The Holy Standard

Unpacking the Orphan Spirit

• Chelsea Tansey

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We tackle the orphan spirit, why high-achieving women often feel saved but not seated in the kingdom, and how to move from performance to belonging with Abba. We share scripture, prayer, and simple practices to break striving and receive love.

• defining the orphan spirit and its roots in trauma and family of origin
• high achievers, control, and the fear of surrender
• culture’s “do it all alone” message and loss of community
• authority versus fatherhood and intimacy with God
• symptoms: striving, people-pleasing, hyper-independence, inability to rest
• core scriptures that replace lies with truth
• practical steps: renounce, replace, rewire with action
• daily rhythms of worship, prayer, and receiving help
• moving leadership from proving to inheritance

Go into prayer now: tell Him everything that came up and let Abba meet you

Thank you for listening and God Bless YOU!

Connect with me here: Instagram

Work with me: chelseatansey.com


SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Holy Standard, the podcast for bold, God-led women with strong spirits, sharp minds, and high standards. This is where Kingdom Authority meets high performance discipline. Together, we're raising the standard for what it means to be a woman of God in business. Holy and high level. Obviously, a lot of it was rooted in a bit of the new age movement, but more than anything, it was really just rooted in my own journey trying to heal myself, trying to finally get away from the trauma that I had accumulated as a kid. And so I want to bring up a bit of a conversation around trauma and around healing today because I think that it is so ultimately important. It is something that we still need to face as Christians. And if I'm honest, it's something that I don't feel is talked about quite enough because it impacts our relationship with God to the highest degree. So I want to give a bit of a backstory. If you don't know my story about how I grew up, I ended up running away from home at 16. I had a very rocky relationship with my parents for a very long time and a lot of feelings of abandonment, um, taking care of myself, kind of having to grow up a lot earlier than most people need to, right? Not a lot of people are living on their own at 16. Never mind just the responsibility and weightiness I felt when I did still live at home. And so we're gonna just dive into the topic of the orphan spirit. Now, if you don't know what this is, and if you guys have never actually heard about the orphan spirit, it kind of is what it sounds like, right? It's the spirit that you are an orphan, right? More than anything in the spiritual sense, but it but it often becomes something that impacts you through a physical and usually through your or family of origin, usually that is how um you come to experience it. And I think that it's important to note that often spirits like this typically are passed down from generation to generation, right? You'll often see in your family line feelings of abandonment, um, might it be abuse, whatever it is that you have you have physically, emotionally gone through, you often see it running through a family line very clearly throughout history, right? We now have a day and age where healing is a lot more accessible. Um, social media just talks about topics that used to be so taboo even 20, 30 years ago. And so now we have a landscape to better understand these things and open up the conversation. But I think it's really important to go into this conversation just with the understanding of hey, this might not have started with me, but it will end with me. And it is the orphan spirit. I see this time and time again in conversation, especially with high achievers who have experienced trauma in their background. And what's so insanely accurate about this is it's usually the most ambitious women who have this deep feeling on their heart of I'm meant to do something great in the world, right? Q, finding Jesus, whenever that happened to you. And then comes the ultimate and very difficult surrender of control. It becomes really hard to not be super self-reliant and to pedestal ourselves. And so what I see with a lot of high achievers is we have this tug and pull of I want to be a good Christian woman, but I don't fully trust God. Right? I don't know he's gonna really come through for me, right? I struggle with the complete surrender part. Um, I'm scared of being super vulnerable and being put in a position that maybe you once were before in life, right? And so what we see is you might be living saved, but you don't feel fully seated in the kingdom. And so when I even talk to women who are like, Yep, I'm saved, I read my Bible, I do the Christian things, that's often not the problem. High achievers are really good at ticking tasks off a list. What I do see, however, that is missing from the equation that I would just love to see talked about more in just in the Christian space is it often isn't the reading the Bible, going to church, praying part that a lot of women are having a hard time with, but it's actually coming into saying, I'm going to let God love me. I'm gonna do all the things, I'm gonna pretend I'm perfect, right? I'm gonna perform for my salvation. But the actual opening of your heart, the opening of your hands to say, I'm here, God, love me, fill me up, make me whole, that we will sit here and accept love from an everlasting joy and an everlasting love. That is probably one of the hardest parts I see most women try to accept. And I just want to say we're gonna get into this topic today, and it might make you emotional because it still makes me kind of emotional, if I'm honest, right? Your biggest problem is not doing the things, but it's actually just letting God delight in you. And I want you to just notice what happens as we have this conversation, what comes up for you? What comes up with the idea of just letting someone delight in you? I had calls last week, and about three calls back to back, I said the same thing to each of my clients. Now it wasn't scripted, I wasn't going into it just copy and pasting the formula, but I saw the same problem over and over and over again, right? And again, it goes back. The family of origin most likely made her feel like she needed to be self-sufficient. She often felt like she, you know, bumped the ball up and nobody caught it, right? When you constantly have people dropping the ball in your life over and over and over, why would you want to fully surrender your life to God if he's never shown up for you in that way? Mind you, he hasn't shown up for you in that way because you haven't let him, but your mind doesn't know that, right? And so what I saw time and time again is I just asked them, you know, when was the last time you just delighted in the Lord and just let him delight in you? Or anyone? When was the last time in relationship or in a social setting that you just allowed people to pour into you, to love on you without you needing to do something, earn it, pay it back, perform, contribute in any shape, way, or form, right? When was the last time that you went into an interaction empty-handed and let other people provide for you? Whether that was in a physical sense or an emotional sense, most likely the idea of that probably makes you squirm, cry, want to throw up because you're so used to doing every single thing on your own. Now I want to bring in the cultural component that we also face that is we are actually, as women nowadays, encouraged to do it all ourselves and to do it all alone, right? At first we kind of saw, and again, this majorly I think happened in COVID, but the deterioration of the village, if we will, happened way beyond that, right? Way before that with cell phones. We stopped prioritizing the American, the traditional American family, the biblical family, right? We stopped embracing grandparents living with families and kids staying with their families, and we started to see a ton of separation, right? Whether it was kids going off to school, whether it was grandparents being put in old folks' homes, etc. Now, why this is important is because it started to set the precedence that you don't need the village anymore as the woman, right? And so now we see a lot of single moms, a lot of just single women who are struggling, who don't have the community that they really need, right? Just going off on their own. Okay, that was a layer that was already hard, right? Perhaps and hopefully they would find a man and they would run off into the sunset and it'd be happily ever after. But now the narrative has gone that much deeper that says you actually don't even need a man. You can do it all yourself. You can be the boss babe and the mother and the cook and the queen and this and the that, and the list goes on and on and on. You can be everything a man, you know, you can do and be everything that a man is and more and in heels, right? That is the narrative that is being pushed on us. And while that looks and probably at the first glance feels like empowerment, I feel it is the complete opposite. I think that when we continue to accept the narrative that we can do it all alone, we abandon ourselves, we abandon our roots, we abandon what is the most necessary and needed to see our culture thrive. This is the problem with today's generation and culture is that we have become so heavily incentivized to consistently push our individualistic nature of being selfish, of blocking people, of our self-help, of if someone's not serving me, I cut them off, right? Any any single point, right? We lack the communication and relationship skills to build the the system and the network that we actually desire and we actually need. On a very basic level, humans need other humans to thrive, to live, to reproduce, to experience joy, to connect, to do all these things. You cannot do it alone. Don't let that be something that disempowers you, but instead understand God's design for humanity and start to live within it, right? Okay, so I wanted to give that background because when we look at the orphan spirit nowadays, there is nothing in my mind that is surprised that we have an entire culture of women, but also men as well, who have the orphan spirit, right? They're living saved, but they're not fully seated in the kingdom of God because they only know authority, they don't know fatherhood, right? And I could go on and on about us needing more fathers and society and men leadership. That's a podcast for another time. But what we're seeing again, and Rachel said this in one of our previous podcasts, I think I've quoted this 80 million times, but she was talking about how in the kingdom, um, and I'm just gonna make this shorter for lack of or for the sake of time. In the kingdom, there's multiple roles. One of those roles is being a knight. And so you go out, you go to battle for the kingdom, you work under the king, aka Jesus, aka God, right? And so you get to do the work on his behalf. But we aren't knights, we are his sons and daughters, we are the princes and princesses, which also means that not only do we go out and do the work, but we also crave and create the intimacy with our father, who is also the king, right? When you only see God and Jesus as the king, as Lord, as God, as authority, as the almighty, as the Alpha and Omega, but you forget to include father, this is where I see it come up the most, is that you become developing a religious practice without the relationship, because you can't have intimacy with God without surrendering, without seeing him as father, without producing that type of intimacy within a relationship. And this is the most common with high achieving women because most women are high achievers because they don't trust anyone around them. And it's their lack of what they didn't get as a child that drives them forward to achieve, right? It also is if I can be successful, I can build walls up around my heart because the external parts of my life will prove how worthy and loved and deserving I am. So I can keep people at an arm's length and achieve, and so my life will look really good, but inside I'm going to feel empty because I have no close relationships because I push them away for the success of my business. And if you're sitting here and you're like, wow, she, yep, yep, yep. Know that I only know that because that has been me. Okay. The promise with this podcast is not only that I am going to be unbearably vulnerable with you, but I also want to help you name it. I want to show you how to call it out, how to see it, and also how to move past it. So I'm going to be equipping you, not just defining it for you. Okay. Well, we need to recognize the orphan spirit is a mindset of separation, right? It's a daughter who still lives like she has no father. It's the orphan spirit. It's you thinking that you are abandoned, that you are not good enough, right? How many times has the enemy tried to get in your head to try to tell you those lies of maybe God's forgotten about you, right? That you are alone, that you have to earn his love, that it's easier for other people, right? Maybe you're overworking and striving. Maybe you find yourself people pleasing. You need people to finally show you that you are enough because you haven't already gotten that from what God has promised you in his word. Maybe you're reading the word and you say, Well, this sounds amazing, but it doesn't feel like this is for me. That is the orphan spirit lying to you and we rebuke it to the pit of hell. If you have difficulty resting, if you maybe have a huge fear around disappointing people, the hyper-independence, right? Maybe feeling unworthy all the time. It's hard to receive love and compliments and gifts, right? Maybe you feel like others are chosen but not you. You think the entire Bible was written for every single person in the world and you will preach it till the cows come home, but for some reason, whatever reason, you don't think it counts for you. And I'm here to tell you that that is a lie. It is a lie. If you've ever thought that you're alone, that everything is up to you, whether it's finances, business, success, your life, your your relationship, you don't feel like you're enough, you don't belong, you think you're replaceable, maybe you don't even trust authority, right? Even maybe surrendering to people is really difficult for you. That's where this comes in. And we actually see it play out in scripture. If you're like, well, where is this in the Bible? Okay, I want to fact-check Chelsea, she's going off about something, I feel like crime, but I want to know truth, okay? I want to show you where it actually proves the opposite in scripture. And so what I like to say is if we are living in anything, anything that contradicts what scripture says, it is a counterfeit, right? We are told to take every thought captive and make it obedient to Christ. So I'm just gonna list off some key scriptures that if you're struggling with this, write these down. Bathe yourself in the living word of God, put sticky notes around your house with these scriptures on them so that you may repeat them to yourself on a daily basis because we know that we are heirs of the kingdom. That means that our father is king. I don't know what your relationship has been like with your earthly father, but what I can say is that we have a heavenly father who loves us so much, who wants to give us every single thing that we could ever ask for, who wants to protect us, who wants to just cuddle up with us, who wants to have intimacy with us, who wants to love us. And if you haven't experienced that from an earthly father, I am sorry, but it is not fair for you to go to God and expect him to be the same, because he is not. And I can promise you that whatever you think the most perfect loving father would be and do, he will completely blow your mind away with who he is and who he will consistently prove himself to be. He is the same God yesterday, today, and forever, the same God that you read about all through the Old Testament, into the New Testament, in every single piece of scripture, the same God who rescues his people, the same God who brings us through the wilderness. That is the same God who knows you by name, who thinks of you every single second of the day. And I need you to come into agreement with that now that you would renounce any single belief that would come up for you that says that any of this is a lie, okay? So I'm gonna read through the scripture, you can repeat it after me, you can write it down, you can just listen and let it penetrate into your heart because faith is not the evidence of seeing something come to life, but faith is the evidence of your heart posture changing and you accepting it as true. I cannot make you believe something, but you can make yourself believe something. And so as I list these out, that is my only ask of you in this podcast, is if this is resonating with you, that you come into, you step forth into that agreement of saying, I renounce any lie that goes against these scriptures. Okay. We're gonna start with Romans 8:15. And it says, You have received the spirit of adoption by whom we cry, Abba, Father. Abba literally means father. So when you are praying to God, maybe you stop going and saying, Lord, God, Jesus. I want you to start utilizing words like Abba, Father. I want you to start saying, Dad, I need you. Just simply in that, see how your prayer changes, okay? Galatians 4, 6 through 7, it says, We are no longer slaves, but children and heirs. We are children of God. I am a child of God, which means he is my Abba, that he will not leave me alone, right? John 14, 18 literally says, I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you, I will seek you, you seek me, and I will seek you, that I will come into the darkest parts of your life and I will redeem you, right? Ephesians 1:5 talks about how God predestined us for adoption through Jesus Christ. Adoption means that you are no longer an orphan. 1 John 3:1 says, see what great love the Father has lavished on us that we should be called children of God. I don't know about you, but that seems pretty clear that I am not an orphan. I am not who the enemy says that I am, that I am not left alone, that I am not here to do it all by myself, and that there is nothing that the Father loves more than utter and complete dependence. This is just the word that has been ringing through my ears over the last few months and especially coming up on client sessions, is complete dependence. And I want you to think about what that means for you, because that is where God wants you. God doesn't want you saying that God's building your business and doing it all yourself and then pretending like he has even had any say in it. He doesn't want you saying, Yeah, I'm a Christian, but then you force your way through life. That is not what it means to be a child of God. Being a child of God means, Father, if you don't feed me, I starve. And I really just want to urge you and push you into a place that you are falling off the building face first. And unless God catches you, you will fall, you will fail, you will die. That sounds gruesome, I know, but it's honestly the position I wish I saw more Christians taking is I'm gonna put myself in this position where I need you to show up, Lord. Nobody else can do it, only you can do it, and I'm gonna sit here and I'm gonna count on you to make a move. You're so busy filling your life up with moves from yourself that you cannot see the way that God is moving for you. That's the problem, is that with this orphan spirit, we forget and we don't understand what it means to surrender. We don't know what it means for someone to come through for us. We get surprised even if somebody shows up for us in a big way, because we're not expectant. As children of God, it is our decree to stay expectant for the way that God is moving in our lives. And again, I just want to go back because I had a really hard time in a really hard relationship when it even came to the words God or Jesus before I became a believer, because I had so much hurt in my past from my earthly parents, more so, so much angst against my earthly father. The second that I began to just approach it with compassion, when I started forgiving my father, I started to recognize and I started to feel the presence of God in my life. I might not have known it then, but that was exactly what was happening. And I want to just mention on that, because a lot of you have experienced childhood trauma, which was exactly the enemy's way. Why do you think trauma is like the biggest thing that is blocking the majority of people from experiencing the freedom of life or the love of God? Satan did that on purpose. If Satan could bloody and mar your representation of a parent or a father at your early stages of life, he knew that it would also affect your relationship to and with God. If I was the enemy, that would be my biggest play. How could I make every single person hate their parents or hate their father have childhood trauma so that when they even hear the word God, it leaves disdain in their mouths? It's the most sinister, the most evil, the most cunning act that he could ever do because it works. Because we look at our earthly father and we line that up to be who God is instead of the other way around. The character of God in Jesus should be our expectation for every other man in our lives. But instead, we take the man from our lives, the ones who've cheated on us, the ones who've left us in the dust, the ones who've abused us, the ones who've hurt us, and we paint that picture and we throw it up to be who God is. That is a misunderstanding of his character, and it's a disservice to you in the freedom that has been cast over your life. If you are not living in the fullness of life that is spoken of in the word of God, you are living a counterfeit. This word is a spiritual contract that you are meant to live in, and to do anything but that is a problem. And so we need to get to the bottom of our trauma, of our hyper-independence, of needing this high performance-driven identity. This is the thing. It's not a bad thing to be high performing, high achieving. But who are you doing it for? And from what place are you doing it from? The second that I truly surrendered and gave my life up to Christ, it felt completely different. It wasn't driven out of burnout or F you energy or trying to prove myself. And if we're really honest, that might be where the majority of you guys are finding yourselves, right? And this matters in leadership and in calling because you cannot build something great out of the pain of your past. You build it out of the purpose for your future. Those are two very different things. You cannot run into what God is calling you into from trying to come out of where you've once been. You need to draw the line in the sand and say, I'm leaving that energy behind. I'm leaving the identity behind. I'm leaving the trauma behind. Now I'm not saying to spiritual bypass and just step over the trauma and poof, it's gone. But you have to come into agreement that this is no longer true for my life. This is no longer who I am, and this is no longer what I am choosing to believe about God. You have control over that. God can't force you to feel a certain way about him. He gave us free will. And you can take that to him in prayer and say, Lord, I want to trust you, but I don't. I'm pretty sure that's actually a book. I haven't read it, so don't quote me on that, but I'm pretty sure there's a book called I Want to Trust You, But I Don't. So look that up if that sounds like where you need to go with this. But bring it to him in prayer. As a father, right? Abba, I want to trust you and I want to surrender my life to you. But I'm having such a hard time. My earthly parents have just bloodied the way that I have seen you portrayed in my life, and I want to come into intimacy. I want to come into communion with you, but I'm scared. My spirit and my heart feels vulnerable. And so I'm just sitting here weary, and I don't know how to take that first step. Father, I would just pray over every single woman listening to this that you would help her take that first step into intimacy with you, away from religion, away from the rules, away from any of that. And I would just ask that you become her father, and then you become her God. That you would show her the relationship that you crave to have with her, and that you would make it abundantly clear how safe she is with you. It's in your name we pray. Amen. I just feel like we need to step into that and really start to understand what's going on here, right? Because yeah, maybe it's it's trauma, but maybe it's also the church hurt that you grew up with. You had maybe some leaders who modeled performance instead of true intimacy that I did, right? And so you start to think that that's what it is. You start to have people who are inconsistent, your attachment wounds start coming up, right? See how your attachment wounds play out with your relationship with God. It is shocking, right? And I want us in this moment to just start coming into a place that it's not all on me. I'm not here to quote unquote save myself. There's this big saying that no one is coming to save you, and I'm gonna completely defy culture, and I want to tell you that somebody did, and his name was Jesus Christ, and he died on the cross for you and for your sins, that you would have eternal life, that you would not perish, but that you would go up to the streets of gold one day and he would have your name written in the book of life, that dying is not just a one-day faraway thing, but that we die daily when we live in sin, and that he's given us the gift on earth to experience what life and joy and the fullness really is that he has given us. It is not on you, you are not here to save you, but he actually came to save you everlasting. That it wasn't a far-off two thousand years ago thing, but it still exists here today. That I believe that the Bible is the living, active, breathing word of God, and so every single thing that it says in there applies to me and it applies to you. So if the enemy is attacking you in any shape, way or form, you need to relax renounce that, you need to step away from that. You have to recognize the signs that you are experiencing and run away and say, I'm not going to, I'm not gonna have this anymore. Right? So you already know the symptoms. If you need more, you can literally search them up. And when we're looking at just I want to draw a contrast just for the sake of wrapping this up when you are an orphan, you live in fear. When you are a daughter, you live in belonging. When you are an orphan, you work from a place of performance, improving, but as a daughter, you inherit your inheritance. As an orphan, you strive, but as a daughter, you rest knowing whose you are and what you're built for. That's the difference, is that this is not just a mindset, but it breaks down into your identity, and that's why this is important. And so I want to just talk about the practical steps on how to break out of this orphan spirit. And if you're listening to this, we can do this live, okay? But the first thing is I want you to just name the lie that you've been living under, call it out. When we confront Satan and his lies, it defeats so much of his power. You can repeat Psalm 139, search me, oh God, know my heart, right? Refine me from any of the impurities, and I want you to start renouncing the lie. You can repeat after me and just say, I renounce the lie that I am alone, I renounce the lie that everything is on me, I renounce the lie that I must earn love. And then you go and you replace that with truth. You go back to the scripture that I created for you and said for you, and you go and start putting those up everywhere. You read that, you bathe yourself in it on a daily basis, and then you rewire the pattern by your action. Prayer alone is not enough to reinforce a pattern and a habit that you've created by action. If you're hustling, if you're striving, if you're proving, it's time to stop and to change things. That instead of fighting for victory to win, you fight from a place that we've already won. That we only know triumph and we move from that place. So you start going into prayer, worship, stillness, you start moving from a place of belonging instead of trying to earn it. In your posts, in your relationships, and all of that. You could start your day by saying, if I was already worthy, if I already knew that I belonged, if I already won, what would I do and how would I act? And I can guarantee you it will change everything for you. And so declare that every single morning. Again, right? Bathe yourself in the word and give yourself proper cadences to continue to reflect on how is this showing up in my life? Have I been has my relationship with God started to change and move? Right? And so that is my ask for you is if you know that this is you, if this episode exposed something in you, go sit with God before you move on and talk to somebody else about it. Go actually step into what it means to be a child of God, to have a a heavenly father who loves you. Start better understanding what that true character is of Christ. His character was never for you to prove yourself to him, but rather to come to him, right? In sin, it's never been about running away. We see in Genesis 3 that God walks out to meet Adam and Eve, and he isn't condemning, he isn't shameful, but he walks towards them and he says, Where are you? Why are you hiding? Come here, right? He already knew the answer to every single question he asked Adam and Eve, yet he asked it anyways, because he wanted relationship, not a dictatorship. And so my only ask is once you're done listening to this, I want you to go into a prayer. Right? There's so many worship songs. Run to the Father, good, good father. You can listen to both of those and just really set your heart. But my ask is that you just go into prayer for maybe what might be the first time in your life. And I want you to just tell him everything that's come up out of your heart from listening to this as a father. If you had a direct line, if you picked up your phone and you're talking to him across the table, like he was to come back in the flesh right now, and you just give him your heart because that at the end of the day is all he really wants.