Mary was a difficult case. She was not on speaking terms with her husband, and her daughter had learning difficulties. Mary grew up in a neglected and abused home, and suffered from dissociative amnesia and dissociative identity disorder with multiple alters, panic attacks, and post traumatic stress disorder. She had also cut herself, attempted suicide, rejected counseling and pastoral intervention, and manifested demons when you got too close to her pain. Her church and family considered her to be a hopeless case.
Mary deeply believed the lie that she was unlovable, and thus stomped on her heart with stoicism so that she no longer felt anything, and as a by-product, could no longer hear from God nor spiritually see. When she tried to see Jesus, she saw demonic images instead and shut down her imagination and spiritual sight in self-defense. When prayer teams tried to diagnose the spiritual grounds for those demons to harass her, she would get sudden, sharp headaches or numbness in her arms and hands. No one could get far in the healing process without encountering strong demonic opposition.
What Mary needed was to be stable long enough so she could recall a traumatic story, repent, renounce, and forgive the sins related to it, and then have Jesus deliver her from the demons that encamped around that story of abuse. When a demon would begin to manifest, the default counter-attack was to recite out loud, and then have Mary read it out loud until she regained control. Then the prayer team used the Story Method to find the sin grounds that that demon had over her life, pray the Intercessory and Personal Prayers to remove those grounds, and ask Jesus to dismiss the demon from her life. The demonic attack would stop until the intercessors got to the next story.
As Mary got healed and delivered from her traumatic stories, her spiritual hearing and sight gradually improved, but with frequent regressions as hostile, or even violent alternate personalities and demons fought for control of Mary’s body. It’s called spiritual warfare for a reason!
Healing her required using all the tools of our healing toolbox over a period of years. Keeping her stable between prayer sessions was a big challenge, but of all the grounding techniques that were tried, the spoken or sung word of God worked the best. However, Mary could not remember key verses while under attack, let alone speak them out loud. One of the prayer team members came up with the idea of a Verse Pack where Mary would write the verses that she found particularly helpful to her on flash cards that could fit in her pocket.
Her chosen verses ranged from issues of courage to truth. Then, when she started to get attacked or felt like she was switching to another personality, she would take out her verse pack and read the verses one after another out loud until one jumped out at her. If she was struggling with fear, verses on courage helped; likewise, when she was struggling with lies, verses on truth got her out of self-destructive thinking. The verse pack stabilized her long enough to activate her prayer team and get her through to the next healing session.
As she healed, she got progressively more stable and could recite the verses from memory, and then eventually, she could live her daily life without having to carry her verse pack everywhere. But at the beginning of her healing journey, her verse pack was literally a life saver. “The word of God is powerful; sharper than any two edged sword” And it works!
Take-aways
Traumatic events cause severe mental disorders
Finding and healing those traumatic sin events is therefore necessary to heal difficult cases.
Demons are real and oppose the healing process
Without spiritual warfare tools in your toolbox, there are some cases that just cannot be healed.
Identity-based lies are strongholds
Repenting and renouncing identity-based lies is necessary to tear down strongholds in the person’s life.
The spoken Word of God is decisive
“Faith comes by hearing, and hearing the Word of God” So read it out loud to build faith and stabilize the situation.
Further Reading
The Story Method works when nothing else does, but the Whiteboard Method will find and remove sins that it misses as per the Unblocking Your Spiritual Senses strategy. Healing the most difficult cases like spiritually-induced dissociative identity disorders is impossible for humans to do, but salvation depends on God’s power rather than our own. Read How Can I See God and Healing Methods Overview for an in-depth discussion of how and why these healing methods work when nothing else does.