Watch this. Three minutes. Then three questions below it.
Will Hunting was abused as a kid. Not the soft version. The kind that leaves marks on a boy's body and a longer kind of mark on his head. He grows up brilliant. He grows up able to humiliate Harvard students with three sentences. And underneath the brilliance he is convinced of one thing: something is fundamentally wrong with him.
Sean Maguire is a therapist who lost his wife. He has his own scars. He sees what Will is doing - the deflection, the brilliance as a wall, the rage covering the wound. He says four words and refuses to stop.
It's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault.
Will resists. Then he breaks. Because the lie that you were the reason your dad did what he did was installed in you when you were too small to defend yourself, and most men carry that lie into the office, into the marriage, into the bedroom, into every room.
A child cannot make sense of a parent's failure except by blaming himself. So he does. The blame becomes the operating system. You have been running on it for years.
The lie is not the truth about you.
Good Will Hunting was written by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. They were two young men in their twenties who had grown up around men with similar wounds. South Boston was a neighborhood with a lot of fathers who didn't come home or didn't come home sober. Robin Williams' performance won him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. The “it's not your fault” scene was almost cut. Williams kept improvising the line. Damon broke down for real on camera. Director Gus Van Sant left it in.
Isaiah 49 was written to people in exile. They believed God had forgotten them. They believed they had been left to rot because they deserved it. God's response is one of the tenderest passages in the Old Testament. He compares Himself to a nursing mother and then says even she might forget but He cannot. Then He goes further. He says your name is engraved into Him. Engraved is a word for permanence. He is saying I cannot remove you without removing part of Myself.
Sean Maguire kept saying it because the wound does not release the first time. It releases the eighth time. The tenth time. The hundredth time. Eventually the man hears it. Eventually he believes it. Isaiah 49 is the same thing in a different voice. God repeating, again, that you are not the reason. You were never the reason. The voice in your head that says you were is not God's voice and it is not the truth. It is an old recording somebody else installed.