Safe to Hope

Season 6: Episode 13 - Carya's Story Part 5

• Ann Maree Goudzwaard

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In this pivotal chapter of her story, Carya shares how her long nightmare began to shift—when the years of abuse finally gave way to rescue. Yet safety was not something she could walk into alone. This episode highlights the crucial role of people-helpers—those who step in, stand beside, and walk with survivors through the fear, uncertainty, and fragile beginnings of healing.

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.


Ann Maree
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.

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

I’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 to 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.

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.

Today, we’ll be listening again to our storyteller Carya. We acknowledge this has been hard to hear, but even so, important to bear witness. We’ve alluded to this in this series before, but how does someone survive what Carya has shared?

Today, we will turn a corner and begin to hear about the rescue God performed and his children—friends of Carya’s, very much in tune with the Holy Spirit—how they obediently and carefully executed her rescue.

Carya, what can you tell us about how your “rescue” happened?

Carya
On a late September afternoon of what was supposed to be my final year of graduate school I sat on the balcony of a vacation rental with one of my housemates, Joy, trying to read a favorite book but distracted by how wretched I felt. Starting two months prior I’d begun full-time dissertation writing – after finishing two years of intensive dissertation research and travel – and I was trying to simultaneously finish in time to graduate in May and apply for jobs so that I’d have a way to support myself once I did. It was a stressful, overwhelming time. But there was more to my wretchedness than that. For reasons that I couldn’t identify, I’d descended over the previous month into a tetchy, short-fused funk, and as I sat on the balcony I realized how deeply, painfully wrong everything felt. But I didn’t know why. I knew I was stressed, but this… this was more than stress.

Our friend Lynn soon joined me and Joy on the balcony. She and her family had rented the spot for several days, then invited us to spend a night and a day with them there to get a break. The three of us started chatting, and soon I was muttering about how awful I felt and how I didn’t know what was wrong with me. All of a sudden Lynn looked at me intently and said “I do. D-A-D.” Joy nodded emphatically.

My dad had flown out to see me several weeks before and, Lynn told me, ever since then I’d been a mess. What I didn’t know at that point, and what Lynn and Joy didn’t know either, was that some of my dissociative barriers were beginning to break down, and I was losing the veneer of functionality that my DID provided. But none of us knew yet that I had DID. I’d never said a word to either of them about my abuse because, most of the time, the parts of me that interacted with them were parts responsible for doing “regular life” things. The parts of me that handled abuse didn’t talk to anyone, certainly not people who might expose the truth. All Lynn and Joy knew was that ever since my dad’s visit, I hadn’t been okay.

That moment on the balcony is when my rescue began. Or, at least, it’s as good a place as any to start telling the story. I said before that God’s rescue plan was in motion long before I became aware of it, so it’s impossible to pinpoint the exact moment it started. But when Lynn so confidently told me she knew what was wrong with me, then spelled out D-A-D, I felt something shift inside. Or maybe what I felt was a stumble, as someone inside me who was hiding the truth about my dad staggered with the weight they were carrying when they heard her words. I didn’t know it, but God had been preparing to get me out – awakening a few parts of me to the possibility of a different life than the one I had, providing me with critical resources I would need to escape – and he was about to set it all in motion.

Once he did, though, it took a long time. My escape was sharp and sudden and unexpected, but also slow and agonizing and full of waiting. Just as I can’t truly pinpoint when my rescue started, I can’t precisely identify when it ended. Getting out of a system like the one I was trapped in is not easy, linear, nor quick. Groups of abusers, like mine, who invest so much time in developing and programming their victims, and who use DID to control them, do not let them go without a fight. Indeed, they do everything they can to make escape impossible, both before a victim ever tries, and then after. For me, getting out took at least ten years; like I said, I’m not sure exactly when it ended.

My rescue is a good story, one I’m eager to tell. I’m absolutely astounded by what God did: how he extracted me from the network of perpetrators that held me, protected me from their retaliation, sustained me, provided for me, cared for me, and eventually set my feet on solid ground and gave me a life that I’m glad for. I hope listeners will be glad too, that they’ll be filled with wonder at his goodness and glory. But it’s important to know that the process was not only long, but painful. As crazy as it might sound, I felt worse during the years of my rescue than before it began. Before I end today I’ll explain why, and why the church needs to understand this aspect of walking alongside those with complex trauma.

Ann Maree
Nothing is ever really wrapped up in a neat little package, is it? My daughter coined the phrase, “big bow theology.” I think that’s the type of story we’d prefer to hear, Carya, one that’s all wrapped up at the end and made pretty with a big red bow. You’re right, it’s important to acknowledge that not everyone (at the end of the “episode”) gets “fixed.” It’s important to emphasize that there are people in the pews of every single church who may be spiraling from similar circumstances, or (as we keep saying) less concentrated circumstances; but nonetheless, great suffering, and loss, and pain. Add to that, how a mind and body respond for our own protection, the complication of dissociation and DID. Many people–even those without a similar story–struggle to navigate the implications of dissociation and DID.

As much as we’d like to put a bow on this story, wrap it up in “all things work together,” it isn’t that easy. So Carya, will you share your experience of this rescue?

Carya
When Lynn’s comment on the balcony that September day cracked open something inside me, things got a lot harder. I spent the rest of that fall getting steadily worse, more wretched. By November I felt like I was losing my mind. A war was raging inside me. God was slowly and gently drawing forth a few parts of me who, he knew, were close to being able to tell the truth about what they’d endured. But other parts, the vast majority of my parts, were not ready for this, and they were doing everything they could to keep it all stuffed down. I was like a pressure cooker with a degrading seal. Everything was roiling inside, but it had never been able to get out; now, bursts of scalding steam escaped without warning. I was constantly sick to my stomach, and by Thanksgiving was having daily panic attacks. I kept doggedly working on my dissertation, but I was losing my grip. On everything.

Finally, in early December, a little-girl-part of me, about 8 years old, couldn’t take it anymore. Her dissociative barrier came down and she woke in the night – I woke in the night – and started showing a regular-life part of me all about a time that one of my dad’s closest friends came up to my bedroom and leisurely raped me. A crack had appeared in that one part’s wall, and as the year wound down she peeked through it more and more, allowing more of her experience to be known. As she did, all that she’d endured – the knowledge, pain, anguish, shame, confusion, and despair she’d carried for decades – were no longer neatly contained, quarantined away from the rest of me. It all spilled out, all over my life, all over me. I thought I’d been a mess before, but once this happened, life seemed to stop. Progress on my dissertation ground to a halt.

The way DID works is that dissociated parts hold a lot more than mere information. In my previous episode I talked about how, for example, the parts of me that might know I had been raped on the way to school, or know that I had an appointment with a client after school, were different from the parts who took a spelling test or played in a soccer game. What each part knew wasn’t just the fact of their abuse, but the effect of it. The reason I could function throughout my decades of abuse was that all my parts kept the fallout quarantined, not just the facts. A little girl who is being raped every day by sadistic, calculating, organized groups cannot handle life. Once my dissociative barriers started coming down, my ability to handle life came down as well.

Ann Maree
I hope this doesn’t come off as simplistic, but I want to relate what you’re saying in a way that those who have not experienced such a concentrated version of evil might comprehend better what you’re telling us. I think about adults who tell a small child who has just fallen and been hurt not to cry. Or even adults who ask for prayer when they’re suffering from life’s devastations to “pray that I won’t break down.” Simplistically, we all dissociate and create false identities (stoicism or bravery for example)  when we “stuff” our God-given emotions. I think it’s because those around us are uncomfortable with OUR feelings. They don’t know what to do with them so they encourage us to not feel the feels we are feeling! Then, when we actually recall the pain of betrayal, or life’s losses, or even worse (like you, Carya) sexual assault or coercion/manipulation/gaslighting (programming!) it all seems to come tumbling down on us like a wall of bricks. It feels overwhelming.

Similar to the extreme of DID, training ourselves or one another to ignore the thermometer of our emotions, to disregard what they may be trying to tell us in order to protect ourselves, get out of the way of danger (if possible), find safety, we all have a tendency toward bandaging wounds which require emergency surgery and then having to deal with the subsequent infection instead. God designed our emotions, and the physical manifestations in our bodies of these emotions (knot in stomach, heart rate racing, or that sense that something is off when we walk through a dark parking garage), to alert us to something. The question is, do we listen?

As helpers, we don’t do anyone any favors by encouraging ignorance of what our minds and bodies are telling us. And that can be accomplished by any level of caregiver. Carya, I think what you’ll share next is also so important to hear. There is a season for different types of care, and there is a place for different disciplines and levels of expertise. Help us understand this from your experience.

Carya
The good thing about losing my ability to function so well was that it made it obvious that I needed help. I was way too scared and overwhelmed to seek out [quote] “professional” help, but I started opening up to my friends. Though none of us knew it, God had been preparing and equipping us for this. That moment on the balcony with Lynn may be as good a place as any to begin my rescue story, but another place I could have started was thirteen years prior when Joy and I became friends, and four years after that when I met Lynn. Over the years I had come to trust and love these women. I may have been a closed book, but once those cracks appeared and I realized I needed to let others in, there they already were. God had given them what they needed for this, too: wisdom, discernment, patience, and a love for me that outweighed the burden on them that my mess undeniably was.

Lynn, several years older than me, would come over to my house regularly to talk and pray with me and Joy, and to shepherd me through the turmoil that was leaking out of my internal lockboxes. It was to Lynn that one of my parts first spoke directly, without “me” knowing, and Lynn who recognized that for what it was. By God’s grace, she knew someone else with DID, so she took it all in stride, and over the course of time gently helped me to understand what I was experiencing. One day she gave me a big bag full of children’s books, many of them about God, and suggested that I try reading to my parts. It felt insane, but I did it, and it proved so wise. It helped some of them to start to trust me and, even more importantly, enabled some of them to long for God rather than fear him. It was incredibly kind of God to give me friends who could walk through this time with me so closely, and so unfazedly. I was freaked out by my DID and by the explosion of dysfunction in my life, but while they grieved with and for me, my friends were not freaked out.

I suspect that those who work with people who have DID or suffered severe sexual abuse would say that someone in my my position at that time should get the help of a trained, skilled therapist or psychologist. As a general rule, I agree. It was certainly the case that none of us really knew what we were doing, and we readily admitted it. It was also the case that as the winter and spring months unfolded, my situation got worse and more complicated. More cracks appeared in more of my parts’ walls, and I became a clamorous cacophony of selves. I was tormented by flashbacks, and reluctant to drive after one erupted so immersively while I was behind the wheel that I nearly caused a wreck. I – who loved going for long walks where I could hear the birds and wind and hubbub of the world – took to stuffing in earbuds whenever I was out in an attempt to stave off more flashbacks and drown out the anguish inside. I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t handle crowds. I was scared all the time. I had flashbacks every day. I couldn’t sleep. I wasn’t even pretending to work on my dissertation any more.

So, yeah, it would be reasonable to conclude that I needed professional help. I know that Lynn, especially, was acutely aware of her lack of expertise, and that by human standards it seemed foolish for us to stumble along, her taking point in shepherding me toward healing. But here’s the thing: God doesn’t always do things according to human standards or wisdom.

I want to be really careful in how I say this. There’s a tendency in a lot of Christians to disdain and distrust expertise, especially in the realms of mental health and trauma, and to think that all we need is God and the Bible. Neither Lynn, Joy, nor I thought that we could just wing this on our own. I absolutely needed more knowledgeable help, and Lynn very much wanted me to be able to work with a counselor. In fact, she got connected somehow to one who works with women just like me – women whose families abused them for years, women who suffered satanic, sadistic, and ritualistic abuse, women who have DID – and Lynn regularly called her for advice. It was not that we didn’t think that we needed help. It was simply that I was. not. ready.

I’d spent over three decades keeping the awful truth about my life tightly sealed away, not letting anyone see. It was a massive, wrenching step for me to start opening up to the only two people in the world I felt safe enough to allow in. There was no way I could have worked with someone else on this, and even less of a chance that my parts would’ve been able to trust some new person. We all knew that I needed counseling, but we also knew that pushing me there was a bad idea. God knew it, too, and he gave us all just exactly what we needed. To me, he gave a willingness to trust where I never had before, as well as a stubborn faith that clung to him during this storm. I’ll say more about that in a minute. To Joy, he gave the ability to listen daily to a friend’s awful processing, and patience to live with a housemate who was no longer functioning well. And to Lynn, he gave immense wisdom, on-the-job training, and the grace to spend hours with me every week on top of her demanding job and her family responsibilities with two young children. To all of us, he gave hearts to seek him and ears to hear his leading.

Ann Maree
This is such a powerful picture of the body of Christ. There is a place for “lay-level” care even in something so decidedly outside the realm of our expertise. We (lay counselors/church members/leaders) need to stay in our lane (this is so obvious for the kind of care you’d ultimately need). However, as Heather Gingrich writes in Restoring the Shattered Self lay level care is valid no matter the circumstances. There are ways those of us with expertise in the church can come alongside professional counseling care and partner together for the body’s good.  There are always ways, in fact, as you’ve articulated, we (as primary point people) can be prepared to listen and to hear when someone comes forward to report their abuse. It’s not rocket science! It’s a posture. It’s a condition (of compassion/empathy/love of neighbor). And it’s imperative that those qualities begin with how we (in our own lives first, as Diane Langberg writes) relate to our Heavenly Father. That’s the foundation for care (in the church).

But we would be remiss not to highlight the limitations of lay person care. What you are going to share with us next, Carya, emphasizes the absolute importance of victim centric care. The victim alone knows the level of risk in reporting their abuse. The victim has to live with the consequences of what they share. I think our audience will sense this importance as you tell us the next part of your story.

Carya
During these long months many of my internal walls crumbled, but nowhere near all of them. There were still parts of my experience that no one inside me was willing to let out yet. Although Lynn had told me that my problem was D-A-D, she didn’t know why, and the ones inside me who did kept it quarantined. Other parts, who knew what my dad’s friends did to me, were able to let that out, but the ones who handled my dad’s direct abuse were too terrified and traumatized to admit it. Still other parts – those who handled my abuse from Kurt (whose former house I know owned and lived in), George (to whose home I regularly went for family dinner), Pastor Farrow (now a seminary president and no longer my pastor, but still influential in our church circles), as well as elders at my church – were also keeping their knowledge behind thick, hermetically sealed walls. This meant that even as some parts of me met with Lynn to talk and pray about what had happened during rituals in my childhood, other parts of me still followed orders to go to my church at night for new rituals or kept appointments that George, now my handler, arranged.

You might wonder how or why this could be so – how could I still be so internally divided, if dissociative barriers were now coming down? The easiest answer is that this is just how DID works. Parts don’t necessarily know one another’s experiences, and even when they do, each one has to work out for themselves what they’re going to do with what they endured. Remember that their entire purpose was to protect me, both from the effect of the abuse and from threats of retaliation. The parts who knew about my dad had to feel that the rest of me could handle that without breaking psychologically before they would even consider letting it out. Same thing with the parts who knew about all the men and women who were still abusing me. Additionally, perpetrators in groups like this – who know about DID and use it for their purposes – force some of their victims’ parts to, essentially, spy on them. Some of my parts had programming to report back to my abusers if and when I started trying to deal with what was happening, and then my abusers could take additional steps to reel me back in. Other parts were threatened horribly with what would happen should I ever try to escape.

God was working, effecting my rescue, but it had to go slowly. It was many, many months after Lynn spelled out D-A-D before anyone inside who knew the truth about him let it slip out, and many more months still before a part shared something about Pastor Farrow. When that happened – almost a year and a half after the conversation with Lynn on the balcony – it precipitated a sudden, surreal escape attempt from my handler and most regular abusers. Before I tell that part of the story, though, I want to pause to say something about my relationship with God during that year and a half.

Ann Maree
As you continue to tell your story it becomes more and more evident that God was at the center of your rescue. We know from episode 2 that the struggle and wrestling involved in both knowing that fact but not being able to mediate it with your day to day reality while living in bondage to your abusers. The audience likely wonders precisely what you’ve said, what did a relationship with God look like during this season, the season of rescue?

Carya
I said earlier that I felt worse during the years of my rescue than I had before it was set in motion. The reason, as I hope I’ve made clear, is that all the damage done by my abuse was held in quarantine along with the fact of the abuse. As the seals broke, the damage oozed out everywhere. If you had seen me from the outside during the first 30+ years of my life, you probably wouldn’t have known anything was wrong, because all my parts were handling everything and enabling “me” to function. But if you’d seen me from the outside after the rescue commenced, you would definitely have known something was wrong, even if you couldn’t tell what. As each month went by I looked more and more like a woman who had indeed lived the kind of life I’d lived – I was shattered, desperate, afraid, overwhelmed, struggling to function.

Yet in the midst of what I can only describe as an agonizing year and a half – during which I started facing my trafficking, the “intentional community” I’d grown up in, my family, my training, and the rituals –  I came to know God in a way I never had before. During this time, my life was coming undone – I was coming undone – and I felt storm-tossed, battered by waves and lashed by wind and rain. There was no solid ground anywhere it seemed, no guarantee that I would survive or be okay. But, by God’s grace, I clung to Jesus. I’m afraid that will sound so saintly and pious, and I assure you that it was not. I clung to him because I did not know what else to do, because I had no other choice. I clung to him because he was the only thing that made any sense to me in a world that had become senseless. The truth is that much of the time I wasn’t even the one holding on, and I knew it. He simply would not let me go.

I questioned God and why he didn’t protect me; I pleaded with him to make the pain stop; I begged him to yank me out of the valley of the shadow of death. He didn’t do any of those things, at least not in the way I meant them, and not on my timeline. But as I clung to him – because he was clinging to me – I learned to recognize his voice and presence. Unfathomably, I learned to know that he was good even when my life was awful. As I wrote in Jesus is My Captain (which we aired at the beginning of this season), during this time I learned to trust God as the author of my story. It was not comfortable, not peaceful, not easy. I felt terrible. But by the time my parts admitted that I was still being raped, I’d learned to hold on to God in the wilderness, and I’d learned that he was more real than I’d ever imagined. I would need those skills for the next stage of the rescue: escape.

Ann Maree
At the end of this season we will be talking to Lynn. I’m anxious to hear from her and get her perspective and insight from during this time. Honestly, I think Lynn is probably the most important “expert” we will hear from during this series (no offense to those we consider valuable expert contributors as well!) But, as God was holding on to you, preparing you, Lynn was practically finding help. I want to emphasize that this is not a formula for “how to rescue someone from a satanic cult and trafficking situation.” Each case is unique. In advocacy care we avoid paternalism at all costs. That is, we do not take away a person’s agency and, as previously mentioned, our care is victim centric. The victim decides their safety in their decisions. However. “Safety first” is how we advise those who seek our help at Help[H]er, and sometimes that safety includes a decisive decision making (with safety still at the forefront of our minds, of course) that intervenes in order to provide a resource for protection. Tell us more, Carya.

Carya
When Lynn learned that I was still being abused, she immediately called the counselor she sometimes spoke with for advice. That advice was blunt: “get her out. Now.” She said my parts couldn’t even begin to heal if they were still being accessed, harmed, and programmed, and I couldn’t get free and whole if I was still in proximity to my abusers. She said that there was no way to prevent more abuse if I stayed, because the parts of me that had to report to my abusers would keep doing so – they wouldn’t be able to stop until they learned that safety was possible. And now that the secret about Pastor Farrow was out, my perpetrators would seek to take me more fully in hand. Perhaps they would even want to make me disappear.

I didn’t know any of this. All I knew was that Lynn didn’t want me to be alone, ever, so during the day when Joy was at work, Lynn had me come over to her house where her husband worked from home and could keep an eye on me. We did this for almost a week, until Lynn came over to my house on a Friday for our usual time of talk and prayer. But instead of the usual, she took me and Joy out to brunch, then out to one of my favorite state parks, where we walked in the cold February air. There, Lynn told me about her conversation with the counselor, and told me that she was flying me out on Sunday morning to go stay in a safe house. I couldn’t believe it. She wanted me to leave the only two people in the world I trusted and go live with complete strangers so far away that I had to fly there?? How could that be a good idea? I wanted to just hole up in Lynn’s house forever. I reached down to scoop slushy snow with my bare hands, then flung snowballs at distant trees to vent my anguish. But after only one or two hard throws, the anger drained out of my arm as I felt God shift something in me. I still did not want to leave, but I was suddenly sure that I was supposed to, that this was his plan.

The next 36 hours were surreal. I needed to pack two suitcases for a trip from which I wasn’t sure I would ever return. I didn’t know where I was going – Lynn didn’t tell me, for fear that one of my parts would report it to my abusers – and I didn’t know what kind of stuff I might need there. Lynn was able to give me a few tips, including that I would be glad if I brought my French Press for coffee (she was right). But how do you decide what you need when you are not traveling, per se, but fleeing from danger? And what do you do with yourself for the day-and-a-half before you leave? I couldn’t tell anyone what was happening, because at that point we didn’t know who was safe. I couldn’t even trust myself not to compromise my own escape, and we had to make sure that I wasn’t alone even long enough for one of my parts to take over and make a phone call. Lynn got worried enough that she had both me and Joy come over to sleep at her house on Saturday, not wanting to leave me at my own home overnight even with someone else there.

On Sunday morning we all woke up early, and Lynn drove me and Joy to the airport. Joy was flying out with me, both because we weren’t sure that I had the basic capacity to navigate travel on my own, and because of the safety concerns of what I might do if left unattended. It was a long, long day. Our flight had a layover, and it wasn’t until Joy led me to the gate for the final leg that I knew what city I was flying in to. After we boarded and took off, once the flight was at cruising altitude, Joy handed me a short letter from Lynn explaining to me where I was going. She had tried to get me in to a spot at a safe house with the counselor she’d been talking to, but there wasn’t room. She considered several other possibilities, but finally decided that there wasn’t a better place, or safer people, than the Kuchens – her parents. She was sending me to the home she’d grown up in, and knowing that I’d be with the family of this friend who had walked so closely beside me was a huge relief. I trusted Lynn implicitly, and that trust transferred to her parents.

They lived on a farm out in the country in the middle of nowhere. We arrived well after dark, and as soon as I got inside I called Lynn to tell I’d made it safely, then broke down sobbing. I had no idea what was happening to me or what had just become of my life. I hadn’t even begun to face the reality that Pastor Farrow was one of my rapists, and before I could get my feet under me I’d fled to a new part of the country with a fraction of my belongings and no expectation that I’d ever go back to the home I’d just left.

Ann Maree
It strikes me just how measured Lynn and Joy were, and how they used wisdom based on both what they knew and what no one really could have known. Again, this just speaks volumes of God’s intervention. Human knowledge was seriously deficient. I’d have to gather, as well, that the “ripping” effect, being taken from what you knew to something you knew NOTHING about, had to be incredibly disorientating from even the previous circumstances. I can’t help but sense God’s presence to even hold you together in order to get you to safety.

The timing, the planning, and now the “landing” in your new surroundings…all by God’s design. Can you share with us now what the “new” looked like? I realize it included adapting and transition, but also a whole new way of living (or was it?)

Carya
When Lynn talked to her parents about my situation, she asked them to let me stay with them for four months. At the end of those four months, she and her family would be moving close to where her parents lived, so the idea was that this was a stop-gap measure: I’d stay with the Kuchens for a short time, then Lynn’s family would come get me once they moved and we’d all regroup and figure out a long-term plan. Reality proved to be far different. By the time Lynn’s family moved, we all knew that I wasn’t ready to leave her parents yet. The four months that the Kuchens agreed to shelter me turned into over seven years, fully twenty-one times what they’d agreed to. But that’s jumping ahead in the story.

In the year and a half before I came to the Kuchen’s, I’d lost a lot of my capacity as the damage and PTSD that so many of my parts held secret spilled out. But when the dissociative barrier that quarantined the reality of my ongoing abuse came down, I lost all remaining ability to function. I fell almost completely apart, and couldn’t handle anything. When the Kuchens welcomed me into their home, they didn’t know that they were welcoming a woman who didn’t just need a place to live, but one who fundamentally couldn’t take care of herself anymore. Neither Lynn nor I knew it either, but it became obvious immediately.

When I first arrived I was such a basket case that I did close to nothing. I handled my own laundry, and (I think) started helping with dinner and dishes after a few weeks, but that was it. It’s hard for me to remember what filled my earliest days there, but I can remember how I felt: utterly at sea and hanging on to life by a thread. I didn’t mean to be lazy or self-centered; I just couldn’t see or handle anything outside myself; I couldn’t even handle what was inside myself.

I couldn’t go anywhere alone or be left at home by myself, which limited the Kuchen’s ability to see friends and visit family. Even simple errands required extra planning because of my presence in their lives. They were deeply involved at their church, but I couldn’t go – we’d stopped by on a quiet weekday only a few days after I arrived to give me a chance to get used to it, and it triggered me so badly I nearly threw up – so they had to arrange for someone to come and be at the house with me on Sunday mornings. I certainly couldn’t earn an income. Even if there had been a paying job I could do from their home, I was in no condition for it. I imagine it felt like they had taken on an adult-sized infant: someone to provide for who was not yet capable of contributing in any meaningful way to her own support, much less to that of the larger household. At least, I did my crying in private, and did not need diapers.

It went on like this, more or less, for several years. My capacity did grow just a bit and I became more helpful around the house and, eventually, sometimes even able to anticipate needs or initiate projects. After about two and half years I took on a small job when Lynn’s husband needed someone to handle finances and admin for his work. I could do that from home, and found I was able to put in about 5 hours a week. Thankfully, that was all he needed, and this tiny income enabled me to pay for my own toiletries and supplies. The Kuchens still covered everything else. After a few more years I was up to 10 hours a week for that job, plus another 5 or so doing projects around the house and farm, in addition to my share of daily and weekly chores.

Throughout these years my dissociated parts continued making themselves known, revealing their pain and sharing what they’d endured. I learned that the worse things were, the more deeply they were buried. I faced the reality of my life in unfolding layers, repeatedly thinking that, surely, I had finally hit bottom, but it was always a false floor. I spent hours each day wrestling with God, wrestling with my life, wrestling for hope and a future. I’d taken a medical leave from my PhD program but hadn’t touched my dissertation in ages. After some time with the Kuchens the Lord showed me that it was time to let it go; I wasn’t temporarily derailed, as I’d been telling myself for over two years now, but permanently off the track. I wrote to my committee and withdrew, just 6 months shy (for a healthy person) of finishing my degree. At the time it wasn’t even all that wrenching, because I was so incapacitated. But still, I knew I’d lost the future that I’d spent so long working and hoping for.

Life was almost impossibly hard. I longed to be able to just let it go, too, and would have welcomed the diagnosis of a terminal illness. Occasionally I stared into a bottle of pills or fingered my pocket knife, wishing they were viable options for me, but knowing God wasn’t offering me that choice. One day about five years into my time with the Kuchens I was driving back to their house (we had recently deemed it safe for me to drive myself on short trips), when I suddenly looked around at the road I was on and realized I had no idea where I was. A part had switched out with me completely, taken over, and was driving somewhere I didn’t know. I regained control, figured out where I was, and got myself home, but once there I called an internal family meeting to find out where we had been going and why. The part that had taken over was heading toward a roadside cliff, hoping to drive over it and put a final end to all the pain.

We also learned that, although my escape attempt had been successful, it hadn’t quite been complete. My abusers weren’t able to stop me from leaving, but all the work they’d done to program some of my parts to report to them didn’t go completely to waste. We’d abandoned my cell phone when I fled, but Joy bought me a new one, with a new number, so I could keep in touch with her and Lynn without racking up long-distance charges on the farm’s landline. Some of my parts used it to contact my abusers, who were then able to continue accessing me, though far, far less often. Their grip was attenuated now, but some of my parts were still obedient to them. One of the reasons I said earlier that I can’t pinpoint the exact end of my rescue is that I don’t know precisely when I last kept an appointment for a ritual. But I do know that it was well after I was no longer living at the Kuchen’s farm.

I realize that all this may sound very grim, and not at all like the good story I’ve been promising. I’ve lingered on this because I think it’s important for listeners to understand that the process of getting out of an abusive situation is difficult and messy. It’s not a snap of the fingers, a neat before-and-after intervention. This is true for any kind of abuse, but all the more so when dealing with organized perpetrator groups like the ones my father and handlers were a part of. The other reason I’ve lingered here is that listeners might not realize how astounding God’s rescue was if they don’t see it against its full backdrop. If we don’t see just how hard it was for me to get out and to survive the process, we won’t fully see the magnitude of what God did. One of my favorite sights is the way early evening light looks when it illuminates trees and landscape in the east, its soft, warm colors making hills and forests glow. But it is absolutely stunning when the eastern sky behind the illuminated landscape is dark with storm clouds. Then, the beauty and glory of the light leaps out from the troubled sky behind it.

Ann Maree
That imagery is mindblowing. Even more so when you relate it to what happened to you. I know we will dig in a little more to some of those word pictures about your relationship with God that you draw so beautifully in the 6th episode of your story, but thank you for giving us this glimpse. And. Wow. the pervasiveness of the assaults to you…mind, body and soul…and the sheer amount of your life evil persons owned.

This next part of your story is, again, such a beautiful picture of care. I think of the idea of spiritual adoption and just how important that is, especially for a situation like yours. Jim Wilder writes, “the biggest deterrent to Satanism is a loving relationship with a person…” and, “Life giving communities help their members develop strong identities” (Red Dragon, 55, 68). So, then I also think about the family we have in the church, and how these circumstances from your story might encourage us as a community to be hands and feet for those in the most need. Again, no one knew this was what to do, nor HOW to do it. And each situation is unique. But I think we can glean a lot from how Lynn and her family surrounded you.

Also importantly, I’d suggest for the audience to listen to the gentleness and carefulness in their approach.

Carya
When Lynn asked her parents to shelter me, she was desperate, just looking for someone safe who had the space and ability to take me in for a brief time. But as it turned out, the Kuchens were far more than just safe, and their home was far more than merely big enough to accommodate my presence. In my earliest years there, when my PTSD was so bad that I almost couldn’t handle any human interaction at all, their farm in the middle of nowhere was the perfect place for me. It was isolated, quiet, and very low on stimulation. But the most extraordinary thing about where God had put me was the Kuchens themselves. They were patient, understanding, and so very gentle. I am amazed, when I look back on this time, by how unbothered they seemed by my inabilities and needs.

In those first weeks they just let me be a basket case, never reproaching me for my failure to pitch in around the house. As time went by, they looked for small ways to engage me and bring some joy in the midst of my sorrow. A month or so after I arrived Mr. Kuchen asked me if I would like to raise bottle lambs. His brother had sheep, and every year there were some orphan lambs that needed to be raised. There were other people who could do it, but Mr. Kuchen thought I might like it. We set up the barn, and Mrs. Kuchen found me some old, oversized barn clothes I could wear over my own warm clothes (lambing season is cold), and for weeks and weeks I prepped bottles and fed lambs several times a day. I spent hours snuggling them in the barn, prayed over one whose front legs stopped working, and got pooped on extravagantly by another I was nursing back to health. I can tell you that it’s true that sheep know their shepherd’s voice – later in the spring, once those lambs could graze and didn’t need bottles anymore, they would ignore anyone else’s voice but come running when they heard mine.

There was a sweet barn cat who gave birth to kittens a couple of months after I arrived, and I found their nest (inside one of the barn walls) before their eyes were even open, and handled them so often that they started following me around like the lambs did, mewling exuberantly as soon as they saw me. Every morning I’d eat my breakfast then take my coffee down to the barn and sit on the ground while the kittens clambered and played all around me. In the afternoons, when I was wrung out from the flashbacks that tore through me everyday, I’d climb up to the haymow and sit with them purring on my lap, reminded that there was more to the world than what my abusers had done to me. I hung out with the horse and eventually took over haying her in the winter (I didn’t know haying was a verb until I lived on the farm) and pasturing her in the summer. At the Kuchens’ suggestion I took long walks circumnavigating the fields of the farm because I didn’t feel safe going for walks off the property.

Rather than beholding me – a woman in my mid-30s who could only manage a few hours of “productive” activity in a whole week, who never left home, who hid in her room when people came over to the house, who spent hours hanging out with animals, and whose mental health was steadily declining – instead of beholding me with dismay, disappointment, or disgust, the Kuchens loved me. When I told them I was suicidal they took it seriously and prayed for me, but didn’t freak out. When I wasn’t sure if I could handle adding weekly mowing to my limited repertoire of chores, they didn’t reprimand me, and simply waited for me to be ready. When I nearly threw up the first time I visited their church, they were the ones who declared that I shouldn’t go, and throughout the 3+ years it took before I was able to try again, they never once tried to hurry me. When I asked if I could hang a punching bag down in the barn so I’d have something to hit that wouldn’t damage me when my rage bubbled out, they didn’t blink an eye.

Mrs. Kuchen made sure to put half-and-half on her grocery list for my coffee, faithfully replenished the sharp cheddar cheese I loved, and kept us well stocked with apples when she saw that I ate one almost every day. Mr. Kuchen answered my endless questions about farming – what’s a combine? why are end rows treated differently than the rest of the field? what’s the difference between discing and plowing? – and he engaged me deeply in questions he was wrestling with about church, despite the fact that I wasn’t even going. They treated me with respect, asked me for advice, and acted like there was nothing weird about or wrong with what I could and couldn’t do.

A critical moment in my relationship with them came early, only 2-3 weeks after I arrived. They knew of a counseling center two hours away that had a counselor who was familiar with DID and ritual abuse. They offered, through Lynn, to take me there for an exploratory appointment and, I later learned, were willing to pay for ongoing counseling. The idea of seeing a counselor still scared me, but I thought I should try. The three of us made the long drive, then Mrs. Kuchen and I sat in the office with the counselor for an hour. I no longer remember much of what he said, but I remember hating every minute of it. First, he spent too much time on small talk at the beginning. Then, when we did finally rip the bandaid off, he somehow left me with the impression that he thought that what I was going through wasn’t all that big a deal.

I held it together in his office, but as soon as we got back into the car I retreated into my iPod, and tears started leaking down my cheeks. We stopped at a Trader Joe’s in the city so Mrs. Kuchen could stock up on the way home, and while she shopped I sat in the backseat of the car, hunched over, sobbing silently, with Mr. Kuchen in the driver’s seat pretending there was nothing to see here. This must have been incredibly awkward for him, and I was sorry, but I was a wreck and in no condition to talk. I cried hard for most of the long drive home then stared, desolate, out the window while my music still drowned out the Kuchen’s conversation in the front seat. Once home, I fled to my room, called Lynn, and cried all over again, for a long time. The whole experience had felt so awful, but in my fragile state, I couldn’t tell if I was reading things correctly. Maybe it had actually been good for me, and my reaction was just because I’d never done this before? Maybe this man could help me, even though I had not liked him at all? I wrestled myself to a place where I would submit to going back, if the Kuchens thought I should, because I didn’t trust my own judgment. But I dreaded the possibility.

At dinner time I came down from my room and faced the Kuchens without the shield of my earbuds for the first time since the appointment, wondering what my fate would be, wondering what they thought about how it had gone. I didn’t know how to start the conversation, but before I had to, they told me they were sorry. They told me they were incensed with the counselor, that they felt like they’d been fools to think he might help me, that there was no way they wanted me going back to see him. For the third time that day I broke down into overwhelmed tears, but this time they were tears of relief. When I saw the Kuchens talking in the front seat of the car during the drive I’d been so afraid that they’d see this differently, that they’d think this counselor could shape me up. But no – they were entirely on my side, protective of my heart as well as my life, and angry that it hadn’t been cared for well. It had been a miserable, wrenching day, but at the end of it I learned that the Kuchens were fully for me. God knew I needed to see them defend me.

Another crucial moment, probably the most critical, came not quite two years into my time at the farm. I’d always addressed the Kuchens by their first names, but in the fall of my second year there I began to notice that when I was about to say something to one of them, my brain would insert “mom” or “dad” before I spoke, and I had to translate back to their names before opening my mouth. Without meaning to, I was starting to think of Lynn’s parents as my parents. Eventually, I wondered if I should just ask them if I could call them mom and dad. First I asked Lynn what she thought – would she mind? She didn’t, so I decided to ask. I had to work up a lot of courage to do so, and was so nervous I could hardly get it out. But once I did, they said yes – again without batting an eye.

Now, technically, all I’d asked was if I could call them mom and dad, and technically that was all they said yes to. But God was doing something bigger. He was making us family. He was giving me what I had never had: parents who loved me, wanted me, were able to protect me, and thought I was worth fighting and even sacrificing for. Now, I don’t just call the Kuchens mom and dad; they are mom and dad. Without that, I never would have made it.

Ann Maree
I just want to repeat that last sentence. Without the Kuchens, the family that surrounded you– not just physically–the family that cared for a whole person (again, mind, body, and soul!), without them you wouldn’t have made it. That IS caring well. Praise God for the willingness and presence of this family.

When I originally heard this next part of your story I sensed a bit of “normalcy.” This season has been, in many ways, overwhelmingly heavy with the many surprising twists and turns. But, as your rescue to settle in, life seemed to begin to sound like what it might have been had you “grown up” in a regular (and I use that word loosely) family. Can you let the audience in on what your day to day was like?

Carya
One day, long after we had blown past the 4-month mark that the Kuchens – my parents now – had originally agreed to house me, I asked them how long they could keep doing this. My new dad shrugged, not so much to indicate that he didn’t know, but that he wasn’t worried about it. “As long as God wants us to,” he said with a smile. I ached with the slowness of it all, and I felt like I could hardly see progress. But as months became years – and then more years, approaching seven years – it became easier to see that things were changing. Going by myself to a new place was still beyond me, but I’d started doing some errands to familiar stores on my own, dashing quickly in and out. I tentatively began attending church again, slipping in after the service started, sitting inside one of the classrooms at the back of the sanctuary where no one could see me or sit near, and hurrying out again before people were dismissed. I’d made a couple of friends with whom I spent occasional time, and one, Tara, became close enough that I drove myself to her house for the afternoon once a week to give my parents a break. About a year after I started going to church I moved out of my classroom hideaway and into the back left-most pew with Tara and her family. At my mom’s request I’d also begun attending a Wednesday evening Bible Study – she couldn’t go if I didn’t – and to my great surprise I began subbing for the lead teacher after about a year.

I’d also started working with a counselor. One day, five and a half years after I’d come to the farm, I was visiting Lynn’s family in the city where they’d settled, just over an hour away. She told me that she’d just had another conversation with the counselor she touched base with about my situation, and during it the counselor said “are you asking if I have any openings for new clients?” Lynn hadn’t been, actually, but… “because I do,” the counselor finished. Shockingly, my reaction upon hearing this news wasn’t “no way,” but rather “maybe… maybe I’m ready now.” She couldn’t have taken me on any earlier, and I probably couldn’t have done it any earlier either. God’s timing was perfect.

So, as I approached seven years on the farm my capacity was still low, my mental health fragile, and my ability to function in society only partial – all in comparison to a “normal” adult. But I was exponentially healthier and more functional than the version of myself that fled from my abusers seven years before. Much that I thought had died was coming to life again. For the first time in long years, I pondered the future with occasional hope piercing into my despair.

Ironically, as I experienced this slow resurrection and increase in capacity, I began to chafe under my living situation. If I was like a helpless infant when I first arrived, seven years of stability, protection, and healing brought me (on an alternative timeline) to a stage of late teenage-hood. This growth was a direct result of my new parents’ unfailing love, kindness, and provision for me, and I knew it and loved them for it. Yet eventually I became healthy enough to resent my dependence on them, and the personal restrictions and conformity to their patterns of life it required of me, even though I was not yet capable of being on my own. But unlike an actual teenager, I was over 40 years old now, yearning to feel more in control of my life and struggling with shame over my dependence. I knew that full independence wasn’t possible, but I was ready for something different.

One day, when I spent the afternoon at Tara’s, we talked about how stuck I felt, and she decided to take things into her own hands. Unbeknownst to me, she talked to her husband, and the next morning texted me with an invitation to move in with them. We all talked and prayed, including my parents, and within just a few weeks I was settling in to a new home. It was only 6 miles by gravel road away from my parents, which is why I felt able to try it. In retrospect, this move proved to mark the beginning of a season of breathtaking growth. A mere eight months later I was still only 6 miles of physical distance from where I had been, but in capacity, functionality, and health, I had travelled an immeasurable distance indeed.

Ann Maree
This makes such sense, and especially that there were “growing pains.” And again, praise God there was growth. In all the details you share about how things continued to progress throughout the time of your rescue, God’s hand remains evident. He is obviously the conductor of this orchestrated plan to provide for your needs in the right way, at the perfect time. This is not to say you landed “on the other side” of your rescue “fixed” (we’ve said that before), nor even really completely (yet, if ever) capable of regular, adult world life complete with its responsibilities and decisions. Healing from significant trauma does not necessarily have a beginning and end. Oftentimes there’s a back and forth. You might move forward (on the healing journey), but then there may be times when you might move back. Movement is the hope, not simply movement forward. This is a key concept for caregivers (both licensed and lay). You need to know that you’ll be in it with a victim or survivor for the long haul.

I think the progress you’ve made shows both God’s great power and also provides hope. Hope not in circumstances changing, but hope in the God who transforms. Tell us some of the ways you were growing and thriving over the past many years since your rescue and subsequent movement to thrive more on your own.

Carya
Tara and her husband let me stay with them rent-free. They said it didn’t really cost them anything to have me there, although surely the utility bills were higher. But we agreed that I would handle all my own food: shopping, paying for, and preparing it. Tara cleared out a kitchen cabinet for me, and I started learning how to shop again. When living with my mom and dad I purchased my own toiletries and also bought my own coffee and chocolate, so I knew where those things were in the store. But now, instead of dashing quickly to just a few aisles to get the same few things, I needed meat, vegetables, half-and-half, oats, nuts, flour… everything. I didn’t know where anything was, nor which of the three grocery stores in the nearest town carried what I needed at the best prices.

For the first few weeks Tara handed over the grocery store flyers when they came in the mail, and I sat at the kitchen table perusing the sales and figuring out my budget. I found it very frustrating that the flyers only ever gave the sale price, and not the regular price, so I never knew if the sale was a good one or just a gimmick. I muttered this aloud one evening, asking how much bananas usually cost, and if the sale price of $0.39/lb was a good deal. That was the moment when Tara realized more fully just how disconnected from the world I was. We laughed together, but the learning curve was steep. In those first weeks I took multiple trips to Walmart (I needed various supplies for my room in addition to groceries), and spent an hour or so each time wandering the aisles, trying to learn the lay of the land, testing my tolerance for being in public by myself, and re-acclimating to this basic aspect of handling my own life. I felt like Rip van Winkle, freshly emerged from a long hibernation and finding the world unfamiliar and strange. “Since when does cereal come in bags instead of boxes?” I exclaimed to Tara one day. She just shook her head.

Without intention or planning, I was crossing a major milestone. I still didn’t like being out in public by myself, still needed to choose times for my shopping that wouldn’t be too crowded, and still needed someone to come with me if I was going somewhere new. But in a familiar store I found that I had enough capacity to monitor my surroundings, navigate my way through seemingly endless aisles, and keep track of what I was doing and why – all at the same time, and all without panic or overwhelm. I could evaluate different options and decide which item might best suit my needs, rather than mindlessly grabbing the first thing I saw and placing it in my cart. All this may sound simple enough, and is mere daily routine for many, but for someone with Complex-PTSD it is a major accomplishment. I was proud of myself, and so thankful for this unlooked-for change. Just a year or two before I thought I’d need a PTSD service dog if I was ever to re-engage out in the world again, and here I was spending hours at Walmart alone, without meltdown.

On paper my circumstances didn’t look all that different. I was living under someone else’s roof, having a large part of my expenses covered, and receiving the mercy and stability of few responsibilities, just as I had been with the Kuchens. But the dynamics of my relationships with Tara and her husband were very different from those with my parents. In age they were my peers, so it felt like having housemates, each of us running our own affairs. In key financial, emotional, practical, and spiritual ways I was dependent on them. But in other ways – also financial, emotional, practical, and spiritual – I was learning again how to care for myself, and thereby stepping towards a kind of future I’d long ago buried.

That summer Tara and I attended a week-long ministry program over 500 miles away. When we considered whether to go, I told Tara that before we said yes she needed to know that I might not be able to be alone there. I knew we would be in a large room with a lot of strangers, in an unfamiliar hotel in a city I’d never been to. I would want to sit in the very back. It was possible that if she got up to go get a drink of water, or look at the book table, I would need to follow her; it could be that when I needed a restroom break, or she did, that I would need us to go together. It was conceivable that I might not ever feel safe by myself, and we just wouldn’t know until we got there. I wanted her to think hard about whether she was up for such a possibility before we paid our registration fees.

We decided to go for it. When we got there I found that I didn’t need Tara to be my shadow, nor I hers. Bathroom breaks could be handled individually. We did sit in the very back, but I sometimes raised my hand and spoke up about something in front of the whole group. There was a coffee shop across the street from the hotel where all our sessions were held, and on the second morning we stopped in before we started, since I wasn’t too impressed by the hotel’s brew. The next day, as we parked and got ready to head in, I surprised myself by telling Tara, who is not much of a coffee drinker, that she could go ahead into the hotel and get settled for the day while I ran over to the shop by myself for coffee. I had not done such a thing in years, and all of a sudden – without planning or preparation – I was doing it in a city I’d been in for fewer than 72 hours.

The whole week was like that, full of me doing things that, only months before, I wondered if I would ever be able to do again. I had vulnerable conversations with people I’d only recently met, navigated through crowded rooms without panic, and engaged deeply in what we were learning. I even chose not to attend a session when I was overwhelmed, an act of self-protection and boundary-making I only barely believed it was legitimate for me to exercise. Tara was absolutely essential in all this. Her friendship, understanding, and especially her presence were necessary for my ability to function so well, to feel so secure, during that week. I was most definitely dependent on her. But I was also more independent than I’d been in years.

That week was transformative, and God began unfolding a new hope within me. During the long years of slow, incremental healing and severely limited capacity, I felt like I had little purpose in life, little that justified my existence. I’d been fighting for life just so I could stay alive; actually doing anything with that life had been impossible. During that week God reminded me that there was a reason he made me, that there was someone he was calling me to be, and that he would enable me to step into that. He didn’t give me specifics. But as though from a vantage point on a mountainside, I could see a life spread out in the valley below that was going to be worth living, a life that included my past but also had a future, a life that I would actually thank God for giving me. I had no idea what this meant for next steps, but I returned eager to see what God had in store.

Soon after, Lynn told me that a group she worked with needed a part-time administrator, so I added a second job and another 5 hours a week to my schedule. That fall the group’s board would meet in person in the same city where my counselor lived, so I decided to travel out there with Lynn – an almost twelve hour drive – in order to do some intensive in-person work with my counselor, and to sit in on the board’s meeting to help me learn the ropes for this new job.

I was due to my counselor’s place after lunch the day after we arrived, which was a further hour away. After dropping off Lynn I pulled up Google maps on my phone and left to find my counselor, alone. I was late leaving and thus late arriving, and my counselor didn’t get my text giving her a heads up. When I got there, she told me she wondered if I had bailed, and was really impressed that I’d come. She said that what I had just done was remarkable for a person with DID. I spent a day and a half working with her and taking long walks when we weren’t in sessions.

Early on my last morning I drove back into the city for the 8am board meeting, successfully navigated the downtown area, found the building where the meeting was, and figured out where to park. Although Lynn arrived soon after I got there, she was running late and I made my way up – to a new place, in a new city, and filled with new people – by myself. We met for almost four hours – much of which required me only to take notes and assimilate information – but this was on the heels of an incredibly intense few days, and I had never before even seen five of the six people who sat around the conference table with me.

Once the meeting ended, and Lynn and I had grabbed lunch to go from Chipotle and were back in my car for the long drive home, I collapsed. Tears and exhaustion poured out, and I had energy and concentration enough to drive only about one hour of the return trip, putting the lion’s share on Lynn’s tired shoulders. But only ten months before it had been a triumph for me to dash into a familiar store alone to grab bags of coffee. Just three months ago I wasn’t sure if I could handle a conference without Tara constantly at my side. Now, though I was utterly spent, look what I had done in just the past 48 hours! Mingled with my exhaustion were tears of amazement.

Ann Maree
These everyday life activities are all ways in which we (most of us) take for granted. But for silent sufferers of a variety of different abuses, particularly those who’ve dissociated and developed identities designed to help them cope, “everyday” activities accomplished are significant. I wonder if caregivers might tune their ears to listening for what seems like very small milestones, and then celebrating with survivors and encouraging them for every seemingly insignificant (to us!) step along the way. I sense we are not only programmed to wrap every situation up with a big bow, we may also fault on the side of looking for, and celebrating, only the major milestones. Yet every step for survivors is important, and worthy of acknowledgement.

On that note, I’m recognizing that you were not only growing in confidence of performing basic life skills, your conscience and intuition was strengthened, and you were growing in listening (and following) the lead of the Holy Spirit. This was also something that was also harmed in your experience, and retraining a conscience takes time and a safe environment. Tell us a little about how that looked.

Carya
God wasn’t finished with that wild year. He wasn’t even finished with that wild month. Shortly after I got back I was working at my computer one day when I saw a picture of a small house, tucked up against some woods, in the city where Lynn lived. In my earliest years at the farm I had hoped to relocate to that city once I was able to move out of my parent’s house, but I’d soon changed my mind. The problem with that city was, well, that it had people in it. I couldn’t handle people. By the time I moved in with Tara I fully expected to live out my days out there in the sparsely populated country. So when I saw this picture I was idly curious, but disinterested. As soon as I clicked on it, though, it was like I could feel the ground shifting beneath my feet. “God, what are you doing?”, I asked aloud. “It feels like you’re doing something!”

Less than a month later I stood in Tara’s kitchen, cooking, while I nervously awaited a response to the offer I’d made to buy that house. During the intervening weeks it had become clear that what God was doing was pushing me to move. I didn’t want to. I told him that I didn’t want to go live in that city, or anywhere where I’d be surrounded by so many people. I kept trying to shut the door, but everytime I did, he opened it again. Reluctantly, I called a realtor for a house showing, and when I toured it I said no way, absolutely no way – the house was way too small. But before I could even get out the door I sensed in my spirit that God might not be thinking “no way.” So I told my friends and parents – from whom I’d been keeping this, because I wanted the door to be shut – and asked Tara and Lynn to come to a second showing. I made appointments with loan officers, to see if anyone in their right mind would let employed-for-15-hours-a-week-me take out a mortgage, small though it would be for this tiny house, and walked out of the bank with a loan approval letter. Finally, I decided that after shutting the door so many times, only to have God keep reopening it, all I could do was try to walk through it. If he didn’t want this, I told him, he would have to shut the door now. So I made an offer on the house.

A few days later I signed the contract, and about a month later – just a couple of days before Christmas – I closed on it. It needed some work, so I didn’t move right away, but spent a few months juggling work with house prep. I still didn’t want to move. People at church kept telling me how excited they were for me, because they had some inkling of how big a deal this was. It was a small country church, and everyone knew everyone. When I first came to the farm, they’d prayed for my parents and the woman they’d taken in, then seen me inch my way into church services years later, then watched as I became more comfortable there, started teaching, and eventually moved to Tara’s house. They didn’t know the details of my story, but they knew I had a story, and they knew that my buying a house meant something good. I knew it, too, because I knew with a certainty I’ve rarely experienced that this was what God had for me. But I wasn’t glad about it, not yet. I just hoped that the day would come when I would be.

In late March, just over eight years after I’d fled from my abusers, and almost exactly a year after I’d moved out of my parent’s house and in with Tara, I drove my last load of stuff over to the city I thought I’d never live in. I slept that night on my new bed in my new home, alone in a house at night for the first time in eight years.

That fall I got a third job, teaching, of all things, and between the three jobs increased my workload to about 25 hours most weeks. I made enough (barely!) to cover all my expenses, and was now financially independent, also for the first time in eight years. I looked for a church – a daunting prospect, as you might imagine – and eventually settled at the one Lynn’s family attended, though I’d tried to pick somewhere else so as not to glom onto her. She told me I was being ridiculous, and over time I found community and even pastors I learned to trust there. Lynn and I were able to go for walks together most weeks, her home now a 10-minute walk away rather than an hour-plus drive. After a few years my parents moved to the same city, the farm having become too much for octogenarians to handle, and now they’re a seven-minute drive away. It didn’t happen all at once, and it wasn’t easy, but eventually I realized that I was glad, very glad indeed, that God had told me to move.

It won’t be too much longer now before I will have lived in my little house for as long as I lived with my parents. A couple of years ago one of my jobs became full-time, allowing me to drop the other two, and requiring much more creative thinking and energy than I’d had in years. I’m no longer just barely covering my expenses, and I even love what I do. God continues to surprise me with things that he is regrowing in my life, things I thought were dead. My work requires occasional travel, and I’ve now flown, slept in hotels, and ridden in Ubers – all by myself, all things that I thought were impossible not long ago. Lynn’s family is even closer now, and I can make it to their back porch just three minutes after I leave my front door, to be greeted enthusiastically by their miniature dachshund and informed by him in no uncertain terms if he is unsatisfied with the amount of attention I’m giving him.

When does a rescue end and the living of regular life begin? Where is the line between before and after? It’s not a single, crisp moment in time. Sometimes, the edges blur to cover years. What I know is that my abusers don’t control me anymore. I am out of their grip, out of their mastery, out of their tightly-controlled world. Out.

But I’m not out of my own life. I keep working with my counselor, grueling sessions that produce much fruit but also exhaust me. I still sometimes meet a new part of myself, one who had not previously felt safe enough to share the burden they carry. Flashbacks occasionally flood over me still, leaving me raw and ragged. I sit in the very back at my church, my PTSD especially active there, and fight to get anything out of the service. Many evenings my heart starts to race when I am trying to wind down for bed, my body remembering that nighttime was always the worst time. That body suffers from all it endured, and as I age it struggles more and more. I expect that the wounds I bear – spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical – will require tending for the rest of my life.

But God taught me how to cling to him in the wilderness, and he taught me that he is good. He wrote my story, and he is here with me in it. I don’t know what the next chapters contain, nor how many there are. But when God suggested to me, after showing me a picture of my whole life spread out in a valley below, that I would come to be glad for that life, he was right. He has given me a life that is good, a life I am thankful for. What is that if not astounding rescue?

Ann Maree
This is why I felt it was so important for you, Carya, to share your story–as hard as it might have been for you and also as difficult as it may have been for our audience. Who comes out on the other side of a story like this and says that God has given you a life that is good? Not to mention in light of the difficulties that remain. I’ve said from the beginning of meeting you and our time together working on this series that God is the star of your story. You have presented your circumstances in such a way that God has been glorified in spite of the opposite your abusers intended. I definitely look forward to our next episode together and hearing more regarding your relationship with him; the good and the hard! Please know how grateful I am that you took this chance, that you persevered through the very difficult process, and that you shined a light with your story in some very very dark spaces.

Please join us next time on the Safe to Hope podcast. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed you did! On September 23 we will interview “Lynn”, the wise and faithful woman who walked Carya through her rescue. She did this selflessly and compassionately. And I believe we who serve in christian institutions can learn much from her sacrifice and faith. See you then.