Why Memories Are Important for Healing

In order to be healed of extreme childhood abuse it is necessary for the survivor to remember what happened. The abuse experiences are so horrific that the only way the survivor could function in life as a reasonably normal person was to bury the memory in the deepest recesses of their mind. The best way to do this is to dissociate—to split away from their mainstream of consciousness and form another “personality” to take the abuse the person could not bear in their conscious mind at the time.
The survivor will never have rest and peace in their mind as long as the memory remains inside. They may not remember what happened cognitively because they split away from it, but they feel the emotions of it and they formed wrong beliefs that underlie their thinking at the present time. One example of a lie they may believe is, “My purpose in life is to be abused by other people.” This belief is reinforced by a demon. The combination of the belief with the demonic power behind it causes the person to continually make decisions that set them up to be abused. Once they have their memory and renounce the lie, then we can cast out the demon and defuse the power of that particular memory. This helps, but they had many experiences that reinforced that abuse lie, and it will take time to get them mostly out and learn to think differently.
The old identity needs to be replaced with a new, healthy identity. This is one reason why healing needs to take place in the context of caring relationships in the Body of Christ. There they can learn that not all people are abusive and that they were not predetermined by God to be abused by everyone. They learn it is just an unhealthy identity based on abuse that can be dismantled and replaced with an identity that helps them know who they are in Christ. This needs to be demonstrated to them in loving relationships.
This is so important for healing that I was led by God many years ago to only minister to a few persons at a time. It became obvious that taking them through their memories and casting out their demons would only bring partial healing; they needed my love and protection. At that point my husband and I decided that I would only minister to those who were in our church. That way they would have a strong spiritual covering against the demonic (my husband being the senior pastor), and we could protect them from well-meaning Christians who say things like, “There is no need to rehash the past. It is all under the blood of Jesus. Just get on with your life.” This is commonly taught in some churches but it is not true. Anyone who goes into any depth of relationship with Jesus knows you have to clear up your past. We can’t change what happened, but we can change the effect it had on our life by forgiving offenders, renouncing the lies we believed, breaking our unconscious vows and bitter root judgments, and accepting who Jesus says we really are.
One great lie that greatly hurts satanically ritually abused persons is the lie that there is no such thing as satanic ritual abuse—that it was just hysteria that swept over the world in the 1980s-90s. You’ll read that on Wikipedia and a few other websites. I have a lot to say about valid proofs of this abuse I have personally seen in another article!