I’ve been pondering all the times in my life when I wasn’t expecting a big change and got blindsided by what I never saw coming. It felt like the floor fell out from under me and there was nothing that I could do about it. Sometimes it was my fault and sometimes not.
It’s like everything that felt steady yesterday suddenly feels like quicksand. Your thoughts scatter. Your emotions flood you as your parts scramble to fix everything. Old fears surface and you hyper focus on trying to figure out what you did wrong to find yourself here again. People around you may look at you and think you are falling apart, but sometimes that is not what is happening at all.
Sometimes the floor did not fall out from under you. Sometimes God moved you up another level because of your obedience, and you have not learned how to stand there yet. I’ve been trying to find language for this because it is one of the most disorienting parts of healing. It feels like collapse, but it is not always collapse. It can feel like regression, but it is not necessarily regression either. It’s like everything underneath you gave way, when the truth is that you are standing on ground you have never had to stand on before.
It is like being in a multi-story building. You lived on one floor for a long time. You knew where everything was and how to function there. You knew what to expect, how to survive, and how to keep yourself steady. Then God moves you up. Now the floor under your feet is the ceiling you used to live beneath. You are higher than you were, but you don’t recognize it yet. You feel shaky and exposed, sometimes even betrayed. You don’t understand what is happening or what to do next because your footing has changed. The room is different, the scaffolding is gone and you are suddenly scared of heights. The responsibility is different here.
1 Peter 1:6-7 In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in various trials / so that the proven character of your faith—more precious than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory, and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.
Peter said not to be surprised by the fiery trial when it comes to test us, as though something strange were happening. What I’ve learned is that the same test can be given to everyone in the room and it will develop each one according to the area they need to grow. If I handed each one a piece of paper and asked them to write down how Peter’s words applied to them in this situation, the responses would be vastly different because the Word is living and active. It will meet each person where they are and deal with the intentions of each heart. All the while, a lot of times each person thinks they are the only one taking the test.
Hebrews 4:12 For the word of God is living and active and full of power [making it operative, energizing, and effective]. It is sharper than any two-edged sword, penetrating as far as the division of the soul and spirit [the completeness of a person], and of both joints and marrow [the deepest parts of our nature], exposing and judging the very thoughts and intentions of the heart.
We all know that healing can be messy but learning to have grace for when another person’s mess bumps into ours helps us to pass the test. I have had seasons where God was clearly shifting something in me, and it was messy from the outside. It looked like I could not get my act together. I was emotional, reactive, scattered, and too intense for my own good. What people could not see was that despite it all, God was doing a deep work in me. Attachments were being tested. Old systems of safety were being exposed. Holy Spirit was suddenly shining his light on places where I had depended on people more than I realized. I would look back later and see that He was either removing me to protect me, or He was calling me to go deeper with Him because I was ready. (I’m not talking about the purposeful attachment breaks that the occult does here.)
It is one thing to say, “Jesus is my safe place.” It is another thing entirely to have the person you usually turn to be unavailable, unable to understand, or even part of what hurt you, and then have to find Jesus in the middle of the chaos without the support you thought you needed. This is the kind of trials (aka healing) I think Peter was talking about when he said count it all joy because it produces so much fruit and when you finally get through the valley of the shadow of death and God sets your feet in a new spacious place, it’s an amazing feeling. I am not saying safe people don’t matter. I believe God uses safe people, and I love mine. I would not be where I’m at without the people who have helped me.
Attachment wounds are real, and when a survivor finally finds someone who feels safe, it is easy for parts to build their sense of stability on and around that person. Then life happens. A conflict occurs and a part hears it as rejection. Maybe another part hears it as a threat. Protectors come up. Younger parts go inside. The adult self is trying to reason through what happened, but parts are responding from trauma time, not from the present moment. What may have been a misunderstanding to someone else can feel like an earthquake inside the system. The other person can apologize and go on with their day. They don’t understand why the impact is still moving through your system hours later or even days and weeks later. They may not realize that their words touched attachment, fear, punishment, abandonment, old programming and all the things. They may not know that parts are now trying to figure out what they must do to keep the attachment safe.
But you know.
You are the one left inside with the fallout. You are the one trying to calm the parts, sort through the fear, listen for what God is saying, and decide what is true. You are the one trying not to collapse under the weight of being misunderstood. You are the one having to choose whether you will abandon ship and run or stand firm and wait on the Lord’s instruction.
This is not the first time I have lived through this kind of shaking.
I had a therapist I deeply trusted. At the time, I believed God had sent me to her. In many ways, she did what a therapist is supposed to do. She built an attachment with a lot of my littles and created a safe space for us to start healing. She met needs in me that had gone unmet my whole life. There were also poor boundaries and things I did not have language for back then, but at the time, my system experienced her as safe. That is what made the betrayal so devastating. The attachment had been built, and then it broke. I was left holding the pieces of something I did not know how to survive without. I can look back now with more understanding than I had then. I’ve learned from the complexity of what I did not understand at the time, but it doesn’t change that what happened hurt me deeply, and my system experienced it as abandonment.
That kind of wound does not just disappear because time passes.
When a similar situation happens years later, even if the person is different, even if the outcome is different, even if there is apology or repair in the present, my system doesn’t know how to respond to that. Parts freak out because they remember every aching detail of the past. They remember what happened the last time attachment felt unsafe. They remember being left. They remember having to survive the collapse after someone who was supposed to help became part of the wound. So, when the ground shakes now, it becomes about every other time the floor seemed to disappear beneath me. I think that is part of why these moments are so confusing. People may think, “This reaction is too big for what happened.” But inside a survivor system, the reaction is often connected to a long line of betrayals, broken attachments, unsafe helpers, spiritual confusion, and parts who learned that closeness can become dangerous without warning. That is the place God has been touching in me, not just with what currently hurts but in the pattern of a lifetime of hurt.
He is showing me in a deeper way than ever before that I can tell the truth about what happened in the past without letting the old abandonment define what is happening now. I can acknowledge that my system was hurt without deciding that every painful moment means I am being left again. That’s the great thing about freewill. We can choose to run, or we can choose love knowing that love covers a multitude of sins (again, not talking about SRA/MC here). We can choose to surrender and say, “let this cup pass from me, but not my will but Your will be done.” Sometimes, getting out of God’s way is our part of passing the test. And we can choose to count it all joy knowing that He will work it out for our good if we align our will with His.
Today, I’m standing on what used to be the ceiling over my head, and I have to learn how to get my footing here. First Peter says that after we have suffered a little while, God Himself will restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish us. I love that because it does not pretend the suffering isn’t a big deal. It doesn’t shame us for being shaken and thankfully it does not leave us there. God is not just comforting me on the old floor but patiently teaching me how to stand on the new one.
When you find yourself in similar situations, you have to decide what obedience looks like for you.
For me, sometimes obedience looks like staying quiet when I want to explain everything. Sometimes it looks like taking the concern to God instead of trying to make a person see what they are not ready to see. Sometimes it looks like protecting my system without turning bitter. Sometimes it looks like telling my parts, “I know this hurt. I know this felt unsafe. But we are not going back into old attachment patterns to survive this. Jesus is here, and we are going to let Him lead us through it.” The old level could only take me so far. It taught me what it needed to teach me. It gave me some language, some safety, some structure, some healing. But when God is calling me into more maturity, more discernment, more dependence on Him, and more responsibility for my own system, then I cannot keep living as if the old ceiling is still above me. I’ll do it afraid if I must, but I have to learn how to stand where He has placed me now.