Safe to Hope

Season 6: Episode 11 - Carya's Story Part 4

• Ann Maree Goudzwaard

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Through language rarely spoken in Christian spaces, Carya explains the difference between grooming and training, and how dissociation became the means of survival when life became unbearable. Carya invites listeners to see not only the trauma, but the mercy that allowed her to endure it. Her words call us, the Church to deeper understanding, and to become a place where stories like hers can be known and safely held.

Show Notes:

Safe To Hope is one of the resources offered through the ministry of Help[H]er, a 501C3 that provides training and resources for those ministering in one-another care, and advocacy for women in crisis in Christian organizations. Your donations make it possible for Help[H]er to serve as they navigate crises. All donations are tax-deductible.

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We value and respect conversations with all our guests. Opinions, viewpoints, and convictions may differ so we encourage our listeners to practice discernment. As well, guests do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of HelpHer. It is our hope that this podcast is a platform for hearing and learning rather than causing division or strife.

Please note, abuse situations have common patterns of behavior, responses, and environments. Any familiarity construed by the listener is of their own opinion and interpretation. Our podcast does not accuse individuals or organizations.

The podcast is for informational purposes and is not a substitute for professional care, diagnosis, or treatment.


This particular season of the Safe to Hope podcast is extremely difficult to hear. The 2025 Season is for mature audiences only. We advise listeners to apply an abundance of caution and discretion, and we warn those who might be significantly triggered. This story includes childhood sexual abuse, rape, sex trafficking, satanic, cultish, and ritualistic abuse. 

Throughout the 2025 season, we will occasionally insert breaks between segments of the story to provide listeners with an opportunity to “come up for air.” At other times, we will offer the audience an opportunity to skip over difficult subject matter. 

For more information about how to even process these stories, please listen to Episode 4 and Episode 6 on the Safe to Hope podcast.

We’ve asked our storyteller to describe the details she thinks will be helpful so the audience will understand the terror she endured. While this story is hard to listen to, living it was unbelievably hard and horrific. We bear witness as we listen. These stories are disturbing, and may even be confusing. One of our goals throughout this series is to help the audience understand (specifically knowing good from evil), but also have compassion, exhibit empathy, and acquire the ability to minister to those in need. 

While this type of abuse is less common than others, we listen for two good reasons. 

First, it is a reality that we need to be prepared to understand and respond to this kind of abuse. 

Second, even if we never encounter a similar situation this storyteller’s experience, it teaches us, in a concentrated way - about dynamics that are at work whenever people commit harm against others. 

We’ll be listening again to our storyteller Carya and, Carya, I know you’re planning on backing up today, taking us back to your childhood to explain the last major component of your abuse. Could you give us an overview of where you’re going today?

Carya
Over my past three storytelling episodes I’ve talked about family-controlled sex trafficking, satanic worship, ritualistic abuse, the central role of so-called Christian leaders in my abuse, and the fact that I was repeatedly and deliberately made pregnant once I was old enough. I’ve highlighted my father and my handlers, and mentioned my extended family, the “intentional community” that my family lived in and helped create, clients, other figures such as coaches or teachers, church elders, and countless others over the years who participated in rituals. In broad brushstrokes, I’ve covered over 30 years of my life, with both a childhood and an adulthood marked by complete subjugation to evil.

I’ve also talked about how my life looked from the outside, how what the world could see about me and my family and my church seemed to look just fine. Finally, I’ve commented on the fact that – despite the horrors that filled my nights and other hours – I did well in school, played sports, held down a job, owned a house, and nearly got a double PhD. Even more remarkably, through all the years of my abuse my faith held firm and even grew.

You must wonder how all of that could be true simultaneously. How could I have wanted anything to do with Jesus after being told over and over again that he liked what my rapists were doing to me in church sanctuaries? How could I believe, as my dad had convinced me to believe, that my purpose in life was to be raped, but also believe that God was good? You probably wonder how I could function at school or soccer in my childhood; at boarding school, college, and the Christian fellowships there; or graduate school or church in my adulthood – or anywhere, frankly – if this is what my life was like. It would be entirely reasonable for you to wonder how it is that I’m even sane. These are all very good questions, and the answers are an important part of the story. 

Up to now I’ve tried to address these questions briefly without derailing my narrative. My goal today is to finally focus on that part of the story, to help listeners understand how this could stay hidden, how my abusers were able to control me so thoroughly for so long, how I was able to function given everything I endured, and why I never tried to escape. Once I’ve done that, we can get to the good part, and in my next episode I’ll share the story of how God got me out. His rescue plan was in motion all along – only with Christ’s intervention could I have survived to get to a point where I could get out – but next time we’ll get to see him crawling into the enemy stronghold to set me free. Today, though, I’m going to try to better explain the dynamics that kept me trapped.

I’ll begin with a quick story: If you’d been standing part way up the street in the neighborhood of my family’s “intentional community” one particular summer night, you might have seen me emerge from our front door around 11pm, wearing my pjs and looking recently awakened. You could have watched me walk, alone, arms wrapped around myself, just a few houses up the street and then disappear into a neighbor’s house without knocking. If you’d stuck around, a few hours later you could have seen me come back down the street, now naked, barefoot, and bleeding, and go back inside my house. With each walk I knew I was going to be raped on the other end of it, yet no escort was required to force me to go where I was supposed to, or to do what I was supposed to once I got there. The reason is that I was very well trained.

I’ve mentioned several times that my dad, handlers, and others “trained” me for my abuse, and that I regularly endured entire training sessions where I was taught how to do whatever it was that was required of me with family, clients, or in rituals. Grooming, in a child sexual abuse context, is when a perpetrator develops a connection with a potential victim and cultivates it to earn their trust, dependence, and/or loyalty until the perpetrator can safely exploit the child. This concept is well-known, but training is not the same thing as grooming. None of my abusers needed to slowly and carefully gain access to me, nor to manipulate an emotional relationship with me in order to enable their abuse. My father had no need to “groom” his toddler daughter, since his wife and relatives all knew about and participated in her abuse. Clients coming to the appointment room had no need to “groom” the girl waiting for them there, since the appointments were not secret rendezvous that had to be kept hidden from her parents. My handlers had no need to “groom” the young woman given to them by her father and threatened with torture if she disobeyed.

I was not groomed, nursed carefully along until the moment a perpetrator could cross the line. My whole life was lived well beyond that line, and whenever I encountered an abuser for the very first time, he or she could just step immediately and brazenly over it. No, I wasn’t groomed, but I was deliberately, carefully, and constantly trained. The most significant and devastating training came from my father and my handlers, but in less intense ways many other perpetrators helped train me too.

To train a person (or an animal) is to teach them certain skills and behaviors, learned through practice over time. These skills and behaviors can be physical, mental, or even emotional. We can also train plants, by binding them to grow in particular ways, training a vine to grow in one direction but not another, or a bonsai tree to take on this shape but not that one. Another meaning of “train” involves fixing our attention or aim on something, perhaps training a camera at the end of a race to capture the photo finish, or training a gun at a door through which we expect an attacker to burst at any moment. 

When you’re house training your new puppy, you want him to gain the consistent skill of holding it until he’s outside. That’s the only behavior you’re interested in. But when you’re training your new puppy to win the Westminster Dog Show, you’re training everything about him – how he thinks, how he looks, how he acts, what he fixes his attention on – at every moment, all the time. My trainers worked to shape everything about me. With constant reinforcement, they taught me the physical, mental, and emotional skills necessary for them to use me the way they wanted, and for me to serve them the way they wanted. 

Ann Maree
Sometime during our workshops you started talking about this aspect of your abuse. And, yes, training in your circumstances, itself was abusive. But I called it grooming. I remember you saying your training was decidedly NOT grooming. 

So, grooming is, yes, more typically known. That’s not to say it’s more readily believed nor acknowledged by many Christian leaders nor lay counselors. Especially when the grooming “fails” if you will, and the one being groomed does not end up assaulted by the perpetrator who sought to gain access to them. Grooming is a whole different procedure than training, a whole other mindset as you’ve so helpfully described, Carya.

Training is so incredibly comprehensive in your story, Carya. We’ve often mentioned on this podcast there may never be another person in our audience’s life who suffered the same (or even similar) to the way you did. But we’ve also said your story is a concentrated version of the evil of abuses that happen more frequently. And while the specific type of training you experienced isn’t grooming (as we’ve said), other forms of training OFTEN happen in other abusive contexts. Think about the wife who is “trained” to immediately understand the cues from her abusive husband and know instinctively what she can or can’t do and still remain safe. Or the child who has made notes of a sequence of events that they’ve learned will lead to their repeated assaults. Think about the ways abusers use pain, or even threats of pain, to teach their victims to fear or obey them. We all “train” naturally (parents in particular will understand this). Training, again, is something perhaps we might consider “good” that can also be deliberately turned upside down to serve the devil’s purposes. Help us understand how so from your training, Carya.

Carya
I’m so glad you said that, because I don’t think we can emphasize this point enough. I’d suggest that training is a part of any form of abuse that’s repeated. In my case grooming wasn’t needed to get access to me, but in other cases where it is, once a perpetrator has successfully groomed a victim, they can move on to training the behaviors and obedience they want. The training that I received was extreme, to be sure, but it was just an extreme end of the spectrum on which all abuse exists. I hope that when listeners hear my story it gives them eyes to see how evil abusive control always is.

In my training some of the skills I was taught were purely physical. My abusers taught me what to do in a myriad of situations – how to use my hands or my body, what positions to take, or how to perform countless sex acts – and they also taught me what not to do, such as scream or make a fuss if something was happening in public. Training takes practice. They didn’t just tell me how to use my body in a certain situation, or warn me not to scream in another. I had to rehearse, over and over, with however many people it took, just exactly how I was supposed to use my body in that situation. Or we’d practice in private something that could be done in public – seating me on someone’s lap, perhaps, and having him molest me under the cover of my skirt or a blanket – and repeat it over and over again until I could take it without reacting.

Other skills they taught were focused on pattern recognition. They trained me to recognize and understand subtle cues so that I could read a situation and know what I was supposed to do without having to be told. Often this entailed my taking initiative, by making the first move in an appointment with a client, or beginning a certain sequence in a ritual. Sure, they could just tell me what to do – and they often did – but a lot of clients liked the control they demonstrated by not having to instruct me, and a lot of rituals were best served by my seeming participation. In other cases the initiative might come from the abusers, but I was expected to react immediately to the unfolding ritual or session without instruction. I was also taught to recognize when an encounter that did not seem sexual was supposed to become so, and how to respond. 

An example of this occurred one day when a potential soccer coach came to my house to meet with me and my dad about me playing for him. The three of us sat in the living room talking for a while, eventually agreeing that I would try out for the team. Then we all stood for the leave-taking, and as we did I suddenly read my dad’s unobtrusive signals. I realized that the coach was one of them, that my dad already knew him, and that he was interested in more than my soccer prowess. Both he and my dad expected me to understand immediately and, therefore, to offer myself to the coach right there on the living room floor. I’d been trained for every aspect of an encounter like this, and once I saw the cue, I performed exactly as I was supposed to. I ended up making the soccer team, too, and by the end of today’s episode I’ll explain how I could love this sport despite the fact that my coach was one of my rapists.

Another aspect of training was focused specifically on my body itself, and they trained it – my body – to do things that were entirely outside of my control. When I was trained to do a particular thing, I may have had no choice but to obey, but I was still the one who had to take the action. But there were other things they wanted my body to be able to do, whether I took action or not. This type of training focused on teaching my body to react involuntarily to sensory triggers like pain or pleasure. Those involuntary reactions could then be coupled with other forms of training to produce particular desired outcomes. 

I’ve briefly mentioned in earlier episodes that my abusers often provoked my sexual arousal, and I’ve said how awful this always was for me. It may seem like a weird thing to keep bringing up, but the reason I’m doing so is that this is a very common experience for abuse victims, and it doesn’t get talked about enough. Victims tend to feel immense shame about their own bodies’ reactions, but they shouldn’t. I still feel immense shame about this, even though I know I shouldn’t. God made our bodies to respond to sexual stimulation. Sex, in God’s good design, was holistically good, and he made it to not just be good but to feel good. God’s intention is for everything to be united and whole, but in this fallen world we are often divided. Now, living after the fall, our bodies, minds, and hearts can feel contradictory things. It is possible for something to feel good physically while simultaneously feeling awful mentally, emotionally, or spiritually. Satan loves this, and those who are like him – whether they mean to be like him or not – love it too, and they love to take advantage of it. Anytime my abusers could create division within me, they did. Making my body respond with pleasure to things that I hated was a way for my abusers to turn things upside down, to love what Satan loves. Additionally, it was an incredibly powerful training tool.

In my first episode I talked about the photos my father took of me, and how he used them to enhance my performance by reviewing them with me and pointing out areas he wanted me to improve. There was another way he used them for training, one of his favorite ways. He would select a few of the worst ones and hand them to me wordlessly, knowing that I knew what was expected of me. Obediently, I’d spread the photos out in front of me, my stomach churning as I remembered the events they captured. Then, while my dad made sure I kept my eyes on them, I’d begin to masturbate as I’d been taught to do, not allowed to stop until I climaxed. The purpose of this exercise was to train my body to feel one way while everything else in me felt a different way. My dad loved doing this to me. He loved that he could make me orgasm no matter how much I hated what was happening. He loved even more that he could make me do it to myself. As a result of this training, my abusers could require me to arouse myself while I waited for them.

Ann Maree
I could have a lot to say about this. Primarily, though streams of tears flow from my eyes, for God’s law is not just disobeyed, but utterly obliterated. His image in you was so incredibly violated (to say the least) and nearly destroyed, inside and out. The Enemy, the enemies (of God and of YOU) were (are) relentless in their pursuit of evil. It is mind blowing. 

I know that talking about this was and is triggering. I so appreciate your willingness to share, though, because I also know the difficulty many victims have with a similar shame from how their body responded to an assault. You are right, it isn’t spoken about often. And, it is highly misunderstood! Thank you for reminding us that God made our bodies TO respond, to BE responsive. But let me just say also that an involuntary physical response does NOT indicate there ever was or could have been consent for the abuse! Yours or anyone else’s. The body’s physical response is not an indication that someone wanted what happened, participated in what happened willingly, nor enjoyed in ANY WAY  no one being abused. The body’s perfect design to respond to stimuli (like heat for instance) is entirely possible without a person’s compliance.

What Carya is going to share next, about how pain and terror were deliberately used, is also very disturbing, and as we’ve mentioned before, perhaps something too triggering for vulnerable individuals. Please just be advised. If you’d like to skip this part you can pick back up where we will address the “how, how in the world?!” Carya could survive.

Click here to skip over this section.

Carya
Pain, like pleasure, was something that served both as an excellent way to turn things upside down and as a powerful training tool. I don’t think I really need to explain why so many of my abusers liked it when I hurt. They were like their father, the devil, who came to steal, kill, and destroy; of course they wanted to cause me pain. Even when they caused physical [quote] “pleasure” they were doing it to cause pain, through mental, emotional, and spiritual anguish.

But I do want to highlight their use of pain in training. Training always involved pain. Always. Not only when the skill they were teaching me was painful to perform, nor only when the rape that was part of the practice was rough or ungentle. The deliberate application of pain was a critical part of every training session. Pain prepared me for what they wanted to teach me, making my mind, body, and will pliable and ready for what I was about to learn. Pain instructed me in the skills I was taught, correcting my mistakes and punishing any hesitance or disobedience. Pain seared into me what I learned, threatening me with its exponential return if I failed to perform. This was the reason I obeyed when told to do something I didn’t want to, such as arouse myself. Pain was the preamble and epilogue to every training session, and a constant tool used during the instruction itself. It came in many forms and was applied in numerous ways, some of which sexual and some of which weren’t. But, unless clothes were specifically needed for learning a particular skill, I was always naked when they trained me.

A lot of my training happened at home. Often when my father, or perhaps both my parents, came into my bedroom at night it was for practice, me demonstrating and perfecting what I’d been taught to do. More serious training sessions, however, usually happened in the basements of our homes. My dad had a workbench down there, one that could be used for machinery repairs, woodworking, and other normal shop activities. But its primary purpose was for training, and some of its drawers held tools used for breaking me rather than for repairing household items. It wasn’t uncommon for my dad to tell me to go down to the basement, undress, and position myself on the workbench. Sometimes he also told me which tools to get out, or how to start tying myself down. He might come down right away, or he might wait for quite a while. Either way, if he didn’t find me on the workbench as he’d said, in exactly the position he’d told me to be in and with whatever other preparation he’d told me to make ready, the training would be delayed by a tortuous punishment, to be resumed once I regained consciousness.

My dad’s instruction to go downstairs always made me panic. I’d rush, desperate to get ready in case he was coming down soon, terrified that he wouldn’t give me enough time. He occasionally followed right on my heels, guaranteeing that I’d earn a punishment, his capricious cruelty itself a way to train me to fear him. More often, though, he’d delay, knowing that the minutes or even hours I spent anticipating him were another kind of torture. I’d wait on the workbench, naked and shivering, not daring to move, and trying not to think about what he planned to do but usually able to guess some of it from the position I’d been told to take or the tools I’d been told to take out. 

All this training – of my behavior, body, emotions, and will – was about more than just making sure I could perform certain sex acts or respond to abuse in particular ways. It was about control; my abusers’ complete control of me. The thread running through all the training was obedience. Whatever the specific thing was that I learned during a given training, I was always being taught to obey, and to fear the consequences of disobeying far more than I feared the awful things they were training me to do. The intensity of the training grew as I grew, but as with everything else, my earliest training started before I can remember. By the time I was out from under my dad’s roof – or even six years after that when I was under my own roof – I’d learned compliance so thoroughly, and so painfully, that it didn’t occur to me to try to get help. To have done so would have meant disobedience, and disobedience meant torment. 

The training worked. Even after I became an adult, they had full control over me – over my behavior, body, emotions, and will, yes – but also over my mind. I hope that understanding this largely answers the questions of why I obeyed, why I never went to the police or tried to tell a teacher or a coach or someone at church, and why I kept obeying even once I was old enough (so we might think) to exercise agency and get out. My training – begun before I could even think for myself – prevented me from ever developing agency.

 

Pick up here:
Ann Maree
This has been, oddly one of the most difficult parts of your story for me to hear. When you describe the ways in which your father used sadistic pain to instill fear, I feel that fear too. My mind imagines what it must have been like for you. Even my body goes into flight mode. I think that kind of fear, the fear of hinting at what might be done to you (whether it was or not), is pure evil. I keep saying I’m so sorry this happened to you. That continues to feel trivial. But it’s all I can think to say! And I also keep wondering, “what in the world do you do with those memories now?” 

Carya, you said that after all the training, your abusers had full control over you, your mind as well as your body. Given what you’ve described, it’s easy to see how this would have affected how you think. But you’re talking about even more than that, right?...

Carya
Yeah, there’s another piece to the puzzle, and that piece also addresses how I managed to function and not go insane, and how everything stayed hidden. It addresses how I could love soccer despite my coach, love learning despite my handler at boarding school, even how I could love God despite the satanic worship of my abusers. 

Each time I endured an appointment with a client, or a ritual in a church sanctuary, or a training session with my father, the weight of what I was experiencing was literally more than I could bear. Sometimes Christians try to comfort themselves or each other with the reassurance that “God will not give us more than we can bear.” Based, I assume, on 1 Corinthians 10:13 (which is about temptation, not affliction), this assertion not only misses the direct meaning of the passage, but runs counter to abundant evidence throughout scripture. God is constantly giving his people more than they can bear. We are frail, made of dust, and intended for life in a “very good” creation, not life in this broken world. We cannot bear either the costs or the penalty of sin, whether ours or others’. As Paul said, “... we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God,” (2 Corinthians 1:8-9). 

We survive only by relying on God, not by ginning ourselves up to bear the unbearable, and that is true for all of us, everywhere, all the time. Additionally, God – knowing the reality of sin, depth of evil, and intensity of the enemy’s rage against God’s people – has given our minds and bodies remarkable ways to deal with overwhelming trauma. The only way a child can function while experiencing the levels of abuse I’ve described is if his or her mind splits the trauma off and holds it in a separate place – sort of like it’s quarantined – where it can’t interact with the rest of the child’s life. Most people know what it’s like to a hold painful experiences in a place in our minds where we not only don’t think about them, but effectively don’t remember them at all until, all of a sudden, we do. 

In situations of severe, ongoing trauma in early childhood, there’s a particular version of this that can occur in which the child’s mind develops distinct identities to handle repeated trauma, rather than just quarantining off a few individual traumas. This is another area where I’m far from being an expert – and Ann Maree, again, I’m really glad that you’ll be talking to someone who is – but I think I should make clear that what I’m talking about now is what psychologists used to call multiple personality disorder, and now call dissociative identity disorder, or DID. 

Dissociating is something everyone has the ability to do and, in fact, does do quite regularly. All it means is disconnecting from your own thoughts, feelings, experiences, or memories when they’re too intense or overwhelming to handle. But DID is when a person unknowingly takes that a step further and develops one or more identities that are dissociated – or distinct – from the person’s core identity and from each other. Usually, each separate identity plays a particular role, and the purpose of those roles is to protect the person’s core self from the full weight of the damage they’re experiencing. This means that a person with DID usually does not know they have it until sometime in their adulthood, when it becomes harder and harder for those identities to keep their pain and knowledge neatly hidden away.

When I was too little to remember, my mind shattered for the first time into different identities, or parts, to help me survive what was happening to me. As I grew, and the abuse grew, that shattering continued. Instead of my whole self trying to comprehend, endure, and survive daily trauma – and then function afterward – splintered bits of my being took responsibility for different aspects of it. The burdens each part bore were crushing, but in dividing myself up to handle them I prevented the full weight of all of it from settling on me at the same time, which probably would have destroyed me. Each shattered part of me bore only some of it, and there were other parts that took responsibility for “normal life” things like school, soccer, and church. The parts that were dealing with the traumas were trying to protect a core part of me, to enable me to function. The best way to enable me to function was to have the parts of me who endured the abuse be different from the parts of me that did [quote] “normal life.”

If the part of me that endured a training session the previous night had to take a spelling test that morning, how do you think that would go? Or imagine if the part of me that came to the fore when my dad took me to a soccer game early to spend time with the coach then had to play the full game, diving after balls shot on goal. Or, finally, what might happen if the part of me that was “up” when Pastor Farrow got me pregnant was the same part who was up when I sat in the pew listening to his sermon the next Sunday? No. The only way for me to do the regular, normal parts of my life competently was for those different aspects of my life to be handled by different parts of me, parts who usually didn’t talk to each other, parts who didn’t really know what others inside me were going through.

Ann Maree
Okay, I’m guessing that for many in our audience, this language (DID) could be totally foreign. Understanding DID certainly isn’t a part of the training most Christian leaders or lay counselors will receive. So let’s break it down. We all dissociate all the time; we dissociate ourselves from that which overwhelms. I think about witnessing a tragic accident, or suffering loss of a pet, or a loved one for sure. The pain and grief can be overwhelming, so we tuck away the experience, especially if we have a job or responsibility to perform. It happens in other contexts as well. Like when we daydream, or get lost in a book or movie. Many people experience it when they drive a familiar route (“Highway Hypnosis”), when we arrive at our destination without knowing how we got there. Another way to think about it is like mental escape. This should help our audience relate. 

But in DID there’s another element. It’s like the “person” (more often than not, a child) is frozen in time at the moment of the devastation, or victimization. I recently watched a video series developed from a true story. The woman in the story was raped, and during the assault she focused on a photo on her wall that captured a woman walking on the beach. While she was being violated she removed herself into the photo. She experienced walking on the beach rather than the reality of what was happening to her. 

I know it’s not a one to one, but I use that as an example of how the mind God created carefully and creatively adjusts to, like you said, life in a fallen world that it was never intended to inhabit. Okay. That’s the limit of my “expertise.” We will benefit from listening to our expert after this episode. Carya, please tell us how this all impacted you.

Carya
The example you gave of the woman who put herself into the photo is a perfect example of dissociating. As you say a person with DID just takes that a step further – the person with DID doesn’t just “remove” herself from the situation, or “go somewhere else” inside her mind while the trauma occurs, but actually splinters off a separate part of herself that absorbs the trauma and keeps it separate from the rest of her. 

I started learning that I had dissociated identities in my early 30s. Personas or alters are also common terms, but as I’ve done so far, I usually just call them “parts” because they are all parts of me. Realizing that I had dissociated parts was incredibly surreal and deeply distressing at first. I’m used to it now, but when I first faced it I felt absolutely crazy. I had a couple of good friends with whom I had slowly started talking about my childhood, and sometimes when they talked with me or asked me questions, one of my parts would take over and answer, and I’d find myself saying things that “I” didn’t understand or know anything about. A part of me who did know was the one answering, but that part hadn’t shared the knowledge with me yet. Occasionally, when this happened, the part who took over to answer switched out with me so completely that “I” wasn’t present at all any more. My friends would later tell me about bits of conversations we’d had that I had no memory of. That kind of switch is how it worked with abuse. The part or parts who took control did so completely, leaving the other parts of me – the ones whose job was to help me live my regular life – not only unaware of the abuse itself, but unaware that there had even been a switch.

Do you see why I felt so crazy as I began to understand this? All my parts are simply me, but because our minds have this ability to shatter, these different parts understood themselves to be distinct from me. Again, all my parts are me, just me, neither more nor less. But inside, I often feel like a we. My different parts can feel different things, want different things, and know different things. Sometimes they don’t like someone who I like, or don’t trust someone who I trust. Most painfully, many of them once felt and believed different things about God than I did, and there are some who still do. 

A lot of my parts have names and distinct personalities. Some had very specialized jobs. One of my parts is called the Timekeeper. The Timekeeper’s job was to always know what time it was, to know when I was supposed to be somewhere for an appointment, and to make sure I got to that appointment. That’s how, for example, I could function at school even if I knew that I had an appointment with a client as soon as I got home. The part of me keeping track of the appointment was the Timekeeper, and the Timekeeper held that information in a container so that the rest of me wasn’t dealing with it or even aware of it until it was time. Another crucial part of the Timekeeper’s role was to keep the regular-life parts of me unaware that I was losing time. If I had an appointment after school, it was critical that the “me” that did homework later that evening didn’t realize that there was an hour or so of the afternoon that I couldn’t account for.

My dissociated parts are many different ages. Whenever one came into being, they were usually whatever age I was at that time, and many remained frozen at that age. Even now, well into middle age, I still have parts who are toddlers, teenagers, young girls, even some who can’t talk because they were split off before I could talk. But other parts grew along with me as I grew. Those whose jobs required them to come to the surface regularly, such as the Timekeeper or those who helped me live the normal parts of my life, tended not to stay frozen at whatever age they were at first. 

One of my most important parts, the one who I know the best and who has talked to me the most, is one who split off when I was very young and who grew older as I did. That part also understands himself to be a boy. I’ll call him Christopher, because his name is like that – a full name, not a shortened nickname. In fact, many of my parts think of themselves as boys, either because they were forced into that identity by my abusers, or because they themselves felt that they needed to be boys to do whatever their roles were in my system. Christopher is a serious, responsible, diligent protector, and does everything he can to protect not only me but all my other parts too. He’s always watching out for everyone in my system. 

But, this was another thing that initially made recognizing my DID so disorienting and distressing. Of all my parts, Christopher feels the most like me… except for the fact of him being a boy. How could it be possible for a woman to have dissociated identities inside of her that are boys? What kind of woman does that make me? I now know that this is really common, and it actually makes a great deal of sense. Remember that DID is a protection, a way for someone’s mind to handle something that is overwhelming. When a little girl is raped by grown men, her femaleness is part of what makes her vulnerable. It’s entirely reasonable for that girl to try to protect herself from that trauma by imagining that she is a boy instead. At the same time, while Christopher is a boy, he doesn’t have an existence separate from mine, and I am a woman. So really, ultimately, he’s not male, because he’s a part of me. But if I tried to call him a girl, or use a girl’s name for him instead, it wouldn’t feel right, to him or to me.

Ann Maree
And, if I’ve heard correctly in speaking with victims with DID, there can be a hatred of your body and the ways in which it may have felt like it betrayed you. So of course NOT having that female (or male) body will, in a sense, provide feelings of being able to control if or how you are able to protect yourself. 

Our next expert, Dr. Heather Gingrich writes in her book Shattered No More, “Perpetrator groups use their knowledge that individuals who experience trauma often use dissociation as a coping mechanism to their advantage. They know that if a child is tortured, the child probably will develop a dissociated trauma state that can become a dissociated identity (DID). They count on the victim developing amnesia for the trauma, which serves as a dual purpose. First, this dissociated part will comply with their demands without other parts of the person stepping in to resist. And second, a particular secret is more secure if only one part of the person is aware of it and is terrified of revealing it.” DID protects the abusers as well. Your story conveys a bit of that too, right?

Carya
Very much so. My father, my handlers, and many other abusers knew about DID, and they knew how to use it. They not only knew that I had dissociated parts, but they knew how to control those parts for their purposes. They even knew how to cause new parts to come into being. As I said, DID is caused by overwhelming trauma, something that is literally too much for a child to bear. Additional subsequent shattering can occur if a dissociated part that is “up” cannot endure whatever abuse they’re suffering. That part may then cycle out, switching with another part to share the burden, or he or she may split or shatter into more new parts. 

The easiest way to cause a new split is extreme pain. If my abusers wanted a new part – perhaps they had a specific assignment or role that they wanted a part to carry out – they would hurt me, more and more and more, until whichever part of me that was up couldn’t take it anymore. Suddenly, a new, distinct part would split off, a part of me that knew nothing but the pain I’d just endured and that believed they had to do whatever it took to make the pain stop and prevent it from returning. That new part would be fully at the mercy of whatever instruction or commands my trainers might give.

Each part of me that was given a specific job by my abusers required their own individualized training. My one body – my one whole self – endured all the training, but the different parts of me learned the different lessons I was taught. The part that knew how to keep quiet when I was abused in public was responsible to fulfill that role whenever needed, but she didn’t know how to initiate something with a client. The parts of me who knew how to execute in a ritual the training they received from my dad with his photographs didn’t know what to do when I went into labor. But my parts didn’t need to know how to do any job other than their own; a significant element of training was teaching parts to know not just what to do, but when they were required to do it.

The thing that made DID so useful to my abusers was the fact that its entire purpose was to protect me. That may sound contradictory, but consider how it worked. Each dissociated identity came into being in response to something that was too much for me. Those identities wanted to enable the regular-life parts of me to function, they wanted to keep me sane, and they wanted to preserve my life. They would do anything to accomplish this, and that made them easy for my trainers to threaten and control. The reason I was so obedient was not only because I feared the awful punishment that disobedience entailed, but because my parts were threatened that if they didn’t do what they were told, my abusers would kill me. None of my parts had any reason to doubt this. As far as the ones inside me knew, obeying my father or my handlers or my trainers was a matter of life and death. They may even have been right.

DID is a funny thing. It’s caused by severe trauma, which is another way of saying that it’s caused by great evil. A person with DID endured something so terrible that the only way they could survive it was by shattering. God intends us for wholeness; he does not want us to be divided. Yet, I believe, he gave people the ability to shatter in this way, because he knows that, sometimes, shattering is needed for survival. The shattering is not “good” – it’s not how things are supposed to be, and not how they will be when God makes all things new – but it is a good thing that we can shatter. I think of how car windshields are made of tempered glass, which is designed to break – when struck – into small, smooth-edged pieces rather than into large, knife-edged shards. A shattered windshield is not “good.” Windshields are meant to be whole. But given life in a fallen world – given the reality that cars will wreck – it was an act of mercy for the windshield maker to design his windshield to shatter protectively when a car crashes. The Lord was merciful to me when he allowed my mind to shatter into different parts under the impact of trauma. And whether it’s in this life, or not until life in the new creation, he will make me whole again.

So DID allowed me to survive, and I thank God for it. But it is also true that the serpent and his servants exploited it, they took advantage of it, and they used it for their ends. Each part of me worked hard to protect me, and no part knew every single thing about my entire life. Their fragmented knowledge, limited experience, and single-minded focus made them easy to isolate, confuse, and manipulate. My abusers also used my DID to keep what they were doing a secret. I said earlier that if the parts of me that endured abuse one moment were the same parts that had to take a test, play a soccer game, or listen to a sermon the next, I couldn’t have done those things competently. The fact that I had different parts who enabled me to do the regular, normal parts of my life is the mercy of DID. It’s how I made it through school, how I grew in my faith, how I survived until it was time for my rescue. But that same fact is also why no one knew that I wasn’t okay. Imagine what I would have been like – in speech, behavior, attitude, etc. – if my trauma wasn’t quarantined. Observers would absolutely have known something was wrong. Indeed, they would have known because, without my different parts, I probably would have died or gone howlingly insane. So, DID protected me, but my abusers used it to protect themselves as well.

Finally, having different identities also explains why and how I could believe the contradictory things I’ve shared that I believed. Throughout my childhood my faith in God was sincere, and from at least from 6th grade onward it was active and maturing. But I also believed, as my dad had taught me, that I was made for rape, and in other rituals I learned that God was pleased when I was raped. For some of my parts, that was the only thing they knew about God, and so they hated or feared him. A big part of my healing journey has been helping the parts of me that don’t trust God to learn that they can trust him. It’s like evangelizing myself, even though I am a Christian. 

I believed these contradictory things because different parts of me believed them. If you had run into 15- or 20- or 30-year-old me and asked me if I was truly human, you would have gotten a puzzled look and a “duh, of course” sort of answer. But at the very same time, inside the 15- or 20- or 30-year old me a little girl part might have heard your question, and if she had she would have curled up into a fetal position and started sobbing and shaking, knowing that she wasn’t human, because of what her dad did. She just wouldn’t have been able to share that knowledge with the part of me that you were talking to.

Ann Maree
It’s interesting, or rather (better said) it’s disturbing, that while the biblical counseling world debates the very idea of trauma and whether or not it’s a valid condition, groups of perpetrators are literally using trauma, intentionally traumatizing victims, so that they will dissociate. They do it intentionally to protect their sadistic lifestyle.

At the beginning of my coursework on trauma I was so anxious to learn! I kept saying I couldn’t learn fast enough to help the people the Lord was placing in my path. So I got right down to it and devoured the readings and lessons. I remember fairly soon I had this “aha!” moment where I sat back from the texts with the realization that trauma is the human condition. We were created with a perfect body in a perfect world. Sin ushered in death, so our bodies are decaying from the moment we’re born, in an environment conducive to our dying. This isn’t as it was supposed to be. And it overwhelms us! (BODY AND SOUL) Yet, somehow we (some of us) live and act and breathe as though (some of us, an elite select few) are unaffected. Perfect (still). Otherly, MORE human.  I think “normal” needs a different definition.

Carya
It’s really interesting that you say that, because a big part of my experience with DID is a fear that others will see it as not just not normal, but dangerous. That’s actually why I’ve chosen to share about DID so explicitly. Certainly, my ability to dissociate all the way to splitting off different identities is the answer to the questions about how I could function, and it’s a big part of the answer to how no one knew what had happened to me. I wanted to answer those questions, but I also also want to shed light on something that I’d like to see the church become more comfortable with, more able to sit with. 

I now truly thank God for my DID, but when I first learned I had it I felt like it was evidence that I was insane. I wondered if I was still within the bounds of God’s creation if my mind worked like this, or if, instead, I was in some sort of universe outside of God’s creation, where different rules applied. Of course, I knew that wasn’t true – there is no universe outside of God’s creation, and no human condition beyond his knowledge, grace, and love – but I felt profoundly unmoored. It took me several months, after first learning that I have DID, to stop believing that it was proof that I was crazy. Now, 15 years later, I know I’m not crazy, and I thank God for giving me the ability to shatter in this way. Nonetheless, I’m still afraid of how other people will see it. How they’ll see me.

DID is another part of my story that I’ve kept hidden except within a very small circle. I fear how it will sound to others: “I’ve got personas, with names they chose, who talk to me; sometimes they take over and talk to other people without me knowing; sometimes they show me things from my own life that they’ve kept hidden up until now; and a few of them still don’t like Jesus. But, really, you should have no concerns about hanging out with me, or me teaching Bible study, or serving in ministry.” Yeah, right. If people knew, could they understand, or trust me, or even want to be around me? These are the questions my fear whispers to me.

My dad, and so many other perpetrators, made me feel dehumanized because of what they did to me and what they made me do. Often, my DID makes me feel that way too. I understand so much more about it than I did at first, and I now truly see it as an act of extraordinary mercy from the Lord. But even so, it does feels like something that puts me outside of [quote] “normal” human experience, outside the realm of normal human understanding. I’m convinced that people just won’t get it, that they’ll think I’m toxic or dangerous if they know. I no longer think or believe that DID renders me less than or different from fully human, but I do fear that others will think it does. So I feel like it’s a secret best kept hidden if I want to be loved and accepted. I spent so much of my life being hated and rejected and trashed that I’m desperate to avoid anything that might make someone back away from me, and I’m afraid that this truth about me, if fully exposed, will absolutely make others back away.

I want to be as clear as possible here – I am not saying that the people in my life now have given me any reason to think that they would treat me this way if they knew. Not at all! Rather, I’m just trying to reflect on what this feels like inside. To some extent, it’s my own “fault” if I am not willing to share. But I also want listeners to know that sufferers of complex trauma – whether or not they have full-blown DID – carry heavy burdens that they feel like they have to carry alone. I need to be invited to share my burden, over and over again, because I’ll cling to it by myself rather than risk it pushing you away. I’m sure I am not alone in feeling this way. Show us – those of us who have extreme experiences – that we are still human, still within the normal world of human experience. We struggle to believe it, even when we know the truth. Show us that our stories can be known and safely held.

Ann Maree
Carya, thanks for explaining for us not just how DID works, but how you feel about it, and why it feels like something you have to hide... So many of us, maybe even all of us, feel like we have to hide to be loved... you asked us to show you - and others carrying great pain - that your stories “can be known and safely held.” What would it look like for churches to be places where this happens?... Listeners, consider mulling on that question... how can we be people who invite others’ stories, and hold them safely?

I know you’re about to end this episode with a story that will help the audience understand how all of this cruelty worked together to perpetuate your harm, and devastate the image of God in you. Friends in the audience, as you might imagine, this story won’t be easy to hear, even though Carya has kept specific details out. Our minds (like our sin infused bodies) were not created to grasp this level of evil (any evil!). Before listening, make sure you have the physical and emotional space. Perhaps find a therapist, a trusted friend, or a support individual to process afterward what you’ve heard. 

Click here to skip over this section.

Carya
I’m going to finish the story I started with today, the story where, one summer night, you might have seen me walk up the street to one of my neighbor’s houses. This story illustrates how training and DID were woven together with abuse and ritual and trafficking to make possible the life I lived under horrific abusive control for so many years. It took place some months after we moved into our “intentional community.” All our houses were on an isolated, dead-end road with no street lights or sidewalks, and surrounded by woods and brambles and very few, tucked-away neighbors. Yet our street was right inside the city and mere minutes away from thickly populated residential areas and commercial districts. It was a perfect place from which my parents and their friends could train, traffic, and abuse their children. 

That summer night, my dad woke me from sleep and told me I was expected up at the Pickford’s house. Obediently, I pulled a sweatshirt over my pjs and put on my shoes, and walked up the street. I knew that I was being summoned for rape but I can’t remember what I was thinking or whether my dad gave me any additional instructions. All I knew, with a childhood full of pointed lessons, was that I’d better go where I was told and do whatever I was told once I got there.

When I got to the front door I walked in and, finding no one waiting for me, proceeded to the master bedroom. That door was cracked, and I pushed it all the way open, then paused on the threshold. The Pickfords were both in bed, and they looked at me silently but expectantly. Interpreting this to mean that I should initiate, I walked in to do so, but immediately Ian’s stern voice stopped me: “You know better than to walk in here with your clothes on.” 

In this case, I didn’t actually know that – I’d never been given that particular scenario before – but I wasn’t particularly surprised, either. As much as my abusers worked to shape my behavior, they also worked to make things unpredictable. They required my unhesitating obedience, but they didn’t want me to always know what was coming next. A new scenario or a never-before-heard instruction were regular experiences. They were always sickening, because they signaled something new that I wasn’t prepared for, but they usually weren’t noteworthy. On this night, though, what I didn’t yet know and wouldn’t fully understand until the next day, was that this encounter was a setup, the beginning of an elaborate training sequence disguised as an appointment.

In the moment, however, I had no premonition of that. I simply turned around without a word, crossed back through the hall into the living room, undressed and left my clothes on a chair, and then walked back into the master bedroom. Ian and his wife took their time, and once they were satisfied, he told me I could go home. But then I got the first hint that this wasn’t a normal night. I could go home but, Ian said, I was in trouble, and would need to be punished. Because I had tried to come into their room with my clothes on when I shouldn’t have, he would now send me home without them. And when I got there, I would have to tell my dad what happened and ask him to discipline me.

I can’t remember how I got out of the bed, out of the room, out of the house, but I walked back down the quiet, unlit street barefoot and naked, my stomach roiling with fear. That brief walk was the worst part of the night so far. Although I still couldn’t recall having being told that I wasn’t supposed to go into the room with my clothes on, I knew it didn’t matter. If I tried to hide this from my dad, or tried to explain that I hadn’t known, the punishment would only be worse. When I walked in the front door I found my dad standing in the entryway, waiting. Immediately I told him what I’d done, and asked him to punish me. His countenance contorted with fury, rage flashing from his eyes while his frighteningly controlled, quiet voice told me to go down to the basement. 

The next day I awoke in my own bed, cleaned up but still without clothes, and in considerable pain. My dad came in and informed me that before I did anything else that day, I must go to each house in the neighborhood, explain to them what I had done the night before, apologize, and make amends. This took several hours. My last stop was the Pickford’s again and after I finished I made my way home, walking down the street naked and bruised for the second time in less than a day.

Once back home I learned the rest of it. Up to that point, everything that had happened since Ian sent me home without my clothes the night before seemed only like a brutal punishment. My dad had spent hours with me on his workbench the previous night. The whole thing seemed calculated to make sure that I never, ever, ever walked clothed into someone else’s bedroom again. This was reinforced by the amends I’d made earlier in the day, walking naked into each house to apologize. Whether I really should have known it before or not, after this punishment there was no chance I’d make the same mistake again.

But what I learned after making the neighborhood rounds was that this was more than a correction of unwanted behavior. When I walked back in the door, my dad told me that I’d lost the privilege of clothes altogether. For some time he said, if I needed to leave the neighborhood he or my mom would dole out garments, but whenever I was home or in the “intentional community” I would have to relinquish them. They put a bin by the front door, and as soon as I crossed the threshold I had to strip and leave my clothes in it. I would not be allowed to walk even the few steps to my room to undress there. He didn’t tell me how long this would last, and I can’t remember how long it did. But after hearing his pronouncement I stood, shocked, in my room, staring down into an empty dresser drawer. While I’d been apologizing to our neighbors, my parents removed all the clothes from my room. Even my bedding was gone.

For weeks – or was it only days, or perhaps months? – I lived stark naked unless out in public, never covered by a garment or a blanket. There was no “regular life” during this time, and the parts of me that dealt with abuse had to be up all the time to handle my life during it. Sure, the minutes and hours in which I was not sexually molested were still greater than those in which I was. And, sure, I did “regular life” things like reading and chores and watching TV. But for a time, the line between my abuse life and my regular life – symbolized by clothes – disappeared. 

When my dad sent me up to the Pickford’s house he knew exactly what would happen there and what he would do afterwards, because he’d planned it all out ahead of time. Before this incident I was already compliant, as evidenced by the fact that I walked up to their house alone, even knowing that rape awaited me there. What my father taught me through this extended incident wasn’t obedience – I already had that – nor was it just a new behavior, to undress before walking into a bedroom when summoned. I, and the many parts of me who suffered through this time, learned that there was nothing – absolutely nothing – between me and my abusers. We learned to never even think about doing anything other than perfectly serving and pleasing men like my dad. Together, my parts and I learned that life outside of my abusers’ control simply didn’t exist. 

 

 

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Ann Maree
This is just such a horrific whole new level of twistedness. The way an evil mind works is simply beyond comprehension. I think that’s why hearing your story, Carya is so important. If we, in the church want to help (particularly abused women) well we really do need to understand this mindset. As we keep saying, it is the mindset within every type and degree of abuse.

Carya
I know that it’s shocking to hear that there are people this cruel, this evil, this deliberate. I expect that this story was hard to hear, and I am sorry about that. I told it to help listeners understand how my life could have been what it was. Imagine the girl who lived through what I just described, now a high school junior, pregnant with her father’s child. Or imagine that little girl, walking bruised and bleeding down the street, now a college or graduate student, whose handlers continue to use and create dissociated parts to hide what they’re doing to her. Imagine that little girl – perhaps standing at the kitchen sink doing the dinner dishes or in the bathroom brushing her teeth before bed, all without any clothes on – now an adult, working and living and attending church among men who continue to train her, punish her, impregnate her, and control her. She may be an adult, but her mind as well as her body have been enslaved for her whole life. The question, really, shouldn’t be “why didn’t she run away?” but, rather, “how in the world did she ever get out?” That’s a good question, and the answer is a very good story. I look forward to telling it, to showing you what Captain Jesus did when he crawled into the enemy stronghold where I was held captive. 

For today, to wrap up, I want to again explain why I’ve chosen to tell my awful story. How could a story like mine be relevant for the church? I know it’s heavy, enormous, maybe even completely overwhelming. It would be so easy to walk away from it – either from the story I’ve told today, or the totality of the stories I’ve told over these past four episodes – with pity for me or outrage at my abusers, but not really anything else. It would be easy to assume that my experience was so severe, so extreme, and so unusual that it has no application outside contexts exactly like mine. But it does. The whole reason I’m asking listeners to hear this is because I think it can help Christians see the world more clearly.

First of all, as I keep saying, the depth of evil I experienced is not as unusual as we’d like to think. There are people we encounter in our regular lives – in the pews of our churches, at our places of work or school or play – who carry enormous burdens of unbelievable suffering. We need to expect this, to not be surprised by great evil, and to learn how to respond well to it and to walk alongside the hurting.

Second, as you and I also keep saying, in my story we see evil in a particularly distilled form, but it works the same way everywhere, even when less concentrated. If you’re appalled by what happened to me, you should be appalled by anyone who tramples on the image of God in the vulnerable. If you are outraged by the pastors who raped me, you should be outraged by any leaders who feed themselves rather than those under their care. If you are heartbroken by how my father treated me, you should be heartbroken by every child who is not cherished. 

My father loved what Satan loves, and hated what he hates. So too did Mr. Dunbar, Kurt, Pastor Farrow, George, and so many others. They sought out ways to turn things upside down because they knew it would please him. But the devil is perfectly happy to use whatever he can get his hands on to wage war against God’s people. It need not be someone who worships him explicitly. We tolerate seemingly lesser evils far too readily. I hope that when listeners hear my concentrated, terrible story, their eyes will open to see evil no matter what guise it wears, and their hearts will expand to fight for the oppressed no matter where they are.

Ann Maree
Right. Because that’s our calling, right? I think God sees these things just as severely.  Well um my heart is just broken hearing your story, Carya. and I’m not going to try to find the right words, there just aren’t that many. I’ll just thank you again for your bravery, your honesty for sharing what you’ve told us today. 

And, I will admit, I’m incredibly grateful that I will be talking with Dr. Heather Gingrich as our expert contributor on the next episode. I believe she will be able to add a good bit of information that will add to your story and experiences…and in particular to DID.  I think she will be a wealth of knowledge for those of us who want to come along side people like you, Carya who want to help.

Safe to Hope is a production of HelpHer. Our Executive Producer is Ann Maree Goudzwaard. Safe to Hope is written and mixed by Ann Maree and edited by Ann Maree and Helen Weigt. Music in this season is ‘Cinematic Slow Sad Piano | Soundtrack’ by OpenMusicList, licensed via Pixabay. We hope you enjoyed this episode in the Safe to Hope podcast series.