In late 2016, when I had my first major depressive breakdown, I was a scientific materialist — caught in a sexless marriage, unable to make sense of how I had ended up there. By 2025, I had prayed deliverance prayers in Jesus’ name for strangers and seen things I couldn’t explain away. This is the story of what happened in between.

The first part of my testimony traced how I met Christ through agony. This second part follows a different trajectory: my search for trauma healing modalities.

Breakdown and Awakening

That journey began in late 2016, in what I would now call my first major depressive breakdown. Depending on the frame you hold, some call it an awakening — that moment when you realize something is deeply off. At the time, I was in a sexless marriage. I thought of myself as a virgin, because I had not yet recovered the repressed memories of sexual abuse. Technically, I was a virgin — at least when it came to consensual sex. At 29, sitting in a marriage that felt impossible to resuscitate, I broke down. How did I get here? I thought I had life figured out.

That’s when I began meditating for the very first time — fifteen minutes a day with the Headspace app. Until that moment I had been a strict scientific materialist. I believed only in the material realm, mocked anything spiritual, and probably fell somewhere between atheist and agnostic. I definitely lived as if God did not exist. Astrology, in particular, I ridiculed with the weak arguments common to the scientifically minded. Looking back, I fit perfectly into what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls the “intellectual yet idiot.” Highly educated, armed with frameworks that sound dense and impressive, but inconsistent and shallow when examined.

Still, fifteen minutes of meditation made a noticeable difference. I ended the marriage and went into therapy, beginning with cognitive behavioral therapy, which helped. From there, I became open to introspection, to the concept of inner conflict, and eventually to the idea of “parts” within oneself. It was through this that I began to recover repressed memories of sexual abuse. I discovered an inner trifecta: the exiled wound, its protector, and the manager parts. This dovetailed with Internal Family Systems (IFS), and I dove deep into parts work.

At the same time, my body began to come online. I explored embodiment practices. As a freshly divorced, technically virgin, 29-year-old in New York City, I was also preoccupied with sex. I approached it analytically: if I wanted sex, I needed to be attractive. I accepted that I was overweight and began working on my physique. New York City, with its culture of fitness and fashion, made it easy to find inspiration.

In that process, I noticed that body shame never fueled true transformation. Somehow, I knew that self-love was the real path to becoming fitter. Today, I have a better physique than I imagined ten years ago. Back then, my fantasies about what a “fit” body would look like didn’t match the body I now inhabit — one that I like, and that feels good to live in. I enjoy my body, I enjoy how it looks, and I want to keep building strength. At some point, I became hooked on the joy of movement itself — walking, lifting, dancing — the sheer aliveness of it.

So the mental path of parts work grew alongside an embodied path of movement. And both converged the day my chronically tight right hip released. It vibrated intensely, and with that release came the first recovered memories of sodomy. Those memories had been locked into my hip. For years I carried pain there. Since that release, I don’t.

Encountering Spirits

From there, I continued with parts work until I encountered something startling — something in me that wasn’t me. To my surprise, researchers in the IFS community had independently stumbled on the same phenomenon: parts that were not the client’s own, but ancient, external entities. These entities would sometimes openly admit their stories. This discovery put the IFS community in a dilemma. Mainstream psychology, steeped in materialism, cannot tolerate the idea of spirit entities.

One man, Bob Falconer, took this seriously. He himself was a survivor of horrific sexual abuse — not just at the hands of his father, but also his mother and his father’s friends, in upper-middle-class New York City. Out of that experience, and out of his clinical work, he became the one within the IFS community to really name what was happening when people encountered entities that were not their own parts. He wrote a book about it called The Others Within Us. I later contacted him, and eventually interviewed him on my podcast.

Bob became something of a champion for this discovery within IFS — that not everything showing up in a client is actually a part of them. Some of it is ancient, external, spirit-level. The organization as a whole was in a real dilemma about this, because up until then IFS had been fairly mainstream, and mainstream psychology — rooted in scientific materialism — balks at any mention of spirits. To even hint that there might be entities influencing a client was almost unspeakable in that world. But Bob pressed forward, insisting that what he and others were observing could not just be ignored.

In order to keep IFS palatable to the mainstream, they rebranded what they were seeing. Spirits became “unattached burdens.” The process of release became “unburdening.” And so, without using the word exorcism, modern psychology was circling back to what almost every indigenous tradition around the world had always known: that spirit infestation is often at the root of human suffering, and that relief often comes through releasing these spirits.

I contacted Bob, had a session myself, and was released of what I’ve described as a sinister trickster or joker archetype — a kind of poltergeist. It fueled mean humor in me and dark sexual fantasies, and guarded me from a deeper layer of trauma, the trafficking dimension I described in my previous essay. There are even tenderer layers I’ve not spoken of openly, though traces leak through my content. Trauma this deeply repressed seeks a voice.

That entity may have entered my system through my perpetrator, or simply been present in the room when the trauma occurred. I don’t know. In some spirit release modalities, there is space to ask the entity directly, and they can be surprisingly honest about where they came from and how they entered. Perhaps it’s because it is so rare for anyone to listen with genuine compassion. Even a being caught in hell can open up when finally given a compassionate ear.

The Limits of Spirit Release

Eventually, I trained in compassionate depossession with Betsy Bergstrom, a practitioner Bob recommended. By then I was already enough of a trauma-healing nerd that I had sussed out the protocol Bob himself used — first through the session I did with him, and then through a consultation group I joined with him. Betsy’s training laid out a very thorough protocol, rooted in mythology, and I practiced it with clients. But what I noticed disturbed me. After doing a clearing session, I noticed a nagging sense that the client was going to come back again. They didn’t seem to have the capacity to prevent new spirits from entering.

Part of me — the capitalist — immediately saw the business model. You wouldn’t need many clients. Ten would be enough. You help them release spirits week after week, and the spirits keep coming back. You have recurring revenue, steady income, a simple protocol you can repeat over and over. But another part of me was uneasy. It felt off. Looking back, I can see why: what that really amounted to was striking an unconscious deal with evil. Clean the house, let the spirit return, clean again, keep charging. The client’s suffering continues, and the spirits keep being fed.

I also noticed that the protocol itself didn’t seem to close things off strongly enough. There were elements in it that talked about sealing entry points, but in practice it didn’t hold. In some ways, IFS’s “unburdening” protocol had a stronger orientation toward sealing entry by integrating the inner parts that might have gotten caught up with the spirit. But the “unburdening” protocol is not as fully worked out as Compassionate Depossession. And just because a framework is more complex or more elaborate doesn’t mean it’s more effective. History is full of examples of sophisticated theories that later proved false.

I say all this with very limited experience. I hold deep appreciation for Betsy’s work, and I learned a lot from it. It just didn’t satisfy the perfectionist in me. Perhaps I’ll be proven mistaken. Only time will tell.

So I was left with the unsettling question: if the entry points aren’t being sealed, then what exactly are we doing here? I could keep making money off of clients whose spirits keep returning. But wasn’t that just another form of collusion?

And then I came across the words of Jesus in Matthew 12:43-45: “When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that person is worse than the first.”

Suddenly it all clicked. This made sense. Without Christ, the house remains open. With Christ, it is sealed.

Deliverance in Christ

Around this time, I had already experienced Christ somatically, through agony. Now, reading these words, the trauma-healing nerd in me recognized their truth. Since then, I’ve been drawn to Christian deliverance.

I have only begun to practice. Sometimes I simply pray for strangers when I feel the call. And I’ve noticed things that surprise me. Two stories:

I was at a gas station in Virginia and started chatting with the cashier — a Black man who used to be a rapper. He told me he had come to Christ and now did Christian rap. I love asking strangers about their love life because it always opens the door to fascinating conversations. So I asked him, and soon we were talking about our shared desire to find a wife.

From there, the conversation slipped easily, as it often does between men, into talking about women. We were laughing about how beautiful women look in sundresses. Just two men, bonding over the thought of marriage and the simple delight of how women carry themselves.

Before I left, I felt moved to pray for him. I said, “Brother, I want to pray for you.” I prayed to the Father in heaven that he might find a wife. As I walked out of the gas station, a woman in a sundress walked in. I kid you not. It didn’t have to be a woman in a sundress — but it was, and I couldn’t help but notice. Now, if you’re caught up in the scientific materialist paradigm, you might brush it off as a “minor coincidence.” But that’s exactly how you end up living a life stripped of miracles, wrestling with struggles far longer than necessary.

Another time, I met a man while buying hiking shoes off Marketplace. We struck up a conversation, and he told me a wild story: he had once been an illegal weapons dealer, went to jail, and there found Allah. Now he lived as a devout Muslim, completely sober — no substances at all. That’s something I’ve always appreciated about Islam, how Muslim men often take sobriety seriously. I even remember thinking, If only Islam treated women better, it would be perfect. But his story really caught my attention.

As we spoke, though, I noticed he was coughing every few words. It was constant, disruptive, and I could see he was suffering from it. He told me he had worked as a firefighter, so I assumed his lungs were damaged. We kept talking, and at some point this clear thought came to me: Why are we wasting time on this conversation when he’s suffering?

So I stopped and asked him if it would be okay for me to pray for him — and specifically if I could pray in the name of Jesus Christ. He said he was open to it. I asked if I could place one hand on his chest and one on his back, and when he agreed, I prayed.

From that moment on, he did not cough once for the rest of our conversation. Not a single cough. I noticed it, but I didn’t point it out to him. Something in me felt that drawing his attention to it might break the spell of the moment. So I just held it quietly, but it stayed with me.

Moments like these, along with watching Christian deliverance videos — particularly by Nicholas Bowling — and witnessing people throw up during worship at my church (as they do in ayahuasca ceremonies) have confirmed my sense that Christian deliverance is perhaps the most powerful spirit-release modality. It holds the potential to cure trauma-borne addictions and self-harm, and I’ve seen many testimonies of exactly that.

So that’s where I’ve landed. I’m still figuring out how to practice this regularly. I’m listening for answers from God. But praise Jesus, praise the Lord for this.

After years of searching, my hunt for what is complete in healing and consistent in truth has ended.

In Jesus Christ.