When My Mind Tried to Protect Me: My Testimony of Dissociative Amnesia

In this deeply personal episode, I share my testimony of surviving severe sexual trauma and the years that followed as I battled dissociative amnesia—a trauma response that caused parts of my memories and experiences to become inaccessible.

For a long time, I didn't fully understand what was happening to me. I struggled with confusion, fear, emotional pain, and the lasting effects of trauma while trying to make sense of my experiences. In this episode, I open up about my journey, the impact trauma had on my mind and body, and the process of healing, recovery, and restoration.

My prayer is that this testimony brings understanding to those who have experienced trauma, hope to those who feel lost in their healing journey, and encouragement that recovery is possible. No matter how broken things may seem, healing can happen.

If this episode resonates with you, please share it with someone who may need encouragement today.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, beautiful soul family. Welcome back to Red Hat Troot, a home for the broken where healing begins. If you're new here, I'm Michelle and I help people heal their soul wounds through the love, power, and transformation of our Lord Jesus Christ. And I'm so happy to have you here. If you're on your healing journey, then the Lord can bind up your wounds. He can heal you. He can set you free. He has set me free from so many things in my life, including severe complex PTSD after family scapegoating, narcissistic abuse, years of silencing after sexual trauma. He gave me back my voice and he discipled me, healed me, raised me up from ministry. And during all of that, my chronic illness, which was quite aggressive, started to go into remission. And now my symptoms are actually very manageable, very bearable. I'm no longer in distress due to my physical health, which is amazing. I still do struggle with some high cortisol, pain, stiffness, inflammation, but I would call it mild compared to how it used to be. I'm still a work in progress, but I am living proof that the Lord heals and that your situation can drastically change when you take him by the hand and allow him to lead you and allow him to heal those soul wounds and that trauma. I just want to do a quick update on the laptop situation. So I posted last week saying that my laptop broke. After that, it did turn on, and I'm able to edit and schedule on it, but I'm not able to type. And I'm also not able to record today. I thought I would be, but my laptop is not letting me record. So I'm recording on my phone again, which I know is not the same quality that you were used to. And if you're watching this on YouTube, you're used to seeing my face in these episodes. So I apologize that the quality has changed. And I am trying to save up for another laptop. So if you would like to help support this ministry, you can sew a seed. There is a link below in the description, and every little helps because it's going to help get me the equipment to get back on track and continue with the same level of quality that you guys are used to. But if you are listening on YouTube, please like and comment, engage with this video because that really helps us grow. And if you have any feedback, any questions, any suggestions, please do not hesitate to contact me. I'm on Instagram, or you can text the show as well. That's in the link below. So engage with this ministry because this ministry is for you and I really want to help you get free. Today we are talking about dissociative amnesia. And I'm going to share some of my story again in this episode because I can only talk about this from my own experience. This may not be the same for every single person. It may look different to other people, but for me, I lost all memory, which is frightening. It took me a long time to believe my memories and to trust them. I'm still not at a point where I feel safe enough to report what happened to me as a criminal offense, even though it was, it was a crime against me, and this person was a perpetrator, is a predator, and there's a risk that he could harm somebody else. But at the same time, because these memories are so dissociative and they involve amnesia and they involve confusion, and there's a lot of flashbacks and not a hundred percent certainty with some of them. I personally haven't felt safe enough to report that crime and to seek justice regarding it. So this is something that can be quite complicated. And I want to talk about it today, just from my perspective and what I've been through. Some of you will relate to it, I'm sure, if you have gone through complex trauma. For years I had no idea that trauma could actually affect your memory. I thought if something bad happened to you, you would simply just remember it. But that's not how trauma works. In my own journey, there were significant parts of my childhood and abuse history that I either couldn't access, couldn't fully remember, or had become very disconnected from. I didn't understand why I was struggling with severe anxiety, panic, OCD, flashbacks, chronic fear, and major physical symptoms when I couldn't clearly connect them to specific memories. I honestly just thought I was sick. And I was sick. I went to numerous doctors and saw the specialists and tried different treatments, and nothing ever worked. Nothing ever helped. Nothing ever really seemed to help until I started healing my trauma. Because it wasn't until I was in my 30s and after my foster mother had died, and she was always my safe person as a child. I really trusted her. I felt safe with her. Losing her felt like I was losing that only safe haven and losing the good parts of my childhood and the good memories and the good people. They were all gone because my foster father had died about 18 months before her, he died. So this was like a huge shock to my system. It was like an earthquake went off inside me, and suddenly I started to be flooded with flashbacks. And it was so overwhelming and so stressful that I didn't understand fully what was happening until about a year later when I finally connected the dots and realized that these are memories. I did say it to Chris when it started that I think I'm having memories. Because I just remember seeing flashbacks of my father in a rage and feeling terror. My heart was racing constantly, and the inflammation in my body was getting worse and worse, and everything was heating up to boiling point, and I just felt so overwhelmed and scared. At the same time, I was really in the early stages of grief, which is such a raw, difficult stage, and I couldn't rest. A lot of people, when they lose somebody close to them, they tend to dissociate and disconnect a bit from life and reality, and the brain starts to shut down in order to protect them. So they tend to slow down, they tend to do things in slow motion, they tend to rest a lot more and focus on the bare minimum. Take care of my kids, work if you work. That's it. People literally slow down to the bare minimum in a lot of cases when they lose somebody close to them. But for me, I just completely sped up. I went into absolute fight or flight. My whole system went into chaos. And the panic and the anxiety every single day was really difficult and unbearable. And around this time, COVID began, which I think, in hindsight, probably also had a lot of impact on my fear levels. Because as trauma survivors, we don't like unpredictability. We don't like things that we can't control. We don't like uncertainty. We definitely don't like the whole world shutting down unexpectedly, nobody allowed to leave their house, kids can't go to school, suddenly you're stuck at home with two young children with a chronic illness with severe grief. I mean, it was a very challenging time because that was really the only rest I had was those three or four hours in the morning. And that was suddenly taken away from me. I just remember feeling more and more scared and overwhelmed as my symptoms spiraled out of control. And I did end up having a medical emergency where I almost died. A friend of mine prayed over me for hours, a lady that I met from America. Her son ran a ministry, and they got their whole ministry to pray for me. They had multiple churches. It was just incredible the support that I received from complete strangers during the worst time of my life. I think I learned two very big lessons during this crisis. One was that my family and my nearest and dearest and the people closest to me do not give a flying crap about me, to try and say it nicely. And two, complete strangers went out of their way to try and save me. So I learned on one hand that these people don't think I'm worthy. And for years I believed that I'm unworthy, but these people believed I was worthy and I was worthy enough to God for him to save me. And literally that changed everything in my life. It changed me. I was a different person after this experience. And even though I was still shaking, and I actually did develop PTSD from that medical emergency because it was very frightening. My body went through levels of fear and terror that it had never experienced before, and levels of pain that it had never experienced before. So the healing journey after this was very difficult because, on one hand, I had to heal the trauma that I experienced during this crisis, but I also had to go back and heal all the layers because all these layers were activating and opening up during this medical emergency. So it's like as I healed this part of me that was facing near death, I'm also healing all her memories, everything bad that happened to her, all her confusion, all her fear of answering all her questions or trying to. And it's just been this back and forth thing since then, trying to heal me and heal all the fragments and heal all the parts of me that activated during this time. It really has been a journey. The Lord will show me visions of me crawling through the pit, walking through the valley, climbing a mountain, moving a mountain out of my way, and all these themes that come up in the Bible. I literally get these visions as I'm on my healing journey, and he will say, This part of you went through this. So we're going to heal this today. It could be a root of shame. And we have to remove that shame so that I can feel safe enough to be seen and safe enough to speak and safe enough to use my voice for ministry. So it all serves a purpose. It's to me, to heal me, to give me back my voice, to give me back my autonomy, to help me feel safe in my body again, and to help prepare me for my work in ministry so that I can help other people who are going through this as well. Because healing from these types of things are not easy. Healing from narcissistic abuse, healing from dissociative amnesia, healing from complex PTSD, complex trauma, complex grief, these are very hard things to heal from. I feel like I kind of cracked the cold in a way. After going round in circles for 10 years and making no progress in the medical system, I really feel like I found a way forward. But it's not the path that a lot of people would choose because it's hard. Healing is hard. I mean, everybody wants the quick fix. They want to go to the pharmacy and take a pill or take an injection or hope that there's some sort of magical solution to their problems, but often there isn't. Often the strongholds are within us, and the trauma lives within our nervous system. And the memories for somebody who has this type of conflicts trauma, those memories get locked away in all these different boxes inside of us. And once they're ready to unlock, we don't really have a whole lot of control over that process. It's like our nervous system decides, God decides, the Holy Spirit leads, we follow. That's how it's been for me. Like it hasn't really been much of a choice. So when people say to me, Why are you healing like this? Why are you digging through the past? Why are you walking through memories? Why can't you just put it down and get over it and move on with your life? I'm like, because that's not reality. That's not how healing works. That's unrealistic and it's avoidance, it's suppression, it's pretending you're fine when you're not. And I did that for years. That's how I got sick in the first place. So right now my body finally feels safe enough to process the trauma and to release it and to start healing. If I try to fight that process, then I'm literally just at war with myself. So I've embraced it. I've given my inner child a voice and I've let her come forward to heal. And she's showing me things that I blocked out, things that I don't remember. When I'm being shown these memories, I'm also feeling it all in my body. I'm feeling the fear. I feel the confusion. I have the inflammation and the physical symptoms, and it's very visceral and very somatic. So it's not like I'm just looking for memories or just making stuff up with my imagination. Things are coming up in a systemic way. So it's physical, it's spiritual, it's emotional, it's psychological, and it's all happening all at once. And sometimes the memories are so difficult to face and confront that I will try to avoid them and old patterns will activate. And suddenly I have OCD again. Suddenly I'm cleaning my house frantically. Suddenly I'm obsessing about some new topic, some new interest, because I'm trying to avoid what's happening within me because it's so overwhelming. Sometimes it takes me days to ground into a memory and to actually sit with it because it feels like I'm crawling into boiling water, and it is so overwhelming, it is so hard. But that's how we cope. These are coping mechanisms, and they're not necessarily bad. Sometimes they're necessary, sometimes they're good. Sometimes I feel such fear of punishment, such fear of sin, such fear that I'm being condemned, or that I'm disappointing God, or he's upset with me, he's angry with me. And he never is. He never is because that's not the voice of the Lord, that's the voice of the accuser and the tormentor, and he literally feeds off of all of my pain, that Leviathan spirit that was present in my father and the Jezebel that was present in my mother. These demons literally haunt me at times, and they attached to these fragmented versions of me, these traumatized parts of me. So, in order for me to actually be delivered, I have to heal the fragmented parts of my soul and deliver them from this evil. It's not just about delivering me. I have to deliver the parts of me that split off and separated and locked themselves away because they were terrified. So when you go through this type of trauma, you do become so fragmented and you compartmentalize, and that is how we cope. And that's often how illnesses like dissociative identity disorder, that forms as a coping mechanism because the person becomes so fragmented and so split that it's like a hotel lives inside your body. Sometimes I'll literally see a hotel and I'll see all these doors, and the Lord will show me that the reason why it takes so long and why it's so hard to heal the fragmented soul is because you're so compartmentalized. And they've all split off, and one is in shame, one is in fear, one is in confusion. Well, more than one, probably multiple. One doesn't want to remember, doesn't want to deal with it. One wants to move forward and be free, another is terrified of being seen. So you are kind of at war with yourself in a lot of ways, and then these strongholds can cause that cortisol and adrenaline and inflammation and pain and infirmity. So we end up getting quite sick from this, either mentally ill or physically ill, or sometimes both. That doesn't mean that every person who's gone through this type of fragmentation has dissociative identity disorder. We all have different ways of expressing it. Some people develop bipolar, some people develop complex PTSD, some people develop an autoimmune disease, some people develop OCD. So we're all different. But what's important is that we are addressing the roots and that we are actually going back and allowing ourselves to heal and feel and release. And there are people out there in Christianity that will tell you that we don't have to do any of this, that there's no such thing as the inner child. Somatic work is new age or demonic, that meditation can be dangerous if you use visualization techniques. And honestly, that is a lie because we need to release it somatically. All the prophetic healings on my YouTube channel are there to help you release somatically, where the Lord is actually helping you release that stored pain from your body because it gets stuck in there and it has to come out. It has to be released. It can get stuck in the organs, it can get stuck in your joints, it can cause very real illness and pain. Over time, the body can really start to break down because it's in such fight or flight or fawn or freeze, or maybe you're dissociating. When somebody is dissociating, I'll do a whole episode on this because it's important. But when we dissociate, that actually gives the enemy such access to us. And it's dangerous, it's harmful, it's just as harmful spiritually as getting blackout drunk. It can cause us to fragment, it can cause strongholds and tormentors to attach to our soul. So healing dissociation is important, and that's essentially what I've been healing is the dissociative memories, the things that I blocked out. And almost every single one of my soul fragments who I've rescued, they all were being tormented by a demon. Every single one of them were in chains. They were all being held captive against their will because I dissociated, and that gives the enemy so much power. So we will do a full episode on that. So let's just go back for a minute and I'll explain exactly what dissociative amnesia is before I continue. I don't want to make this video too long because it's a lot to take in. What is dissociative amnesia? Dissociative amnesia is a trauma response. When a person experiences overwhelming fear, abuse, neglect, violence, or other major traumatic events, the brain sometimes protects itself by separating certain memories from our conscious awareness. And this doesn't mean that the memories disappear, it means they become disrupted. So you might forget specific events entire periods of time. You might have fragmented memories or flashbacks. You will often have emotional flashbacks, which is very common. You might remember certain facts without any emotion, or you might have emotional flooding without understanding why. And you might experience emotional reactions regularly that seem excessive, where you overreact to certain things. And the brain is essentially trying to help the person survive. When a child experiences something that is too overwhelming to process, the brain might decide this is too much right now. We will deal with this later. The problem is that later can be coming years or even decades later, because our body is really trying to protect us. It's very common for people who have trauma to go through this, where they they only remember fragments or they remember very little. And I think the issue with the court system is they don't understand trauma. They don't understand how trauma actually works, how it's relived, how it's re-experienced, how it releases, how it might be 20 years later before the person starts to remember. For me, the societive amnesia wasn't just waking up one day remembering absolutely nothing. It was so much more complicated than that because I knew pieces of my story. I knew certain things had happened. I suspected certain things had happened, but I was very disconnected from the full reality of what had happened. And when I would try to even think about it, I would get so anxious that I would just push it all away. Many memories felt very distant from me. Some felt unreal. Others were completely hidden and buried. But what I did have was fear, panic, OCD, hypervigilance, chronic dissociation, shame, and lots of complex PTSD symptoms, as well as a very aggressive autoimmune disease. The autoimmune disease that I was battling with was called ankylosing spondylitis, and they also suspected Schulgren syndrome. These are both very complex illnesses, and they do cause very severe infirmity, very severe pain, very severe anxiety and overwhelm. And I also struggle with symptoms of PMDD since I came off birth control, which during certain periods of my monthly cycle, I will have catastrophic tinking. I will feel Like I'm dying. It's like extreme emotions that just come out of nowhere. And it seems to be rooted in terror and the terror that I experienced as a child. It seems to activate the week before my period. It's like those hormones, when they are increasing, my body reacts very badly to them. And I do think that this is a trauma response for a lot of women. Because my body was carrying information that my conscious mind couldn't fully access yet. And memories are still coming up for me. Sometimes your body will remember long before your mind will. And sometimes it does take something major happening, like a traumatic birth or trying to raise your own children and having flashbacks when they get to certain ages and stages, having lots of fear and guilt around being a parent and just thinking you're not good enough all the time. It's like these memories will activate through certain phases, stages, events, losing a loved one, going through something terrifying. All of these things can cause your body to remember. And the flashbacks can start to come. And why trauma survivors often feel confused? I think this is one of the most frustrating parts of dissociative amnesia because we often wonder: am I imagining this? Why can't I remember? Did it really happen? These questions are really common and it causes a lot of stress and a lot of chaos. Trauma memories are not stored in the same way as ordinary memories. When the brain is in survival mode, memory processing can become very fragmented. So that's why survivors experience these flashbacks, body memories, emotional triggers, sudden fear, fragments of memories that come to the surface. And this is before we understand the full picture. We have to be really careful of not planting false memories as well, because when we're working through flashbacks and digging through memories, sometimes we can try to piece the memory together and try to understand what happened in between. Because I remembered this and I remember this, but I don't remember what happened in between. So then we're trying to piece that together. And that can cause false memories to be planted right in the middle of your trauma. So we have to be so careful not to do that, to take a step away from the memory and say, okay, I don't understand everything that happened, but this is what I remember, this is what I know. And by doing it that way and accepting that you may not fully ever know every detail, and that's okay. For me, I think learning that I don't need to remember every single detail to heal. I just need to believe myself and believe my inner child and believe my memories so that she feels seen and heard and safe and safe enough to come home to me and not stay fragmented or in chains. So that is the goal of healing is to bring them home and help them feel safe. Psalms 139 reminds us that God knows us completely. Oh Lord, thou hast searched me and known me. Even when we don't fully understand ourselves, God understands us. Nothing is hidden from Him. I remember when I came home to Jesus, at the time I was very sick, very tired. I had spent time working with a lady who I now think is a false prophet because she had so many witchcraft spirits attached to her, and there was like a wolf spirit that I saw later on that would frequently attack me. And at the time I was just so sick. I I was literally spitting out foam and bubbles and getting sick all the time. And I think part of that is witchcraft. I was reacting to the marina coil as well. It was leaking too much of the hormone into my body. So I was just so sick during this time. And when I came home to Jesus, I needed time to just rest and detox and recover. Then when I was finally ready, I said to the Lord, Will I ever feel okay? Will I ever be okay? And he said, Only if you're willing to face what happened and acknowledge it, accept it. Because I was still running from it. I was still refusing to deal with it. I had still struggled to face it. I was blocking it out and I was like, I don't even know if it really happened. So I would push it away. And the Lord was like, the only way that you are ever going to be okay is if we heal this. And if you let yourself face the truth, the truth of what actually happened to you, and heal your inner child. And this was about giving me back my voice and showing me that I didn't imagine this, that this was real, this did happen to me. My body wasn't reacting for no reason. I didn't develop an autoimmune disease for no reason. I didn't get really sick and mentally ill for no reason. There was a reason. And there were parts of me that were in distress and were screaming and were scared and they needed help. And there were parts of me that were so stuck in dissociation from the terror that they were being held captive by the enemy. And the only way to really reclaim back my voice was to free them. And this is freedom. This is how the Lord walks with us and he frees us. Healing really started to happen as I started to focus less less on warfare, intensity, magical thinking. I did get lost in a lot of that for a while, which was part of escapism and coping mechanism. It's very common for people who have trauma. But instead, I started to focus on safety, nervous system regulation, prayer, processing my trauma and just walking with Jesus and focusing on Him. And as that safety increased in me, understanding followed naturally. And the goal was simply healing. That was my goal is to get better, to have peace, to have stillness, and to find freedom so that I can be the best mother to my children, the best wife to my husband, and the best minister to my people. I just want to live a normal life. There's parts of me that really crave that normality. And in in some ways, my life has been very extraordinary and very complex. And I don't really regret that. I'm okay with it because it led me to Jesus and it led me to where I am now. And I feel mixed emotions about everything. On one hand, I still feel hurt and wounded because I ultimately lost a lot in this process. Because after I remembered everything, I then had to figure out what to do next. And ultimately I had to walk away from my family, which was one of the hardest things and one of the most painful journeys that I ever embarked on. It left me with no real support, no community. And it has been challenging. It's been very difficult trying to create a new life. And my children have struggled with that as well. My son is currently in play therapy because he has lost a lot. My oldest boy has been really struggling the last couple of years. My youngest so far doesn't seem too fazed by it all, but maybe it will hit him suddenly once he's ready to process it, you know, because they have gone through a lot of change. They have gone through a lot of loss. And then when our dog died, that was the catalyst really for my older son, where I think he started to really cling to control because he just felt like I'm gonna keep losing people. And that's terrifying. And for me, I've carried so much pain because I feel like everybody that I loved and cared about chose my abuser over me. That's how it feels. Because I made that decision to walk away and to start healing, and nobody ever came looking for me. Nobody knocked on my door, nobody sent a text, nobody asked, Are you okay? And I wasn't okay. My voice started to choke as I said that. So you can see, even talking about this, there's still that element of my voice being choked out. Because I think when I talk about this, it still triggers shame in me, and it still triggers all that rejection sensitivity, and it's just still unbearable in some ways. Where I'm like, I can't believe these people didn't didn't choose me. They chose a predator, they chose a perpetrator, they chose a monster over a child who had gone through literal hell, and that still doesn't make sense. I don't think it will ever make sense to me. But this is how toxic and dysfunctional families often operate. They will protect the system, they will protect the reputation, the image. They don't want anybody knowing their business. But I mean, this podcast is gonna blow up. I know that I can feel it in my bones that the Lord is doing something with this ministry. I mean, the truth is all going to come out. A lot of people are gonna hear my story, whether they like it or not. And I know that I declare it today, that a lot of people are gonna hear my story. My testimony is going to break chains and it's going to set people free. So them with their cover-up culture, choosing silence and image over a victim, that's all gonna blow up in their face. And I'm sure they're gonna have a lot of regret when that happens. But right now, I've had to heal and forgive and let go and put these people down. There was so long in my healing journey where I was still waiting for them to come back, still waiting for my mother, still praying that my sister would one day see the truth and choose me. But they never did. It's four years later. They have not come back, they have not come looking for me. I bumped into my mother in town recently and she said hi and walked straight past me. We've become strangers. The truth came out, and my mother became a stranger because she chose him. And it's not the first time she chose him, she chose him every time. Since I was a young child, she chose him because I have a memory of her walking in and seeing the abuse and freezing and panicking, and maybe she blocked it out. Maybe she got such a fright that she blocked it out, I don't know. But she is wearing a blindfold. There's so much denial there. She's refusing to acknowledge the truth. And that that's reality. I couldn't keep carrying the guilt and the shame and carrying these people and hoping that one day they'd come back and they'd all see me and they'd be on my side. I had to put that down. That's the only way that I can actually truly find peace again is if I accept what's happened. And that journey of acceptance was probably the hardest one. But even now, as I continue to try to reclaim my voice, I have learned to trust my memories for the most part. There's still some where I can see the enemy is trying to plant confusion or lies or distortion, and I renounce it. But there's some because they're so vivid and visceral, and I remember every detail, because trauma stores in that way, where you'll remember a plant on the windowsill, or you'll remember the bin in the corner, you'll remember a certain area of the house where there was a mushroom growing on the wall. All these little details will suddenly flash up. You'll remember tastes, you'll remember smells. One time I got sick in the bathroom after going through a trauma, and the smell of bleach was so in my face. I would say to Chris, get that smell away from me. And there was no bleach in the house, you know. This is trauma memory activating. Another time I remember the smell of cigarettes being so strong. It was like as if somebody had blew smoke up my nose. It was that strong. I mean, my neighbors smoke and the smoke comes in the windows sometimes, and it honestly drives me crazy. I've prayed that the Lord would help my neighbors quit smoking because I hate the smell that much. I quit smoking myself years ago. But this was different. This was so much worse. It was if somebody had literally blown smoke right up my nose, and I couldn't get away from the smell. And I realized that this was part of a memory eventually. So sometimes these memories are just so visceral and somatic and in your face, and there's no escaping them. And the flashbacks are so vivid and the emotions are enormous. And we can't deny it when it's happening in this systemic way. You have to trust your memories, trust your body, trust your inner child, trust what they're telling you, and let yourself accept it so that you can heal. One of the scriptures that has really carried me through this journey is he heals the brokenhearted and he binds up their wounds. Psalms 147 tree. God doesn't just expose your wounds, he heals them and he sits with you in them. He sits in the darkness with us and he's not afraid of our pain. He literally has broken chains off me, he's taken a muzzle off my voice, he's taken a blindfold off my eyes, he's taken veils off of my mind, he has removed witchcraft, he has done so much healing on me from the inside out, on every single emotion, every single stronghold, and he has delivered me from numerous demons. Jesus has never condemned me, he has never blamed me. He has never even been upset or angry with me if I get stuck in an old pattern for days and I'm struggling to get out of it. He's just so patient because this type of healing is complex and it's hard. And he's very patient, he's loving, he's compassionate, he's kind. I'm way more hard on myself than he ever is on me. Sometimes I'll be really hard on myself, and the Lord will touch my heart and he will remind me to be gentle with myself and to be compassionate because I have been through a lot. Sometimes I forget that. Sometimes I just expect everything in my life to be okay. And I just want everything to be peaceful and happy, and when it's not, I get frustrated. And the Lord says to me, Nobody's life is perfect. It's never going to be perfect. There's always going to be some challenges. So stop trying to seek the impossible and try to enjoy the present moments in between the trauma memories. Try to be present and try to enjoy the now because I don't want to miss out on things. I don't want to miss out on my children. I don't want to miss out on a day at the beach or a day at the carnival because I'm sitting here in fear. So you have to find a balance to your healing. You have to be able to heal your inner child in real time whilst remembering all the emotions and all the feelings while still getting on with your life. And that's hard, but you can find that balance. And you can say, okay, I woke up feeling anxious and tired and heavy today, but I'm gonna go burn some of that off outside with a game of football with the kids. And sometimes that really helps me, just running around with them for 10 minutes. I actually release a lot during that, or taking the dog for a brisk walk. You don't have to just lie in meditation and prayer in order to heal. We also heal in movement. We heal through exercise. We release all of this from our body. Sometimes just going to the carnival, my inner child feels so free, feels so happy, getting a burger afterwards. Like that's my idea of the best day out. Or taking the kids to the beach and getting fish and chips afterwards. I just love that so much. It's one of my favorite things to do. And for me, embracing life whilst healing is important. Because otherwise, your whole life is going to pass you by and you're going to spend all your time just staring at your pain. And you're going to look back and say, I didn't live. I didn't live for 10 years while I was healing. So you have to try and live at the same time. That is my advice, especially if you have a family and kids because they need you. They need to experience the good parts of you. They need to experience fun with you. And your inner child needs that too. It's to just be kind to yourself, be really gentle. And it's okay to slow down. It's okay if you're not able to work right now. It's okay if you're only able to release one episode of a podcast a week, for example. Sometimes I have to really slow down. I haven't worked outside the home for probably six years now because I've been healing and I have created this ministry. I'm very grateful that Chris works and he provides, but being a one-income family has been difficult and it's been a sacrifice that we've had to make so that I could heal. It hasn't been easy. We always have everything that we need, but we don't always have everything that we want. And I am trying to get to a place in my life where we're more comfortable. There's still things in my life that I'm trying to improve and trying to bring more peace and more freedom, but I'm a work in progress. And I think it's okay to give yourself grace and to understand that even though you haven't got everything figured out, and maybe parts of your life look very different to your friends who don't have major trauma or who are not dealing with amnesia, chronic illness, or autoimmune disease, or major fear. These things are debilitating, even though they're invisible. And I think a lot of people don't understand what it's like to have an invisible illness and to struggle and not be able to keep up. We have to give ourselves grace and we can't compare ourselves to other people because they're not dealing with the same level of trauma as we are. So let's just close this out in prayer. Father, I lift up every person listening to this episode. Lord, you know the wounds that they can remember and the wounds that they can't. You know every hidden place of pain and every fear, every memory. You've literally seen every tear that they've cried. I ask that you surround them with your peace and your protection. Lord Jesus, bring healing to their broken hearts, bring comfort to those who feel confused, bring clarity where there is fear, bring truth where there are lies. Help survivors know that they are not defined by what happened to them. They are loved by you. They are seen by you, and they are known by you. They are never alone because you walk with them. I pray that you will guide them on their healing journey one step at a time. In Jesus' name, amen. I pray that this episode brings you some clarity and peace. And I love you guys. I will see you in the next one. Take care. Bye. Remember to stay close to Jesus because freedom is yours.