One of the first things that I was taught when I stumbled into the world of SRA was that you cannot control who someone is connected to and what they choose to do with that relationship. The word “handler” means something entirely different to the outside world than it does to a survivor. Part of society hears it and thinks it’s part of a conspiracy theory that the tin foil hat people fabricate. Others think it’s someone that is controlling or handling another person’s affairs.

For someone with no exposure to SRA or mind-control terminology, “handler” probably does not immediately mean an abuser involved in programming. They are much more likely to interpret it through ordinary cultural uses of the word.

Most people would probably think of one of these meanings:

• Someone who manages or controls another person — like saying a politician or celebrity has “handlers” who tell them where to go, what to say, and keep them on schedule.
• An intelligence or espionage relationship — movies and TV often use handler for the person directing an operative, informant, or asset.
• Someone responsible for an animal — a dog handler, horse handler, K-9 handler, etc.
• A caretaker/manager in a specialized situation — someone assigned to supervise or manage another person.

Even without knowing anything about SRA, though, the word has a fairly strong control connotation when applied to a human being. Before my life completely changed six years ago, if I heard someone say, “That person was her handler,” rather than her manager, assistant, caregiver, or supervisor, I would have assumed there was some kind of power imbalance involved. Most people could agree that it sounds like the person being “handled” does not have complete autonomy.

For survivors, we didn’t have autonomy at all. Yet, most of us didn’t feel like we were being “handled”. We were living the only life we had been exposed to without giving it much thought. They break your freewill, they don’t allow independent thoughts and opinions. Your feelings don’t matter and you certainly don’t get to make decisions for yourself that are free of their manipulation. A lot of us had no concept of being in the cult or any awareness that we were not in control of our own life, especially as we moved into adulthood and started making what we assumed was our own decisions. It’s not typical to recognize the manipulation and setups that happen behind the scenes when you’re still in the middle of it.

When they send someone to handle you, they come well equipped with an understanding of what you care about, what will draw you to them and how to earn your trust. They will know what to avoid and what is most important to you, preventing you from questioning their motives and/or their new role in your life. It’s often euphoric in the beginning, because there is such a desperate need for hope, for a reprieve from the self-hatred and constant loss life has dealt you. As long as you do what they want you to do, that euphoric feeling remains available to pull from anytime you start to question if something is wrong. But when you start setting boundaries, when you start to stand on what the Lord is showing you, handlers have very strong reactions to you trying to gain autonomy and walk in your own truth.

Nobody can control whether someone follows their programming and goes back when they are called home. You cannot just tell someone not to go back. They have to come to the understanding for themselves that it isn’t good for them. That it isn’t safe for them. And there is a whole lot of trauma bonding and attachment that has to be worked through before that choice becomes as simple as it might look from the outside. You can know somebody hurt you and still love them or that a relationship is unhealthy and still miss them. Knowing exactly why you left doesn’t magically erase the pull to still want to go home, and singletons have a hard time understanding the dynamics of these trauma bonds that kept us alive.

You cannot ask somebody to cut every tie they have to the people they have been attached to their whole life and then leave them with nothing to replace those relationships. Because unhealthy love feels better than no love at all. The people you are trying to get away from can be very good at making sure you don’t feel alone when they want you to come back. And you can’t build something worth holding onto, then the past will always be there quietly calling you back.

And when you are lonely enough, scared enough, or grieving enough, familiar can start looking a whole lot like safe even when you know it isn’t. There will always be an incentive to return to what you know. But I think the time when that pull gets especially strong is when the person who became safe decides they don’t want to walk in that role anymore because it has gotten too hard. Or when the person who helped you believe you could survive leaving suddenly disappears. Or worse, maybe they don’t disappear at all, but they just don’t seem as invested as they used to be.

You can feel the difference when they start checking in less often, when the phone calls become shorter and things that used to matter no longer matter to them. Maybe they are tired. Maybe their life changed. Maybe they never meant to become as important to you as they did. Whatever the reason, the survivor still feels devastated over the loss of safety. And suddenly you aren’t just grieving that relationship, your world is spiraling out of control because you thought love in the context that they spoke it was different. You thought the rules had changed and they wanted to help you become a better version of you, a healed version of who God created you to be. You’re questioning yourself; you’re realizing that you didn’t know you were still required to play the game correctly. You start to understand that they too will hurt you and letting your guard down to trust was not safe. You suddenly know that the cult got to them and they became too blinded by the manipulation and witchcraft to see it.

All of the old attachments start pulling at you again. The people you left are still there. The familiar ache it left inside of you to walk away is still there. And now the thing that helped make leaving possible doesn’t feel so solid anymore. That is when I think we have to be really careful about looking at a survivor who goes back and asking, “Why would they do that?”

It’s almost always about attachment wounding. The better question to ask is:

What happened to the relationships that made it possible for them to stay gone?

I’m trying hard to look at all sides of this. A safe person cannot become a replacement handler. The answer to controlling relationships is not to replace them with a new relationship where somebody else becomes responsible for every decision, every emotion, every crisis, and whether or not the survivor stays safe. That isn’t freedom either.

Maybe one person helped you escape, but healing has to eventually become bigger than one person. A survivor needs healthy relationships. Plural. They need a safe community of people who will tell the truth. People who will stay when things get messy and won’t use their vulnerability against them. But they also need room to learn how to hear God for themselves, make their own decisions, recognize what feels unsafe, set boundaries, and survive disappointment. It’s walking out these things that helps us discover that losing one relationship does not mean we have lost everything.

Helpers often underestimate how long that takes. When someone has spent a lifetime learning that attachment can be taken away, used against them, or made conditional on obedience, you cannot undo that quickly. It takes time and walking through a lot of new experiences to start to understand what it feels like to be loved without being owned or to trust that someone actually means it when they say, “I’m here for you” without that secretly meaning, “as long as you behave the way I need you to.”

I think we get there by building enough healthy attachments that one relationship no longer has the power to determine whether everything falls apart. I don’t know what He is doing with this new wine skin, but I know this next year is going to look very different.

I went five years without talking to my mom so that I could have some space to heal and find out what I had hidden behind my own amnesic walls. Then last year, the week of the conference, I talked to her. Now, I’m leaving to go to the conference again, and it’s bringing up a lot of my past. It’s been a painful year, and I’ve had to process a lot of stuff on my own. I’ve watched as infiltration has changed people and how my relationships have suffered because of it. It leaves me hoping this next season won’t hurt so much while at the same time aching for what was familiar and dependable. Was my relationship with my mom unhealthy? Absolutely, but it was dependable and sometimes that feels safter than the unknown. I knew what I was getting; there was never a question of where I stood or what I was worth to them.

When you start considering rebuilding relationships that didn’t serve you well, it doesn’t mean you forgot what happened. Sometimes it means something in you is reaching for attachment. For familiarity. For somebody who still wants you to be a part of their life. And sometimes, before we judge the person who went back, we need to understand just how powerful that pull can become when the safe place they had learned to trust doesn’t feel quite as safe anymore.