Activation phone calls can happen without the presenter having any conscious knowledge of them. From the outside, everything can look completely normal. The person is going about everyday life, making decisions that appear to be their own. The goal of Return Programs (call backs) is to draw the survivor back to the cult for a ritual or further programming. It often happens through ordinary messages about your family, friends, or co-workers. It’s so hard to identify because it’s going to be something familiar, a call that you wouldn’t think twice about. Afterwards, you will start to feel an urge to call a former trainer or family/cult member for a reason that will feel like a normal response to whatever scenario they set up.
It’s really important to try and work with your parts to find out who inside feels the need to reconnect. If they are invested in contacting someone, there is usually a reason behind it. Find out their perspective and what they seek to gain, protect, or not lose by making contact. Try to find out what they think will happen if they don’t respond or go where they feel an urge to go. This can be anywhere. For me in the situation below it was across the country. Sometimes, it’s to a grocery store, doctor office, hospital, school, park or family gathering. The goal is to find out the internal reason for needing to reconnect and deal with any double binds or consequences that the parts believe will happen.
I can look back over my life before I started getting any SRA memories and see the pattern and the destruction that followed. One of the clearest examples is in the top three most spontaneous things I have ever done. I was living in the town where I grew up, going about my life with no thoughts or plans for a major change. About a month earlier, I had broken up with my boyfriend, and he had moved 1,800 miles away. I wasn’t talking to him, and I wasn’t struggling with the breakup. When someone left my life, I had learned to cut them off completely. I pushed them out of my conscious awareness along with any lingering emotions. It was no different with this guy. I’ll call him Chris.
Chris was 33, and he was someone I would never have been attracted to. He came into my life through a mutual friend at a time when I was desperate for help. He knew all the right things to say and do, and what to offer me so that I would want what he was offering. I know now that he was pulling up a part in my system. Back then, I just thought I was really good at making really dumb choices.
He played on my disorganized attachment style and made me feel as though I could build a life that looked completely different from the one I had growing up. I was operating from a place of being about 1% invested in this realm while living in the astral realm and depending on dissociation like it was oxygen. I was completely unaware of the underlying programming and control.
At first, he only offered me a job as a live-in babysitter for his six-month-old son. I thought it was an answer to prayer. It didn’t require anything of me that I didn’t want to do, and it gave me a safe place to live. I moved in with him and his wife, and at first everything was great. It felt too good to be true in some ways, but I was so thankful to be away from my mom. I didn’t have the emotional maturity to recognize the danger I was putting myself in. A lot happened that year to get me back under cult control, but I believed it was all the result of my own decisions and my broken home.
Eventually, Chris decided to show his true colors. Because I couldn’t say no, I now had a new handler who was reporting back to my mom about the lessons I was learning.
The first thing he did to activate my system to walk into the role he was creating for me was take me to a friend’s house. The friend was a man much older than either of us. He sat drinking beer while they talked, and I sat there wanting to disappear. I didn’t know at the time that what I was feeling was demonic, but I was extremely uncomfortable.
I ended up stuck there because Chris wanted to spend the night. On that creepy old man’s living room floor, Chris did not care that I did not want to do anything with him. He was very aggressive, and the demons in him now had an open door to my system. I think having the older man watch gave his demons an open doorway as well. I don’t know who that man was or whether he played another role in my life after that night. (It’s important to break soul ties, contracts, agreements etc. with anyone who was present even if you don’t remember anything specific happening.)
I left with a new layer of brokenness. My Christian programming told me I needed to obey Chris, protect him, and honor him because I had just lost my virginity to him. To those questioning how I could think that, the cult has ways to abuse someone and then alter their body medically so that, when they grow up and “have sex for the first time,” it appears as though they were a virgin.
I carried a lot of guilt and confusion because my programming was telling me I was bound to a married man I had no desire to be with. I learned it wasn’t the first time he had cheated on his wife, and he continued to have expectations of me while she was at work. The biggest problem was that he was not doing these things with me. He was calling up very young parts who were programmed to give him what he wanted. He also began taking on the role of a father to them, which added even more confusion.
I don’t know much about this particular programming, but I remember that he used Who Framed Roger Rabbit? with them. Roger is a skinny white rabbit with large blue eyes, a pink nose, and a tuft of red hair. He wears red overalls, yellow gloves, and a blue bow tie with yellow polka dots. I see multiple cues in the character’s outfit: the polka dots, the gloves, the familiar red, and the fact that he is a white rabbit. I don’t know how my little parts knew it, but they understood their role and the unspoken expectation that they measure up to Jessica’s character.
Eventually, I moved out and thought I had gotten away from him. To do that, I moved back into the house where my mom was living. There was never a safe way of escape. I was being bounced from one handler to another. My mom decided to move Chris into her house. A couple of months later, she moved out, and I found myself living alone with him. By then, he had convinced me that I wanted the relationship and that dating him was the safest thing for me.
Later, he took a job across the country as a mechanic, and I was finally free from him. I didn’t see or hear from him for about a month.
Then, one day, I got a phone call from Chris’s sister-in-law, someone I had never heard of or met. We talked for about ten minutes. She was very nice. Within 24 hours, I had packed everything I owned, including my cats, and driven 1,800 miles to live with her. I had no idea that I was moving in with a Jesuit cult family.
Chris then moved in, and things became more and more complicated. I felt completely trapped and out of my element, but I didn’t know how to get myself out. I continued to live under the “hear and obey” command he had reinforced in my system. From there, I was taken to Salt Lake City, Utah, and to the temple there. I lived in Utah for a year, but I can account for only about ten hours of that time.
None of this screams “cult” to the untrained eye. When you know what you are looking at, though, you can see the setup throughout. Code words can be used in an ordinary conversation by someone you know or someone you don’t. They can activate back parts in a system to carry out what that person tells them to do, without the presenter knowing what has happened. The same can be done with hand signals, photos, colors, and other cues in person or through emails and letters. This is a systematic, organized way of communicating orders to programmed alters while the front person remains unaware. Even when you are living it out, you don’t typically know anything nefarious has happened.
That is why it is so important to work with your system, show your parts the truth, and help them understand that they do not have to listen to the bad people anymore.
A lot of activation calls will be made between now and Halloween. During this season, I do not answer calls from numbers I don’t recognize. I don’t read texts from people who aren’t in my contacts, open emails from people I don’t know, or listen to voicemails from unfamiliar numbers. I limit my time in public spaces and don’t go alone to malls or other crowded places. I don’t post about what I’m currently doing in my personal life. I watch very little TV and limit the podcasts I listen to during high cult seasons.
Sometimes survivors can be given an assignment to appear on a podcast and unknowingly send out activations, especially early in their healing. For that reason, I don’t listen to survivor interviews at this time of year unless the survivor’s safe person is present on the podcast with them. There is no judgment towards the survivor, but this is how programming works and how I choose to protect my system.
These are practices I put in place for my safety, and it helped reduce the number of activations in my system. At first, I was nervous that I would miss something important, but I haven’t found that to be the case. The Lord has ways to get us the information we need. It’s a season to stay in prayer, seek the Lord about your plans, pay attention to how your body reacts, the checks in your spirit, and advice you get from those who walk alongside you. This is not a time to let our guard down. Talk to your parts often, try to find out what’s going on inside. Who’s scared or restless? Who is adamant about going somewhere or talking to a certain person? Who is contacting you from your past? What family events are scheduled? The occult plans everything. Part of coming out of the cult is being willing to question ourselves and our plans especially during high ritual seasons.
When an activation call happens, the person does not give an obvious command. It can be a short, pleasant conversation that seems to have nothing to do with the decision that follows. Someone may ask how you’re doing, mention a person or place, or offer something you believe you need. The presenter can finish the call believing it was ordinary while parts inside are responding to something they recognized in it. These calls often come from friends, family, or co-workers because they don’t recognize what their own back parts are doing.
Other survivors have written about this under the terms accessing, recontact programming, and callbacks. They describe contact that can come through a phone call, a message, or someone already known to the survivor. What makes it so difficult to recognize is that the contact may look harmless on its own. The change shows up afterward: a sudden urgency to call someone, go somewhere, return to a relationship, or make a decision that wasn’t even on your mind before.
That is what I see when I look back at the call in this story. I cannot tell you which word(s) activated my system. I can tell you that I had no plan to move, spoke for about ten minutes with a woman I had never met, and within 24 hours packed my life into a car and drove 1,800 miles toward the man I thought I had gotten away from. In my situation it happened in real life, but the call can come and activate parts to go in the astral realm as well. It’s so important to be working on staying in your body and calling your parts back to your body right now. I still do it several times a day even though I have no awareness of parts leaving to go to rituals. It happens to all SRA survivors, and until we have quite a bit of healing and good communication with all of our parts, it’s better to be safe than sorry.
Your voice is your most powerful weapon. Call out to Jesus for help. Command your spirit to rise up and fight on your behalf. Call your parts back. Explain to your parts what is happening. They don’t always know what you know and often they think they don’t have a choice. They can’t get free without knowing the truth. Most of all, love them. Love is always the answer. Love them because you are learning to love yourself. Love them because that is what gets them to Jesus. Love them because love covers a multitude of sin. Love them enough to tell them the truth and the truth will set you free.