S2E6: Sovereign Love: Finding God at the Root of the Wound

What does it mean to choose love when your body has learned that love must be earned, performed, or withheld?

In this episode of Power Back Here, Megan explores the power of sovereign love: love that is not based on performance, approval, safety, circumstances, or whether someone has met our expectations. She shares a deeply personal account of confronting a core wound of abandonment — the belief that she was fundamentally alone, unsupported, and even unseen by God.

Using her CASCADE process in real time, Megan traces a present-day business-building shutdown through the body’s alarm signals, survival stories, constricting emotions, early memories, and protective escape patterns. What began as overwhelm around work revealed a much deeper belief: I’m all alone.

From there, she shares the prayerful healing moment that followed — an experience of Jesus Christ and God’s protective presence that made it possible to release longstanding despair, reconnect with her body, and move forward with greater freedom and capacity.

This episode is for you if you:

• Feel stuck in cycles of overwhelm, shutdown, or self-doubt.
• Notice your body reacting before your mind can make sense of what is happening.
• Carry a deep fear that you are alone, unsupported, or abandoned.
• Want a framework for discovering the roots beneath present-day triggers.
• Long for a relationship with God that is personal, healing, and powerful enough to meet you in your hardest places.
• Are learning that love does not have to be earned in order to be real.

Megan also offers a glimpse into how the CASCADE process can help you identify the hidden survival pattern underneath a trigger, bring the underlying wound into the light, and invite God into healing that exceeds willpower or intellectual understanding.

You are not required to force yourself through pain alone. There is another way: to pause, listen to your body, tell the truth about what hurts, and bring it to the Divine with openness.

In this episode:

• What Megan means by “the power of sovereign love”
• Why conditional love can become a hidden foundation beneath trauma patterns
• The CASCADE process: cue, alarmed sensations, survival story, constricting emotions, archived images, distorted energy patterns, and escape behaviors
• How a work-related shutdown revealed an early abandonment wound
• The difference between demanding an answer from God and surrendering pain honestly in prayer
• How healing increased Megan’s ability to act, create, and move forward
• Why body-based awareness can be an invitation to pause and tend to what needs care

If this episode resonates and you are ready for support in healing trauma patterns, rebuilding intimacy, or developing a more direct relationship with God, visit powerbackhere.com to learn about working with Megan individually or as a couple.

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

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 0:23

One of the subtitles of or in the tagline of this podcast is uh The Power of Sovereign Love. And I want to describe this concept a little bit more and this and share a little bit of what I'm learning about what it means and how to claim that uh power to choose love. For a long time I would say I believed in the power of love. I had been taught the power of love. I could see it, but then I really would dig down into it, a realization that I felt like some people deserved love and some people did not, that love was very conditional and situational, something to be earned, uh performed or received, but only if you could like match a certain like list of expectations and in vice versa, in contrast, other people were only conditionally worthy of love as well. And things like, oh, they did this or I did this or fee, I feel this, or they feel that, um, would then therefore become like reasons essentially why people were not um deserving of love. And so it got really easy to get twisted up in things like um really actually quite elaborate and logical sounding thought processes that um when you stripped all the pieces away really came down to fundamental beliefs that that uh only some people deserve love and it was something that had to be earned. And as I have pressed deeper and deeper into my relationship with Jesus Christ for my own healing work, and then been privileged to support others and theirs, what I learn is how unconditional the love of God is for us. And that at the root of almost every wound or insecurity or fear or barrier uh or pain that I have in my life or that I cause others, is this some kind of a distorted sense of uh my worthiness to be loved. And that's something that I specifically, as I have deconstructed everything that I ever knew in my life, and I'm in the process still of reconstructing piece by piece. Um, that's one reason why I have um picked back up this concept of a need for uh a redemptive Jesus Christ, savior and redeemer of the world, uh, who had who has offered us this literal atonement process because, uh, and I'll explain it more in future episodes, but essentially it's like there is no other way for me to get a grasp in a way that my finite brain can make sense of it, except for looking purely at the relationship and the motivations behind why Jesus came and did what he did, and why we have like a God in heaven that would send him. Uh, and I remember I really, really struggled growing up with this idea. I remember we would be in like church classes or whatever, and they would read some kind of a scripture passage where it talks about how God loves his children. And I remember feeling angry inside, and even at one point arguing with the teacher, like that's not true. Uh, God does not love me. If he did, then ask why is it he would have done this, he wouldn't have done that, he wouldn't have let this happen, he would have stopped this thing, and he didn't. So clearly he doesn't love me. But on the flip side of that, in moments where it did feel maybe like he loved me, it was because I had done something to earn it or deserve it. So it was always this constant like battle inside of me. Um and I remember as he was really just digging into that so hard. Um, at one point, this was years ago when this first I first had this answer. He brought me to this breaking point where I had to know, like, why? Why do you love me? Like he it was like he kept asserting he did. And I'm like, I don't believe you. And he's like, Yeah, but it's true. And I'm like, well, how do I understand that? And I remember that it was more than just words that I heard in my mind, it was this like visceral shift. And he said, I love you because I choose to. And in that moment, I understood it was like, he chooses because he has the power to choose it. It's not because I this or someone else that, or the circumstances this, or the feelings he had were something. It was simply he had the power to choose it. And so he chose it. And as I I'm trying to explain that phrase, sovereign love, that is what I'm trying to describe. For me personally, is very aspirational. I learn all the time how I fall short of choosing love. I like my list of conditions because it feels so much safer and it's less painful to uh feel justified in only offering love and vulnerability or compassion and forgiveness to people who uh treat you well and do what you think they should be doing. Feel the divine continuously providing me new opportunities to see uh where I really have power. And part of that, and this is what I want to walk us through today, just deciding and saying I need to uh or I want to choose this path of sovereign love is one thing, but then really understanding what exactly for you gets in the way and how do you clear it, that's a whole different process. So, what I'm gonna walk you through, I've spoken about before, but this is my cascade process. Have my journal notes right here in front of me. So I'm just gonna walk through kind of what it looked like yesterday. Uh, and it started rather innocuously. And this is something I do all the time in like my business building. So um the first C is your cue, cues up your survival sequence, where it's an external event or triggering event. What I noticed yesterday was I was engaging in doubling down on business building tasks. I was saying no to other distractions. And um, I was looking at my website statistics, and what started happening was I was starting to see all that and feel really like overwhelmed. Uh the next piece was the A of the alarmed physical sensations. And so that's what started happening. I started shutting down. That was my first sign that what I was doing was bringing out some kind of a trigger. Then I was like, oh, I'm starting to shut down. Okay, what's going on? What's happening right now? So that's when I started to map it. I'm okay. What are the thoughts in my brain? That's the the S, the survival story. And I just started to just free write what's going on in my brain. Oh, I'm so overwhelmed. I don't know what to do next, what to focus on next. I'm failing. This isn't performing. I don't know how to get things rolling bigger. I don't know what to do. I have all these tools and I don't know how to use them. I need other people to come in and fix this for me, and I'm all alone. And that's where I was like, oh, that piece right there. As I just kept going, going, going. That was the juiciest part that I'm all alone and had the most emotional charge. So I took that and I started to work with it. Okay, now I got could start asking myself some questions. When was the first time I learned I was all alone? And as I sat with that question, what started to come up were emotions. I started to feel, and that's the sea, the next sea of cascade is constricting emotions. I started to feel sensations of despair, complete lack of confidence, um, and really utter and hopeless sense of being alone and cut off. And it wasn't more than that, it was like cut off from divine. As I sat with all those emotions, and I'm asking myself this question when was the first time I felt all of these things? More clarity started to come into the picture. And that's when I rolled into the next A, which is the archived images. And I started to be aware of images coming through my mind. And I could see a scene from my very, very early childhood with all of like the adult caretakers in my life at the time around me. And I had this sense, though, that in this moment that I was seeing, like I was outside my body looking down on it like it was a movie. Um, I had been really harmed and I had been violated. And these adults around me didn't do anything to protect me. And because I felt so helpless and alone, and all of the people who were supposed to be providing for me and taking care of me and helping me were actually either totally checked out and unaware, or they were colluding with each other to um violate me and take advantage of me. I felt this enormous sense of I am completely alone. But for me, it also shifted to not only were all the people around me completely undependable and thereby making me alone, but also God. He saw this. So it was like he was like my backup. Like the people failed me. So I looked to God in this moment, and God didn't do anything either. He didn't take me out of there. In fact, he had put me here, goes my belief set, right? Like God had put me in this situation. I'm like, what? You just stand here watching like everybody else, and he's not doing anything. So there's this wound not only about being alone and failed by the like human adults in my life during this time frame, but ultimately by being uh this wound from being what I felt like was abandoned by God and failed by God. And there was this very um like sense of being aware in this visual, this memory, it was like I was very, very young. And the sense was like my spirit still remembered what it felt like to be in the presence of my Heavenly Father and to be in the spiritual realm outside of a body, and to be part of the planning and um counseling process of like figuring out what was needed for this family line and what my role was gonna be and how it was gonna match into everybody else's. Um, and I remember how that felt, but it was also like this very um jarring sense now in a body and having this experience that like the the way it felt to be in planning and development phase was completely different from like actual execution phase, which very interestingly mirrored back into what I was experiencing in the present of um like planning out how it was going to roll through this business and the actual execution process have been so different. It's not what I've been expecting. Um, because in this early memory, there was so much pain. And I don't know that I had ever experienced that kind of pain. And as I work with people, um, myself included, and the spiritual level of things, um what I what I experience is that the physical body has the capacity to magnify what is happening in the spiritual body. And I imagine, this is me imagining, I imagine that as like my very newly embodied self, I didn't have much experience with what it felt like to deal with a body. And so the pain of that relational um damage was more than I could handle. And I didn't have any physical um beings present that could help me manage it. And so as I kept working with this visual, I literally, like my younger self, I'm out of my body. I can't even like bring myself to look at what's happening in the house. And what I see, this is the D part of my cascade, distorted energy body or energy patterns. I can see I'm totally up and out of my body. And like my spirit is trying to escape out of my body completely. I like this overriding sense of like, I'm just gonna go back home. I'm just gonna go back into the heavenly realm. And I know how to get reconnected into a sense of comfort and peace and feeling like I'm not alone in that space. So I'm just gonna go back to what I used to do. But it wasn't working. I was feeling completely trapped and again cycling through those really deep senses of despair and frustration, and again, this awful, awful feeling of being completely, completely alone and abandoned. Um, and I have come up against this despair place many times. But this time yesterday, working this cascade process through, I was able to experience a miraculous shift. And I will say it was miraculous because I walked through the whole cascade process. I got all the pieces of my journal template filled out. I asked all the questions, I identified when this first happened. Uh, so I had all that, but nothing shifted. So this is where I went into prayer. This is where I reached straight out. And I will say there's one way to do it where you're like demanding that God do it your way, and there's another way to do it where it's like raw and open and going to him and saying, This hurts so bad. Like, what can I do here? And what can I learn here? And like I surrender to the pain of this and I bring it to you instead of like, I am so mad that you let this painful thing happen, which keeps you stuck. It's like I s I allow this, I allow it to hurt so bad, and I'm gonna feel the feelings of it and bring it to you. Like I don't know what else to do with this, okay? So then begin this incredible prayer process. And often when I get to that place, I feel the spirit say to me, just breathe. And I've learned it's one way that the Holy Spirit invites me into like contemplative meditation prayer. I close my eyes, I get out of my head, and the spiraling stories and like the resistance to everything that's happening inside and outside of me, and I just slow down. And when I do that, often he will come to this is my process, everyone has a different process, but he will come in my mind's eye and I will see something it's different sometimes every time. But in this moment, what I saw was images of that young child, me in that room, I was on a changing table, and I could see how alone I felt. And I could see like the four adults in the house in various positions and and um proximities to me, and and it looked like they were hazy. It looked like they were like covered in curtains of water, and I could see then in the corner of the house, God like larger than life, and he was holding back what looked like massive flood waters behind him. And I saw like this little tiny like column of a clear that like descended right over me and my tiny little body. And I felt and experienced in my soul as well as in my body, this profound antidote, the opposite sensation of that despair and that abandonment, and that like I am so alone and disconnected. It was the opposite, it was this visceral and visual and spiritual sensation of like God literally holding back the full ramifications and sense of drowning in these despair feelings and a very tangible sense that he was with me, he was intervening, and he was guarding and protecting me, even in the middle of this very flooded place, this very tumultuous, painful place. And that was so calming. And then I I was able to, this is something I often do, um, work with that visual, and I visualized myself, present self, going into this scene and picking up my infant self and walking out and being the adult in the physical body that she needed at that moment and bringing her to the present and just holding her. And I just sat, I sat and cried. And it was like releasing the weight of that sense of abandonment that I had carried my whole life. And then I was able to wipe my eyes. I heard encouragement from the spirit that said, just keep going, you're not alone. I went back to my work task, I sent out my email, I finished my blog post, I put together social media posts and released those. I reminded myself of all the other things that are still in the process that I'm building, that are moving, and seeing, I'm like reminding myself, look at the momentum of things that are happening. And I moved forward where before this whole process, this took about 30 minutes. Before this whole process, I had come to an absolute standstill and could not continue. I couldn't think. My body was reacting, I was spiraling down into the deep despair. I was, um, my stomach was starting to hurt and feel nauseated, my hips were aching, like all kinds of things were going haywire in my body. What I've learned is like that's my body's way of saying, hey, we need you to look at something here. This is an opportunity to clear something so you can move forward. Instead of like dragging uh your wounded self through a war zone, it's like, let's just let's just bandage you up and get your bones set, and now you can move forward um with confidence and not so much pain. So for me, it not only like brought me to a place where I felt God's love for me, but that love, the way he showed me it to get to the wound and then bring it to him and then work with him to allow his healing allowed me to increase in my sovereignty. Because before this, I was stuck. I couldn't do the things that I was wanting to do. And after I could do them. And I have more experiences to share with you in the future about specifically how um I've been taught recently to be able to do that in more um with greater flexibility and freedom in relationships as as it connects to like loving, like I talked about in the beginning. Um, but I hope that that process of like how I walked through the cascade template and use it as kind of a structure and framework to then be able to find the root wound and bring it to the divine for healing that was above and beyond my power and capacity, uh was just totally incredible. And that's the process that I walk my clients through. And um I just absolutely love it.