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What is it like being married to a man of many? What is it like when we are back home and going about our daily lives? It is not what you think.

The process of healing and restoration can look very different from what most would imagine. I spent six years of my life wondering what it would be like to just be me, to be naked and unashamed, to know the feeling of unconditional love. What is it like to wake up and be able to be whomever you wanted to be, unhindered by handlers and manipulators? It was joyful beyond measure, overwhelming, and heart-wrenching agony.

Some days were better than others. The first nine months of my deepest healing were the worst. They were plunged into the depths of chaos looking for lost pieces of my shattered soul. I needed time to heal; I needed to experience lifetimes of comfort and gentleness. I needed to know I would not be condemned for what I’d done to survive, the things I’d been made to do and were done to me. Chelsea along with a biblically gifted and spiritually discerning counselor helped to ensure these were offered to me. With that being said I need to make sure to take a moment to discuss therapists and counselors for Survivors of trauma or survivors of “normal” life.

There is a quagmire of problems infesting counselors and therapists especially those who are “Christian.” The unfortunate truth is that most of them have been indoctrinated into worldly, unbiblical, but profitable methods of counseling, psychiatric and symptom management and treatments protocols. The primary and biggest thing to guard against when you are looking for a counselor is to test what their true doctrines and approaches are.

For example in no way do I support any memory retrieval techniques such as hypnotism, past life regression, or even guided imagery like many schools of theophostic and New Age infiltrated counselors teach. In no way should individuals go about astral projecting into the second heavenly realms and dimensions to do battles or find fragments and personalities. The Captain of The Heavenly Host is more then capable to do this work as we pray and agree with His will. Furthermore, there is no need to try to have SRA/DID clients imagine new things or go after memories while in dissociative states, let alone under the control of other potential handlers or manipulators. Unfortunately, this happens with regularity. Many handlers and cult loyal therapists under the guise of “Christian Counselors” will reprogram Survivors to go back to their abusers; perpetrators or worse still get them to re-engage in ritual majik and the opening of further spiritual doors to The Enemy.

It is critical to learn how to allow The Wonderful Counselor and His Living Word to do the real work to test the spirits (1 John) and walk in truth. However there can and are some, though not many, quality and trustworthily counselors out there who are gifted and disciplined in their understanding of The Word and this complex issue. They are faithfully and humbly ministering and working to see the restoration and deliverance of SRA/DID.

It is critical to test the fruits of these counselors or teachers’ doctrines and approaches before you just jump in. More often then not the more secularly educated or New Apostolic Reformation indoctrinated they are they tend to have the greatest hindrance to following truly Biblical approaches to healing and restoration. This is why each of us must learn to trust Yahweh’s written Scriptures and His Set-Apart Spirit is a better guide to our inner healing than any fleshly being could hope to be. If you are in need of another to help you along in this I know He is faithful to help provide them to all who have need. That being said, the vast majority of my healing and those of most Survivors is not done through outside counselors but through faithful yielding to His restorative work. Much of this ground work is critical to set up a better understanding for the methods of healing and redemption of past bondages and wounds I will now discuss.

When Survivors believe it is safe to let your other parts or personalities come out or come up and experience the world the real healing can begin. Coming up to the surface gives the personality body time where they can experience the world in a different way from what they’ve known. It is a time of great vulnerability, and often there is a tremendous amount of fear, confusion, and insecurity. More often than not, the last time they’d experienced life, it had been so horrific that they had to shatter their soul. As such, their understanding of reality was locked up in shattered lenses of pain, suffering or terror. The Little who was coming up was in need of healing. Every day we would pray and ask The Holy Spirit to show us anything we needed to see to be set free, but we also prayed that He would buffer the pain, emotions or flooding to not cause us further trauma.

These parts or as I like to call them, “Littles,” are often fragments and pieces of my soul that were shattered off during a moment of such insurmountable pain the only way to survive was to split off so the rest of our soul could go on living. They are the Littles who stood in the face of torture and volunteered to take the pain, the beatings, or the killings. They endured death time and time again. If not for them, surely I could not have survived a single moment of madness.

Dissociation is a miraculous gift from God that allows us to survive things no being should have to endure. It is our way of living when all others would perish. It is not supposed to be permanent or an identity we continue to seek to embrace, but rather a way to endure and then heal when we can.

The pain the Littles carry can be brutal and is often physically debilitating. Our bodies were not made to endure so many traumas. Our bodies carry the pain or the marks of abuse until that trauma pocket or neural network is able to share the load and release the pain. Many days I would wake up in the morning with excruciating lower back pain. The pain was so severe I could not stand; I would crawl around instead on my hands and knees, trying to be a helper to Chelsea and Naomi but just being a mess. My body needed to connect to the pain so that my soul and spirit could deal with the reality of what we went through.

Once I felt truly safe and I was able to either meet with my counselor or sit down and write, I could allow the Littles up and let them speak. Sometimes I would be co-conscious and present as the other personality shared their story, the memory, or the reason for their hurt. Other times a full switch would happen, and another personality would be in the driver’s seat. We did not allow any portion of our personality body time unless it had surrendered to the will of God and renounced its service to The Enemy. I was not about to let my body be used as a tool for The Wicked One; however, I was going to let healing be done according to The Holy Spirit.

The Little often needed to describe the moment they split, the ritual they were partakers of, or the physical abuse they’d survived. They would share their memory and found that they would not be condemned. Not by Chelsea, my counselor, or by The Deliverer. So much of the healing would come when we discovered the source of the lie that had caused them to split or prevented them from getting healed. It was most often associated with guilt or shame or fear that Jesus would condemn us, our wife would leave us, or retribution would come for speaking The Secrets.

Commonly, an identity crisis would occur internally as our Little had come into agreement with a false identity, such as murderer, filthy, cursed, or hated. The power of healing flooded into our hearts as we combated these lies with The Sword of The Spirit, which is the Word of Yahweh. We needed truth to counter the lies about ourselves – His Word is Truth – and once we surrendered to this, we could find freedom. This was the literal reading of The Scriptures to counter the specific lies we’d come into agreement with.

Once our Little would find forgiveness, for themselves or even later for their abusers and targets, we would be free to lay our burdens, doubts, and fears at Messiah’s feet. We would cleanse out any demonic elements that may have mingled with this portion of our personality and cleanse the internal space with The Scriptures, and then ask for a filling of the emptied space with The Holy Spirit. There can be no vacuum in our souls or in this world; something will always take its place. When you bind up the unclean spirits or cleanse out an area, you must also fill it back up with The Holy Spirit and allow His redemptive work to be done. (Matt. 12:43-45, Luke 11:23-26)

This healing and restoration can happen in two places at once. It is sometimes marked on the outside, as we need to weep and cry or have a cat purring on our lap. Other times we are not entirely aware of the internal healing that is occurring; instead, The Holy Spirit is allowing portions of our soul to see what is happening and show us the blessings of peace, safety, and refuge we now live in.

Chelsea would see us typing away, our fingers on the keys as we let these Littles share the suffering that split their soul. We would have to take a break to crawl under the table and sob hysterically, grieving the death of someone whose name we never learned. Or we would head out to the backyard to let the anger boil over while we pulled weeds, smashed a stick into a tire, or dug a hole only to refill it. Other times we needed to head up into the mountains and hike with our dog, seeing there were still beauties of this world to be explored.

The agony once so strong it split our soul would come roaring to the surface buffered only enough to prevent us from further trauma but not enough to cause us to remain distant from the pain. We had lived through impossible things – horrible things – that left a devastating mark on our soul. It is essential to touch that pain, fear, or fury even if only for a moment in order to let your Little know that you too have felt their hurt, their betrayal, and their despair. We would then surrender that pain and burden to the Messiah, finding He would give us a new hope and purpose instead.

There are moments that define each of us. Moments in life that are so monumental, so pivotal that they can shift our focus from the present to a time lost in the past. It’s like a hyper reality, so intense and focused that the monotony of our life fades into oblivion and this moment shines brightly against the greys of our day-to-day. Such a moment could be when we stand in front of our family as we walk across the stage and receive a diploma we’d worked years to achieve, or when we feel the weight of relief when our child resurfaces after we thought he’d drown, or the moment a truck backs over our favorite childhood pet and leaves us weeping in our mother’s arms, or when we see our mother throw her wedding ring back in our father’s face.

These moments of delight and moments of crumpled hope become pebbles of remembering on this journey of life. They mark our souls, and for those who have used dissociation to survive, they become us. They become the shattered pieces of the puzzle that once was a whole soul. To heal, we may need to step back into that memory and see it from The Father’s perspective to be given understanding, purpose, identity, or a new job. Out of the pain can come freedom, meaning, and relief.

I am going to do something I had been so afraid to do. I am going to open up a few of the pages of the journal from my first year of healing. It will paint the canvas with harsh reality and with the strokes of salvation to a nine-year-old boy and a twenty-eight-year-old man.