It is always a victory worth celebrating when a core part of a survivor’s system is finally able to see truth, receive healing, and integrate. The road to that moment is steep, and it is lined with tripwires and booby traps designed to make you fail before you ever reach the other side.

The work of dismantling programming begins long before a survivor can fully understand what was done to them. It begins with creating safety. It begins with nervous system regulation. It begins with helping the system gain enough stability to face gut-wrenching truth without collapsing, shutting down, or quitting when the next hill of impossibility comes into view.

Sometimes, we have to tear down what has been built before we can truly begin to move forward. Strongholds, legal rights, contracts, false belief systems, vows, agreements, and layers of deception can all stand in the way of freedom. But before any of it can be torn down, the survivor has to come to a place where they can even accept that it exists. That is its own journey and for this survivor, it took 5 long years to accept.

It can require pulling strength from the deepest depths of your being. Denial programming has often been your best friend for decades. It has been your refuge. Your only protection from evil that was meant to break you.

And denial programming does not usually have only one trigger or one cue that activates it. It has backup systems upon backup systems. It has layers. It has fail-safes. It has ways of convincing you that looking at the truth will destroy you, when in reality, truth is the very thing that begins to dismantle the prison.

For a season, facing the truth can feel like it is ripping away every single thing that matters to you. It can make you believe there is nothing left worth fighting for. It can make you feel like this will never end but that is a lie from the pit of hell. There is a way out through Yeshua.

It is not an easy journey, and it is not a quick one. When a core part who has carried terror, loyalty, deception, grief, or unbearable memories is finally able to see clearly and come home, it is not a small thing.

For this case study, I am going to walk through a session where we were able to help a core part recognize the truth, break agreement with the lies that had held her, receive healing, and integrate safely. Identifying details have been removed or changed to protect privacy, but the heart of the process remains the same: truth entered where programming had ruled, and healing became possible. This survivor does not have clean splits, and you will see how there was some possible bleed through of storylines that became clearer as she told her story.

Case Study (TRIGGER WARNING)

A part came up who said she was sleeping on a table in the forest waiting on her prince to come and give her true love’s kiss and had not opened her eyes in ages. She was afraid of the trolls in the forest and the tree that was alive with branches that grabbed little children and hurt them. She said she was extremely tired and had basically been sleeping forever, most likely since around age four. She presented as if she had been drugged, yawning repeatedly and could barely hold her eyes open.

My first thought was that maybe she had Sleeping Beauty programming. However, when asked where she came from, she described more of a Middle Eastern city like depicted in Aladdin. As we went through the process of her sharing her memories, she described a trap door in the forest that led down into a hole in the ground. Because her name is Jasmine, I looked up these different story plots, and this picture is shown in the Aladdan plot.

Jasmine stated that there was a baby down there with black eyes from being beaten. Jasmine did not want to go near the hole because she was afraid of it.

As we worked with her, it became clear that she herself had been in the hole with the baby. She described them taking her skin at times “like when your skin peels off after a sunburn” and placing it in the corner of this underground hole and said that some of her essence was somehow stuck in the pile of skin.

She was lonely and starving. She described the bad people making a cake that was full of magic and witchcraft. They would starve the children and then feed them the cake. She described it as ingesting all kinds of things including defilement, magic, word curses, and what she perceived as human spirits. She said it reminded her of “eating the scroll” in the Bible. There was also a blue bottle or a clear bottle with blue liquid that she drank from that they had manipulated somehow.

After this, she began creating multiple parts. This appeared to be one of the earliest splits because it involved the baby and very early trauma. When asked how many parts she had created, Jasmine replied, “I can’t count that high.”

As we continued working through the process, another part presented whose job was to stop the session. This part manifested and then drew an “X marks the spot” over her heart and invited additional demons in as backup to fight against Yeshua. This was described as creating or opening a portal for every available demon to enter and fight against the survivor getting freedom.

After dealing with the manifestation and closing the portal, Jasmine turned fully back into a baby. She presented as an infant no longer able to communicate and started sucking her thumb. The survivor’s host presenter part stood in the gap for the baby and went through the courts of heaven process. She saw Yeshua come and pick up the baby. He gently touched her eyes and the black and blue bruising disappeared. The baby returned to looking healthy and beautiful again and rested peacefully in His arms.

Jasmine and all the parts she had created seemed to be folding back into the baby as if the subsystem was collapsing. At that point, we felt like He was continuing the ministry process and that integration would eventually follow.

What surprised the survivor most was how ordinary the integration initially felt. The dramatic rush of emotion or instant life-changing revelation that she had expected was not there. She did not walk away feeling consumed by some overwhelming spiritual experience. There was just a quiet awareness that Yeshua had brought a new measure of healing and something important had shifted in her system.

She reported that she kept noticing little things throughout the next few days that were different. Her dyslexia became noticeably worse, and her processing of work tasks was different. She walked away from food she normally enjoyed because they just weren’t appealing anymore. Certain reactions and thought processes felt more mature and her emotional capacity seemed to have increased.

She described it as feeling more complete, but in a way that was almost too subtle to explain. Like a missing piece had returned to its place and her system was still learning how to function with it there. She also explained that she was feeling excited that healing was progressing, but there was also a new layer of the underlying grief that had surfaced. Not an overwhelming grief, but more like the kind that comes when the nervous system begins realizing what was lost, how long parts had been carrying pain alone, and how much survival had cost.

It’s very common for integration to bring relief but also a deep sadness that is difficult to explain to someone who has never experienced this kind of fragmentation work. It’s as if a new burning ache and fresh indwelling of the Holy Spirit now exists simultaneously in the spot where the part was frozen in trauma time and reliving their experience while waiting to be rescued.

It’s as if the gratitude for healing and grief for what made healing necessary in the first place have to learn how to blend and work together to allow for a new kind of growth.

If you are a survivor reading this and you relate to pieces of this story, please know that healing is possible even when the road feels impossibly complicated. Systems are not created because your mind and nervous system found a way to survive things that should have never happened to a child in the first place.

A lot of survivors feel discouraged because healing does not always look as dramatic as we think it will. Sometimes there are breakthroughs and powerful moments, but sometimes healing is subtle. It can look like realizing you are responding differently than before or an increased grief surfacing because your system finally feels safe enough to let you feel it. Often, it looks messy, exhausting, confusing, and deeply uncomfortable.

The nervous system often has to relearn how to function when parts begin reconnecting and walls begin coming down. There can be moments where things temporarily feel harder before they feel easier. When those places finally begin experiencing safety, truth, love, and connection, there is often both relief and mourning happening at the same time.

Healing is allowing the pieces that were scattered in survival mode to slowly come back together so you can finally live as the person Yahweh created you to be instead of the person trauma forced you to become. No matter how fragmented things feel right now, Yeshua is still able to reach the places inside you that feel frozen, hidden, terrified, numb, or trapped in darkness. You can ask Him for a fresh measure of healing today. He knows exactly what you need.