Coaching for Coping with SRA and DID with Dan Duval

In this episode I do not have a guest. It is just me, and I want to talk to you about coaching for coping with SRA and DID. SRA is satanic ritual abuse. DID is dissociative identity disorder. At Bride Ministries, walking with survivors is one of our main missions. I sit with a lot of survivors one on one every week. There are many more I wish I could sit with. So today I want to give you some of the coping strategies the Lord has taught me. I will not be making clinical claims here. I am a coach. I am Jesus' sidekick. He is the healer.

Dissociation, before we go any further, is not a sickness. It is a universal part of the human design. On the low end, daydreaming is dissociation. Driving and talking on the phone is dissociation. What happens to survivors of severe trauma is that their God-given capacity to dissociate has been hacked and weaponized against them. The capacity itself is not the problem. It is what was done to them.

This is the first thing I want to walk through because it crushes so many survivors. Survivor's guilt means a person feels horrible about surviving what they went through because others did not. In SRA backgrounds, survivors were rarely just victims. They were often forced to hurt others. Forced to watch terrible things happen and feel they were too weak to stop it. So they hate themselves. They sabotage every good relationship, every good opportunity, every good job. A part of them deep down believes they do not deserve any of it.

The question survivors ask is, "Why did God let me live when others died?" The first thing I have to gently correct is the religious idea that God is in control of everything. He is sovereign. He always wins in the end. But His plan is executed through the cooperation of man. That is why Jesus taught us to pray "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." His will is not always done on earth. God honors free will, because without free will love is not possible. He cannot violate His own laws to stop an abuser, because if He does, He is no longer righteous. What He did instead is go through the suffering with us. Matthew 25 says, "Inasmuch as you have done it to the least of these My brethren, you have done it unto Me." There is no suffering on this planet Jesus cannot identify with.

So the right question is not "Why did God allow me to live?" It is, "What is God's purpose for my life?" Every survivor I work with is what I call a walking class-action lawsuit in the courts of heaven against the powers of darkness. Your testimony is leveraged in heaven for the dismantling of evil systems. You are not here by accident. You are not unloved. There is a difference between conviction and guilt. Conviction leads to repentance and to the heart of God. Guilt leads to condemnation and despair. Give the guilt to Jesus. Step into purpose.

I get this question constantly. Survivors come to me holding the Old Testament command "Honor thy father and thy mother" and they feel trapped. Their parents are manipulating them, destroying their families, ruining opportunities, and they feel they cannot break away because the Bible says to honor them.

Let me untangle this. In the context of the Ten Commandments, to honor your father and mother means to live in such a way that you do not bring shame on them through your actions. It does not mean give them unlimited access to your life. It does not mean accept manipulation. It does not mean maintain a codependent relationship while they keep wounding you. God is into interdependence, not codependence.

You honor your father and mother by taking a healing journey with Jesus that brings you to the platform of purpose He has for you. You are not dishonoring your parents by acknowledging the truth of what happened. You are dishonoring them when you make decisions that bring shame on the family name. Acknowledging that they hurt you is not in that category. Draw the boundaries. If someone steals from your house, you do not invite them back in. You may meet them at a coffee shop, but they do not come back into the house. That is protective for both of you. It actually keeps them from adding more to the account they will be judged for.

One of the things we deal with in survivor work is that there are often pieces of the parent's broken humanity living inside the child, parts with jobs like manipulator and programmer that slid across during the abuse. That is why we developed the Freedom From Human Persecutors prayer on our website. Pray it. Use your parent's name. The angels of the Lord will remove those pieces, and drawing healthy boundaries gets a whole lot easier.

For survivors, suicidal ideation comes in waves. When a flood of memories surfaces, when something disappointing happens, the wave can hit hard. Here is what we have learned helps.

First, do a roll call. Stop and ask, "Who on the inside is hurting really bad right now and wants to end it all? I want you to identify yourself." Most of the time, suicidal ideation is not coming from the front of the person. It is coming from a deeper part. Let's say a part named Mike raises his hand on the inside. Now you can do targeted ministry. Renounce the spirit of suicide, but do not stop there. Mike needs healing. Mike needs to be heard.

Ask Jesus, the Wonderful Counselor, to come minister to Mike. If fake Jesus programming gets in the way (and yes, that is real, the enemy is a counterfeiter), ask the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, to come. Ask the Father. Ask the angels of the Lord per Hebrews 1:14 to minister. Speak bread of life and living water to Mike. When parts drink the living water, they are consuming God in that manifestation. Jeremiah 2:13 calls God the fountain of living waters. Give Mike a gift in your imagination, the way you would give a flower to a crying child to take their mind off their scraped knee. Tell Mike, "I am proud of you for what you survived. I love you. Jesus died for what you did and for what was done to you. You are loved."

This is slow, careful, pastoral work. It is not deliverance theater. It is sitting with the parts of a person who were left in the dark and walking them into the light of Jesus. Diagnosis belongs to qualified clinicians. Coaching is what we do. Both have a place.