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The Difference Between Imaginary Friends and Demons The Stranger-Than-Fiction True Story of Christine, a College Graduate and Sexual Abuse Survivor in her Thirties For most of my life, imaginary friends have been my comfort, confidants, companions and source of matchless pleasure. Not everyone understands. One woman even had the audacity to say they were demons! Having an imaginary friend is often a harmless phase that children grow out of. Occasionally, imaginary friends are actually vital parts of a person that he or she needs to connect with in order to be whole. This is the case for people with Dissociative Identity Disorder. For help with this, see D.I.D. Explained . In Christine’s case, imaginary friends proved to be more sinister than she realized but even such cases can have happy endings, as it did for her. Here’s her story. I was four years old when first sexually molested. It started with the man working in my backyard asking if I wanted to be a good girl and make him happy. Yes, I wanted to be a good girl. It quickly turned sour. I felt awful. I had nightmares that night. The next day, he came back and smiled at me. He winked and my mother told me to give him a hug. He saw the fear in my eyes. He was angry but we hugged. He went outside. My mother asked my father what had made him so angry. “I think I know,” I said. She scolded me and made me tell the man I was sorry for whatever I had done. He was happy then. “I’m shocked at how bad you are,” he told me in private. “You are a monster! Your mom will hate you if she finds out. You are a bad girl. Girls like you who make men do bad things get locked up. The police will come and lock you away.” The terror of the police chills me to this very day. I believed every word, convinced that I must be very, very bad. It had to be true. He was an adult. Adults know these things. “Now you belong to me,” he said. I was trapped. There was nowhere for a four year old to run. Even mommy would turn on me if she knew my dirty secret. As a neighbor and family friend who also did maintenance work on our house, he had easy access to me. Time after time after time he not only sexually abused me, he drilled it into me that what happened was my fault and that I was bad. Every time, it rammed home to me yet again the devastating conclusion that I was evil because, as he kept insisting with unchallengeable authority, there was something about me that I could never change – my very appearance; the body I was born with – that made him do bad things to me. Finally, when I was seven, he moved away. (He is now in jail for other sexual offenses.) Him leaving, however, did nothing to undo the damage. So devastatingly powerful is the effect of being programmed in one’s impressionable years, that it took over thirty years and an act of God for me to stop believing that his despicable acts were my fault. So I kept quiet. My family taught that everyone must handle his or her own problems and that if anyone couldn’t, then he or she deserved the problems. I was a wicked little girl with a black secret. I had seduced a married man. No one would ever love me if they knew how bad I was. When I was five I sat under a cherry tree and in desperation asked God if he loved me. He answered my prayer with warmth and an assurance that made me believe. We became friends. We would talk and play. You might think it crazy – God, the mighty Creator playing with a child – but nothing will make me believe that it wasn’t God. I would sing to him and he made all the trees rustle as if to applaud. I giggled and giggled. We played that way all summer. What joy God gave me. At church I kept hearing that God hates sin. I knew I was bad. Eventually, I felt compelled to the sad conclusion that God would not want me. I stopped talking to God. Ever since, my whole being has yearned to return to those wondrous times with God. If only I’d realized that God felt the same way. At age seven I saw a pornographic magazine. All the photos featured just one man engaging in various acts with a harem of women. They were bad girls but unlike me they were beautiful and someone had even wanted to take photos of them. Maybe I could become like them and have some sort of future. I was so captivated that I stole the magazine. I hid it under my bed. I would stare at it over and over. “So this is what bad girls do,” I told myself. And I knew I was bad. I yearned to be good. I wanted to be held and told I could be loved in spite of being bad. I would hide away, suck my thumb and curl into a ball, crying for someone to love me. In my mind’s eye, someone came. He was kind, and didn’t care if I was bad or good. He introduced himself as an imaginary friend. But he was the man in that magazine. There was no way I wanted a grown man acting toward me the way he did in those photos. Terrified, I rejected him and hastily burned the porn. On a warm summer’s day I slipped on my swimming suit and went outside to lose myself in the sun. I was twelve. To my acute embarrassment, I had been developing a womanly figure from an unusually early age, and I hated it. But I relaxed, enjoying the sun. In my mind’s eye, I saw a kind, sensitive man – the imaginary friend I had seen after looking at the porn five years earlier. He said reassuring, flattering things that made me feel good about the body I hated. He was warm. He moved his hands over my body, caressing me and assuring me he was only imaginary. He guided my hand as I masturbated. It was the first time I had ever climaxed. The experience had somehow felt morally wrong. But it was only fantasy and what harm could there be in having an imaginary friend? Still, I felt unsure and rebuffed him. Deep down, however, I wondered if it would have been better to let him have his way. Knowing this, he merely stepped back and waited. Whenever I was lonely or hurting, I would seek him out. It was wonderful. I was safe with him. He said his name was Michael. He approved of me. He would come to me, whispering love in my ear and we would have sex. He introduced me to a couple of his friends with whom I chatted, but he alone was my lover. When I gave my life to Christ at aged thirteen, “Michael” was angry but silent. I told him my friendship with him was over. He left. But my relationship with God was rocky. The Lord started speaking to me about the abuse I had suffered as a tiny child. He told me I wasn’t bad. I could talk to him, he said, and be healed of my pain. I didn’t want to face reality, however, preferring to live in denial that the abuse had ever happened. I wanted God to ignore my deep inner wounds and act like a new imaginary friend living in a fantasy world. But God wanted reality. So I began to push him away. Lurking in the shadows of my mind had always been the haunting expectation that God would end up rejecting me. After all, God is holy. I had never been able to rid myself of the conviction haunting me since age four that I was bad and that, except for a product of my imagination, no one knowing my dark secrets would want me. Eventually something happened that felt like God leaving me. I should have concluded that since God is always loving and forgiving and faithful my interpretation of that feeling had to be mistaken. Instead, I caved in to the devastating feeling and took it as confirmation of what I had always feared: God was too holy for me. With the fracturing of my relationship with God, my old imaginary friend eventually wormed his way back into my life. This time, however, “Michael” brought more “male” friends with him. They were fun. More friends meant less loneliness. They accepted me and didn’t care about my black past. We would talk and laugh and share secrets. Later, I began again to give priority to God and I rejected all my imaginary friends. Eventually a tragedy hit me and life became unbearable. Desperately needing comfort and supposing that God had left me, I let “Michael” return. This time he brought still more of his friends with him. Over the years, I grew very close to them. We shared everything. With “Michael,” I now had eight imaginary friends. One of them was his “sister,” “Marie.” She was sassy, delightfully wicked and a dark horse. One day, “Marie” and I were alone. Her brother and friends were out and we were playing an imaginary game of dare. She dared me to kiss her. I laughed, assuming she was joking. She wasn’t. I told her I was loyal to her brother. She smiled and told me to kiss her. She didn’t want to be kissed on the lips, however; she wanted oral sex. We laughed and joked about it. But then she removed her clothes. “Go on,” she urged, “it’s only your imagination.” I did it. I thought it was fun. Together, we entered into a secret world of cheating on her “brother,” “Michael.” Eventually, I confessed to him. He only laughed, saying he loved me no matter what. He was actually pleased about it. My imaginary friends seemed to have a mind of their own. That made them interesting, though sometimes frustrating. For example, to my disappointment, “Marie” would always insist I take the male role with her, saying she was the one with the great body. They made me dependent on them, saying no one else would want me and promising never to leave me. If ever I didn’t please them, however, they would threaten to leave. Nevertheless, consistent with them being imaginary, I had certain powers over what they did. By a simple act of my will, for instance, I could change the color of their hair. It was harmless fun. They made me feel safe. They took my loneliness away. With them I was loved and wanted. They knew my dark secrets and yet accepted me. We had great sex as they captivated my imagination and guided my hand. It was only fantasy. Eventually, my dark secret that I was bad began to overwhelm me. I hated myself. Even with my imaginary friends, I was hurting and lonely. They were right: life in this world is awful and I was unlovable. They tried to comfort me, but I wanted them to be real. They were in another world; a fantasy world that I could join in death. All I had to do was to kill myself. They encouraged me not to die in vain. They said I should get revenge and hurt someone to release the fury and badness locked up inside. Terrified at the possibility of me actually doing what they were urging me to do, I realized I needed help. Just in time, I found help from a secular suicide hotline, and stayed alive. I knew my former friend, God, was the real answer, but he didn’t want someone as depraved as me. He was too pure to love me like my imaginary friends did. So I leaned on my imaginary friends even more. Whenever I tried to pray, they would warn me with the deepest concern. “God has hurt you so badly. Be careful.” Surely I could trust their insight. After all, they were my friends. Nevertheless, my yearning for God refused to die. Certain that Jesus had rejected me, I tried Buddhism, desperately, though foolishly, hoping it might turn out to be a back door to God. One day, searching the Internet, I found Netburst.Net . I began to read and was captivated. Whoever wrote that website knew my secrets! He knew my fears, my pain, my yearnings. And he seemed to have answers! My spirit grabbed the pages. I read and read and read. Each page awakened things within me and I devoured it as if I would die if I didn’t get it. It was such an intense experience. Each page jumped at me, screaming HOPE. I felt naked and clothed, debased and honored, understood and drawn. It had to be God. I asked my imaginary friends about Grantley, the author of those pages. They warned me that he was an evil man pretending to be good. I wondered how, if he were that bad, he could be so kind in his webpages and understand so completely. I consulted real-life friends, including a social worker in my church. They all warned me not to contact Grantley. Despite everything, I still felt drawn to Grantley. Finally, I e-mailed him, telling him how God had rejected me. Grantley showed me that God is faithful and that if it had seemed that God had rejected me, it was just an unpleasant illusion based on me mistakenly choosing to believe powerfully convincing feelings of rejection, rather than believing in the power of God’s love revealed in Christ. Keen to find out if Grantley was genuine, I asked if I could phone him. He provided his phone number, along with that of his ministry partner, Helen. As soon as I mentioned my imaginary friends, Helen became very worried and said they were demons. The notion was preposterous! What kind of people in the Twenty-First Century believe in mediaeval folklore like that? “What could be more harmless than fantasy?” I reasoned. “They have been my trusted friends and comforters most of my life. I need them. They protect me from emotional pain. I am safe with them. I can control them and shut them up when I need to. I can change certain features about them with my mind. Besides, they tell me that though I am a reject and a bad person they love me. They accept me and give me pity. Helen just doesn’t understand!” Grantley was disturbed by Helen’s outburst, worried that I’d be offended. But despite it all, I began to wonder. Could demons really exist? Could my dear imaginary friends actually be demons? No, they loved me. They told me so. Although I seldom admitted it to myself, however, the truth was that I did not have full control over them. I also had to admit that living in a fantasy world did not ease the loneliness. And, come to think of it, whenever I prayed, they interrupted and chattered loudly to prevent me from continuing. They said it was to protect me. For years, something, cold, dark, and chillingly evil would sometimes appear before me, telling me to kill myself, or threatening that if I were to serve God it would kill my loved ones. On such occasions I would be petrified; my body frozen solid with fear and my mind reeling in horror. Since I couldn’t believe in such mediaeval hogwash as demons, I concluded the experience was some sort of powerful, emotionally based hallucination. But whatever it was, I desperately needed protection from it. I needed someone with me 24 hours a day – especially when asleep or trying to sleep – who would deliver me from these “hallucinations.” “Michael” did just that. I dismissed his effectiveness as some sort of mental trick on my part, whereby I used my imagination – “Michael” – to control my subconscious. Whatever was happening, however, it definitely worked: “Michael” would literally chase those terrifying “hallucinations” away. There was no way I wanted to face those harrowing experiences without the protection of my imaginary friend. If I didn’t quite obey “Michael,” he would threaten to leave me. There were all kinds of threats to get me to submit. Each threat seemed a loving warning, but a threat, nonetheless. A particularly disturbing thought he played on was who would protect me from that dark spirit? I quickly obeyed. Grantley listened to me with what I knew was growing concern. He asked me to imagine what it would be like to have a boyfriend who paid a gang to harass me so that I would keep seeing this boyfriend as a desperately needed hero. That got me thinking. Could my imaginary friends be deceiving me? Could they be playing “good cop, bad cop”? Could they really be in league with the visitations that tormented me? Actually, I had known for a long while that “Michael’s” sister, “Marie” was friends with that dark spirit that would threaten and terrify me. I hadn’t bothered to think through the implications, because the practical reality is that “Michael” kept protecting me from those awful experiences. Then there was something else that scared me. One of my imaginary friends was a pedophile. What made that particularly disturbing was that although I had not thought of myself as a lesbian, one of them, “Marie,” was relentlessly luring me into that seamy world. Neither was I a murderer, but they had been enticing me to kill not just myself but to take other people with me. Moreover, every time I had pushed them out of my life they not only eventually returned but brought other friends with them. It was disturbingly like Jesus’ parable of the demon that left a person, only to later return with seven other demons more wicked that itself (Luke 11:24-26). They were definitely growing stronger and stronger, and seeking to make me increasingly depraved. What if they eventually succeeded in turning me into a pedophile? Could I end up like my abuser? I recoiled in terror at the thought. But demons ? In me ? Could any theory be more outlandish? I was still getting to know Helen but I knew she loved me. I studied Grantley’s photo. He seemed to look sane, despite him believing in demons. Confused, I asked God for help. His reply was, “Can you give up these imaginary friends? Can you choose God over them?” I thought about it and to my dismay I discovered that, despite my yearning for God, I felt unable to give up my imaginary friends for him. I admitted to Grantley that I was in trouble and he encouraged me to put God first. Steeling myself, I told the imaginary friends to leave, but they just mocked me, saying I couldn’t really mean it. When they finally saw that I was serious, these “friends” got angry. They threatened to give me cancer and financially ruin me. I was terrified. They reminded me that I was a reject and that no one but them could ever love me. I told them God loved me. They angrily replied that they hated God. “Why?” I asked. “Michael” took me in his arms and kissed me. “Dear lover,” he said, “God rejected you. He doesn’t deserve your love. Have I ever left you?” Deep inside I knew these God-haters must be demons. Fear gripped me. Helen prayed with me to be delivered, and they backed away. Before long, I tried to interact with my imaginary friends as usual but this time, to my amazed concern, they would not come. If they were just imaginary, why could I no longer “imagine” them? Clearly they could not be products of my imagination. They must be demons! I panicked. “What have I done?” I wondered in horror, “How could I have been so deceived?” I was afraid. And I knew they would be back. When they returned, I rebuked them. Some left. The two main ones remained, along with some minor ones, but I felt the minor ones would leave if the main ones left. What I was facing was as traumatic as a divorce. I was facing losing my cherished friends, on whom I had been emotionally dependent for years, in order to trust a God I had thought had rejected me. Fearful of trying to survive without their comfort, I found myself on a wild emotional roller coaster; one moment – usually after phoning Grantley – sure I was doing the right thing by resisting them, and the next moment plummeting into fear and doubt, and again needing reassurance that it was worth what felt like the greatest of sacrifices. In the light of my experience, it seems to me an act of cruelty to leave anyone newly delivered from demons to cope alone with all the emotional consequences and spiritual battles. I suspect it would be most unusual for anyone to keep resisting letting the demons back in, without continual support from an understanding Christian for a minimum of three or more weeks. Thankfully, Grantley and Helen remained by my side to help me through this gut-wrenching time. I knew I could never be good enough in myself to be friends with the holy Lord. Grantley encouraged me, however, to dare to believe that the holy Son of God had swapped places with me on the cross, dying for my imperfections and in turn granting me his perfection. If that is really what Jesus achieved, then I could truly be a friend of God. So finally, in a leap of faith, I made up my mind to believe that, through Christ, God is really my friend. No matter what the cost of leaving my imaginary friends, I wanted God back in my life. “Marie” put up an ugly fight – even using me to e-mail Grantley in her name an embarrassing, sexually explicit message. I managed to omit some things from the e-mail but I felt powerless to completely stop her. Despite it all, however, Grantley refused to give up on me. Angry at what she had done, I told “Marie” to leave. She left in a rage, along with a couple of the minor demons. “Michael,” the main demon, and a couple of hangers-on remained. Deciding to play on my emotions, “Michael” appeared to me. His heart was as ugly as vomit and in reality he probably had a body more hideous than a tapeworm, but of course that’s not how that slimy lowlife chose to manifest himself. He chose for himself a beautiful man’s body, and claimed to love me. How could I resist someone so exquisite who knew me and said he loved me? No matter how perverse and grotesque he was behind his stunningly beautiful mask, he was powerfully seductive. That devouring wolf in sensuous clothing began to fondle me, arousing me. I resisted, but weakly. I contacted Grantley. He reminded me that this demon had threatened me with cancer and financial ruin. What sort of love was that? The demon, he said, had shown his true colors with his evil threats of cancer and financial ruin. He was neither harmless nor a friend. Alarmed, “Michael” apologized for his threats, saying he had only uttered them in anger and hadn’t really meant it. His protests that he would never hurt me rang hollow. Grantley reminded me of Scripture speaking of those who return to their former ways as being like a dog returning to its vomit and they end up more depraved than ever (2 Peter 2:21-22). I certainly didn’t want that. Nevertheless, I remained enticed by the demon’s beauty and adoring words. I told Grantley I needed these friends. I begged God to understand that I was a reject and needed them. God, however, refused to see me as a reject. “Michael” kept returning and I kept resisting, though half-heartedly. At one point he tried to trigger within me feelings of helplessness by using the very words my childhood abuser had repeatedly used to fill me with fear and guilt and had convinced me when I was little that resistance was useless. Grantley pointed out that it was no coincidence that the demon was acting just like that abuser. He said this demon could well have been the very spiritual power that had driven that heartless child molester to afflict me sexually and emotionally. Though it took enormous effort, I kept refusing to surrender to “Michael’s” seduction. But he kept returning. Although I had so far refused him, I was hesitant about losing him forever. Part of me wanted to keep my options open, just in case my relationship with God did not work out, or life without my imaginary friends proved unbearable. Encouraged by me wanting to keep him as an if-all-else fails last resort, “Michael” gleefully persisted with his visits; arrogantly acting convinced that he would eventually wear me down. My torturous battle to keep resisting seemed never-ending. I asked God for help. He led me to a webpage of Grantley’s about renouncing the pleasures of sin. As I read it, a light switched on, illuminating my soul. I had been addicted to the pleasures these evil “friends” brought me. I had been hoodwinked into not seeing that the “pleasure” they offered was dangerous, isolating and cruel. “Michael” appeared again. That despicable parasite seemed tall and handsome with beautiful skin and a perfect body. He removed his shirt and smiled. “No!” I said, but not very strongly. He knew what makes me happy. He moved closer. Part of me wanted to resist but his words were sweet, seductive, familiar and soft – honey flavored cyanide. He tried to kiss me. “No!” I said. He stopped, and smiled. I reached for the phone to call Grantley. “Michael” laughed gently. “You’ll wake him,” he said. “That isn’t necessary. We don’t have to tell. A little lie won’t hurt.” But I had promised Grantley I would keep nothing from him. “I am not lying to Grantley!” I told “Michael.” “He will know, and God will know.” “I’m no demonic,” he gently mocked. “It’s just your natural passions. God understands.” I resisted and called on Jesus, but as I did, “Michael,” using all his seduction skill, began fondling me. “He won’t stop,” I told myself, “and I can’t stop him.” Fear swept through me. “I couldn’t stop being molested as a child and I can’t stop this.” Then I remembered Grantley saying that because of Christ the demons had no power over me. Their apparent power to control me was just an illusion. “This is silly!” I told myself, “I can stop an illusion.” “Michael” reached out to grope me. I was tempted but I resisted. He tried again, but another word came to me that Grantley had used about sexual pleasure outside of marriage: “promiscuity.” I grew so angry with Grantley, with me, with God, and with “Michael.” I wanted to yield. I wanted that pleasure, but not being clean, and not being free, was a high price to pay for a little pleasure – a little deadly pleasure. “Michael” backed away as God’s presence came to me. “You must be faithful to me,” said the Lord, “You can’t have two lovers. Are you going to be promiscuous?” I hated that word. I didn’t want to be promiscuous, but I did want sexual pleasure. “Michael” was soft and sensual. “Just a little . . .” I told myself, but I know I wouldn’t stop with just a little. A war raged within me. God was telling me to stay faithful, and “Michael” was doing his utmost to seduce. I craved the poisonous pleasure he offered. I wanted God to just look the other way. I remembered Grantley reminding me about the Jews wandering forty years in the wilderness because they missed God’s window of opportunity. Grantley was right. But no matter how much a depraved deceiver “Michael” was, his hands were warm and seductive. Reluctantly, I rebuked “Michael.” I was certainly no superstar. My rebuke was in sheer obedience to God; not what my heart longed for. I really wanted to sin. “Reject me and you’ll never again have sex,” said “Michael” in anger, “No one will want you. Grantley is a fool and dreamer to say you can do better than me.” I quickly left the room and e-mailed Grantley, telling him everything. If I have one strong point it is that I am faithful to my friends and I was determined to be faithful to God. In my e-mail I said: It hurt me to say no to the pleasure I craved. But it isn’t about getting what I want. It isn’t about sex. It isn’t about me. It is about putting Jesus first and submitting to his will, even if it is painful, frustrating and denies me what I want. It is about trusting God and letting him be God. I have made a commitment. I want God. If, by doing things in private with my “imaginary friend,” I am acting promiscuous, how can I be free in Jesus? I don’t want to be promiscuous with God’s love. I again pondered Grantley’s webpage about renouncing sin’s pleasure. No matter how friendly those demons had pretended to be, they were deadly. They had earlier made me suicidal, while pretending to offer comfort, and had almost driven me to suicide. I had been lied to and robbed of so much. No “pleasure” was worth this. It was so much better never to have the pleasure they offer than let them rob me of my dignity and my walk with God. As I realized what evil impostors they were, my anger grew and when “Michael” again appeared I commanded him in Jesus’ name to leave. This was powerfully effective because I was no longer inwardly implying, “not this time.” I meant I never wanted him again, no matter how much pleasure he offered. My mind was made up and he knew it. I was free. Shortly afterward, craving the sexual pleasure I had always given myself and had shared with these demons, I phoned Grantley. I desperately tried to convince him that it was alright for me to continue my former habit of masturbation, but without involving the demons. Grantley was kind, but immovable. Finally, I agreed that he was right, even though at the time giving up masturbation felt like a devastating loss. My life turned around. I soon found I didn’t need those lying “friends.” I reveled in the knowledge that God had forgiven me and cleansed me. He loved me and comforted me. I could talk to my Lord and love him. I had answers to tormenting questions. With the demons gone and my determination to cling to God’s truth, they could no longer get away with whispering their disturbingly convincing lies that I was a reject and dependent on them. I didn’t get cancer. In fact, the Lord soon gave me the courage to see a doctor about a lump that for five years I had been too terrified to have examined. The lump was medically proven to be harmless. And not only did I not see financial ruin, my finances were quickly rescued by a dear friend. I am empowered financially, emotionally and spiritually. For most of my life I had been pressured to see myself as a lesbian, when I was simply apprehensive about men, and mistakenly felt rejected by them all. To my surprise, I soon discovered that I am more feminine and lovable than I had dared dream. Even the thought of marriage and marital relations have begun to seem not only no longer terrifying but warmly inviting. Despite the cruel deception, I’ve found to my delight that I’m strongly heterosexual. I have my dignity back. I’m not dependent on demons for company. I have the God of all creation as my dearest friend. For the first time in my life, I actually feel free and lovable and understood. My imaginary friends took on the form of people I had met. Other people have shared experiences with me that indicate their demons took the form of people who have died, or fictional characters from books or movies. Regardless of the form they hide behind, however, they are creeps who exploit and accentuate our weaknesses and prey on raw emotion. They delight in breeding within their victims such self-destructive passions as anger, bitterness lust, fear, and pain, because these are the very things they feed on. I’d felt sure that if I got rid of those demons, I’d be doomed to a lifetime of loneliness and sexual frustration. Soon after ruthlessly burning my bridges by sending the demons packing, however, I found more love and companionship than I had ever known. In fact, in lightning speed a very special Christian man fell in love with me; irreparably shattering my long-held belief that I am unlovable. We expect to marry. I cannot guarantee that this will happen to everyone who gives up demons! Nevertheless, those demons were like drugs that make a person become withdrawn and then the drugs become insidiously addictive because they seem the only way to dull the pain of isolation those very drugs cause. What had seemed to ease the loneliness was actually perpetuating it. Moreover, the greatest source of love in the universe is companionship with God himself, and I can certainly guarantee that to everyone who gives up demons through the power of Christ. Not long after being freed from the demons, I became deeply upset over something. It turned out to be minor, but at the time it seemed huge. In that vulnerable moment of distress, and longing for comfort, “Michael” returned, promising comfort that he claimed he alone could offer. Terrified, I ran to my room and hid under a blanket. Sobbing, I prayed, “Please, God, don’t let go me go back to those demons.” The Lord comforted me and told me to rebuke the demon. I was scared but I stood up. I wiped my eyes, put on my bravest face, and shouted, “In Jesus’ name, leave me alone!” To my surprised delight, “Michael,” who had been the head demon, ran away. Yes! He ran from me. The Lord was pleased and I was thrilled. A couple of weeks later, after a terrifyingly real and distressing flashback of childhood abuse, “Marie” appeared to me, hoping to seduce me. I didn’t even find her tempting. I rebuked her in Jesus’ name and she left. With “Michael” gone, however, I had a nagging fear about the possible return of the terrifying dark spirit that “Michael,” used to protect me from. My apprehension continued nightly, despite the spirit never returning. One day, when praying about this, I suddenly realized that although “Michael,” my “protector” had been so powerful that he would command the dark spirit to leave, God had empowered me to command “Michael” to leave. Power over demons belongs to every Christian but the Lord had graciously allowed me to prove this glorious truth for myself. “Michael” had indeed left at my command. If “Michael” was stronger than that scary spirit, and through Christ I could send “Michael” packing, imagine what I could do to that lesser spirit! What an exhilarating revelation! My attitude now is that it would make my day for that scary spirit to return and try to intimidate me. Through Jesus I’d send him fleeing. I’m not the slightest surprised that occasionally the demons return to test me. I recall Jesus’ parable of the demon forced out of someone he had lived in. After a while the demon returned to check out his previous residence in the hope of once again setting up home (Luke 11:24-26). This suggests that after being forcibly evicted from anyone, evil spirits are likely to occasionally check back with their former host to see if they are still barred from entry. We can expect them to employ attempted seduction or intimidation to test our defenses. As with any attack or temptation, attempted re-entries are unpleasant. Just as it is normal for good Christians to be tempted, however, demonic attacks are normal. We Christians wrestle against spiritual entities (Ephesians 6:12), stated Paul, in a matter of fact way. It is only if a person surrenders to the attacks that there is a need for repentance. They will be unable to gain entry while we remain vigilant. If we keep resisting, the demons will slink away, in the hope of finding easier targets elsewhere. So dramatic is my transformation that, just a few weeks after being delivered, I can barely comprehend I was once the person I’ve described. I look back appalled at how deluded I was and in what spiritual and physical danger I had been. This compels me to forgive my childhood abuser and to yearn for his salvation. How could I do otherwise, knowing that my own delusion and torment must be similar to his own, and that his suffering has lasted much longer than mine? I’ve heard that he is ill and has turned very savage in prison. I make no excuses for myself. To try to justify myself would be to denigrate the fact that Jesus died so that all of us could be justified. Nevertheless, it is a fact that I, like many abuse survivors, had been cruelly and very literally brainwashed into seeing myself as unacceptable to a holy God and to shrink from him in shame. Such was my longing for God that, in addition to regular personal devotions, over the years I had attained far above average formal Bible training and theological education. This training, however, was unable to undo the devastating effect of my previous brainwashing. Right up until recently I would regularly have nightmares that would end with me shouting in my sleep over and over, “I am bad, I am bad, I am bad” – the very words that child molester had forced me to use from the most impressionable and tender age of four. Certainly, the demons greatly contributed to my delusion and confusion. Nevertheless, I had opened the door by letting my strong guilt feelings block out my awareness of the unlimited forgiving power of Christ’s sacrifice. I had added to this by rejecting God’s loving attempts to heal the pain and shame I felt due to my abuse. Preferring to live in denial, I had pushed the God of truth away and then fooled myself into thinking it was God, not me driven by fear and guilt, who had done the rejecting. At one point I even mistakenly expected God to be like my abuser. From my abuser’s actions I had wrongly concluded that love equals sexual exploitation and that if God loved me he would force himself on me and want a sexual relationship. So, although I recoiled at the thought, I expected God to want to “prove” his love for me sexually and I mistakenly interpreted his refusal to do so as rejection. Now that I have learned to trust God’s love and invite him into the darkest corners of my life and memories, I keep experiencing healing after healing. For example, as is common among abuse survivors, I often used to masturbate while fantasizing about things so terrifying and disgusting that I actually vomited in revulsion when Grantley coaxed me to talk about it. Despite my mind telling me that God is already aware of everything, I didn’t want even God to know about these fantasies. Upon admitting them to God, shame lifted, like the sun evaporating a fog, and I enjoyed God’s warm acceptance on an even deeper level than I had ever known. How much comfort and healing I had missed because I mistakenly thought that God could not be trusted to love and forgive someone like me! I’m determined to make up for lost time by plunging fully into God, no matter how scary it might sometimes seem, and God keeps proving himself worthy of this trust and rewards me over and over with beautiful healings and affirmations. I have peace like never before. My nightmares, sleepwalking and panic attacks have gone. God is real. His love is genuine. He always wants to do me good – me who had been certain I was hopeless, and too perverse to ever be accepted by God. He never puts me down. He never wants me to think of myself as bad or unlovable or a reject. Instead, he calls me his trusted daughter; his pure and holy princess. He continually liberates me and empowers me. In him I have a true friend. Besides all this, I am now enjoying the indescribable fulfillment of seeing other people set free, as God empowers me to love and support dear people e-mailing me who have been tricked by demons. I know from bitter experience that there is no one so vulnerable to demonic deception as someone who does not believe demons could deceive him/her. As is typical, demons occasionally test Christine in the hope that she might have reverted to someone they could again bluff and bully. But she remains strong and their attempts have grown less and less. For Christians who understand, demons are no more a concern than the occasional pesky fly. We all encounter them from time to time. They come in the form of temptation, accusations, and so on. Not even the weakest Christian need fear the strongest demon. It’s as if all Christians have guns loaded with live ammunition and demons are weaklings with nothing more than blanks in their weapons. If a Christian imagined his/her gun is unloaded and that the demons’ guns are loaded, the Christian might cower, not use his/her weapon, and let demons order him/her around, but doing so would be as ridiculously needless as being scared of a butterfly. Essential Reading Our Authority Over Demons Spiritual Warfare: Turning Spiritual Attack into Victory Further Help When Harassed by Demons: The Secret to Casting Out Demons Letting Christ be our First Love: You Can Find Love The webpage you have been reading belongs to a series of free webpages devoted to the full recovery of survivors (male and female) of all forms of sexual interference. See Comfort, Understanding and Healing for Abuse Survivors for an overview and links to the other critically important pages.

Sex Demons?   Lucid Sex Dreams?   Suppressed Memories?   Christian Help Your Sexual Dreams: Normal, Demonic or Highly Revealing? This is a sober, first-hand account of a woman’s journey of discovery about the unexpected cause of her sexual dreams. Although it would be rash to suggest her experience definitely applies to you, what makes her astonishing discoveries worthy of serious consideration is that I have encountered other people whose experiences with lucid erotic dreams and/or fantasies have been almost identical. Some of the information is disturbing but it ends happily, just as it can for you. Grantley Morris For as long as I could remember I had a ‘friend’ who showed up in my dreams. He was a tall, blonde, blue eyed, muscular man. I enjoyed those dreams because they were full of sex. I would wake up on the cusp of an orgasm and the slightest move would push me over. Eventually, I learned to control these dreams. I discovered I could make this man look like anything I wanted – even a woman or a dog. All I had to do was ask. Then it hit me: if things changed because I asked him it meant I could talk to him and he would respond. I experimented and soon learned that he and I could talk about anything in my dreams. My life was full of abuse and he was the only one that would listen to me. One day, he appeared outside of a dream in the real world. He took my hand and showed me how to masturbate. He enjoyed watching me and I didn’t mind giving him the show. The only cloud was that it was a sin. I was so desperately lonely and felt so worthless, however, that I pushed that concern aside and continued with my ‘friend’. The more time I spent with him, the closer I got to real trouble. I stumbled onto porn at my uncle’s house and my ‘friend’ encouraged me to watch more of it. My window faced the road and he encouraged me to give our neighbors a show. They hooted and hollered. He encouraged me to stare in fascination at children’s genitals. I’d drive around naked and wave at people. Masturbating at work and with other people’s things became another way to get a high. At age 26 I was a nanny for three different families. One of them caught me masturbating while their daughter napped. I was immediately fired and that family told my other two families and they fired me as well. That shocked me enough to realize the depths of my sin and sent me on a search to deepen my relationship with God. I drew near to God and, knowing that my sexual activity did not please God, I made every effort to break my sex addiction. I threw myself headlong into a Christ-based 12 step recovery program but, try as I may, to my crushing disappointment and frustration, I kept falling. I almost drowned in guilt and shame. My ‘dream friends’ kept giving me dreams that left me with strong sexual cravings. Then, throughout the day, my ‘friends’ appeared to me and attempted to seduce me. I cried out to God but I continued to fall. I tried looking in my past to find anything that would account for this. I thought that if I could find some source of pain I could bring it to God and he would heal it. But no matter how hard I tried, nothing came to mind. Despite learning much about receiving God’s forgiveness and forgiving others, I continued to languish in defeat. The guilt was unbearable at times and God’s only response was, “Keep trying and repenting. My grace is sufficient for you here.” I grew to hate those words: I craved not just grace but victory. I had no idea that throughout this ordeal God was working on making me strong enough to cope with what I would eventually learn about myself. Then, eleven years later, I started having nightmares. I didn’t even know the content of the dreams because I couldn’t remember them upon waking but the feelings they caused stuck with me throughout the day. I dreaded going to sleep. I pleaded with Jesus, “Tell me what the dreams are about or take them away. Either way is fine with me. I just want to sleep.” Jesus chose to tell me, but he did so in an unusual manner. One day, I became aware of another presence in my mind. It was a six-year-old girl. Terrified for my sanity, I asked Jesus about it. “She’s a little girl,” he said. Treat her like it.” As I talked to this six-year-old over the next few days I started remembering rapes and being molested. Once again, I feared for my sanity. So I talked to Jesus. “Find a therapist,” he said. The therapist diagnosed me with Dissociative Identity Disorder. Apparently, I had suffered significant trauma as a child and, in order to cope, my personhood had split into different ‘people’. Each one held back certain traumatic events from my conscious memory so that I could function in this world. The notion of having different ‘people’ inside me was so overwhelming that I kept being tempted to think it must be just an overactive imagination. Nevertheless, more and more parts revealed themselves to me and shared the traumatic memories they had kept from me. I learned that as a child I had suffered satanic ritual abuse by the pastor of our church. This same man was also the principal of my school. He enforced a hierarchy, with men at the top, followed by boys, then women and last of all girls. The rules were: 1. Never look your superior in the eye 2. Never speak unless you are spoken to 3. Obey your superiors without question. Being a little girl, I was the lowest of scum. I endured beatings and found myself used as the sex toy of any man or woman or boy. I was called names, spat on, beaten and raped. I felt utterly powerless and without hope. As memories slowly returned I learned that, though still a girl, I was eventually offered the chance to be treated as a woman. In desperation, I accepted this opportunity, thinking it would be a way out of my misery. Then they brought a girl to me. She made eye contact with me, thus breaking one of the rules, since I was now a ‘woman’. My abuser required me to beat the girl for her insolence. Not wanting to do so, I lightly slapped her on the cheek hoping this would appease my abuser. It didn’t. He pressured me mercilessly until I was afraid for my life. I felt utterly trapped. I didn’t want to beat this girl but I didn’t want to die either. It was then that I met my first special ‘friend’. He called himself Jonesy. He came into my body and used it to beat the girl. I felt awful for the little girl but at least I had not been the one to beat her and I was still alive. Jonesy came back any time I needed to beat someone. Eventually we became friends. He told me about how sorry he was that I was going through all of this and that he was glad to be able to help me out. He said he loved me and he’d never want to harm me. I told him how scared I was of my abuser. I found safety in him. Over time, he began making small sexual advances. None of them were forced on me. They were gentle and couched in loving terms. I loved Jonesy and wanted to make everything in his life happy. So I accepted all of his advances. He protected me from the beating I have would received if I had refused to obey my abuser, and in return I had sex with him. I now know Jonesy was not like the other ‘people’ inside me. They were actually parts of me that had split off from my consciousness in a little girl’s desperate attempt to survive abuse. Jonesy, however, was not part of me. He was a foreign being. He was not even human, although he seemed to be. He was a demon. I kept my relationship with Jonesy a secret. I was terrified that someone would take him away from me, leaving me friendless and in danger of losing my life. He was my lifeline and only source of comfort. Later, another demon was intentionally given to me by my abusers. He was much smaller than Jonesy and he called himself Albert. He was different from Jonesy. Albert loved beating other people and in forcing others to service me. Between these two ‘friends’ I had everything I needed to cope with the abuse dealt to me day in and day out. Jonesy satisfied my craving for comfort. Albert kept me alive by doing what I was too afraid to do. For those times when everything felt bad, they gave me the high that sex produces. As I processed my way through these astonishing memories, I stumbled upon who my ‘dream friend’ was. Jonesy fitted my ‘dream friend’ to a tee! I was shocked. I had been having sex with a demon! I asked Jesus what to do. He said one of the parts inside of me was still attached to Jonesy and until that part willingly told the demons to leave, I would continue to suffer at Jonesy’s hands. So the battle began. For days, this part of me debased herself with both Jonesy and Albert right in front of me. They begged me to join in and they kept my body constantly aroused sexually. It was torturous. In time, Jonesy stopped asking and started demanding that this part of me gratify his sexual desires. Then they put this part of me in chains and spewed out baseless and sometimes outlandish threats. All I could do was tell this part to run to Jesus. For this part, however, doing so was not as easy as it might seem. A feature of the satanic abuse I had suffered was that a man had regularly dressed up as Jesus, claimed to be him, and sexually tortured this part of me. Being unable to discern between the real Jesus and the fake, made her terrified of the real Jesus, despite my efforts to explain how vastly different the real Jesus is. She begged for there to be some other way to be freed from demons than having to go to Jesus. But there was none. “I cannot save you without your cooperation,” Jesus told her. “If I did, you would forever question my judgment of Jonesy. You must come to me.” One day, she finally did, and Jesus stepped in to defend her but, to my surprise, he did not send the demons away. I questioned him about this and he replied, “My daughter is under my protection yet her heart cannot be mine until she rejects them and sends them away.” She wrestled with guilt and was afraid that Jesus would reject her because of her past sins and she knew that if he were to reject her, she would have no choice but to return to the demons. Eventually, she realized that holding onto guilt by regarding herself as unforgivable was the same as siding with demons. So, with a gentle steel in her bones, she commanded Jonesy to leave. On that day she broke all ties with Jonesy. Like never before, this breakthrough has empowered me to be victorious over even the strongest sexual temptation. Nothing to Fear In case you have not read it, let me repeat what I have written elsewhere: For true Christians, demons are nothing more than a harmless nuisance. Just as everyone – even the best Christian – is tempted, everyone has dealings with demons. In fact, although we often talk of the devil tempting us, it is almost always his underlings – demons – since the devil does not have God’s unique power of omnipresence (able to be everywhere at once). Not even the weakest Christian need fear the strongest demon. It’s as if all Christians have guns loaded with live ammunition and demons are weaklings with nothing more than blanks in their weapons. If a Christian imagined his/her gun is unloaded and that the demons’ guns are loaded, the Christian might cower, not use his/her weapon, and let demons order him/her around, but doing so would be as ridiculously needless as being scared of a butterfly.

For Dissociative Identity Disorder / Multiple Personality Disorder Although a good counselor can be extremely valuable, a bad one can significantly set you back. You can even choose a superb Christian therapist / counselor and still end up deeply hurt, if due to unforeseen circumstances (sickness or whatever) the therapist / counselor ends up having to leave you in a year or so before you are fully healed. This is quite a possibility because full healing usually takes several years and counselors are typically so compassionate and needed so much that they are often in danger of over-extending themselves and burning out. This is one of several reasons why it is important to try to avoid emotional attachment and/or dependence upon a specific counselor, but despite the best intentions it often happens and if the counselor is forced to leave at a critical time in your healing, it can be quite a blow. So already it is becoming obvious why your choice of counselor should be a matter of much prayer. It is essential that a counselor not believe that alters are demons. (Ideally the counselor should believe in demons and be willing to cast them out but must strongly believe in caution in this regard). It is important that the counselor believe in regularly speaking individually to alters and not just addressing the host. If at all possible, find a counselor who believes in leading each alter to Christ. I am suspicious of any counselor who thinks healing from D.I.D. might only take a few sessions. A counselor should not be overzealous in seeking quick integration of alters so that they are no longer treated as individual alters. It is tempting for all of us to seek a quick fix but a supposed cure could end up merely forcing alters into hiding. It might seem helpful in the short term but it would actually end up very counterproductive. Each alter has individual issues that needs to be addressed and healed, and each has a will that needs to be respected. Counselors need to keep a little aloof. Since the reasons for this are not immediately obvious, I need to provide a fuller explanation than for the other points. It is of critical importance to your healing that every part of you bond with, and become dependent upon, Jesus and each other. Unfortunately, even though it can seem to initially help, getting too close to a counselor, or to anyone else, can detract from this critical bonding or even undermine it. How awful it would be if someone wanted to heal her marriage and took her husband to a counselor and then her husband fell in love with the counselor! To heal a marriage the goal must be for a husband and wife to bond with each other, and certainly not with a counselor. Likewise, for healing of Dissociative Identity Disorder, the goal is for all of a person’s parts to bond with each other, not with a counselor. You obviously need to bond with any children and/or marriage partner that you have, but not even these relationships must be allowed to detract from your relationship with Jesus and with every part of you. Counselors should not let little alters call them Dad or Mum or hug them. It is very tempting to break this rule because, in the short term, it seems loving and effective. The serious problem, however, is that it can create too strong a bond that, in addition to the issue already mentioned, would prove devastating if ever the counselor suffered from burnout, illness, needed to move away, or whatever. Counselors who make the mistake of getting too close usually have a good heart and, even if they have been doing it for years, are too inexperienced to realize the dangers. Not only is it unprofessional to hug counselees, it is often a sign of lacking the training and understanding that professionals have. Do not presume that the counselor’s gender will protect you from inappropriate bonding. Young, love-starved alters can bond exceedingly deeply and very quickly to either gender. Moreover, people with D.I.D. have usually been sexually wounded and often have alters who are unsure of their own gender and/or are attracted to the same gender as their body. You might not be currently aware of any alter within you with such vulnerabilities but you probably have alters you have not yet met. For more about the very real dangers of getting too close to a counselor, see the first section of Help for People with D.I.D. The counselor should be someone you feel comfortable with and preferably has an office and waiting room in which you feel comfortable. Ideally you should not always have to leave the premises immediately after the session but should have the opportunity to de-stress in a private room and to ensure that an alter skilled at driving or finding one’s way home is fully present. There are advantages in having a fully accredited counselor but ideally, the counselor should continually seek God’s guidance rather than trusting his/her experience and training. Sending Alters to God/Heaven? Ask if the therapist/counselor ‘sends alters to God.’ If the answer is yes, he or she needs to be questioned a little more. If alters are ‘sent to God’ as a very temporary measure, it might be okay, but if it is done in an attempt to be permanently rid of some or all alters, this is not good. Sometimes, certain alters benefit from being temporarily isolated from earthly concerns and from the rest of the person, and allowed to fellowship exclusively with their divine Healer. As explained in Why You Desperately Need Every Alter, however, alters are a critically important part of you, and you need them down here with you as soon as practical. Another important consideration is whether alters are ‘sent to God’ in a way that might be misinterpreted either by them, or any alters who might be secretly observing, that some or all alters are not wanted. This would have quite a negative impact. For a more detailed explanation of all of this, see Could ‘Sending Alters to God/Heaven’ Sometimes be Harmful? More about Choosing a Therapist/Counselor Before deciding on a counselor or therapist, I urge you to read thoroughly all the webpages listed at Christian Resources: Index of Help for Dissociative Identity Disorder. This will provide a very solid grounding and give you information that would usually take you months or even years to gain from a counselor, and it is free. Moreover, it will empower you to recognize a misguided counselor, although of course it will take time to get to know the counselor. If you looking for a counselor in the US, The American Association of Christian Counselors and the Christian Care Network website might be a good place to start. Not even this association, however, is prepared to stand by its counselors. To use this service you must agree to the disclaimer and proceed. If, like me, you live outside the US, there might be an equivalent association in your country. You Have Rights and Your Counselor Has Rights You always have the right to say no and object to anything a counselor says or does. Survivors of child abuse are used to being in a situation where objections were ignored or even increased the abuse. They were also usually repeatedly told they were stupid. Being subjected to this is deeply wounding. Until full healing occurs, it will carry over into adulthood and strongly tempt these people to endure behavior from a counselor that should not be endured. Moreover, what is triggering to one person might not be for someone else. So if a counselor says or does anything that makes you feel uncomfortable, let him/her know. A good counselor usually has many people clamoring for his/her help. And a compassionate counselor can easily endanger his/her long-term survival as a counselor by giving you more time than he/she is capable of sustaining. This is particularly the case when it comes to calling your counselor out of hours. It is in your own interest not to burn out your counselor, so please ensure it really is an emergency before you contact him/her out of hours Summary: Questions to Ask a Prospective Counselor I suggest you introduce yourself roughly like this: I’m in the process of choosing a counselor. Would you mind if I asked a few questions to help me decide? Please don’t think these questions impertinent. I’m not necessarily looking for a perfect score; just hoping to weigh up which of the counselors available is best suited to me. * Do you believe in demons? * Do you cast out demons? * Do you believe alters are demons? * How important do you consider it to speak to individual alters rather than primarily just to the host? * Do you consider it important to lead each individual alter to Christ? * How long do you expect it will take to heal from D.I.D.? * Do you believe in letting little alters call you Dad/Mum? * Would you regularly hug little alters? * After counseling sessions, do you provide opportunity to de-stress and ensure that an alter skilled at driving or finding one’s way home is fully present? * What training have you had? * What experience have you had in treating people with D.I.D.? * Is your training and experience enough or do you find yourself regularly needing to pray for discernment? * Are you a full member of a counselor/therapist association? * Does the government recognize you as a fully accredited counselor/therapist? * How frequently could I see you? * In emergencies, how available after hours are you? * Is there any charge? If so, how much? * Add any other questions you consider important. Important Therapist sessions and medical consultations (including dental, physical therapy, scans, blood tests, and so on) are occasions when new alters are more likely than usual to unexpectedly take over. Not having had a problem in the past is no guarantee about your next visit. So even if you find a superb therapist, it is still important to read this short webpage: When your Therapist or Health Professional Does Not Understand Dissociative Identity Disorder. It also explains how you can benefit from a therapist who is not skilled with D.I.D. Related Pages God, Counselors & Inner Healing

Help for Christians Who Wish They Were the Opposite Sex Or Even Want a Sex Change Operation Even if your frustration is not so extreme that you want a sex change operation, this webpage is for you if at times you have envied the opposite sex. And who hasn’t?   Before moving on to more perplexing quandaries, I think it appropriate to first address the development of mild yearnings.   If the two sexes are different, yet equally blessed, and if it is human nature for the grass in the other field to always seem greener, it is inevitable that almost everyone will covet at least one or two advantages perceived as belonging to the opposite sex.   Parents often strongly desire their next child to be a particular gender, and yet with there being only about a fifty percent chance of their wishes coming true, many are doomed to crushing disappointment. Add to this mix the heart-wrenching reality that children have an inbuilt yearning to please their parents. Stir into this fact the that the sexual wounding (sex abuse) of both boys and girls is appallingly common, and that most victims gain the mistaken impression that they could have avoided their devastating ordeal had they been the opposite sex. Add to this that it always seems the other kid gets a bigger slice of the birthday cake, and it is no wonder that both men and women find themselves wishing they were the opposite sex. Often the wish is only half-hearted; sometimes it turns to envy or feeling sorry for oneself; but passions can sometimes grow to the extent of seeking a sex change. And being a devoted Christian does not make one immune to these pressures.   If you are so distraught by your gender as to consider a sex change operation, you have clearly been subjected to something very distressing. Your parents or siblings might have failed to nurture you with the respect and tenderness God wanted, someone might have broken God’s laws and his heart by sexually interfering with you, or perhaps you suffered some medical catastrophe. Regardless of the specific reason, gender frustrations are a consequence of living in a sin-marred world where God’s will is currently  not  done on earth as it is in heaven. The anguish caused by our ancestors and contemporaries acting contrary to divine love and wisdom ways does not mean we are justified in pointing the finger at the God whose laws they broke, but neither does it mean God is coldly indifferent to your plight. On the contrary, he is tenderly compassionate and perhaps even enraged that you suffer this way.   We might rail at God and rage at people and external forces that have shaped us, but, regardless of our past, the most powerful force shaping our future is usually ourselves. So much of who we are today – feelings, likes, dislikes, and so on – has been programmed by years of what psychologists call conditioning, like Pavlov’s dogs trained to salivate at the sound of a bell. We have done far, far more to concrete into our lives our passions, cravings and reactions than most of us dare realize. In the words of the old slice of wisdom, “Sow a thought, and you reap an act; sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character . . .”   We powerfully shape our sexuality according to how we indulge ourselves with porn, fantasies and masturbation. An unfortunate experience (such as being molested as a child by a member of the same sex) might nudge us in a particular direction, but what might have initially had a minor effect on our sexual orientation can turn major if we choose to regularly pair sexual stimulation (such as masturbation) with same-sex fantasy. Similarly, we can be the innocent victims of something that causes us to wish we were the opposite sex, but in the years following, it is we who fuel or extinguish our frustration, according to whether we choose to engage in daydreams, wishful thinking, resentment or envy. Further down, I will share a sample of the wide range of people’s experiences in wishing they were the opposite sex. Most likely, you will be able to identify with some experiences, some will fascinate you and some will be so different to your own that they will puzzle or even annoy you. For the moment, however, I need to lay a foundation so that each of us may value our gender.   When the Almighty Lord reveals his heart concerning one of his most spectacular achievements – creation – we find that he had been delighted with each aspect of his work, declaring over and over “. . .  it was good . . . it was good . . . it was good . . .” until suddenly he declared “It is not good . . .”   Genesis 2:18  The LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”   The good Lord was not saying, it is not good for a man to be single (1 Corinthians 7:1 corrects this common misinterpretation). He was saying it is not good for humanity to consist of just one gender. Creation was perfect only when humanity consisted of both males and females. It is good to be male. It is good to be female.   Here’s a Scripture I find very insightful:   Genesis 1:27  So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.   This famous Scripture not only shows that women, as much as men, are in the image of God. It also says to me that both male and female were required for God’s image to be complete.   God is neither male nor female, but in whatever respect one gender excels, in that respect that gender better reflects the nature of God. For example, the typically greater male physical strength – significantly more important in pre-mechanical eras than now – means that in their ability to offer the security of physical protection, men in biblical times portrayed slightly better that aspect of God. On the other hand, if women tend to be a little less callous than men, in this respect they are that bit more like God. In their ability to nourish and comfort, women typically better portray that side of God’s nature.   Galatians 3:28  There is neither . . . male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.   Biblical revelation clearly indicates that this does not mean there are no physical differences between men and women and that it is acceptable to relate sexually with the same gender, but it does mean that both sexes are of equal value and importance to God and that there is no spiritual difference between the sexes. No gender has the slightest spiritual advantage over the other. Each gender is equally blessed.    There is nothing inferior about being a man, nor about being a woman. The Creator loves and empowers both genders equally and makes no distinction when it comes to dignity, value, importance and so on. Many sexual stereotypes are troublesome strait jackets that are not from God.   In  Real Christians Grieve  I explain that having an iron grip on one’s emotions is not only  not  an intrinsically masculine quality, it is undesirable and not authentically Christian. In a link to that page, I cite in excess of 120 different Scriptures that refer to men crying.   Proverbs 31 reveals the biblical ideal of wife as a highly capable person with a skilled business head. Melody did not exactly want a sex change – just a whole body change. Melody suffered from Body Dysmorphic Disorder, a serious body image problem that drives some people to suicide. I’ve shared her experience elsewhere but I find myself needing to quote a considerable portion of it here because what Melody learned through bitter experience that turned to joy, applies with equal force to gender issues.   She writes:   What I saw when I looked in the mirror was akin to a horrendous Halloween mask. I could literally watch myself “morph” into a hideous creature right before my eyes. How had I reached this point?   When I was little, my mother had never told me I was pretty, but instead allowed my siblings to make fun of me and cruelly tease me about my looks, as kids can be prone to do. I was a very sensitive child, and I would cry in my heart. More dangerous than the teasing, however, is that I believed every word they said.   As I grew older, I felt still more ugly. It even made me cry on my wedding day. I learned to smile for the world, so that no one would know how I really felt about myself. I never shared my “secret” (that I hated everything about me) with anyone. Not even my husband knew, until well into our marriage.   If anyone complimented me, I instantly disbelieved it and never let it live for even a moment. I felt they either pitied me for how I looked, or were outright liars, or had really poor taste!   I blamed everything on my looks. If someone didn’t like me, it was because they thought I was ugly. If someone got a promotion over me, it was because of how ugly I was. And so on.   Circumstances came to a head in my early thirties. I became more depressed than ever before. Thoughts came saying I was too ugly to deserve to live. The more I opened my heart to these thoughts, the stronger they became. The more I believed them, the more they “fed” me their lies. They became almost like friends, because they understood my life-long battle with my outward appearance.   My self-hatred grew.   It was often agony for me to be out in public, not only because of my deep depression, but because I thought I looked so hideous that I would scare people if they had to look at me. For my husband’s sake I would force myself to go out with him once a week, but despite my best intentions, we sometimes had to turn around and go back home because it was just too much for me.   I had known Jesus from the age of four. I knew he loved me – even in my (imagined) ugliness. But deep down, I harbored anger at God for making me so ugly, when with all his power he could have made me pretty.   I loved every verse in the Bible, except Romans 9:20, “ . . . Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’ “ Those words were exactly what I would rail against God. I said he made a mistake, and didn’t know what he was doing. I told him that he loved those that are pretty more than he loved me.   He didn’t answer me a word, for he is always right, and deep down I knew it. Nevertheless, I stubbornly held on to my pain and anger. Until one day . . .   In the pain of another deep depression, I stopped sidestepping that scripture and fully surrendered to the Lord. I no longer wanted to believe I had found a part of the Bible that was somehow incorrect. I was finally at a point where I would rather accept the way I looked, than carry anger toward the Lord anymore.   I still felt horrendously disfigured, non-human, ugly, monstrous. Nevertheless, I was at last willing to tell the Lord that if this is the way he made me, then I know he is all-wise, and that he does not make any mistakes, and he always chooses what is ultimately best for those who love him.   To my delight, once I gave it all to the Lord, my inner healing began. Almost immediately, he gave me the grace to love myself and accept myself, for the very first time that I could remember. In those early days after my surrender, it was God who was fighting for me, but he began teaching me how to fight for myself. After about two weeks, I was able to join the Lord in defending myself. I had never fought for myself before, only against myself. I could never fully stand before because I had been at war with myself. Now I was whole! Now, instead of seeing myself or my body as my enemy, I could unite with myself and with the Lord to fight those things that were attacking me.   I found that I could begin to look in a mirror and not cry or be disgusted. That was the first step. The enemy had lost this battle but he didn’t want to give up easily.   The Lord taught me that I had the power to stop following negative trains of thought. Just because they entered into my mind, I did not have to “join in” with their negative, demoralizing, self-critical messages. He revealed that I had the choice to not let minor things become major issues for me. We all have the choice to let minor things just waft over us, instead of letting them upset us. I do not have to act like a victim. I have the power to choose. It is up to me whether I major on a “bad hair day” or whether I refuse not to so focus on the minor as to let my mind turn it into something big.   But beyond stopping destructive thought patterns, we need to replace them with positive, truthful, self-validating and honoring messages.   The Lord showed me that unrealistic expectations of perfection would always end in sorrow. He said that to break free from misery I must be willing to let go of my infatuation with perfection. Nothing this side of heaven is perfect. In fact, he revealed that there is beauty in imperfection. Much in nature – clouds, cliffs, streams and so on – are beautiful precisely because of their imperfection and uniqueness. I needed to embrace that concept and apply it to myself.   Because I often felt as if just being me – wasn’t “enough,” I began to tell myself, “I am enough, just the way I am. God loves and accepts me just the way I am, so I will do likewise.”   The Lord sometimes dropped whole sentences into my heart, such as, “I am more than how I look.” As commonplace as that may sound, I had never in my life thought like this. Previously, I would have dismissed such thoughts – and had I done so now, I could have lost my healing – but now I was keen to grab such thoughts like a starving child grasping for crumbs. I chose to believe positive thoughts and savor them, repeating them over and over to myself.   As I continued to heal, I also found that the Lord would bring back kind words/compliments from others from my past. I used to immediately dismiss such things, but now it was like I was hearing them for the first time and was able to allow them into my heart and it also helped to heal that wound within me.   Slowly, as I walked in faith and in the victory that I had won, I began to see myself through different eyes. I began to tell myself that most of all I wanted to be beautiful in the Lord’s eyes. 1 Samuel 16:7 says that God looks not on our outward appearance, but on our hearts.   I purposed in my heart not to base my opinion of myself on what people may say or think (whether good or bad), but on those things that really matter in this life. It will not end up mattering at all what we looked like physically during our stay on earth, but it matters what we have allowed God to do in our hearts. I want to set my mind on things above, not be disappointed for all eternity by letting myself be sidetracked by earthly things (Colossians 3:2).   The Lord has brought me to a place where my greatest desire is that if anyone sees beauty in me, it is because of the beauty of the Lord within. Isaiah 53:2 says that Jesus did not have physical beauty that we should be attracted to him, but his attraction is the beauty of the Lord upon him and his godly nature.   Repeatedly, the Bible says that we are to love others as we love ourselves. I had always thought it would be prideful to love myself – and was taught that in church – but the Lord showed me that while we are not to love ourselves in a selfish or prideful way, we are allowed, and even commanded, to love ourselves. To not love as God loves is to put ourselves at odds with God. We cannot claim to be godly unless we love others (ourselves included) as God loves.   That means we must love every part of ourselves, and not reject parts we deem not acceptable. We must want and strive for the best for ourselves; to embrace and accept ourselves, even our imperfections. We should cooperate with Christ in changing those character traits that need to be changed and accept the rest of us. When we can have mercy toward ourselves, it is easy to extend it toward others, and when we can love ourselves, it is easier to love others as God loves and sees them.   Ephesians 6:11-16 – about putting on the armor of God – has taught me much, not only about thoughts affecting my attitude toward my body, but for life in general. God has shown me that I need to hold every thought captive to the obedience of Christ and to make sure it is the Truth and/or in the spirit of Truth (2 Corinthians 10:5).   Holy Spirit has helped me totally reverse how I view life, and myself and other people. He continues to alert me to wrong thought patterns, causing me to challenge their validity. If a thought is erroneous in nature, or not edifying, he shows me the better way to think. A good scripture for this is Philippians 4:8, where we are challenged to think on things that build us up – things that are true, pure, praiseworthy, and so on.   The Lord has been speaking to me lately about covetousness and being content with what I have, down to the tiniest of things. He is leading me to a more pure way of thinking; inspiring me to dwell in thankfulness for where the Lord has placed me, in all areas of my life. To do anything else borders on covetousness and ungratefulness to the Lord, as he always chooses what is ultimately best for me at any given time.   Philippians 4:11,12  I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want . (Emphasis mine)   So, needless to say, I repented and determined by his grace, not to compare myself to anyone – as he had already showed me the dangers of doing this.   2 Corinthians 10:12   . . . When they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves, they are not wise. Through Christ, I have maintained my healing for over two years, now. I have resolved to always be vigilant to not allow the lies and distortions of truth by the enemy to take over my mind and heart anymore. The wounded part of me that allowed the growth of a negative attitude toward my body needs to continue to heal, and the last thing I need is to sabotage the healing by re-infecting the wound with contaminated thoughts.   My Story – Grantley Morris   In my case, a significant part of wishing I were the opposite gender is that I am strongly heterosexual and so very drawn to women but have felt cut off from their acceptance and companionship.   For much of my life, I have seen women as warmer, and men as more aloof, less articulate, more disconnected from their emotions and pressured by society to be less real. Consequently, my observations lead me to conclude that men are more likely to be loners and hence more lonely and isolated – something that I have seen as my sad lot in life. I can even point to examples in the animal world where the females form groups but the males are loners who interact only to mate or fight other males.   Having been plagued with loneliness most of my life, a survey that rings heart-wrenchingly true for me is one in which married people were asked to nominate their best friend. Women typically named another woman. Men usually either named their wife or said they did not have a best friend. That’s not good news for a man who is single decade after decade.   Even if you were so desperately lonely for companionship that you were willing to sacrifice all romance, complications arise the moment you seek mere friendship with a member of the opposite sex. They usually fear that the possibility of romance is lurking somewhere and people demand much higher standards of a potential romantic partner than from a casual friend.   “Doomed from Birth” – Helen Hall   My life started to go wrong from the very second I was born – and pronounced a girl. That meant I was a total failure. I would never be able to please my parents because they had wanted a boy. The most fundamental part of me was wrong and unchangeable.   I was supposed to be a boy, someone who could do “boy” things with my father, like going fishing. Not only that, I was supposed grow up and father sons – naturally I’d be expected to have sons – to carry on the family name.   Some fathers go out of their way to make their little girls feel special. I would have settled for feeling wanted! I never knew what it was to have my father pick me up, play with me, cuddle me, take me places, read me a story.   When I was ten my father divorced my mother for a woman who could give him sons.   Whenever my mother told me about the difficult, twenty-four hour labor she went through to have me, I was always left with the impression that what she was really saying was, “I went through all that for you, and you weren’t worth it because you weren’t the son we wanted!”   I remember her “words of wisdom”. “You’ll never be any good with your hands.” “You’ll never be a lawyer – you’re too gullible. “ “You’ll never make it as a veterinarian – you’re too soft-hearted.” “You’re so plain no man will ever want to marry you.” But the thing she harped on most – and kept repeating even into her eighties – was, “If you had been a boy, my marriage wouldn’t have broken up.”   Obviously, being a girl is a bad thing. Girls aren’t worth taking notice of. Girls are a non-event.   When I was a child, the term “self-esteem” wasn’t the flavor of the month. It wouldn’t have mattered if it had been. I didn’t have any anyway.   Surely there are few experiences more painful than rejection – especially to a child!   Although biologically a female and dressed in female clothes, by the way I was brought up I may as well have been neuter in gender. I wasn’t taught how to look after my skin, take pride in my appearance or how to be feminine in my behavior. And I was certainly not taught to value myself as a girl/woman. I was not encouraged to play with dolls, or play dressing up or house, like other girls of my era. So I grew up without any domestic skills.   When I was sixteen, I had to go to a city seven hours away by train for a medical examination. As my father lived in that same city, I wrote to him, asking if I could stay with him. Instead, he booked me into the YWCA and told me that if I wished to see him, I would have to make an appointment with his secretary to see him in his office. How that hurt!   But a greater hurt was to come. I swallowed my pride and made that appointment. As soon as I walked through the door of the office I saw my five year old adopted half-brother, sitting on my father’s knee – a privilege I had never had!   Years later, when I was grown up, I wrote to my father, saying I would like to get to know him better. His reply? “I don’t want to be any closer to you than I am now.”   The only people in my life who valued the fact that I was female were men who took a sexual interest in me. And being very lonely I responded to their advances. Since I was fully aware that any sexual contact I permitted was a sin I grew to loathe my body as it continually got me into trouble with God.   I gained the impression throughout my upbringing that my brain was the only worthwhile asset I had. I remember horrifying a counselor when I told her I would be quite happy with myself if I just consisted of my head on a skateboard. That way my body wouldn’t be there to get me into trouble!   It was many years before I was willing to describe myself as a woman. I preferred the non-gender-specific ‘person’. Even bearing children didn’t make me feel feminine.   I have not wanted to be a man, but I find it hard to have close friendships with women, since I am not interested in the typical women’s subjects.   I accept the fact that God chose me to be a woman, but I can’t say I enjoy it. Narcissistic Mother   A dear friend of mine had a mother (the most influential woman in his life) who cruelly mistreated him, acting as though she had all power. That left him with the impression throughout his most formative years that maybe if he were like her – a woman – he would at last have the dignity he deserves. But dignity and power come not from a gender change. Instead, they come from being freed from the mindset of inferiority and hopelessness this manipulative woman had instilled in him. In Christ, he already had dignity and power and was deeply loved. He simply needed to realize this. Absorbing the truths of  How to Change Your Self-Image  and the links at the end of that webpage was a significant part of the transformation he needed.   Cold or Harsh Father   It is very possible to end up hating your own gender because during your formative years life-impacting members of that gender treated you shamefully or starved you of the unconditional love you craved and deserved. Both fear and hate typically spread beyond a rational reason for the emotion. For example, someone terrified as a child by a venomous snake could end up feeling apprehensive not only about harmless snakes but about eels and even large worms. Such involuntary reactions will not disappear merely by telling oneself that it is irrational. Overcoming such feelings is quite a process but it is worth the effort, whereas radical surgery would still leave unhealed the wounds inflicted by previous mistreatment.   “Part of Me Believed I Was the Opposite Sex”   Almost from birth, Jake suffered such severe physical and sexual abuse that his mind shattered into what is sometimes called “multiple personalities.” This is not nearly as weird as you might first think. It is a desperate coping mechanism, seized primarily by unusually intelligent and/or creative children, who have been forced into mentally intolerable situation. This fracture can then continue through adulthood, with the person being quite sane but suffering considerable inner pain until healing is found.   Some of Jake’s “personalities” (I, along with many others, prefer to call them “parts” or “alters”) knew they were male, but a few were convinced they were female. This is partly because some parts of him felt he would have been safer as a girl – less likely to have suffered such severe abuse – but another factor was the specific nature of the abuse he suffered. Often he was derogatorily called a girl while being raped. Additionally, at least once, he was terrifyingly certain that his father was about to chop off his genitals and at least one fractured part of him emerged from the ordeal believing that the chop had actually occurred and that he was emasculated.   Yet another, possibly younger part wrote:   I scared of Daddy. He hates me. He makes me bleed. I don’t want to be a boy. I a girl sometimes because he nice to Lucy and never hurts her. He said she his princess. He likes Carol, too, but I too bad. . . . I want to stab me there. Then no one hurt us. I want chop off my pee pee then daddy like us.   To have suffered such abuse is tragic. To go ahead and have yourself chopped up by a surgeon in a sex change operation would be even more tragic. Abusers don’t deserve such recognition. Fight back, not by wounding your body but by healing your inner wounds.   Of the several different possible reasons for people feeling strongly that they are not the same sex as their body, one reason you should thoroughly check is what Jake suffered from: Dissociative Identity Disorder (popularly known as “multiple personalities”). Tragically, many people stagger through life unhealed because they fail to recognize this cause. It turns out to be something much deeper than sexual identity. For help with this, please read  Healing the Inner Child  and keep following the main link at the end of each page.   The Bottom Line   You are right to want fulfillment. Your peace, happiness and fulfillment is vitally important not just to you but to your Maker. We all need to be extremely cautious about doing something irreversible, however, because it is tragically easy to become locked in to expecting our yearnings to be met by something that ends up failing to deliver. Supposing a sex change to be the answer can be like the many people who become utterly convinced that if only they had more money they could be happy, when the truth is that many with less money are happier than them, and many with much more money are miserable.   Look beyond the obvious and the superficial: seek God for profound answers.   Related Pages   Gender Confusion & Multiple Personalities: Help for Opposite Sex Alters (Insiders) “I Thought I Was the Opposite Sex!”   One of Jake’s personalities shares his story Cure for Self-hate To God, You Are Special   When you doubt your ability to achieve great things for God Feel Ugly? Could You Have a Distorted Body Image? How to Change Your Self-Image Gender in the Bible: God & Women Is God Male or Female? God’s Gender Contentment Hate Yourself?   A page that provides many more valuable links

SRA can stand either for Satanic Ritual Abuse or Sadistic Ritual Abuse. Both involve cruelty and the deliberate creation of insiders (also known as alters or parts). Technically, Satanic Ritual Abuse occurs when child abusers consciously seek the involvement of evil supernatural powers through Satan worship or occult practices. In contrast, with Sadistic Ritual Abuse the abusers do not attempt to summon occult powers, although it is possible that demons might take advantage of the situation. Satanic Ritual Abuse/Sadistic Ritual Abuse is real. There really are sadists who know how to deliberately create alters and program them. They are so appallingly evil that ordinary people find it almost incomprehensible that anyone could be so depraved. If SRA perpetrators believed they could get away with it, there is no atrocity they would not stoop to. Their only constraint – and it’s far bigger than their victims realize – is that they do not want to be attacked by a vigilante or an enraged mob of concerned citizens, nor end up languishing in prison where they would be unable to continue their crimes against children. These fiends do all they can to convince their victims that they are so well-connected and powerful that the law cannot touch them. They are terrorized, nevertheless, by the knowledge that they are not nearly as invincible as they claim. Even if their atrocities were sanctioned by every law enforcer in the land, it would not be enough to let them sleep at night. If what SRA perpetrators do became known, ordinary people would be so outraged that many would respond violently. Even most criminals hate paedophiles. The bottom line is that, as much as they might hate it, even the most powerful abusers are subjected to far more constraints than they ever want their victims to know. This forces them to become devious and add insidious deception to their sinister arsenal. Less skilled abusers might be far less ingenious in their methods but every child abuser delights in lies and deception that children inevitably believe. This is such an important point that I must quote from what I have written elsewhere: Much of an alter’s current distress centers less on the actual abuse than on being cruelly tricked into believing lies that, long after the abuse has ended, continue to make the alter feel condemned, hopeless, frightened and/or isolated. Most of the misinformation has been deliberately and maliciously inflicted on the alters by the abuser, and repeatedly reinforced by him/her until the abuser’s lies seem undeniable truth. This process – virtually a form of brainwashing – is made easier by abusers accessing children rather than adults. Con artists prove how easily adults can be deceived but children are exceptionally vulnerable and almost instinctively accept as truth whatever an adult says, and even more so when terrorized. Consider how many little children are certain that Santa Claus is real. Little ones who don’t believe in him are not smarter; they simply were not told about him by believable authority figures or they encountered someone who exposed the lie. If older people have authoritatively insisted that it is true and little children hear nothing to the contrary, they will inevitably believe what they are told, whether it be about Santa Claus, or that sexual abuse is normal or that the abuse was their fault or that the police will put them in jail if they tell the abuser’s secret, or any of a vast number of other bald-faced lies. This is an unavoidable part of being a child. Children have to be quick to believe what they are told because their very survival hinges on believing warnings given by adults, and their intellectual development hinges on quickly absorbing vast amounts of information. It would take them excessively long to mature if they had to critically assess the accuracy of every bit of information they gain and, in any case, they start off not having the intellectual skills to do so. This uncritical acceptance of what older children or adults tell them normally works brilliantly because they are surrounded by loving, trustworthy people. It turns to tragedy, however, if an evil person gains access to a child. Even more tragic, instead of being allowed to learn and mature, alters end up cut off from the parts of them that gain the knowledge and maturity and relationship with God to see through the lies. The truth sets us free, but with abusers using sophisticated techniques, discovering the truth can be exceedingly difficult. When a victim is left with horrific memories, it is clear that an appalling offence has occurred. Whether it be offenders getting away with an atrocity they committed or victims failing to see through the cruel deception, no decent person wants these criminals to win. Since SRA abusers specialize in confusing their victims, it is far from easy to discover exactly what they did, but it was unquestionable evil. It is quite common for them to drug their victims. Even without this, there is the haze of trauma, the young age of the victims and the evil cunning of the perpetrators. Untangling all of this to discern exactly what happened might be liberating – especially when victims discover they did not commit the atrocities they had been tricked into thinking they committed – but getting there is undeniably challenging. Less skilled abusers might be far less ingenious in their methods but every child abuser delights in lies and deception that children inevitably believe. This is such an important point that I must quote from what I have written elsewhere: Much of an alter’s current distress centers less on the actual abuse than on being cruelly tricked into believing lies that, long after the abuse has ended, continue to make the alter feel condemned, hopeless, frightened and/or isolated. Most of the misinformation has been deliberately and maliciously inflicted on the alters by the abuser, and repeatedly reinforced by him/her until the abuser’s lies seem undeniable truth. This process – virtually a form of brainwashing – is made easier by abusers accessing children rather than adults. Con artists prove how easily adults can be deceived but children are exceptionally vulnerable and almost instinctively accept as truth whatever an adult says, and even more so when terrorized. Consider how many little children are certain that Santa Claus is real. Little ones who don’t believe in him are not smarter; they simply were not told about him by believable authority figures or they encountered someone who exposed the lie. If older people have authoritatively insisted that it is true and little children hear nothing to the contrary, they will inevitably believe what they are told, whether it be about Santa Claus, or that sexual abuse is normal or that the abuse was their fault or that the police will put them in jail if they tell the abuser’s secret, or any of a vast number of other bald-faced lies. This is an unavoidable part of being a child. Children have to be quick to believe what they are told because their very survival hinges on believing warnings given by adults, and their intellectual development hinges on quickly absorbing vast amounts of information. It would take them excessively long to mature if they had to critically assess the accuracy of every bit of information they gain and, in any case, they start off not having the intellectual skills to do so. This uncritical acceptance of what older children or adults tell them normally works brilliantly because they are surrounded by loving, trustworthy people. It turns to tragedy, however, if an evil person gains access to a child. Even more tragic, instead of being allowed to learn and mature, alters end up cut off from the parts of them that gain the knowledge and maturity and relationship with God to see through the lies. The truth sets us free, but with abusers using sophisticated techniques, discovering the truth can be exceedingly difficult. When a victim is left with horrific memories, it is clear that an appalling offence has occurred. Whether it be offenders getting away with an atrocity they committed or victims failing to see through the cruel deception, no decent person wants these criminals to win. Since SRA abusers specialize in confusing their victims, it is far from easy to discover exactly what they did, but it was unquestionable evil. It is quite common for them to drug their victims. Even without this, there is the haze of trauma, the young age of the victims and the evil cunning of the perpetrators. Untangling all of this to discern exactly what happened might be liberating – especially when victims discover they did not commit the atrocities they had been tricked into thinking they committed – but getting there is undeniably challenging. Never forget that abusers lie. No child abuser ever tells his/her victim, “You don’t deserve to be treated this way. What I’m doing is a criminal act and I’m at your mercy because the moment you tell authorities they will stop me from hurting you.” Instead, they do all they can to silence their victims by lies that crush the victims’ self-esteem; lies that flood their victims with false guilt; lies about the offender’s right to abuse; lies about what will happen if the crime is reported, and so on. Deception is an abuser’s primary tool of trade. As with a sadist handing out candy, no information fed by an abuser should be swallowed. Nothing he or she says can be trusted. Since SRA abusers are given over to evil, they cannot be expected to be truthful. Just as the devil himself is a liar (John 8:44), deceit is second nature to these people. Moreover, it is very much in their interest to deceive because the more they can deceive a victim, the less believable that person’s stories will sound if ever reported to authorities. So SRA abusers cannot be trusted to tell their victims the truth about anything. For example, just because an abuser always claimed that someone is the victim’s parent, ancestor or some other relative does not mean it is true. Likewise, they might claim that certain public figures or organizations are somehow involved, but their say-so does not make it true. Just as abusers like to increase their authority in the eyes of their victims by claiming to have God on their side, others can be expected to, for instance, claim to have the government on their side. If abusers engage in satanic rituals, they might happen to believe in those practices but even their apparent belief could be a lie. They know that dark, cloaked figures, ‘human sacrifice’, and eerie rituals would help traumatize a child and this could be enough to motivate them to use such things as props. Since, in SRA, abusers deliberately create alters, they usually try to anticipate everything someone might do to try to rescue a victim and turn that very thing into a trigger. For example, a Christian rescuer is sure to use the name of Jesus, so abusers often cause their victims to react in terror at the use of that name. They might, for example, have someone dress up to look like Jesus and claim to be Jesus while he abuses the child. SRA abusers often create sleeper alters who will be triggered by certain codes or signals or dates or lunar cycles. For example, a friend of mine had left the cult that had been abusing her but unknown to her they had created an alter that had been programmed to respond to a high pitched whistle. All that one of her abusers had to do was hide outside the house she had moved to, and blow the whistle. Without the knowledge of the other alters this alter took over, unlocked the door and walked outside to the source of the whistle. By such means, people can still be involved in SRA while having no knowledge of it. Since any form of abuse is evil and anti-God, it so delights evil spirits (demons) that they are likely to become involved even if the abuser has no awareness or belief in the supernatural. Some abusers, however, deliberately seek the assistance of evil powers and try to put demons in their victims. Nevertheless, for anyone who is yielded to Jesus, demons are no more to be feared than cockroaches. Yes, the filthy trespassers need to be eradicated but they will run from even the weakest Christian who refuses to be intimated by their bluff. It is very important, however, to realize that insiders can be brainwashed into thinking they are evil and can feel they have to do evil things in order to protect themselves. Some could even be convinced that they are demons. To mistake an alter for a demon is very damaging to a person, so when seeking to expel demons, great care must be taken not to mistakenly have a confused insider in your crosshairs. Lilly’s alters are an example of another confusing possibility. Without even suffering Satanic Ritual Abuse she has many young, highly traumatized alters who each has vivid memories of being locked in a crate and tortured by a man who would prod them with a red hot poker. When the alters first described this to Lilly, she received such a vivid image of it that she could actually smell the burning flesh as the poker found its victim. The ‘man’ behind this torture later confessed to Lilly that he was another very young but powerful alter who had concluded he must torment his fellow alters this way to prevent them from doing things that would incur the wrath of her real father. He was not physically hurting them but, because he thought he must do it to protect them, he and the other alters were convinced it was real. Not only did this alter have many mannerisms identical to Lilly’s father, some people have what are known as introject alerts. Such alters do not just mimic someone they know in the outside world (often one of their real-life abusers) but both the introject alter and fellow alters are convinced that the introject is not an alter but is the actual person who exists in real life. Introjects are innocent victims who think they are perpetrators. In Lilly’s case, the alter who was tormenting the others ended up so filled with remorse that it raises at least the theoretical possibility of the alter of an innocent victim confessing to police to crimes never committed in the outside world. It seems unlikely that such a confession would be taken so seriously as to end up in court but I cannot say with certainty that there could be no situation in which it could happen. Then there is the matter of alters being certain of their age when a particular event occurred. They might be correct, but the complicating factor is that alters are typically convinced they are a certain age even though their physical body is years older. I came across a SRA alter who was utterly convinced her tongue had been cut out. Despite ‘remembering’ the event in vivid detail, the woman still has her tongue. Through information-sharing with other alters, the woman was able to go beyond this alter’s recollection and recover with remarkable accuracy the full memory of the incident. What had actually happened is that her abusers had grabbed a knife, threatened to cut out her tongue, held her down, thrust the knife down at great speed, stopped just a fraction from the tongue, jabbed her tongue a few times with something that did not cut while spilling fake blood on her, and then claimed to have carried out the threat. The abusers creating this distorted memory knew exactly what they were doing because they made the alter show fellow alters her ‘missing’ tongue to terrify the others into submission. (Alters appear to fellow alters to have the exact physical appearance that each alter believes he/she has.) Note that just as easily as this alter was tricked into believing her tongue had been cut out, she could have been tricked into believing she had cut out someone else’s tongue. As traumatized – and hence particularly vulnerable to deception – as she was by believing the threat would be carried out, any sensitive child would be equally traumatized by believing she must mutilate some other victim’s tongue. Add to this the fact that theatres, for instance, use trick knives with blunt blades that retract when pressed into an object. Such a knife could simultaneously squirt fake blood, thus making the event seem genuine to the child forced to do it and the other terrified victim would also believe it is real and so would be screaming convincingly. Even among child abusers with no SRA skills, it is common to make their victims believe the abuse is their fault, and the more they can persuade their victims that they are guilty of grave offenses (such as adultery) the more delighted the abusers are, because they expect it to scare children into never telling a soul about the abuse. SRA abusers skilled at tricking children into believing they are guilty of horrendous crimes are therefore highly motivated to do precisely that. Just as it was a relief to the alter to finally discover she has a tongue, so some alters might be relieved to discover they did not engage in the heinous crimes they thought they had committed. Although the element of doubt over whether certain events were real or a clever illusion is somewhat comforting to those riddled with guilt, it is torturously frustrating and bewildering to be uncertain as to whether or not it was merely a cruel trick. That this woman was eventually able to recall details that confirmed the trick offers hope. In this case, however, full memory could be restored because one alter had a remarkable ability to resist the effects of drugs used by the abusers. Regrettably, not everyone could be expected to have such an alter. In no way does an element of doubt undermine the importance of seeking to recover every memory. Whether the torment was mental or had a strong physical component, a grave offense has occurred. Moreover, the primary goal should not be securing the conviction of the offender but healing the victim, and for this to occur, the source of torment – such as believing one has witnessed or perpetuated horrendous crimes – must be uncovered. Thankfully, from a spiritual perspective, forgiveness has nothing to do with how excusable or minor an offense is in human eyes. In the eyes of our Holy Judge every sin is equally damming and equally forgivable. For help with this, see The Most Tortured Conscience Can Find Peace and keep following the first link at the end of the text for as many pages as it takes to be convinced. Warning Anything that might be perceived by an alter as doubting the accuracy of a memory could be disastrous – even if the doubter thinks the reinterpretation might be comforting to the alter. It is at great cost that alters share secrets. Revealing a secret is typically very scary for the alter sharing it and painful for those alters learning of it. If there is the slightest indication that what is shared is rejected as being mistaken, it will be seen as rejection not merely of the memory but of the alters’ integrity and even of themselves. For an alter’s version of events to be disbelieved is also likely to cause other alters to clam up so that they share no more secrets. This would be a huge setback because the full details about traumatic events is usually stored not by one alter but by several different ones, each of which has only part of the jigsaw. The full picture could possibly be different from the guesses arrived at from the partial memory but the full truth will not be learned until every alter is willing to share what he/she knows. For example, a man I know was told as a boy by his angry father he was about to have part of his body chopped off. The alter was certain the threat would be carried out and saw the blade rapidly moving in his direction but then another alter took over and only the second alter knew that the blade missed. The first alter had no awareness of his external physical body and so no way of knowing he was physically whole. Had the first alter thought that sharing scary secrets was useless because the person hearing them disregards them, he would never have revealed what was troubling him. In this case the truth was easy for observers to verify because they could see the person’s body. In many cases one is dependent entirely upon every alter being brave enough to reveal everything he or she knows. Recovered memories can be devastatingly accurate. Rather than being comforting, however, even the remote possibility of vivid memories being the product of a cruel trick is sometimes even more distressing. It can be so upsetting, confusing and offensive that I have loathed mentioning it. One of the few positives is that a victim might not have committed criminal acts after all. Nevertheless, I think I would rather place my hand on red-hot metal than risk needy alters refusing to talk out of fear that I might not agree with their convictions as to what actually happened. My refusal to lie inflicts me with what seems like an unresolvable dilemma. I have yet to find a foolproof way around this. I can definitely assure alters, however, that I am certain that they are being utterly truthful about their convictions as to what happened. I can also affirm that I am equally convinced that their abusers are so evil that they would have no qualms about committing any monstrous atrocity they thought they could get away with. Moreover, I remain eager to embrace the possibility of alters accurately seeing through the haze of trauma and perhaps drugs and deception. Postscript: Discovering the God of Truth Some time after completing this webpage, an alter formed by Satanic Ritual Abuse emailed me. The ‘priest’ referred to was a church pastor who secretly assumed the title of priest in a satanic cult. Compassion for sensitive readers moves me to omit distressing details. She wrote: I had sex with the priest and I got pregnant. The baby grew in my tummy. I could feel her kicking around. I was about to become a mom. The priest was the father. We were in love. He delighted in me and I in him. The baby was so little when she was born. She had tiny hands and tiny feet. I called her Crystal because she was so beautiful. I carried her to stores and played with her every day. She was my beautiful, beautiful daughter. My husband and I looked after this fruit of my loins; this small cherished part of me. Then one day Crystal disappeared. I don’t know what happened. I just lost her. My husband blamed it on me. He was right to beat me. It was my fault. I should have kept track of her. Then one day the demon came and said my beautiful daughter was taken to hell with him. I wept. My daughter was in hell. I was a horrible mother. I begged the demon to let me have my daughter. So we made a deal. Again, I’ll omit the details of what she had to do but the demon’s part of the deal was meant to be that “he would let me see my beautiful daughter again.” Not surprisingly, he lied. Finally this alter resurfaced after very many years and discovered how much the real world had changed. She wrote: Then I heard about all the changes that had occurred. How time has passed. I couldn’t believe it. The priest was dead?! The demons were liars. My heart melted inside me. What about my beautiful daughter? Where was she? I didn’t dare ask because I thought I had to keep things normal. Then the Holy Spirit came. I could feel his love and power. I thought if anyone could save my daughter it would be him. And he was gentle, so he would never hurt my daughter. When I learned that the Holy Spirit and Jesus were the same person, I went to Jesus. I bowed before him and I confessed my sins and my failure to protect my beautiful baby. I told him that I would do anything to have my beautiful daughter back. He replied, “I am sorry. I cannot bring your daughter back.” I fell to the ground and wept. My beautiful daughter, was lost forever. My shoulders shook and I couldn’t breathe. He put his hand on my shoulder and I started to calm down. He lifted me and sat me next to him. He said, “There has been a lie passed on to you. This lie has caused you to believe things that aren’t true and to do things that are painful to you and others. Do you want all this pain to end?” “Yes, with all my heart,” I replied. He said, “I desire truth in the inner parts. So these lies must be exposed to the truth. This will be quite painful to you. It will be very hard to hear but I want you to know that I cannot tell a lie. I am the creator of everything. I create with my words. If I speak, whatever I say is true of the universe. If I say let all the frogs slither on the ground; they will. If I create a new law then anything that breaks that law is a lie because it is the opposite of what I created. I am the Author of Truth because I am the Creator. Do you understand that I cannot tell a lie because I am truth?” I understood. He said, “My dear daughter, you were never pregnant. The baby you saw get hurt was not your baby. It belonged to someone else. The memories of having this baby never happened. They used drugs and hypnotism to cause you to believe these things. You saw a baby get hurt and that’s all. These evil men lied to you so that you would do as they wanted. You were desperate. You wanted to save a life. I forgive you. This was also something I covered on the cross. Does all of this make sense to you?” I was crying so much that I couldn’t talk. I just nodded. He put his hand on my back and I calmed down a little but I couldn’t look anywhere but my lap. He squatted in front of me and lifted my chin. “Though you having this child was not real,” he continued, “she has won a place in your heart. You feel feelings of love for this child. These feelings caused you to go to any length to save her. It didn’t matter what it cost you because you loved her so much. I feel the same way about you. I will go to any length to make you my daughter, my beautiful daughter. Do you confess freely that you have sinned?” I began weeping again, “Yes. I’m so sorry.” I dropped my head again. He lifted my chin and continued, “Then the way is clear for you to be my beautiful daughter. You are beautiful beyond description and I will do anything to keep you safe and help you heal from this horrible tragedy. I will always be there for you. This is what a good father would do. Will you have me as your father?” “Yes, please,” I said. He put his hand on my head and prayed a blessing on me. Then he said, “Let’s work toward healing and setting things right. It will be hard for you to move past this lie. Are you willing to do this no matter the cost?” I agreed. “Then it is settled,” he replied. Another of this woman’s alters was certain she had been pressured into shooting dead a child. Typical with SRA, the child her abusers chose was her best friend. There were two formidable barriers to her talking to Jesus about it. As is common with Satanic Ritual Abuse, the first deterrent was that one of her abusers used to pretend to be Jesus and this made her terrified of the real Jesus. This fear slowly lessened as I kept assuring her that the real Jesus is nothing like the fake one but is good and kind and safe. Then the second barrier loomed: she was too guilt-ridden to dare mention it to Jesus. I assured her of Jesus’ forgiveness, but what finally drove her to muster the courage to talk to him about it was hearing that Jesus can raise the dead. She concluded that if she asked Jesus, he might raise to life again the child she had killed. Jesus told her that the gun had blanks and the child she aimed the gun at, believing the bullets to be real, had merely fainted. Yes, there was blood but this was from earlier mistreatment by the abusers. This, in fact, is the only way to make sense of the events because the alter later revealed that immediately afterward she was told to put the gun to her head and kill herself. She pulled the trigger and apparently either fainted herself or switched alters because she believed she died. Not only is the woman still alive, she has no scars associated with a bullet wound to the head. The alter is now convinced that she had killed no one. In this case, besides the use of blanks (and possibly drugs), there was little sophistication in the abusers’ deception. When a young alter who already has a history of being terrified out of her wits is forced into the highly traumatic plight of believing she must fire a loaded gun at another child, little sophistication is needed. Weeks later, another of her alters wrote to me saying: I don’t know why but my mommy and daddy said the priest was going to be my daddy just like Hannah did with Samuel. I was a gift to God and that’s why mommy and daddy gave us to the priest. Shortly afterward, she had this conversation with Jesus, whom she calls Dadda: “Dadda, my mommy gave me to the priest. Did you say mommy was supposed to do that?” “I would never sanction that! Not ever! But what makes you think your mom gave you away?” “I don’t know. I just know it. I can kind of see her, blurry like. But I just know it. It feels right.” “Well, here’s the truth: you had a false memory implanted into you. Your mom never did any such thing. The priest wanted you to believe that so you would do whatever he asked. That’s why it’s kind of blurry. Your mom does love you, but in a broken and blind way. She sees what she wants and forgets the rest. And the priest helped her do that, too. But there is one memory that casts doubt but it’s a teeny tiny doubt so she just dismisses it. If your mom knew the extent of what she did, and what happened, it would be too much for her to bear. So we are going to leave it the way it is. She doesn’t need to know.” Everything I have written about Dissociative Identity Disorder (D.I.D.) should be read by people who have suffered SRA.

She had been a stripper, prostitute, drug addict and demon-possessed witch. It was hard to imagine a perversion or Satanic form of depravity she hadn’t wallowed in. Two thousand years ago, Christ agonized on a Roman cross, shedding his life-blood for those very sins. She continued in her extreme degradation. Finally, she joined herself to Jesus, by faith trading her wickedness for Christ’s holiness. One day Jesus appeared to her and said, ‘You are a chaste virgin in my sight.’ None of us have an infallible conscience. In fact, most of us have consciences are at times wildly inaccurate. If you want Scriptural proof of this, you’ll find plenty . So when facing guilt feelings, the most important thing is to establish whether your guilt is real or imaginary. Tragically, most people stand guilty before God and are hardly aware of it. They wrongly imagine that if there is a heaven, they have a good chance of going there. On the other hand, there are countless thousands whom God regards as spotlessly pure and innocent, and yet are riddled with guilt feelings. We must clearly differentiate between deceptive feelings and spiritual reality. You have every right to feel guilty and fearful before God if: 1. You have not asked God’s forgiveness for your sin, trusting Jesus to have paid the full penalty for your sin by dying on the cross for you. Christ alone is capable of the divine miracle needed to wipe out all guilt. 2. You are unwilling to ask God to take your sins from you. To refuse to be delivered from your pet sin is like a drowning man stubbornly refusing to let his rescuer drag him from the water. If you have no intention of giving up a particular sin, you’ll die in that sin. The sins you love are as deadly as the sins you despise. Everyone who is not trusting Jesus for forgiveness, or does not want a sin-free life, remains guilty before the Judge of the universe, until he or she has a change of heart. If, however, you have met these two conditions, God’s smile is upon you. Any pangs of guilt or fear you suffer are simply an illusion – like fearing there’s an intruder in the house when it was only the sound of the wind. The feelings might exist, and they might be most unpleasant, but they are groundless. They have no correspondence to reality. Just to be sure, let’s briefly expound these conditions for spiritual cleansing. Then we’ll move to some exciting facts. 1. You must believe the Scriptures that teach that Jesus, and only he, can remove your sin. (He alone can pay sin’s penalty because he alone has no sins of his own for which he must suffer.) 2. Once you put your faith in God, trusting that he is infinitely wise and good and always has your best interest at heart, [more] the only logical thing is to resolve to follow his leading on every matter, regardless of how scary and costly it may sometimes seem. This is simply a decision. A state of mind. It means that despite some sins still seeming attractive, you decide that God’s way is best and sign over to him control of your life. It means refusing to enjoy the ‘benefits’ of past sin. You will repay money you have stolen, not let people to continue believing a lie you have told, and so on. And it means shunning the hypocrisy of wanting God’s forgiveness while refusing to forgive someone else. (The issue for forgiving others is so crucial that it is dealt with in detail in a special webpage. ) Sin’s full penalty is death, and the sinless Son of God died for you. Why punish yourself? He’s already taken your punishment! Are you morally bankrupt? No way! Paid in full is stamped over your every account. By joining yourself to Jesus, a divine exchange takes place in which Jesus takes your sins upon himself (that’s what killed him) and his perfection becomes yours. The holiness of Jesus floods your entire being, flushing out every trace of sin. That makes you spotlessly pure and perfect in God’s eyes. Almighty God can embrace you and delight in you as intimately as he does his own eternal, sinless Son. Every whiff of sin is obliterated because Jesus died for your every sin. This central spiritual truth is expounded over and over in Bible. Scripture repeatedly promises this to you, but no where does it say you will feel that it has happened. The whole of Christianity is about choosing to believe spiritual reality instead of your inner feelings. It is worth prayerfully studying, and even memorizing, the Scriptures listed in the above link, because this is a crucial area of spiritual attack. Just as Jesus was tempted in the wilderness and he overcame by believing and quoting the Scriptures, so you will be tempted over this matter and you can overcome by clinging to the dependable Word of God. Satan will disguise the true nature of the temptation, but it is actually a temptation to believe God is a liar. The Deceiver is trying to fool you into believing that God lied when he said that all your sins are forgiven, when Jesus said that all that come to him he will not cast out, etc. Don’t blacken God’s name by entertaining such a thought. No one can be any more guilty than the nicest person No matter how horrendously evil you might have been, by God’s standards, you are no more guilty than anyone else. We were all dead in our sins, says Scripture. You can’t get any deader, than dead! Without exception we were all a total write-off. Relative to each other, some of us seem fairly innocent and some seem very guilty. But this is by our sinful standards. It’s like someone who has murdered twenty people feeling superior to someone who killed two hundred people. Perfection is God’s only standard. We get just one shot at living a perfect life and we have all blown it. We have all missed the mark. Whether we missed the mark by a millimeter or a kilometer, means nothing. We all missed, and that’s all that counts. On the other hand, when you receive divine forgiveness through Jesus, no one can be more forgiven than you. Although outside of Christ, we all stand condemned, in Christ, we each stand spotlessly pure before the Holy One. Simple logic suggests that our spiritual enemy, whom Scripture calls the Deceiver and the Accuser, would muster all his evil cunning to distort this simple truth. If the Evil One wanted to keep people from the wonderful forgiveness that Jesus offers, he would try to convince them that they are not bad enough to need forgiveness. Or failing that, he would try persuading them that they are so bad that they cannot be forgiven. Either way, the result is the same. If he utterly lost that battle, and people became Christians, he would then try to get them to feel less sinful than others – producing bigots, arrogant fools and hypocrites. For those resistant to this attack, he would try the opposite lie, hissing that they are too sinful to be fully blessed by God or be mightily used of God. Either way, it would render them powerless. So it’s obviously to the Deceiver’s advantage to make you feel that total cleansing is impossible for you. Don’t let him get away with such lies. If, after God has forgiven us, we won’t forgive ourselves, we are implying we have a higher sense of justice than the Holy One. Anyone having the impertinence to make such an accusation is on dangerous ground. We are also implying that Jesus is inadequate – that he didn’t suffer enough for our sins, or that his sinlessness cannot swallow up our sinfulness. There is no shame in a forgiven person feeling guilty. That is simply the Deceiver at work. For a forgiven person to believe he or she is guilty, however, is a concern.

By “Christine” Multiple Personalities I have vivid and graphic dreams almost every night. They used to be hellish. I have learned that alters express themselves with nightmares, dreams and “daymares” (another subject altogether). While you sleep, alters feel safe to move around and feel. One of the ways they feel is by dreams. I have done my share of sleep walking and re-arranging things in my sleep, but if you are not sleeping alone, your alters might not feel safe enough to physically move, but they will still express their feelings in dreams. Sometimes the dreams are graphic images of exactly what happened in the alter’s past – quite possibly events that you knew nothing about because they shielded you from them and now you have both reached the stage where this secret should be kept from you no longer. In other dreams, the actual events featured have never occurred in the alter’s life but the dreams express dilemmas and emotions that are of great significance to the alters. The biggest point about either sort of dream is that they communicate things that are deeply distressing the alter, and trying to bear them alone has become too great for the alter and is no longer necessary. The alter needs your support, and probably the support of other parts of you as well, and you have much to offer in terms of a listening ear, empathy and wisdom. Often in my dreams, I am in a no-win situation. If I do one thing, I will suffer; if I do another I will suffer. That is exactly how I feel with a certain relative. I have noticed a real spike in these dreams right after I talk with that person. Of the few books I have read on dreams, I have seen that dreams very often reflect emotions that we cannot seem to express or that need continued expression. Dreams play a huge role in the Bible and in many other cultures. Genghis Khan started his whole world conquest based on a dream! I have found that sometimes my dreams are not my alters dreaming but them deliberately expressing themselves through telling stories. On some other occasions, they will intervene in real dreams and change the ending so that it ends up victorious rather than disastrous. When it comes to discerning between demons and alters, I find it pretty simple. Demons are outside voices. They have stood at the end of my bed and ran my blood cold. When I see them they look like a ghostly image, rather like the shades in the story/movie Lord of the Rings. There is a strong presence of death and terror. The cold icy presence from demons is not usually related to a dream. A cold icy presence immediately after a dream is often simply an emotional response to the dream. I think discerning between inside and outside voices/presences is important. Praying in the Spirit or asserting one’s authority in Christ will drive demons away, but God will not drive your feelings away. Feelings are yours to come to term with. God will never force himself on you but he longs to help and will do so, if you let him. D.I.D. Emergency Help contains a very valuable section on this subject. This link with take you straight to it: Dreams & Nightmares

Help For Everyone With Emotional Pain If you are struggling with inner pain, my heart weeps for you. I know how hard it is simply to give the pain to Jesus. I give it to him and it keeps coming back! I just don't get it!!! Well, at least I didn’t used to. Now I realize that giving the pain over to Jesus does not necessarily mean he takes the pain away as quickly as I desire. I usually want fast healing – the quick fix. I long to just give the pain to him and be done with it, but I have found that it does not work that way. Let me share some of what Jesus has taught me about this. I was brutally molested, sodomized, beaten, and threatened with death in a tree house when I was six. (I was formed at that age but I have come to understand that I’m older than that now.) When I initially came to Jesus he took my pain and carried it. After Jesus took the pain, I started to realize that he loves me and accepts me and I began to trust him. After I was sure of his love and that he would never leave me, he brought the pain back. I could not believe it! I cried out to God, “WHY???? Why, Papa God, did you bring the pain back to me when I gave it to you? I know that Jesus died for our sorrows!” Papa explained it to me. He said he carried the pain away until I was sure of his love. However, he explained that if the pain were not there, I would not work on exposing the lies that I was believing that came from that rape. (In fact, I stopped working on the lies because there was no pain in it.) Without the pain, there didn’t seem any need to bother with the lies about my self-worth that came from my dad making me sleep with pee on my head, or the lies that came with my brother abusing me and making me do things, or the lie from my dad putting a knife to my private part to cut it off (I actually thought he carried out his threat and cut it off). The return of the pain has finally motivated me to work on the lies. As I’ve done this, the pain has been receding. I now know that my private parts are intact and that no one will cut them off. I know that what I suffered was not my fault. Jesus has been healing the lies. This takes time. I’ve been talking about the lies, uncovering them, and examining the lies in the light of truth. I did not even know some of them were lies. When Papa brought the pain back, I split. There are many other alters with me formed at other ages, but when the pain returned, I, who had been one alter formed at the age of six, split again. One new alter took the tree house trauma, one took being peed on, one took the abuse from my brother, and I (the part writing this webpage) took the pain from having a big knife put to me. I did not mean to split again. I'm sorry that it happened but it was just too much. Papa understands. Jesus is reducing my pain, but the pain is not the issue. That is just a barometer to the damage. It is the damage that has to be undone. We must forgive – and that is just part of the healing. We can forgive and have freedom, yet the working out of the knots of the lies takes time and effort and many tears before Papa. He is changing my heart, and in the process it is taking my pain away. So I thank him that he brought the pain back, though I was so confused when it first returned and I still sometimes get confused. Sometimes I just talk to him about my private parts, and who I am. I sometimes think he will be mad at me when I tell him how confused I am or how I think, but he never does. Sometimes I think the pain is all gone and then it returns. Nevertheless, he is healing me and I don't have as much pain as I used to. Healing does not usually happen quickly, although sometimes Papa does work that way with some people as soon as they forgive. Not with me, though. That is okay. He is working with me and loves me. That is what the group I’m in is about: speaking into each other’s lives the truth and helping each to untangle the knots that held us tight.

The following information can help almost any alter who does not yet realize his/her true identity. Because it is initially highly disturbing for alters to discover that they are not who they think they are, I usually delay this topic and focus first on comforting them and helping them feel safe. This matter cannot be delayed, however, if – as is sometimes the case with introjects – alters assume an identity that causes them to hurt or scare other alters. Introject alters are convinced that they do not live in the body they really live in. They firmly believe they are someone else – often someone who abused the person with Dissociative Identity Disorder. Their mistaken self-image, sometimes results in them abusing or frightening other alters. The fear is not just because of what the introject does but because some of the others are as convinced as the introject is that this alter truly is the person the introject thinks he/she is. Although discovering their true identity is at first very confusing for introjects, they usually adjust in just a day or so and, even if previously abusive, they end up becoming very nice. Introjects often feel great hostility toward other alters because they blame them for the abuse. They think they were abused because these alters were weak or had low morals. Often this is because the abuser kept telling his/her victims such lies. In Free Effective Therapy I provide important help with the issue of who to blame for abuse. Introjects often take on the identity of an abuser because this self-image helps them feel safer. If they really were the person they imagine themselves to be, they would no longer be a defenseless victim. So one thing that may hasten their discovery of their true identity and will make the discovery less traumatic for them is to reassure introjects that it is now safe to be the person they really are. Introjects were most likely formed very many years ago, and have little awareness of subsequent events. So inform them of all the good things that have happened since then that now make it safer than in the past to be who they really are. For example, their real body is now older, meaning that they are not only physically stronger than when they were victims but they are now far more likely to be believed by authorities if they report abuse and they are able to live away from their abusers. This gives them the upper hand if an abuser were to try to repeat an offense. The abuser probably has far less access to them than when they were younger. Explain all these positives to them. If they believe they are the opposite gender to what they really are, provide them with all the reasons why it is now safe to be their real gender (this will include reasons already cited). When they discover they are not who they think they are the shock might be so great that they suddenly “disappear” – temporarily go into hiding to give themselves time to come to terms with the startling discovery. Do not be alarmed by this. They will reappear when they are ready and when they do they will probably be much more humble and teachable. In a desperate need to give themselves a reprieve from the terror of feeling helpless victims, or to feel they are someone who will be approved of, introjects are highly motivated to convince themselves they are someone they are not. They become so skilled at believing this fantasy that it can be amazingly difficult to help them discover that they are not that person. For example, if asked to look into a real mirror (not just one in their imagination) some might see their real body and so realize that they are not the person they thought they were, but some might convince themselves that the image they see in the mirror is of the person they believe themselves to be. Perhaps the easiest and most effective way to convince introjects that they are not who they think they are is to video them when they are talking and immediately play it back so that they know it is what they just said. They should be able to tell that they do not look like the person they thought they were. If they think it is a trick, repeat the process, asking them to say something unique. If they refuse to talk out loud, remind them that the person they think they are had no such limitation. If videoing is not possible (perhaps you don’t have the technology or perhaps you are as limited as me, who can only counsels by e-mail) I explain alternative methods below. The following is written to introjects, but if you are someone trying to help an introject, your help could make it even easier. Not as Scary as it Seems It would seem alarming to discover that you are not the person you think you are, but it would actually be good news. It does not mean you are mad. In fact, it means you have cleverly used a mental trick that helped keep you sane in an almost impossible situation. Because of cruel people in your life, you once suffered horrible things that you never deserved. It was so intolerable that it was almost beyond anyone’s ability to endure. Things became so desperate that to give yourself a much-needed mental break from the terror, you cleverly gave yourself a mini-vacation by imagining you were someone else – someone who was not in danger. You became so skilled at this clever trick that you were able to totally convince yourself. But now things have changed. It is finally safe to let your guard down and be the strong, nice, highly capable person you really are. While you were giving yourself that mental break, other parts of you had to face the reality of what cruel people were doing to you. So your mind was split between you and other parts of you. The various parts of a person are called alters. They all share the same body but not all of them realize this. Feeling Some alters (or parts of a person) have difficulty feeling and some have difficulty remaining conscious while another alter is conscious. However, if there is someone who claims to share your body, the following might be an interesting experiment. Ask the other person to do something harmless that can be sensed, such as putting his/her hand under running water, pinching himself/herself, or licking chocolate. Can you feel/taste it when the other person does it? If you can, then you both must share the same body. If you cannot sense, it could still be that you share the same body but are very disconnected from each other. Where Do You Live? Have a good look around the place where you live. Check the rooms, the furnishing and the house number. Are you living where you should live if you really are the person you think you are? Are you living in that person’s home or in another place? If you believe you drive a car, is the car you expect parked close by? If the answer is no to either of these questions, perhaps you are not the person you think you are. I n the Mirror As you were looking around the place, did you happen to see in the mirror someone other than the person you think you are? For example, when you saw a mirror out of the corner of your eye, did you sometimes think you saw someone different? If you do not consistently see in the mirror the person you believe you are, then your mind must be playing tricks. This is not surprising, since we have already mentioned a clever mental trick that some people employ in order to cope with a very difficult situation. It would mean that you cannot trust your presumption that you are who you think you are. If you consistently see in the mirror the image of someone different to who you expect, then that different person is who you really are. What year is it? Like Rip Van Winkle, who woke up thinking it was the next day, only to eventually discover that he had been asleep for twenty years, you might have lost time without realizing it. Are you aware that it is now the Twenty-First Century? I wrote what you are reading near the end of 2012, so as you read this, it is at least 2012, maybe later. If this seems unbelievable, here are some suggestions to help you confirm what year it really is. Look around for a recent calendar, newspaper, magazines, letters, and so on and check what date is on them. Obviously, some of the documents you find will be old, but today’s date will at least be the latest date you find – probably even later. Today things are more computer-based than they used to be. Less is printed on paper, so if you cannot find paper copies of the things just listed, you might need to look on a computer to verify the date. A modern computer looks a bit like a small television screen. You are probably reading this on one. At the end of what I am writing I will provide help with using a computer to know what year it is. I would prefer for you not to explore this until later, however, because you could end up not being able to find your way back to what I am writing. Your Real Age If the real time is actually years later than you thought, that means you are years older than you thought. Did you see that you are years older when you looked in the mirror? If not, it means your mind is playing tricks. What you are seeing in the mirror is not what you really look like but simply the result of your powerful imagination. As you get used to the truth, you will begin to see things as they really are. Proving Your Identity If you are the person you believe you are, you should have plenty of proof of that in your possession. So look in your possessions for letters, bills, receipts, credit cards, driver’s license, marriage license, birth certificate and any other forms of ID. Especially if there are other people living where you live, you should find some documents belonging to more than one person and perhaps a few belonging to the person you think you are. If you are the person you believe you are, very many of the documents will be in your name. However, if you are an introject, these will be in a minority. Most documents will belong to someone else – the person you really are, rather than the person you just imagine you are. What Gender Are You? If someone has made the claim that you are not the gender you believe you are, or there have been any hints about this, check all the clothing in your bedroom. Is some of it clothing that belongs to the opposite gender? If so, does this indicate that you are not the gender you think you are? If you believe you are male, try using the toilet standing up. If you cannot do this without making a mess, is this because you are not male after all? What Do You Really Look Like? If someone claims you are not who you suppose but that you live in his/her body, get two or more different photos of that person (perhaps a driver’s license, Facebook photo or whatever and ask someone, “Which of these do you think is the best photo of me?” Obviously, if neither photo is of you, they will think you are joking and you can laugh as if it were a joke. If, however, they seriously believe the photo is of you, don’t contradict them, even if you find it hard to believe, or they will think you are strange. If the image you see in mirrors conforms with what you would expect if you really were the person you think you are, another approach is to try taking a photo of yourself and get the person who claims you live in his/her body to likewise take a photo of himself/herself. Try to get the photos identical except that one is of you and one is of the other person. Write your name on the back of your photo and write the other person’s name on the back of the other person’s photo. Close your eyes and shuffle the photos and then look at them. Neither photo should have changed, unless your mind is playing tricks. Select the photo you believe is of you and then look at the name on the back. Is it your name? If so, shuffle again and check. Do this several times. Using a Computer to Know What Year it is Unfortunately, things on computers often change, so not all the following might work by the time you use it. To overcome this, and to satisfy any lingering doubts you might have, I have provided several options. 1. The following should display (among other things) today’s date, including the year. www.thetimenow.com (Good for the sight impaired.) www.timeanddate.com www.todaysdate.com 2. New York Times Newspaper (Today’s date should be near the top of the screen.) www.nytimes.com 3. Sport Results Listings of results from former years, all the way to the latest Superbowl Winners (1967 to the latest) www.espn.go.com/nfl/superbowl/history/winners National Basketball (USA) Winners www.nba.com/playoffs More Help Therapy / Help for Abusive Introject Alters / Insiders Angry, Bad, Mean, Nasty Alters (Insiders)

Sexual Issues in Relating to Jesus Start at Part 1: An Alter Meets Jesus The child alter of a sexual abuse survivor with Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality Disorder) tells of her encounters with Jesus. A woman I’ll call Violet had a father who used to do bad things to her when she was a child. She has over a hundred alters who are now healing. When one of her little alters became aware of those alters who were healing and noticed that they called Jesus ‘Daddy,’ she became very frightened of Jesus. Knowing nothing about fathers other than her experience of her own father, she mistakenly supposed Jesus must be like her father who used to touch her in bad ways. I told her that her father had been bad and explained that Jesus was nothing like him and that it would really help her to get to know Jesus. Shocked to hear that her father had not acted in love, it took her some time to get her head around the implications. Although still scared, she eventually mustered the courage to talk with Jesus. The following is what she told me about it. Please don't be alarmed by the way it commences; Jesus, as always, proved himself totally safe.   Grantley Morris   You said the new Daddy loves me, and the bad Dad did not love me. That made me so sad and scared and all sorts of other things. It took me a long time, but I was finally brave enough to try talking to Daddy. I was shy, but Daddy put me on his lap. That’s what bad Dad would do, so that he could touch me, and I thought that maybe that’s what Daddy wanted. So I opened my legs a little for him. But he just closed my legs and sang me a song!   The song started with an Ooh and ended with a kiss, and all along the middle it goes something like this: “Ooh, snuggle puppy of mine, everything about you is especially fine. I love what you are. I love what you do. Fuzzy little snuggle puppy, I love you.”   I was so happy! He didn’t want touching. He just wanted singing and he sang that song! When he was all done, he said, “It’s a true song! Everything about you is perfect for me. I love watching you move around and I love the way you look at things. And I will never touch your private parts and I don’t have any for you to touch!”   I thought he was being silly. He must have private parts. Everyone has a pee-pee. That’s how you go pee-pee! “But how do you go pee-pee?” I asked.   He said he digests everything perfectly so he doesn’t need to go pee-pee.   I hugged his neck and said, “Promise?” and he promised me.   Now I know for certain that he won’t touch my panties. He would never break a promise!   I gave him a big hug and he sang, “I say, Ooh, snuggle puppy of mine, everything about you is especially fine. I love what you are. I love what you do. Ooh I love you.”   Isn’t that the happiest?! The Risen Jesus has No Genitals?   Most of the following is devoted to why it is logical and biblical to conclude that no resurrected humans (of the which Jesus was the first) have genitals. Before doing so, however, perhaps I should address a couple of issues raised by an alter reporting Jesus as saying that he digests food ‘perfectly.’   It is essential to affirm that no extra-biblical revelation should in any way be treated as being as reliable as the Bible. Nevertheless, this statement raised two objections in my mind that I feel inclined to comment on.   My first reaction was that the resurrected Lord never eats physical food and so does not digest it. I immediately realized, however, that I was mistaken. There are several biblical references to eating and drinking in the next life. For example:   Luke 22:15-18  He said to them, “I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer, for I tell you, I will no longer by any means eat of it until it is fulfilled in God’s Kingdom.” He received a cup, and when he had given thanks, he said, “Take this, and share it among yourselves, for I tell you, I will not drink at all again from the fruit of the vine, until God’s Kingdom comes.”   Luke 22:29-30  I confer on you a kingdom, even as my Father conferred on me, that you may eat and drink at my table in my Kingdom. You will sit on thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.”   We might be tempted to dismiss all of this as merely metaphorical but Scripture insists that the resurrected Lord ate and drank:   Luke 24:41-43  While they still didn’t believe for joy, and wondered, he said to them, “Do you have anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of a broiled fish and some honeycomb. He took them, and ate in front of them.   Acts 10:40-41  God raised him up the third day, and gave him to be revealed  . . . to us,  who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead .  (Emphasis mine.)   The other query raised by digesting food ‘perfectly’ is: if the design of our current bodies is imperfect why did the perfect Lord design them that way? The elimination of waste is such an integral part of our physiology that it is hard to believe all this was created after the fall. Much in the way of reproduction, such as spreading of seeds and the fertilizing of plants, hinges in animals eliminating waste. However, it is easy to see this as temporary and not needed in the world to come.   Let’s move on, however, to something far more important:   Jesus is not Sexual   Our gracious Lord freely forgives those who see the error of their ways and want his forgiveness. Nevertheless, Jesus insisted that lust is a grave sin:   Matthew 5:27-29  You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery;’ but I tell you that everyone who gazes at a woman to lust after her has committed adultery with her already in his heart. If your right eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out and throw it away from you. For it is more profitable for you that one of your members should perish, than for your whole body to be cast into Gehenna.   Remember that it was not in our sex-obsessed society that Jesus declared lust to be as depraved as adultery. He was speaking to people who regarded adultery as such a heinous crime that it incurred the death penalty (John 8:3-5).   Jesus is no hypocrite. Indeed, he alone has never sinned:   John 8:46  Which of you convicts me of sin? . . .   2 Corinthians 5:21  For him who knew no sin [Jesus] he made to be sin on our behalf; so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.   Hebrews 7:26  For such a high priest [Jesus] was fitting for us: holy, guiltless, undefiled, separated from sinners . . .   1 Peter 1:19   . . . as of a faultless and pure lamb, the blood of Christ.   1 Peter 2:22  who did not sin, “neither was deceit found in his mouth.”   1 John 3:5  You know that he was revealed to take away our sins, and in him is no sin.   The holy Son of God has never lusted. The Son of God is as sexually innocent as a newborn. Moreover, in heaven, where he is now enthroned, there is no sex.   Even for humans who are currently very sexual, their sex drive is temporary. It usually slowly rises from nothing as a newborn to intense in their late teens and early twenties and then gradually fades until it completely disappears in the next life.   Mark 12:25  For when they will rise from the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.   It is there, in that place where there is no sex, that the bodies of all deemed worthy of heaven will be like that of the eternal Son of God:   1 Corinthians 15:42-44  So also is the resurrection of the dead. . . . It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. . . .   1 Corinthians 15:49  And just as we have borne the liken ess of the earthly man, so shall we bear the likeness of the man from heaven. (NIV) Philippians 3:20-21  For our citizenship is in heaven, from where we also wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ; who will change the body of our humiliation to be conformed to the body of his glory . . .   1 John 3:2  . . . when he is revealed, we will be like him; for we will see him just as he is.   One of the similarities between the bodies of people in heaven and that of our risen Lord is lack of sex drive. He has no sexual feelings. Jesus has a resurrected body and resurrected people do not have sexual relations.   Jesus declaration that there is no sex in the next life makes sense. Since there is no death in the next life, there is no need to reproduce to replace those who have died. And in a world of perfect love and fellowship, exclusive relationships, such as marriage, would be out of place, and emotionally needless. And no marriage implies no sex, since over and over the Bible teaches that sex must be limited exclusively to marriage and that sex creates an exclusive relationship by making two people one.   Moreover, Jesus said what he did about the next life because of this question:   Mark 12:19-23  Teacher, Moses wrote to us, ‘If a man’s brother dies, and leaves a wife behind him, and leaves no children, that his brother should take his wife, and raise up offspring for his brother.’ There were seven brothers. The first took a wife, and dying left no offspring. The second took her, and died, leaving no children behind him. The third likewise; and the seven took her and left no children. Last of all the woman also died. In the resurrection, when they rise, whose wife will she be of them? For the seven had her as a wife.   Although the scenario concocted by the Sadducee was stretched to humorous extremes by being repeated seven times. It was, nevertheless, a possibility orchestrated by God himself. Under Old Testament law, if a man dies, leaving a childless widow, his unmarried brother was divinely expected to marry her (Deuteronomy 25:5-10). So the question itself suggests that God has ordained that marriage be restricted to this side of eternity. And if there is no marriage in heaven, there is no sex and resurrected bodies will have no need of sexual organs. What makes this particularly relevant to the Jesus is that, as indicated in Scriptures already cited, Jesus’ resurrected body is the prototype of all resurrected bodies. He became flesh and blood like us so that we could gain a resurrected body like his.   We might find it perplexing, frustrating or even embarrassing, but for all of us the unavoidable reality that a basic feature of fear is that it is stubbornly resistant to rational thought. No matter how intelligent we are, fear bypasses our intellect and spreads from one disturbing experience to safe things that bear a superficial similarity.   Logically, if the all-powerful Lord were an abuser, keeping our distance from him would be no protection. Like no one else, however, the Almighty is worthy of infinite power because he will never abuse that power, but will use it for your good.   Some people were blessed with parents who were non-sexual with them and were continually warm, gentle, compassionate, supportive, faithful and forgiving. Such people are ideally placed to understand God’s love, not merely intellectually, but on an emotional and subconscious level. The sad reality, however, is that, for many of us, our backgrounds are a handicap rather than a help. Our presumptions about God’s love for us are alarmingly warped, both by our shallow understanding of God and by our observations and experiences of ‘love’ from other sources. Nevertheless, when alters push through their fear and get to know Jesus, they find in him the perfect father they have always craved and gain a father superior to any that those with more privileged backgrounds have ever enjoyed and they are blessed with deeper spiritual revelations.    Mary is another sexual abuse survivor with multiple personalities. She is single and in her twenties. Tragically, many abuse survivors marry before healing from their sexual abuse. The result is sheer torture for both survivors and their partners. To enter a rich, fulfilling marriage, Mary and her alters must reach the point where they can fully trust a man, physically. The following account shows Jesus working toward the healing Mary and her alters need in order to enjoy the full life he longs to bless her with – which most likely includes marriage.     As essential as human touch is for a child’s present and future well-being, it is just as essential that touch always be as warm, harmless and non-sexual as a teddy bear. Can Jesus offer this? How safe is he? People with Dissociative Identity Disorder have had their trust violated – often sexually, by people who seemed good and dependable – and are understandably terrified of a repeat, no matter how illogical it may seem.   Jesus is more than just purer than any other human. Nor does he merely exercise total, never-ending sexual restraint like no other man. Jesus is God. He is completely sexless.   As one of Mary’s alters, Little One, implied in the  previous webpage , (which is best read before proceeding) Jesus particularly focuses on doing for alters what would be inappropriate or too risky for friends or counselors to attempt. Only Jesus is totally safe and pure and never gets his timing wrong. He never abuses. He is always innocent and non-sexual. In the following incidents, Little One always felt safe. Nothing turned bad and with Jesus nothing ever would. To be with Jesus is the safest place in the universe.   Among the tragedies that sexual abuse typically brings is that something innocent becomes so associated with past trauma that anything remotely like that innocent thing triggers terror, revulsion or some other unpleasant reaction. In the following account we see Jesus beginning to undo the damage by returning something innocent back to the status of harmless fun.   The following account is by Star, another of Mary’s alters. The instant Star received Christ’s salvation, her pristine innocence was established spiritually. Now Jesus is healing her by progressively restoring her innocence psychologically, so that in her mind and instinctive reactions she is like someone who had never been hurt. Never would Jesus cross the line. He is not only himself the personification of innocence, his goal is the restoration of innocence in all of his children. He is in the process of so fully undoing Mary’s sexual past that when she is ready for marriage, he will, as the proudest of fathers, present her to her husband-to-be as a chaste virgin, both spiritually and psychologically.   The following is from Star, written several days after the previous webpage.   Grantley Morris I was struggling a lot and Jesus wanted to talk to me. I was lying in bed and Little One was in another room. He sat on the side of my bed and we talked. It was so cool because he made me feel much better about things.   Then, out of nowhere, Little One came running through the room and tackled Jesus from behind, landing on his back. He flipped her over his shoulder. She landed on my bed and he started tickling her. She was laughing so hard. Jesus was laughing, too, and it made me laugh. After a while he let her breathe a bit, and then started playing with the end of her shirt. That scared me. Until then, I had been having so much fun, but raising her bottom of her shirt a little made me very uncomfortable. I almost ran away, but I’m glad I didn’t. He lifted the shirt just enough to blow on her belly. She screamed with laughter and played with his hand. She obviously felt delightfully safe but I was scared. I didn’t understand. I didn’t like him doing that. According to my experience, this is how abuse starts. It starts innocent and then gets bad.   I asked Jesus to leave. I didn’t want him tucking me in or anything. I was shocked that he actually listened to me and left. If Jesus isn’t safe, why did he obey me, a little girl? Why was he so nice?   In the morning, Jesus came in, woke up Little One and then sat on my bed. He talked to me about what happened that night. He said that he would never do anything like what those men did to us. He had no interest in that and said that I am perfectly safe with him, just as Little One and Baby are. He said it was good of me to be protective of Little One and try to keep people from hurting her again. He said he was proud of me. He swore to me, on him being God, that he would never do anything sexual to us and would help us if anyone else ever tried to hurt any of us.   Then we got up and did things for the day, but what was cool was that he came in to talk to me again that night. He sat on my bed and told me how proud of me he was and how I had done such a good job in learning to trust him. We talked about some of my bad memories and he made me feel better. The memories don’t hurt as much now. He said we can talk about them again some other time.   Little One came running in and tried to pounce on Jesus again. He moved and she landed on my bed. Then he started to tickle her in an utterly pure, safe and non-sexual way. She really likes that. I sat there watching and he asked me to help him. So I started tickling her under her arms and then he blew on her belly again. This time I wasn’t as scared. She was fighting him away again and I grabbed her arms. Now she couldn’t use her hands when Jesus tickled her or blew on her belly. She just kicked her feet and laughed until she couldn’t breathe.   That’s when Jesus stopped tickling her and came after me. I wasn’t ready for it so he got me very easily. I tried to tickle him, but I couldn’t. I was laughing too hard. My face turned red and I hit him with my pillow. When he gave me a break, Little One and I tackled him. It was so much fun. Then we took the pillows off the bed and started a pillow fight with him. We hit him a bunch of times before he made it to Little One’s bed to get her pillow. After we were all worn out, he sat with both of us and read us a story. Little One fell asleep leaning on him and I was close to sleep, too, so he stopped and tucked us in for the night.   I think you will be excited for me, Grantley, about what I am about to say and I hope you are proud of me. I know Jesus is. I had a horrible nightmare. I was tossing and turning all over. I woke Little One and she got Jesus for me.   I felt someone touch my arm and I screamed. When I opened my eyes, there was Jesus and Little One looking so sad for me. Jesus had a look of love deep in his eyes. I was scared and started crying. Little One left the room, but Jesus put out his arms. I crawled out of bed and into his lap. He balled me up like he does Little One and put his head on top of mine. He rocked me while I cried. He asked me what my nightmare was about and I told him between sobs. He just rocked me and held me tight until I stopped crying.   After a few minutes, I got out of his lap, but he didn’t look at all angry. My father used to yell at me and call me mean names if I woke up with nightmares. But Jesus was so loving. He just wanted me to feel better and be able to sleep. He tucked me back in bed and wiped my face with his hand. That’s when I saw the tear in his eye, too. He sat on my bed, handed me my teddy bear, kissed my forehead, and rubbed my back until I fell asleep again.   As funny as this is for me to say this: I think I am beginning to love Jesus. He is very nice and I feel safe with him now, even when he blows on Little One’s belly.   I asked him if he thought I was stupid for having a teddy bear and he said he thought I was very smart for keeping it because it helped me to feel safe and that was all that mattered.   Since that night, I have felt much better about him and I’ve sat in his lap with Little One sometimes. I let him tickle me and I will chase him around with Little One. I can give him hugs and I’m not afraid to cry in front of him anymore. He wipes away my tears and replaces them with his kisses.   I like spending time with him and he makes me feel good and safe wherever we go. I still get scared and he is okay with that. He gives me space and leaves me alone when I am struggling and need it. But now I know that I can come to him even when I am scared, when I have bad dreams, or just want to be loved. He is there for me whenever I call him.   I try not to ask for too much. He says I can ask as much as I need or want and he will give me what is best, but I’m still scared he will get tired of me. He says he won’t, but for some reason, that doesn’t take away my fear. I’ve never had anyone stay in my life for long. They are around for a few years, maybe, then they move on. I am trying to believe him and not listen to my heart, but the fear is there and sometimes it gets the best of me. He says that’s when I need to run to him the most, but I haven’t yet.   He still lets me go off by myself and waits for me to call him or come back. Then he gives me a big hug and says he is proud of me. I like it when he says that. It makes me feel good. I feel important. Someone not only notices, but cares to pay attention and stick around for a little while.   Mary [Star’s host] is having serious problems at work. I told Jesus all the things that scare me about that and he said that I don’t need to worry about it because he knows what he wants to see happen. He wouldn’t tell me what that was, but he assured me he has a plan. He also said that these fears will come back and all I need to do is remind myself of what he said or come find him again and he will tell me as many times as I need to hear it. He promised he won’t ever get tired of telling me. Jesus really understands me.   Footnote:  In an e-mail a little later, Little One wrote: At times Jesus has told Star that he isn’t a man or a woman. He is a spirit and he will never, ever hurt us like our daddy did. He wants to be to us what a daddy is supposed to be for a little girl. We call him Dada Jesus. We also call Father God, Papa. Papa’s face lights up with joy and he has a huge smile. To see Papa so happy makes my heart glow just like his face. Papa is fun. He’s amazing!   Related Pages Alters Meet Father God  About how safe and kind Jesus and Father God are Afraid of God: Fear of God or Fearing Jesus & Healing Sex Abuse or Dissociative Identity Disorder About Multiple Personality Disorder: Healing your “Inner Child” The Positive Benefits of Multiple Personalities: Does Multiple Personality Disorder Create a Superior Brain? Pages by Alters: “I Thought I Was the Opposite Sex!”  Coping With All the Confusion of Being an Alter (Insider) God’s Love for Alters  A Word from Jesus to an Alter, For all Alters   Free help in the full recovery of survivors (male and female) of all forms of sexual interference: Comfort, Understanding and Healing for Abuse Survivors God’s Extreme Patience With Alters: “I Kept Trying to Force God to Reject Me”  Encouraging testimony of a man with D.I.D (alters not specifically mentioned, but feature strongly) General Help: How to Comfort the Hurting

Everyone’s Guide to Basic Counseling   *   Biblical   *   Practical   *   Essential   A First Aid Course For Emotions     People often find to their horror that the most agonizing aspect of a painful trial is the well-meaning remarks and advice of fellow Christians. But you can avoid the traps and be the Christlike comfort to hurting people that you long to be.   Author’s Background   I enrolled in psychology at university, imagining it would help me in Christian ministry. I quickly discovered, however, that there is power in Jesus that behavioral science could never approach. I believe if ever I have been able to help anyone, it is because I put to one side my academic training and relied upon the Lord Jesus.   I am not opposed to psychology. I majored in the subject. I am disappointed, however, whenever I or any Christian fails to bring the power of God into a situation because we trust our training, or intuition, or experience or even our unaided ability to apply scriptural truth, instead of throwing ourselves upon the infinitely superior resources of Jesus Christ.   Overview   Soul surgery can be as critical and delicate as brain surgery. With a little common sense, however, there is much we can safely do. It’s like the way most people could walk into a hospital and assist patients. Without any training they could spread cheer in the wards and find many valuable ways of bringing comfort. Few would be so silly as to spoil their good work by attempting surgery or prescribing medication. It’s having the sense to know their limits that would make them an asset and not a danger. So in this overview, in addition to discovering valuable ways in which we can offer comfort and support, we will identify the boundaries within which we can safely labor.   This webpage not only explores what I believe is the best approach to counseling but, most importantly, it explains the scriptural reasons for this approach. If, however, you are looking for something briefer, go to the  List of Practical Suggestions .     Gently Does It   If you were treating the open wounds of accident victims you would realize that the most gentle, well-meaning touch could send patients reeling. You would not be offended if someone you were seeking to help lashed out in pain with almost involuntary action. You would half expect it. But imagine the confusion if the wounds were invisible and the person looked uninjured. Consider the further complication if in that person’s experience everyone who had tried to help (and how does he know you will be any different?) had in their ignorance done little but inflict pain.   That’s the norm for someone who is hurting inside.   Emotionally wounded people cannot help but be highly sensitive. Words hit them like whips. It is vital that they be treated verbally with the careful tenderness you would use if you were dressing gaping physical wounds. Once we understand the seriousness of emotional wounds, it’s surprisingly easy to employ the Christlike graces of turning the other cheek and using the soft answer that turns away wrath. When we realize an outburst is just the pain talking, we no longer take it to heart. Only a fool takes personally the actions of someone drunk with pain.   ‘ . . . cry and you cry alone’   In his greener, younger days, Dr Neil T. Anderson was summoned to a hospital waiting room where a couple from his church sat in shock as their son teetered between life and death. They sat and sat, until finally the news broke. The boy was dead. At that crucial moment words treacherously abandoned Neil, fleeing like guilt-stricken cowards from a decisive battle. The parents sobbed. Neil could do nothing but cry helplessly with them. Finally he dragged himself home in utter defeat. Years later he met the couple again and one of their first acts was to profusely thank Neil for the way he had so powerfully ministered to them on the night they lost their son. Neil was stunned. He had been sure he had failed them. Instead, he had done one of the greatest things one human can do for another.   We often achieve most when we think we are achieving nothing, and achieve nothing when we imagine we could teach Solomon a thing or two.   Much heartache could be averted in the body of Christ if, like Neil, we could learn to “mourn with those who mourn” (Romans 12:15) – not necessarily shed tears, but unashamedly embrace the pain of others, and let it be obvious that “if one part [of Christ’s body] suffers, every part suffers with it” (1 Corinthians 12:26).   To be in physical or emotional pain is one of the loneliest experiences on earth. And yet at that time when we need them most, many people flee from us. Some desert us because we have outlived our usefulness when we can no longer give them a fun time. Thankfully, there aren’t too many “friends” like that, but we imagine their numbers are more inflated because we confuse them with the next category. Many shun us because they feel awkward. They would love to help but they are afraid they will say the wrong thing and add to our pain.   A huge contributor both to Christians saying the wrong thing and fearing that they will do so is that we usually feel duty-bound to concoct words of wisdom or quote Scriptures. Rarely is that what a hurting person is hoping for.   We don’t see Jesus asking his disciples for advice, but we often see him asking them for his company. For a glimpse of how much this meant to him, consider his disappointment that they could not stay awake while he prayed in the garden.   Advice is cheap. Love is precious.   Advice a vice?   For most of us, the slightest hint of anyone having a need or problem, ignites within us an explosive yearning to give advice. Yet of all options, giving advice is usually the least effective and most dangerous. When we are on the giving end, we usually consider advice-giving to be a virtue. The world would be saved much pain, however, if Christians considered advice-giving a vice.   Giving advice is taking upon ourselves the role of a superior. Often, it is selfishly inflicting our opinion on a vulnerable person. And it is usually being judgmental. It is considering people to be ignorant – and so we think they need our hallowed wisdom to enlighten them. And it is usually judging them of sin, prayerlessness, lack of faith, not praising God enough, or some other failure such that we imagine they need us to instruct them to change.   Wordless Help   I’m a writer. I spend most of my life at my desk shut away from people, having no personal contact with those that I long to help. Usually they live on the other side of the planet. In my situation I have nothing to offer but words, and yet even I know that we often overvalue words and undervalue what might seem simpler things.   I have a dear friend who suffers horrifically with bi-polar disorder (manic-depressive). She writes of two life-changing moments:   I had gone into the metro station, planning to jump in front of the train. I felt useless to my family, useless to God and damned. I was in utter despair and longed for death. As I stood, watching for the train, I turned and there was a woman standing beside me. She smiled at me. It seemed her eyes were full of the love of Christ. After seeing that smile I could no longer think of death, and I went home to my family with renewed hope, although still fighting terrible despair.   About a decade after that life-saving smile I suffered an extended period of spiritual torture. I mistakenly, but strongly, felt that I had lost my Lord. One day I was sitting in my doctor’s waiting room, in utter despair. In my misery, I could not take my eyes off the floor. A woman bent down so that I could see her and she smiled the same kind of smile at me.   Quick to listen   We almost inevitably overvalue our advice and undervalue our companionship. And the biggest part of good companionship is being a warm listener. And a significant part is simply being there. The perfect friend, however, remains sensitive to the person's need for space, which is likely to change with the person's mood.   “Take note of this:” emphasizes James 1:19, “everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry.” This describes the most vital of all counseling skills and we should give top priority to honing it. It is significant that this verse indicates God expects this skill not of a favored few, but of everyone.  Quick to listen  gives the impression of having acted this way so often that listening, rather than reacting or butting in, has become our instinctive reaction, just as anger once was for most of us. Scripture is pleading that we co-operate with the Holy Spirit in a radical reprogramming of our natural responses. We need to think constantly in terms of offering compassion and encouragement until these become an automatic response, with judgment and advice-giving being totally displaced from our thinking.   Listen intently. Hang on to people’s every word. Every Christian is highly significant, and yet we are each plagued by an insidious enemy who doesn’t want us to know it. By valuing what a Christian says, you counter the devil’s attempts to undermine the person.   Years ago I discovered that whenever I’m speaking with someone, there are two important parties – the Lord and the person I’m talking with – and I need to listen carefully to both. That’s right. When I’m conversing I don’t even rate as one of the the two most important parties.   How much you listen shows how much you value the other person. Often, how much you talk shows how full of yourself you are. And it is not just how much you listen but  how  you listen that shows how important someone is to you. True listening is not sterile silence. It is savoring and feeling a person’s every word.   The most difficult task of all is distinguishing between what, for the other person, is comfortable silence and what is uncomfortable silence. Often we should endure silences that are to us uncomfortable but are comfortable to the other person. When, in the other person’s perception, silences begin to become uncomfortable, then chatting can become valuable, provided we stay alert for the affect our words our having. Such chatting can give people get a tiny vacation by helping to get their minds off the things that are causing them grief.   The book of Proverbs highlights the importance of listening to people. Proverbs 18:13  He who answers before listening – that is his folly and his shame. Proverbs 18:17  The first to present his case seems right, till another comes forward and questions him.   The power of silence   As suggested by Neil Anderson’s experience, we would usually do so very much better if we made our presence do the talking, rather than our flapping gums. We see this vividly portrayed by Job’s friends.   “When they saw him from a distance, they could hardly recognize him; they began to weep aloud, and they tore their robes and sprinkled dust on their heads. Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights. No-one said a word to him, because they saw how great his suffering was (Job 2:12-13).”   They wept. They mourned. They sat with Job in the dirt, in shocked grief, speechless, for seven long days. Then, like so very many of us, they became impatient. Beginning to doubt the effectiveness of their invaluable support, they felt pressured to take over God’s job. Tragically, this ruined their perfect start.   Reeling in dazed bewilderment, Job had not a clue why he had been hit by disaster after disaster. His visitors had the unique opportunity of offering comfort to God’s friend, as people who fully understood his humanity and shared in his frustration and knew the emptiness of staggering through life with unanswered questions. Instead of filling their divinely appointed role of comforting Job as fellow mortals, they chose the satanically preferred alternative of claiming Godlike knowledge. Each wanted to become their friend’s spiritual superior, trying to help from above, rather than helping from his side. Not only was their quest to fill God’s role doomed to fail, they lost their opportunity to support Job as his equal.   Like Job’s friends, we soon tire of being in the dirt with a complaining brother. We want to dust ourselves off and show that we’re above that sort of thing.   Look at Jesus for inspiration. Forsaking his divine privileges, from the time he became a fetus until he was a plaything for Roman thugs, Jesus knew constant humiliation. In contrast to what was his by right, he became physically vulnerable, weak, tempted, subject to pain, and as the final disgrace, rejected even by God.   Matthew 27:46   About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’ – which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’   We often see him tired, thirsty, in tears, impoverished, ridiculed. Scripture stresses that Christ had to become like those he was called to help. Hebrews 2:14 ,  17-18  Since then the children have shared in flesh and blood, he also himself in the same way partook of the same . . . Therefore he was obligated in all things to be made like his brothers, that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make atonement for the sins of the people. For in that he himself has suffered being tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted. Hebrews 4:15   For we don’t have a high priest who can’t be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, but one who has been in all points tempted like we are, yet without sin. Hebrews 5:1-2  For every high priest, being taken from among men, is appointed for men in things pertaining to God, that he may offer both gifts and sacrifices for sins. The high priest can deal gently with those who are ignorant and going astray, because he himself is also surrounded with weakness.   What equipped the Son of God for his exalted ministry was his lowering himself, stripping himself of divine rights and status. We, however, are satanically tempted by the delusion that acting the exact opposite to Christ – exalting ourselves and assuming Godlike status – empowers us to minister. Nothing could be further off track.   Consider our Savior from the time of his arrest until his resurrection. He had never been so humiliated; his apparent inadequacy never more exposed. He said little. And did even less. He was simply  there . And yet his mere presence achieved so much more than every word that has ever been spoken. Nothing we could do could ever compare. Nevertheless, our Savior told us to take up our cross and follow him. Next time we are tempted to play God, let’s do it Christ’s way. “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers” (1 John 3:16). Talk is cheap. Love costs.   Your divinely appointed role   As amazing as it seems, not even the Son of God could claim for himself his High Priestly ministry. Although it was essential that Christ lower himself to the level of those he longed to help, neither that, nor anything else he did, could give him a ministry. He had to be ordained by Father God for the task. Hebrews 5:4   No-one takes this honor upon himself; he must be called by God, just as Aaron was.  (5)  So Christ also did not take upon himself the glory of becoming a high priest. But God said to him, ‘You are my Son; today I have become your Father.’  (6)  And he says in another place, ‘You are a priest for ever, in the order of Melchizedek.’   Job’s friends didn’t understand this holy principle. Their mistake was like that of King Saul. He became impatient with the seeming lack of progress and decided to take things into his own hands by assuming a role he was not ordained of God to take. Saul was already a high achiever who was doing much for the people of God as their king. Not content with this, however, he took upon himself the role of priest, and offered a sacrifice. He succeeded only in displeasing the Lord and by being replaced by “a man after God’s own heart.” I guess most of us have wondered what special quality this expression refers to. The context suggests “a man after God’s own heart” simply means someone who would not make Saul’s mistake of venturing beyond his divinely ordained role.   We, too, can make the mistake of undervaluing our role as someone’s friend, confidant, sympathizer, and equal. That’s a lofty role that not even angels or God himself can fully fill. Our Lord has entrusted so much to us. Only we, for instance, can give a hug. Yet we could let the Accuser convince us we are not doing enough and that things are moving too slowly. We could conclude that we need to exalt ourselves above our friend by trying to become his/her teacher.   But you are not to be called ‘Rabbi’, for you have only one Master and you are all brothers. . . . . Nor are you to be called ‘teacher,’ for you have one Teacher, the Christ. The greatest among you will be your servant. For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted (Matthew 23:8-12).”   “Not many of you should presume to be teachers . . .  because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly. We all stumble in many ways. . . . . the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire . . . . It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell. . . . . no man can tame the tongue. . . .  (James 3:1-8).”   Dare you rebuke God’s child?   If, without parental permission, you corrected someone else’s child, you would be in grave danger of incurring the wrath of the parents. Never forget that every Christian has a very protective Father. How careful we must be not to encroach on to God’s territory without his express permission!   A woman who has suffered much at the receiving end of Christian do-gooders, confided, “None of the people I’ve talked with thought they were being judgmental; they were simply trying to help.” She believes far too many Christians try to do the Holy Spirit’s work. “Our job, she concluded, is to bear each other’s burdens, not solve them.”   What are the practical implications?   Even in what seems minor aspects of service, such as off-hand remarks to friends, we need to be so cautious, always alert to the Lord’s directions. When you are itching to give advice, remember this inspired prayer, “Set a guard over my mouth, O LORD; keep watch over the door of my lips” (Psalms 141:3) because “Life and death are in the power of the tongue,” (Proverbs 18:21).    We must always avoid exalting ourselves above a fellow believer, and especially avoid acting as if we have authority that we are not ordained of God to exercise. “Be devoted to one another in brotherly love. Honor one another above yourselves (Romans 12:10).” In the words of Jesus, “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant,” (Matthew 20:26). Authentic Christian ministry is radically different from the world’s way.    We should not despise the power and privilege of being at the same level as the person we minister to. To prevent us from falling for the Accuser’s lies, it is helpful to recall all that the Son of God did to bring himself to the level of those he ministers to. It was this that empowered him to minister to a degree that Almighty God could never have otherwise achieved. Most excitingly, this level of seeming weakness and limitation that Christ went to such efforts to bring himself to, is the very level which, by virtue of our humanity, we are already at. We are divinely placed for powerful ministry. No wonder Paul exclaimed, “I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong,” (2 Corinthians 12:10).   It’s not that giving advice is never a godly option, but at the very least we need to purge our motives and check thoroughly with God to ensure we have his approval to speak. Continued ...

Relating to People & Multiple Personalities Of itself, having multiple personalities (Dissociative Identity Disorder) presents many challenges. These are greatly multiplied by the fact that the traumas that caused the Dissociative Identity Disorder (D.I.D.) have additional negative consequences. The awful experiences typically crush self-esteem, affect physical health, cause Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (P.T.S.D.), and so on. And if, as is often the case, the trauma was sexual, there is a whole range of sexual implications as well.   People with D.I.D. commonly have at least one protector alter who is excessively wary and protective. Likewise, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder causes one to repeatedly see danger where there is none. Of course, I do not wish to further inflame fears and unnecessary caution. Nevertheless, there are dangers and need for caution that can be missed and so I need to alert you to these, even though I am reluctant to because I do not wish to contribute even slightly to anyone being more on edge than necessary.   For all of us, there is a need for caution in relationships. Not everyone is safe, or understanding, or able to be trusted with a secret. Inexperience renders children particularly vulnerable. One consequence of Dissociative Identity Disorder is that parts of a person are far less experienced than the age of their bodies suggests. A particularly tragic reason for people with D.I.D. needing to be cautious is that ignorance in the general population about D.I.D. means that the average person often has weird ideas about the matter.   Even among people who should know better, there are those who confuse alters with demons or make other serious blunders. This compels me to always warn people not to tell anyone they have D.I.D. without first getting the person to fully reveal his/her views about it. You might say, “Have you heard about people with multiple personalities? What do you think about it?” Then after they have given their answer you could say something like, “If someone told me they had multiple personalities, what should I do and say?”   Provided you get the person talking about it for long enough, raising the subject in casual conversation as if the matter were of little concern to you is often all it takes to get a clear idea of the person’s attitude and to determine whether he or she has a sufficiently accurate and non-judgmental understanding to be trusted. (For a little more on this, see  Letting People Know that you have Dissociative Identity Disorder: The need for Caution .) Any Christian with Dissociative Identity Disorder deserves to be revered as a hero. For such a person to be isolated, and perhaps even ostracized, is not just cruelly devastating and humiliating, but outrageously unfair. And to suffer this at the hands of know-alls who claim to have the heart of God is appalling beyond words. For anyone reeling under this, the temptation to feel sorry for oneself is excruciating.   The sad truth, however, is that no matter how misjudged people with Dissociative Identity Disorder sometimes are, they have no claim to being the only ones treated shamefully. With sickening frequency, even simple physical illness is enough for some people filled with the beauty of Christ to end up accused of inadequate faith or even of secret sin.   Appalling numbers of innocent people have been presumed guilty of vile acts and treated atrociously because of false accusations. Even Joseph, the Old Testament hero of impeccable integrity and especially favored of God, was thrown in jail, wrongly maligned of the hideous crime of raping another man’s wife – and this was after being callously betrayed by his own brothers who sold him into slavery. Moses led an entire nation out of slavery and yet they turned on him and almost stoned him (Exodus 17:4). Likewise, when David was at his lowest – having saved his nation by defeating Goliath and yet hunted as the nation’s most wanted with a price on his head, and then having all this possessions plundered and his loved ones kidnapped – his most faithful companions considered grabbing rocks and stoning him to death (1 Samuel 30:6). Later, his beloved son, Absalom, tried to steal the throne from him and literally raised an army to wage war against him (2 Samuel, chapters 15-18). The Bible is filled with good people suffering unjustly. Hebrews 11:35-38 speaks of people highly esteemed by God who, “. . .  were tortured  . . . Some faced jeers and flogging, while still others were chained and put in prison. They were stoned; they were sawed in two; they were put to death by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated – the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and holes in the ground.” In the words of Stephen, just moments before he was martyred, “Was there ever a prophet your fathers did not persecute? They even killed those who predicted the coming of the Righteous One. And now you have betrayed and murdered him,” (Acts 7:52). And we all know of righteous Job, highly esteemed by God, who lost everything including the lives of his children. His closest friends came to ‘comfort’ him by accusing him of sin.   Nevertheless, whether it be because of D.I.D. or something else, being mistreated and misunderstood by those who should know better, forges a bond of exquisite fellowship with the Lord of glory, beyond what others have any hope of grasping. Jesus understands. Moreover, through our suffering we better understand the anguish of the breathtakingly perfect, supremely exalted Lord of lords who was despised and rejected by esteemed spiritual leaders and by those touted as being so holy. Even long before his arrest, Jesus was misunderstood, slandered and hated far more frequently than all but the most careful Bible readers realize.    Jesus’ Ill Treatment   Everyone familiar with the Christmas story knows how, even when still in the womb, his father almost rejected Jesus (Matthew 1:18-19). Then the most precious and only truly innocent human was treated as such an unwanted inconvenience that, after many rejections, he had to be born in grossly unhygienic conditions surrounded by the stench of manure in an animal hovel not fit for human habitation. His parents were forced to flee even from that and become refugees in a foreign country. It was not that his parents were in any danger but because, even as baby, people wanted Jesus killed.   The stir Jesus caused when he was twelve (Luke 2:42-50) was not a one-off, but typical of how misunderstood he was, even by his own family and his closest friends for the rest of his time on earth:   Luke 9:57-58  When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, “He is out of his mind.”   John 7:5  For even his own brothers did not believe in him.   Even John the Baptist sent him a message saying, “Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?” (Matthew 11:2-3).   Whether they were drawn to him or despised him, to everyone around him, Jesus was an oddball. Even among his closest friends, he never fitted in. Much of the time he might as well have been an alien from another world. Even without his deliberately obscure parables (Matthew 13:10-15), his dearest friends found him as unintelligible as a foreigner who knows only a few words of their language. The times when Jesus’ trusted disciples misunderstood him are too numerous to list exhaustively, but as I provide a few reminders, try to imagine the accumulative emotional cost this must have had on Jesus. He’s warning them about the Pharisees, and they think he’s telling them off for forgetting food. He’s saying Lazarus is dead and they think he’s indicating Lazarus’s health is improving. He’s telling them that serving God is more fulfilling than eating and they think he must have found food. He insists people must eat his flesh and drink his blood and most of his followers leave him in disgust and the few who remain are left reeling in bewilderment. He’s wanting to welcome mothers and babies and they think he finds them annoying. They are protesting their loyalty while he’s telling them they will all desert him.     Without even considering all those who rejected and despised him, Jesus must often have felt disconnected from everyone around him. It must have been like a knife twisting in his stomach, causing him to feel painfully alone even in a crowd.   Not just in his early childhood and toward the end of his life on earth, but from almost the very inception of his ministry, people wanted to kill him (John 8:37,40,59). This applied not only to strangers in Jerusalem but even to the most devout people in his home town. Before he had a chance to become still more unpopular, those he had grown up with not only drove him out of town but tried to push him off a cliff so they could send him hurtling to his death (Luke 4:16-29).   Not only was Jesus continually criticized by strangers, enemies, and those closest to him, he was accused of breaking God’s holy law (the Sabbath, for instance) and even repeatedly (Matthew 9:34; 10:25; 12:24; Mark 3:21-22,30; Luke 11:15; John 7:20; 8:48,52; John 10:20) accused of being demon-possessed.   He did not just suffer racial discrimination – such as when an entire Samaritan village kicked him out of their village merely because he was on his way to Jerusalem (Luke 9:52-56) – but he was treated as inferior even by his fellow countrymen because he grew up in a low class area (John 1:46; 7:41,52).   He was tormented by the worst temptations. We are acquainted with what he endured at the point of starvation and later when his sweat was like blood in the Garden of Gethsemane and he told his disciples, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death” (Matthew 26:38). These, however, were just examples:   Luke 4:13  When the devil had finished all this tempting, he left him  [not forever but]   until an opportune time .   Hebrews 2:17-18  For this reason he had to be made like his brothers in every way . . . he himself suffered when he was tempted . . .   Hebrews 4:15   . . . we have one who has been  tempted in every way , just as we are . . . (Emphasis mine.)   Have you noticed the first few words in the following?   Matthew 4:5  Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple.   Who, according to this Scripture, took the holy Son of God to the top of the temple? It wasn’t Jesus’ doing, nor was it God’s. And consider this:   Matthew 4:8  Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor.   Everyone knows there is no mountain in the world from which one’s natural eyes can see “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor.” The devil not only somehow managed to get Jesus’ body where he wanted it to be, he thrust a vision into Christ’s very mind. This is akin to spiritual rape.   Long before his crucifixion, the holy Son of God suffered highly invasive attacks from the Evil One. He was victorious in the sense that he remained sinless and did not cave in to the attack but not in the sense that he was never attacked. In fact, during this time, and probably others Scripture did not bother to spell out, he suffered spiritual violation.   Hebrews 5:2  He is able to deal gently with those who are ignorant and are going astray, since he himself is subject to weakness.   We know of several instances when Jesus cried but, like everything else in the brief summaries that form the Gospels, countless other instances must have been left unmentioned. For example, the following is not spelled out in the Gospels:   Hebrews 5:7  During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with  loud cries and tears  . . . (Emphasis mine.)   It is easy to slip into taking Jesus for granted and forgetting who he really is. It is no small thing to be understood and approved of by the King of universe, the sole Judge of all humanity. One day, every other voice will be silenced. Every opinion differing from his will die in eternal shame.   I feel the need to recycle something I was moved to write elsewhere:   An athlete, in the midst of a record-breaking run, has never in his life been so fit and strong. Yet his pain-racked body may have never felt so weak. Likewise, in the midst of a spiritual trial, it is not uncommon to be stronger and yet feel weaker than ever before. And to fellow Christians you might seem hopeless. An ultra-marathon champion staggering up the final hill looks pathetic. A child could do better. Anyone not understanding what this man has gone through would shrink from him in disgust. Only someone with all the facts would be awed by his stamina as he stumbles on.   Consider Scott and his team, who struggled to the South Pole only to discover their honor of being the first to reach the Pole was lost forever. Amundsen had beaten them by about a month. To add to the futility, they endured further blizzards, illness, frostbite and starvation only to perish; the last three dying just a few miles from safety. Yet today their miserable defeat ending with death in frozen isolation, witnessed by not a living soul, is hailed as one on the greatest ever epics of human exploration and endurance.   Every fiber of my being is convinced that their glory is just a shadow of what you can achieve. Though you suffer in isolation and apparent futility, the depths of your trial known to no one on earth, your name could be blazed in heaven’s lights, honored forever by heaven’s throngs for your epic struggle with despair, illness, bereavement, or whatever. The day is coming when what is endured in secret will be shouted from the housetops. Look at Job: bewildered, maligned, misunderstood; battling not some epic foe but essentially common things – a financial reversal, bereavement, illness; – not cheered on by screaming fans, just booed by some one-time friends. If even on this crazy planet Job is honored today, I can’t imagine the acclaim awaiting you when all is revealed. Your battle with life’s miseries can be as daring as David’s encounter with Goliath. Don’t worry that others don’t understand this at present. One day they will. And that day will never end.   One of the tragic consequences of being sexually violated during one’s tender years is that it seriously interferes with one’s ability to discern who is safe and trustworthy and who is not. It is heart-breaking how common it is for survivors of child sex abuse to fear people who are safe and would help them and yet trust those who are dangerous.   A related danger is that abuse survivors have usually been starved of love and attention and have low self-esteem which causes them not only to be desperate for love but to set low standards in who they imagine would be willing to marry or even befriend them. They commonly do not consider themselves worthy of someone who treats them with gentleness and respect and basic kindness and finding someone who treats them this way could be so contrary to their experience that it makes them suspicious and think that the person must be fake and trying to deceive. Another serious concern is that sexual predators are skilled at detecting people who are vulnerable to exploitation. These factors combine to magnify the danger that even after escaping the nightmare of their childhood abuse they will end up in an abusive relationship as adults, unless they are very careful.   Yet another complicating factor is that alters know only a fraction of what the whole person knows. This can have serious implications. Unknown to you, there could be a part of you that has ended up deliberately or accidentally quarantined from any awareness of the unpleasant side of sexual abuse and from any awareness of it being morally wrong but is only aware of pleasurable sexual feelings and that sex brings attention and approval. Even more common, are alters who believe they are little and physically too weak to resist any abuser and that no amount of screaming or whatever will reduce the amount of abuse but will only produce more violence. It could well be that such alters remain hidden within you so that you do not know they are there but they are likely to be triggered to come to the fore in the presence of a former abuser, or someone with some features that remind the alter of the abuser. When such an alter takes over, you might lose awareness of what is happening and so be unable to intervene. This can render relating to former abusers far more dangerous than you consciously realize. Avoiding them is important, even though doing so can be very awkward when they are family friends or relatives.   There are vital reasons why Christians should not date non-Christians. See  Dating Non-Christians.  Regrettably, this by no means implies that all Christians are safe to date. Appallingly large numbers of so-called Christians are so deluded by the immorality of present-day western society that they are not defiantly opposed to pre-marital sex or they lack the steely self-control needed to repel temptation if an alter acted seductively.   Moreover, to marry before being healed sexually ends up being torturous for both partners. I strongly advise against marrying or exposing oneself to the possibility of sexual involvement by being alone with someone until being well advanced on the long journey toward full healing. A casual glance at divorce statistics will confirm that it is typical for us humans to think ourselves more healed and more prepared for marriage than we are. I know of no way that anyone with D.I.D. can be certain that they have discovered every alter within. This is quite an issue because one could be unaware of alters who despise the person you intend to marry.   Something to be aware of if you have D.I.D. is that not only is it possible for another alter to do something without your knowledge, the danger doubles when relating in an unsupervised way to someone else who has D.I.D. It is not impossible for alters that neither host is even aware of, to relate to each other in an unsafe way. For example, two women might think themselves completely heterosexual, having no knowledge of highly sexualized alters within them that are vulnerable to same-sex attraction and do not even realize that they are married. Another issue is that people with D.I.D. have a tendency to form high dependency relationships that could even result in stalking. Even if you are sure of yourself, how can you be sure of the other person?   There is no need to get paranoid about remote possibilities but a little caution and setting some safe boundaries is wise.   A dear friend of mine, e-mailed me about another need for caution. I considered it so useful that I sought his permission to quote him. He wrote:   I recently met one of my friend’s alters. This particular alter was pretty aggressive, but what caught me a touch off guard was that she knew me, and had “dirt” with which to criticize me since I had previously shared much with my friend in confidence.   This woman is one of my Facebook friends. A couple of days ago, I posted a Bible verse on Facebook, and mentioned how powerfully this verse had impacted my life. The first person to post a comment was my friend’s protector alter. I recognized her right away. She didn’t swear up a storm like before (phew!), but was still aggressive. Fortunately, in this case everybody (including myself) agreed with what the alter wrote. However, within the hour, my friend had permanently deleted her Facebook account, and e-mailed me privately to say she had done so. Such extreme action got me thinking, though, and you know what? I agree with her. I think she did the right thing – for several reasons.   * For her own protection   * For the protection of her alters   * For the protection of her friends   I can see Facebook being a very dangerous place for someone with D.I.D. to hang out and especially dangerous for alters. An alter can post on other people’s walls, in the name of the host, for example. Often, this won’t be a problem. In fact, knowing what I know now, I realize my friend’s alters have been posting on her Facebook page for quite a while. Her friends just kind of laughed it off as her being silly or something. But even being laughed at can deeply hurt an alter. I can see how even something harmless can quickly become harmful, especially for alters.   I have over 600 Facebook friends, Within minutes of that alter posting on my wall, I had, I think, a dozen comments about that posting, several of which were directed at her. Suppose I happen to be away from the computer at the time, and an alter posts to my Facebook wall, where 600+ random people get a notification. Before you know it, a whole whack of people are responding to that alter on Facebook, saying who knows what, potentially injuring, ridiculing, confusing, or just all around hurting this poor alter who has stepped out but doesn’t know how to relate to people yet. It could also give my friend a bad name, because nobody knows that this is an alter writing. And who knows what the alter might have to say? An alter might do to others like this one had done to me shortly before – speak very critically, bringing up past things I had said and done, etc. And all it could come totally out of the blue. Even though I recognized what was going on when the alter lashed out at me, it was hard to handle. Imagine someone not having a clue, seeing their friend suddenly behaving this way!   Fortunately, I was able to recognize who was writing on my wall, and fortunately it wasn’t offensive at all. In fact, it was pretty profound what the alter wrote . . . this time. But the dangers suddenly became very apparent to my friend. So to protect her inner family and herself, she permanently deleted her Facebook account. My friend is incredibly smart, and so I’m assuming she realized what could happen if she just suspended the account – an alter can get up in the middle of the night and reactivate the account without the host even knowing about it.   I have told my friend’s alters that they can write to me ANYthing they want, ANY time they want. They have an open door with me, I don’t care if it’s offensive; if they gotta swear, that’s okay. I have emphasized over and over to them that I just want to hear from them. But this degree of openness with most other people could prove dangerous.   My friend had over 600 Facebook friends, the majority of whom are non-Christians and many of them are rather emotionally unstable. So an alter could write on any one of their walls, and those people can have hundreds to thousands of people on their pages who will see these writings and can respond.   Then there are little matters like someone I know who recently placed on Facebook photos of her jewelry, boasting about how many thousands of dollars it was all worth and capping it off by sharing she was going on vacation. Surprise, surprise her house was burgled while she was away and the only thing taken was her jewelry. It was almost as if they knew . . . Then there’s my wife’s relative who wrote a scathing Facebook message about someone and accidentally sent it to the very person she was slandering. If adults without D.I.D. can make such slips what might little alters who are inexperienced with Facebook do? – Grantley   My friend will undoubtedly make a new Facebook account in the future, but at this point in time, when she is still working through issues and trying to get wounded alters to come forward, I think she did the right thing. It’s important that alters come out and speak their mind freely, in a safe environment.   I might also suggest to those with D.I.D. that if you have a Facebook account and don’t want to delete it, get someone you can trust with your account. Hand them control over your Facebook account – have them change the password, so you do not know what it is. If you want to hop on Facebook for a while, and you’re in good shape to be doing so, your friend can temporarily change the password to something you know. When you’re finished, they then change the password back later on to a password you don’t know. You will also have to change the reference email address, otherwise you can just request a password reset. It involves a lot of trust with another understanding person, but I can see this system working.   Not So Scary   Yes, it is wise to be cautious but things usually work out. Alters are a very important part of a person and have skills that the host lacks. So if they take over for a while it could be because they are more capable at dealing with the specific matter at hand than the host.