How can I know that I am healing when there are still things I struggle with and things I am not ready to face? How do I recognize the progress I have made when something gets hard again, and denial kicks in or I start questioning whether anything has actually changed? I feel like this is the million-dollar question. I could fill a library with books related to this question and still have things I don’t know how to answer. But I do have some thoughts based on my lived experience and what I can see when I look back at my own healing.

When I first started trying to work on healing from SRA, there was so much I didn’t understand. I held a bachelor’s degree in Christian lay counseling and was working on my masters. I still knew zero about the cult or how to help myself heal. I had a lot of wins, but I couldn’t always remember the breakthroughs I experienced or apply what I had learned afterward. I wasn’t sleeping, my diet was horrible, and I didn’t feel safe. I was tenacious and sold out to the Lord, but I had no framework for what I was experiencing. When I look back and consider all that has happened, the disaster that I called my life was completely understandable. I didn’t know what questions I needed to ask, much less the answers to them. Today, I know that there are layers of questions that must be ask and revisited throughout the healing journey that I’ll go into more detail about in a later post.

Holidays were probably where I noticed the most change because the loneliness had been so extreme. I had cut ties with my natural family and my church family on the same day and had nothing to replace those relationships with. I had met a couple of other survivors who were also struggling, but I was still trying to figure out how to live without the people and relationships that had filled my life. The grief was consuming, and I would spend the whole day in bed. Then I moved to the couch, and eventually I sat up and read, made some tea, and started focusing on self-care. It took me at least two years, maybe longer, to move through all those steps once I made up my mind to do it. Today, holidays are still hard. We are making them our own. We stopped hoping for tradition or for a family gathering. We’ve accepted that we are never going to have a big family and started figuring out how to make the days good for a party of two.

I don’t think you can ask a survivor to give up something as impactful as relationships without helping them build new relationships with safe people. It is a very unreasonable request to expect someone to leave everyone they are attached to and then figure out the loneliness completely on their own. It can come across as abandonment and rejection, no matter how good the intentions are. The struggle doesn’t stop between sessions, groups, or whatever avenue someone chooses for healing. If you are asking someone to leave the only life they know, helping them establish their new life needs to be part of that conversation. If you go home to your family and friends and life goes on as normal for you, where does that leave the person sitting alone in the messiness of everything they have just lost?

I understand that, from the outside looking in, people may think you are being rescued, whisked away to a better life and a bright future, and everyone is excited about it. But you are also being asked to break attachment bonds with the only people you are attached to. You are being asked to turn your back on family and friends and deal with the guilt and condemnation that follow, all while still trying to understand the chaos and pain in your life. You are being asked to give up everything you know, everything you love, and so much of what contributed to your identity. Sometimes that includes your pets, your room, your clothes and shoes, your routine, the places you visit—all the familiar things that made up your normal. Everything can be gone in one moment, even when you are the one who makes the final decision to leave. Making that decision does not mean you are prepared for everything that comes afterward. You can’t be.

For me, I was not at all prepared for the aftermath and consequences of leaving, even with a strong relationship with Jesus. I struggled massively with guilt over hurting the ones I left behind, and it’s not like you can explain it to them because nobody understands this stuff. So, one of the things I can look back on and see as evidence of healing is that I’m at peace in my home now. I don’t carry that same level of guilt for them. I’m not feeling uprooted and completely out of place, with nowhere to belong in the world. Knowing I needed to get the help I was seeking did not make it any easier to manage the guilt over being the one who made that happen. It is very, very hard, and it is not something easily done alone. That is part of what I have to remember when I look back and ask whether I was healing. I was also grieving, trying to understand myself, and learning how to live without the relationships that had filled my life.

One of the hardest parts is grieving the loss of someone older who is still alive. You know that, because of the choices you are making, you may never see them again, and yet you still make those choices. I don’t have any answers for that, but it’s not been a fun season to navigate so far. I can recognize healing in it though, because I can sit with the grief without dissociating or pushing it out of my awareness. However, it brings up so many questions. I’m learning to embrace the questions, but more importantly, I’m learning that it is okay to change my mind as I grow. What was dangerous for me in my early healing might one day become a ministry opportunity, and I don’t want to miss out on that. I will say that I don’t trust myself to make that decision alone because of my programming. I think we need a lot of confirmation and complete peace from the Lord before stepping into those waters.

Over time, I noticed that it was becoming easier to sit in the pain of the isolation and loneliness and just talk with Jesus and listen to worship music. I also noticed that I was starting to think of the self-care I was learning as valuable. I started making myself hot teas and trying new, fun flavors. I would put a soft blanket in the dryer to get it warm, then wrap up in it and journal. Those were things I could actually recognize as changes in how I was treating myself while I was hurting. The loneliness was still there, but I was becoming more and more invested in what might bring me some comfort in the middle of it.

I had already established deep roots in my relationship with Jesus, and I knew how to nurture that relationship. But learning about SRA knocked me off my feet for a season. It was heavy to carry and left my system with more questions than answers. Having that relationship with Him didn’t mean I wasn’t overwhelmed. I still had to walk through the questions, the exhaustion, and the grief of how much my life had changed. I had to learn that the cult sends people in all kinds of roles and jobs so that they can naturally blend into your life, and you don’t even notice your being accessed.

And… I had to quickly learn about omega programming. It was activated often in the beginning and all I could think was that I wanted to go to sleep and never wake up. That rarely happens to me today. I think knowing what they do and understanding how it works and that it will pass if you don’t act on it helped me a lot. Yet, we can know that Jesus trumps every lie our programming tells us, but still not be able to stop following the script without help sometimes. The omega programming took time, and it is not easy nor safe. If you have someone you can call, do it. Don’t take unnecessary risks. Don’t underestimate what your programming can cause you to feel and/or do, especially early in your healing.

When I ask myself how I know that I was healing during that season, those are some of the things I can look back on. I was becoming more able to sit with what hurt. I was finding small ways to care for myself. I was talking with Jesus about what I was carrying and writing things down so I could return to them later. I was also learning to ask for help by calling or texting someone who could pray for me and talk me through the spiritual warfare. Going to Jesus with the struggle and keeping a journal became ways to identify patterns and keep things from going back behind the amnesic wall. I could write down what I was praying about, what I believed He was showing me, and what I was beginning to understand. Later, I could look back instead of relying only on what I could remember or how I felt that day. Sometimes the change was easier to see across those pages than it was to recognize in the middle of a hard holiday.

P.S. It’s helpful for leaders and those walking beside survivors to also journal and track all the moments of growth. It’s a wonderful thing to look back and read the evidence that God is so very good and is indeed moving, especially when things are hard and you’re thinking about quitting.

To be continued…