahi” (meaning “betrayed”), a reminder of the deep connection between them.
Some people may experience the same wound multiple times in one lifetime, while others may revisit them across different lives. Whether or not one accepts the idea of reincarnation, the central point remains: these wounds are part of the human journey, and they call for openness, compassion, and healing.
Ego and the Repetition of Pain
Whatever we do—or avoid doing—has consequences. Even when we say, “I don’t want to live this again,” the same experience often repeats. Why? Because the ego, fueled by limiting beliefs, resists transformation.
Healing requires patience. We must allow ourselves the right to repeat mistakes until we find the courage to change.
Importantly, there is a difference between accepting an experience and accepting yourself.
Accepting the experience means acknowledging what happened—for example, a father rejecting his daughter because he wanted a son.
Accepting yourself means allowing your feelings—resentment, anger, sadness—and forgiving yourself for having felt them.
Self-acceptance removes judgment, replacing it with compassion for both yourself and others.
Masks: Our Protective Mechanism
Each wound is associated with a mask, a defense mechanism we create to protect ourselves:
Rejection → “I don’t want”
Abandonment → “I can’t”
Injustice → Rigidity
Humiliation → Victimhood
Betrayal → Control or manipulation
The thicker the wound, the stronger the mask. These masks help us adapt to our family environment, but they also keep us from true healing.
Imagine an unhealed physical injury on your hand. Instead of treating it, you cover it with a glove so you don’t see it. The glove is the mask. When someone touches your hand lovingly, you cry out in pain—not because they intended harm, but because you never healed the wound beneath.
The other person is not responsible for your pain. Healing requires turning inward, not blaming others.
The Path to Healing
Healing follows the reverse path of how wounds were created. The four stages are:
Refusal of experience – Denying what happened.
Ignoring feelings – Suppressing anger or sadness, especially toward parents.
Blaming others – Avoiding responsibility by projecting pain outward.
Wearing a mask – Adopting defensive behaviors.
Healing begins when we:
Recognize the mask we wear.
Accept that we blamed others out of suffering.
Allow ourselves to feel our emotions fully.
Realize that life is made of experiences, none of which define our worth.
Compassion and Self-Love
The key is not to eliminate wounds but to transform our relationship with them.
To love yourself is to give yourself permission to sometimes reject, abandon, or even betray. Paradoxically, the more you accept this right within yourself, the less you will unconsciously act it out.
Recognizing wounds in others should not push us to change them, but rather to develop compassion.
As Bourbeau says: “There are no wicked people in this world, only people in pain.”
Unconditional love means accepting others even when you do not agree or understand. It also means realizing that what we reproach others for, we often do to ourselves.
✨ Healing begins when we shift from judgment to compassion—toward ourselves and toward others.
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