How do I know if I’m avoiding the harder things or asking myself to do something I don’t yet have the support to get through? I can want healing with everything in me and still not know how to take the next step. We know programming lies to us, so before I decide that I’m not trying hard enough, there are some questions I need to ask.

In the first post, I talked about some of the changes I could look back on and recognize as evidence of healing, even while I was still struggling. But recognizing that I am healing brings up another question. How do I know whether I am ready for the next step? Wanting to get through something does not automatically mean I understand what I am facing or have the support I need to walk through it. There are a lot of questions that none of us knew we even needed to ask when I first started this journey.

First, what is my relationship with the Lord like? Do I know how to bring Him the things I don’t understand, including the things I am afraid to say? What do I understand about what is happening inside me? Do I know when I am losing time? Am I co-conscious, or am I finding out afterward that something happened that I don’t remember? Am I able to communicate with my parts? Can I recognize a familiar pattern while it is happening, or does it only make sense when I look back? What do I understand about the experiences I describe as programming, and what questions am I still trying to answer? Am I able to take care of myself and my kids, pets, etc., without harming them?

We have to be careful not to let healing become more important than the people God has entrusted to our care. If you are a parent, don’t neglect the moments with your child that you can never get back because you get so focused on healing that it overwhelms you, and you can’t see anything else. Putting healing before my child’s needs is my biggest regret on this journey. I thought that the faster I healed, the better it would be for her, but that was not true. My focus on healing became so consuming that I hurt her in ways that I am still trying to repair today.

My daughter became depressed and started isolating because I was always working on healing stuff or researching cult-related stuff, and I stopped making her a priority. I became so wrapped up in “doing the work” that she felt like she was an afterthought. It stunted her emotional growth and pushed her farther away from the Lord than ever. She was telling me that she hated it here, that everyone had lied to her, and that she didn’t trust anyone here. She had no friends and wanted to move back home. And it wasn’t that I didn’t believe her or even agree with parts of her argument. It was that I kept thinking a big breakthrough was right around the corner that would change everything. And that is just not true. This is a LONG journey with a million little baby steps. There are no quick fixes.

I struggled with feeling like I was never going to be healed, but I also struggled with letting other people down, especially with the volunteer work I was doing. My priorities were out of order. God first, family second, and ministry third was not how I was living. I also felt like I was going to be left behind because it seemed like everyone around me could get their memories, but I wasn’t getting mine, so there was a lot of pressure to figure out why that was. None of it mattered in the long run. I think if I had kept my focus on the more important things, I would be farther along now than I am, and I would not have nearly as much guilt.

I stopped researching, stopped listening to every podcast, and started looking for family outings we could enjoy together. I started setting boundaries around when I could work and when it was family time. I started putting my phone down or turning away from my computer to look her in the eyes when she was talking to me. I started looking for ways to let her know that I delighted in her. God says we are the apple of His eye, but how can you grasp that concept if nobody has ever delighted in you? That was one of the verses I was often reminded of. When you grow up cult, you don’t experience life like everyone else does. A lot of things that others take for granted are things we have to be mindful to learn. I think the most important thing I did was apologize and acknowledge where I had failed her, and we made a plan together to start changing that. I made sure she knew that her opinion and what she felt she needed were important to incorporate into the plan.

Don’t be the absent parent sitting in the room or the one who abandons the fun things of childhood because of healing. Let God help you find balance in both. They are only little once, and if you don’t build a relationship with them while they are little, it will be much harder to help them see areas where they need to heal when they are older.

Then there are questions about what I can actually do when I am overwhelmed. Do I know what helps me become more settled? Can I use that help in the middle of a struggle? Do I know how to keep myself safe? Am I self-harming or having thoughts that I need to tell someone about? Am I having nightmares every night, or am I getting enough restful sleep? Am I still living with someone who harms or controls me? These are difficult questions, and I think in the beginning they may be too difficult to answer without someone to help us look more deeply at some of them. I cannot honestly look at what I am asking of myself without also looking at what I am living through. If I’m not willing to look at these things, then I’m going to set myself up for the journey to be more difficult than necessary. When I am trying to move faster than I am ready to move, I am putting myself at risk of more secondary trauma.

Do I have safe support and resources available, or am I expected to figure everything out completely on my own outside of a counseling session or group? Do I have a safe person who is walking beside me and helping me grow in my relationship with the Lord? Do I have safe housing, food, and the financial means to meet my basic needs? Is there someone I can talk to about what I don’t understand? If the person I usually reach out to is unavailable, do I know where else I can turn? There are so many things to consider before deciding that I should be ready to take on something harder. Now, the rub comes when I not only need to look at these questions, but I need to do it from a grounded, present place and not from the outside looking in. These can’t be questions that I hold outside of my comfort zone and answer in the way I think others would expect me to answer. I need to be real and raw with both myself and the Lord.

I had to get to a place where it felt safe to tell the truth, even when my answers might make someone mad or upset. I was so fearful of losing the attachment that was forming, and I was exhausted because I had parts working very hard to make sure that didn’t happen. I wasn’t able to identify my needs. I was so used to not having an opinion and had never experienced having my needs met, so after living my whole life like that, I was starting with nothing. I didn’t know what I liked or needed. I ate what someone else ordered. I couldn’t tell you my favorite color, song, movie, animal or food. I didn’t know myself at all. I was living very dissociated and in complete survival mode.

When I first started trying to work on the SRA, so many of those things were missing. I had a lot of wins, but I wasn’t always able to hold on to what I had gained. I couldn’t remember most of the breakthroughs I experienced. I didn’t feel safe, I didn’t know what to expect, and everything was in chaos. I wasn’t sleeping, and my diet was horrible. I didn’t have someone available to walk me through all the things I didn’t understand. I’m very insightful, but I had no framework for what I was experiencing. Being able to recognize that something was wrong did not mean I knew how to handle what was coming against me. 

There is a difference between following what someone is saying during a conversation and being able to apply it with understanding later when I am overwhelmed. I would hear an explanation and have no idea how it applied to me. Our system was often our own biggest blind spot. I could want to do something differently and find myself struggling with the same thing again and again. I would get stuck in so many loops and want to pull my hair out trying to figure it out. I didn’t understand what the cult had done, and I was super clueless about what my system was capable of. I was trying to apply something I had not yet understood. Ever tried to take on a principality that God did not ask you to take on? It was kind of like that. I knew only enough to make some really risky decisions. Spiritually, I was trying to storm the gates of hell with only a water pistol.

We would pray prayers in session that talked about the astral realm, other dimensions, parts giving up their cult-loyal jobs, standing in the gap, repenting for my ancestors, and breaking bloodline curses. Most of these things were new things to me, and I didn’t have a clue what the prayers actually meant. I trusted the person telling me to pray them, but I don’t know how effective they were because I don’t know if you can really come into agreement with things you don’t understand. The prayers came from a book written by someone that works with survivors, and I found the wording very wordy and repetitive. Nothing seemed direct and to the point, so I didn’t really know how to pray like that at home.

I think being in an SRA community and hearing the terminology over and over in different contexts eventually helped me put the pieces together. There were things I did without understanding them because they were expected at the time that I would not do again. I strongly encourage you not to come into agreement with anything you don’t fully understand. Take the time to watch, sit back, listen, ask questions and learn first.

Therapeutic modalities are valuable resources, and I’ve utilized many of them myself. But when I think about the complexity of what I needed help with, an appointment every week or two only accounted for a few hours of the hell that was happening between those appointments. When I moved a few years ago, I tried to find a new therapist, and everyone I contacted told me they were not qualified to treat DID. They would refer me to someone they recommended, but that person would just refer me to the next one. Six years later, I still haven’t found a licensed therapist willing to help me. I understand that someone may have limits to what they know how to work with, but knowing that didn’t change the situation I was left in.

I also know that there have been things I wasn’t ready to face. I struggled to get to my memories, and then when something was revealed, I struggled to believe it. Sometimes, you are not just facing something from your past; you are looking at a truth that will forever change your entire worldview. Often, the harder thing is being honest about what I still want to hold on to and why. Other times, I need help understanding what is happening before I can even begin to make a decision about it. I don’t always immediately know the difference. That is something I need room to talk through with someone who won’t hold it against me or take away the things that are bringing stability to my life. That is probably my biggest fear.

So many times, I have worked incredibly hard to heal in an area, and it cost me something that created more trauma for me to heal from because things changed. It doesn’t matter if the change is justified or not; it still feels like punishment. Sometimes, a helper will want to talk to a back part, but they aren’t equipped to deal with the things that part says or does when it finally trusts them enough to come up. Survivors learn that not everything is safe to say, even to safe people, after experiencing loss due to being honest. That is a very difficult situation to come back from and can lead to giving up on healing completely.

What we rarely realized in the beginning is that safe people, healthy boundaries, agape love, and all the good things feel much more threatening to our system and terrifying to the host than anything we were experiencing with the cult. The cult we know. We know every sound to listen for. Every warning is organized within us so that we are on high alert, and alters know when to switch. They know the protocol and what to expect. They have mastered keeping their system safe by knowing the rules and knowing the people involved. They can be the most obedient child in the group, never stepping out of line or failing to submit, but they are still reading the room and everyone in attendance with precision. When you take that same child and all their training and put them in an unfamiliar environment of safety and love, they do not know how to read that room or respond to what that might cause them to feel. So, we must have grace for ourselves as our parts learn to navigate and trust what we know to be good things.

These questions are part of learning to pay attention to my own life. They are also steps toward learning to stay in my body. Can I explain what I need more clearly than I could before? Can I recognize that I am overwhelmed and say so? Do I understand something now that used to leave me completely confused? Am I able to use something I have learned, even if I still need help doing it? Have I learned how to rest and let the things I uncover process and heal, or am I keeping myself so busy moving on to healing the next thing that what I just learned hasn’t really integrated into who I am today? Those are things I can look at while I consider the next step.

Today, I’m learning the value of rest in my own life. I’ve always known it logically, and I’ve always fought for the right to slow down and catch your breath when working on healing. Rest is so important as we work through trauma, but this is the first time I’ve allowed that knowledge to become a priority in my own life. I’m coming off the first sabbatical I’ve ever taken, and the Lord used this time to show me that I cannot go back to working all the time and never taking time for myself to just rest without an agenda. I have accepted that others may think I am not working on my healing or I may feel like I’m falling behind because I need breaks, but that is what my system needs, so I’m okay with that today. I’ve learned that self-care on this journey is not optional. My time to sit at Jesus’ feet and just listen and be ministered to is my lifeline. I think it gets pushed aside too often,” but sitting with Him is actually the biggest piece of “doing the work.” 

If something in this post helped you put words to your own experience or helped you understand someone you love a little better, I hope you’ll share it with someone who could use it. I write about these things because I know what it is like to have so many questions and not know who to ask. This is part two of a five-part series, and you can subscribe to follow along as I keep sharing what I’ve learned and what I’m still walking through.