S1E10: Finding Power in Faith — Choosing Healing When the World Can't Promise Safety

In this deeply personal episode, Megan Conrad Anaya, MSW, explores the intersection of faith, spiritual abuse, and the radical power of choice in the healing journey. Drawing from over two decades of trauma work and her own lived experience, Megan shares how a pivotal moment in a therapy session — realizing no human being could truly guarantee her past pain would never return — became the turning point that sent her toward a personal relationship with the divine.

In this episode, Megan covers:

• Why human reassurance alone often isn't enough to sustain deep trauma healing — and what to turn to instead
• How organized religion can be both a source of profound spiritual experience and a vehicle for spiritual abuse — and how to navigate that duality
• The role of personal choice in healing, even when nearly everything else has been stripped away
• Reflections on the life and passing of Holocaust survivor and psychologist Dr. Edith Eger (1927–2026), whose memoir The Choice profoundly shaped Megan's healing philosophy
• How the CASCADE journaling exercise was born out of Megan's own raw conversations with God
• What it means to carry safety within yourself rather than depending on outside sources
• Why connection to a higher power — beyond any specific religion — may be the missing piece for people stuck in cycles of distress

Resources & People Mentioned:

• The Choice by Dr. Edith Eger
  
  
• Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
  
  
• The CASCADE Framework (Megan's proprietary coaching process)

Key Quote from this episode:
"I could start carrying that safety with me everywhere I went, instead of having it come from the outside."

Dr. Edith Eger passed away on April 27, 2026, at age 98. Her legacy — that we always retain the power to choose our response — echoes powerfully throughout this episode. If this conversation resonated with you, stay tuned for more on how Megan integrates directed coherence and subtle body work into her coaching programs to help clients develop their own connection to something greater than themselves.

Power Back Here exists for the individual or couple ready to stop living in survival mode — and start choosing something entirely different.

This is the work of recognizing your trauma patterns, reclaiming your nervous system, and rebuilding the capacity to trust and develop intimacy in the relationships that matter most — with the Divine, with yourself, and with others.

So many of us have learned to white-knuckle it alone — that people aren't safe — while desperately longing for connection, meaning, and the power to bring something uniquely ours into the world.

Jesus Christ is the center of this work — a living, relational anchor who makes it possible to face all of human reality, receive unconditional love, and then offer that love to others. Sovereign love isn't something we manufacture. It's something we choose to receive — and live from.

If this is resonating and you're ready to go deeper with an experienced guide — for yourself or your marriage — reach out at www.meganconradanaya.com and let's talk next steps. 

We have the power to choose love, always. Power back here.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You knew something was wrong before you had words for it. You tried to survive it, explain it, fix it, and part of you is still searching. Welcome to Power Back Here, where trauma, faith, and the work of sovereign love live in the same honest conversation. I'm your host, Megan Conrad Anaya, MSW. I'm a trauma-informed coach and someone who has made this crossing herself. Every episode is built to leave you with greater clarity, a deeper sense of your own power, and a clearer connection to your own discernment and peace, no matter where you are in your healing journey. Let's go. Okay, so I want to talk about faith and organized religion, relationship with the divine, all of kind of that level here of experiences. I remember how critical that really became for me as I went through my healing journey. And in my cascade process, one of the things that I explain is how like all of the stories and the images and and uh all of the things that we get caught in that create so much distress are all there to protect us from having to feel an underlying wound of some kind. And that became like really, really clear to me in context of like organized structures of faith and religion, and how I was going to relate to those uh in the middle of a really heavy-duty trauma therapy session one day. And suddenly it dawned on me that the only reason to that point of my healing journey that I had been willing to take the risk to feel safe enough to take the risk to start looking at and processing some of the trauma that I had worked through at that to that point was because my therapist would reassure me that the things that happened in the past were not happening in the present anymore. So I could kind of get in my brain this and my body, kind of this story, this narrative that said all of the things that hurt me so badly in the past that I'm terrified to look at now. I'm safe to look at them because they're not happening anymore, and they're never gonna happen anymore. That person, that that situation, or whatever, that's long gone, and it's I it's never gonna happen again. So I'm safe now because I can guarantee, as you, if you will, that that what happened that was so terrifying and devastating is never gonna happen again. And I remember it dawned on me in the middle of this session, like, I actually don't know that. I remember it was terrifying. And over the years, as I kept trying to work things through in therapy, uh, trying to manage the anxiety, trying to deal with the depression, trying to process the grief, trying to reduce my social anxiety, trying to make sense of things, understand things, put things in perspective, um, heal, be really confident I had healed so I could build something new. Uh, read all the books, like all the things. What I really I remember now, fast forward about 10 years, in another therapy session with this sweet young therapist trying her best to catch up with uh my whole story and background and and listen for what I was telling her I needed. And uh, and I realized it came to this this head there. So kind of like these two bookends, I'm realizing like I a human being is not gonna have these answers for me anymore. I've got to go to the divine. I I this is like a spiritual, theological, what religious, whatever you want to call it, issue. And being raised my whole life in very structured religion and having the crazy duality of that religion also being piggybacked off of, if you will, to also be the framework of the extreme abuse that I experienced, especially as a child. But then to have it continue to morph and be used to control and harm and manipulate me through most of my life, I didn't know how to approach organized religion in a way to get answers because organized religion means people. And people had used organized religion to really do some of the very worst things that I'd ever experienced. But I also, being involved in organized religion and around those spaces, had had enough personal spiritual experiences with the divine that I knew that that was real for me. And I had my own understanding and my own experiences that made the existence of a God and the reality of a figure, Jesus Christ, and that that I knew for myself. Nobody had taught me that. Um, I'd had my own personal experiences, so I just didn't know how to deal with the human element. And I remember, you know, coming back to the theme of this podcast, Power Back Here and Choice. And I realized that was what now I needed to focus on in my healing journey, in my faith journey, was going deeper and deeper into understanding how is it that I can choose my thoughts, choose my perspective, choose the narrative that I'm going to focus on in this present moment, regardless of what my circumstances are, regardless of what other people might choose as well, because I don't have control over that. And how am I going to deal with that? Uh, in the last year, and this has come up and been in my mind because um last year I was introduced to Dr. Edith Eager and I listened to her book, The Choice. And today social media is full of news that she just passed. And as those reels have been popping up, and I have been just reflecting on what an impact her experience and her stories have had on me, and also um over the years, other Holocaust survivors, um, man's search for meaning, you know, um, and the ways that the survivors that dared to come out of that experience and speak about it, talk about it, uh, heal from it, and not go into bitter rage and anger long term, but to choose to be the ones on the forefront of really the healing that was possible after something so traumatic and awful has really impacted me, really helped me because it's so crystal clear, you know, the way Dr. Eager explained her experiences. Um she was saying, you know, literally every possible choice and safety that we think of today as like a foundation of safety was stripped from her. And yet she's still found a way to choose how she was going to respond, what she was going to think about it, and what she was going to hold inside. I would say, as a survivor of organized extreme abuse, it is especially one that you're born into, um, they specifically orchestrate experiences so that you are stripped of your ability to choose how you're going to think, which um which makes it even more challenging. But I would say in my journey, as I have come to experience a relationship with God for myself, God has helped me to see where I do have choice and restore choice as I've turned to Him. Um and here's an example I want to give you. So as I have continued to do my own living and healing work, coming to terms with the fact that people can choose to create harm and that I can't stop it, has required me to really sit with and build an alternative framework. I used to think like if there was a loving God, then why would bad things keep happening to good people? Don't you get blessed by God because you are willing to obey God? And if you get cursed by God, it's because you were being rebellious, right? That's kind of a very simple um mindset. And frankly, if you read the scriptures, if you read the Bible, that's definitely reinforced uh in Christianity. I'm not super familiar with other faith traditions, so I'll speak from my experience here. Um, but that was definitely my understanding. And um I didn't have words or a framework for a theology of a God that would allow horrible things to happen and still be loving and benevolent, except for in the story of Jesus Christ. And I still, still to this day struggle to wrap my brain around that. But it's a story that I keep coming back to over and over and over again and finding new gems and new layers of relevancy and peace and understanding for my own experiences and how to come to terms with them and how to find where my power is and what I can choose. And one of those is just the constant capacity to choose what I'm going to allow myself to feel. Because sometimes you can't even choose what you're gonna allow yourself to think. Sometimes that even can be stripped from you. Dr. Eager talks about um some beautiful experiences she'd had before going to Auschwitz and running them through her mind and choosing to think those words over and over and over again. But there comes a time where, in my experience, like you don't even have that capacity, but you can choose what you allow yourself to feel. And you can choose what you allow yourself. Uh in feeling, you can choose what you allow yourself to tell others. And in my situation, it got to the point where there wasn't a single living, like in the flesh soul that I felt was safe to tell what was happening. So I started this journal where I talked to God and I just talked to God nonstop, um, out loud and by myself, in quiet, in private, um, writing on my journal app on my phone in the middle of the night when I can't sleep, and I'm roiling in all of the flashbacks and memories and floods or whatever um of healing from my childhood trauma. But then also as as I continued forward and through my divorce and everything that followed, um, and all the transitions and changes that have happened through um it was this process of like I could feel it all and I could go to this deity, this God figure. And at times I wasn't sure what that was, if that was a man, if that was a woman, if that was just a consciousness or a spirit, or uh, you know, I had been taught like it was a heavenly father, but I'm like, isn't there a mother? Sometimes I don't want to talk to a man, you know. So it it was this this very raw, very real, fragile thing. But um I would feel, I would just start with like, here's how I'm feeling, and here's all the things, and here's all the thoughts running through my brain. And that's really how the cascade journal exercise that I teach people to walk through evolved. Was that just as literally exactly what I was doing in my journal? Um, but talking to God and fleshing this out in my own heart and brain and mind, um, and finding God meeting me there and receiving insight that I know was beyond myself and really partnering with this divine being that I could tap into in my own being um that would help me, that would help me see things from a different perspective, co-regulate my nervous system, help me soothe my thoughts, help me make sense of things, help me see through to what was really happening instead of maybe what was portrayed to be happening. Um and it's really where I started to recreate a sense of self and the safety that I needed. Like it started carrying it with me everywhere I went instead of having it to come from the outside. And I I won't say it's it's 100%, but I will say that's that's part of the process, and and um that's how I have come through everything I've been through and how I continue to move forward is this real relationship that I have developed with divine beings. And like I said, in my case, I refer to them as like Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ. And to me, they're real people, they're not just consciousnesses that you can tap into or frequencies, which I think they are both, but they're they're they're literal people, they have personalities, they have um distinct ways that they interact with me, and ways that they call me on the carpet and and call me out, ways that they soothe me. And it's become like our own personal language back and forth. And it's really a lot of what I tap into when I'm engaging what I call energy work, is I'm kind of going into that realm where I connect with them and I'm seeking their guidance and support and tapping into what they know, what they're willing to show me about what is happening with the other person in front of me that is is in need of healing or is in pain or some kind of disease. Um, and so all of that to say, in order to, Dr. Eager, she talked about courage, right? She talked a lot about the courage to face our fear, the courage to heal, the courage to go back and feel all the pain she talked about, you know, at a point in her adult life, she realized in order to really go to the next level and help clients that were coming to her, she was gonna have to go back to Auschwitz and face and relive like that whole experience and um courage that it took to do that. And I can so resonate because that that mirrors so much of my own personal experience and what I walk clients through as well. And how do you get that courage? For me, it has definitely come through my own faith, my own personal relationship with the divine, which has been really challenging and tricky because of all the layers of religion and um spiritual abuse that I have experienced. But um it's also a very, very real part of what I think people are often missing when they're in so much distress and they can't figure it out because we are wired for connection. Attachment science is like rocks all clear on that. And at the same time, most of us, when we're in so much distress, it's because we don't know how to get back to it. Or we know how and we just haven't found a person who can yet go to the level of connection that we're needing in order to feel connected. So that's been where my relationship with the divine has been so critical. And that's one reason why I pull in what I call directed coherence or distorted, subtle body um pieces and training into my program is because it's teaching people how they can start developing that relationship for themselves. I'm not talking about religion, we're not talking about theology. We're talking about sitting with what is and being open to um developing a relationship with something higher than ourselves, you know, our higher power, call it what you will, but it's real and it's powerful, and it's been the only element that I have found can really bring the rest of like all the science behind trauma and the neuroscience and all of that into place. And and it really came to my mind again just recently when I was um working with this beautiful couple, and one of the partners was just saying, you know, what is the point? What is the purpose of all this? We're just gonna mask and and go to work and and keep climbing the ladder and keep making all the professional achievements and making the money and getting the jobs and all the things. And and this person was like, Well, what's the point though? What are we doing it all for? And and I so resonated with that because I've been through that same process. Like, what is all the point? Last year, um, a woman I consider as mother um passed away after a long struggle with her health, her physical health, and then being in hospice care. And uh that was the first time somebody very, very close to me um had passed away in their older years. And it really just even more deeply brought home how fragile and how impermanent and temporary all of life is, every piece of life. Life keeps changing, keeps transitioning. Um, the way we think things are gonna go forever into the future, they don't. They end or they shift or they transition, whether naturally or traumatically, um, or some of both. And just really sitting with that, like what is the point? What is the purpose? And for me, there was no other way to answer that besides going bigger than myself. What is the point? What is the purpose before that? It can feel so ungrounded, it can feel so uncertain. And so that that's one of the pieces and aspects that that I really want to share with people is if you don't have that connection to some kind of a divine force being um in your life, it can feel so ungrounded, it can feel so unmoored and purposeless, like meaningless. What's the point? And also, we can't access any wisdom greater than ourselves without that. So if any of that resonates, if any of that is um really intriguing to you, or you're hearing this and going, oh, yeah, I need some of that in my life, then stick around. I'd love to talk more about it. Thank you for spending time with me today. This is exactly what Powerback Here was built for. Honest, grounded conversation that leaves you more connected to yourself than when you arrived. If today's episode met you somewhere real, share it with one woman who needs to hear it. And if you're ready to go deeper, the passage, my three phase healing program for women ready to come home to themselves, is at MeganConradanaya.com. And for those of you who are in a relationship where both of you are ready to do this work together, Cascade for Couples is there too. The door is always open. There's no rush, and you'll know when you're ready. Until next time, keep the power back here.