How I Was Healed of Fractured Parts

These days I do a lot of deeper healing work with people from around the world.

Some of what I do is comparable to what one may find many places in the body of Christ, such as using Spirit led declarations for healing and freedom, healing memories, praying over people’s human spirits, breaking spiritual bondages in various ways. On the other hand, there are things I’m doing that I almost never see among almost any other ministries.

I spend a lot of time working with people’s fractured parts, helping them to interact with the Lord and to receive healing. This is something I’ve found to be a common need for the average person, and to consistently produce significant healing and transformation, even when nothing else has seemed to help over years of faithful Christian practices and inner healing, etc.

This began with my own journey of needing some answers.

 

THE JOURNEY BEGINS (THE PRELUDE OR BACKGROUND)

In my journey through Spirit-filled churches, I was exposed to many traditional mentalities about how people were expected to become healed or set free from what troubled them. I discovered that many “revival” and “gospel” ministries meant to free people were actually placing unrealistic burdens on them.

Some ministries seemed to expect that a quick time of repentance and briefly being prayed over at an altar would be enough to get people fixed. Scripture verses tended to be quoted such as, “The yoke shall be broken because of the anointing,” and “Behold, I do a new thing! Remember not the former things, says the Lord,” from Isaiah. All you needed (they thought) was someone to lay hands on you, speak the name of Jesus, impart the power of Holy Spirit, and you would then be free from everything – if you were genuinely repentant.

We would experience a real touch from God in those places, maybe falling down and getting the shakes, or having a supernatural sense of his closeness to us and of his joy. This is not to be underestimated, but it usually didn’t equal healing of our issues or anything approaching full spiritual freedom.

God likes to be with us, to share his joy of having relationship with us, to make us feel good, and he doesn’t always need to be fixing us at the time. Just like any quality relationship you have with anybody, you don’t always need to be fixing each other.

However, religious folks expected us to be fixed after such an experience. The truth was that we still had most of the same issues we had come in with, but now we “had no excuse”! I can’t count how many people I’ve known who have been given worthless and ineffective answers to their hurts and then condemned for not being totally healed a week later.

In my case, I was dealing with deep woundedness in some seriously fractured parts of myself. To find real healing, I wasn’t going to be able to just decide one day to “repent,” or to “just get over it.” A little touch from the Lord on the surface wouldn’t be enough. I was going to need to open up long blocked off areas of myself and allow the Lord to work progressively in those places.

I tried every “simple answer” I could. I believed excessive, stretched versions of what I thought it could mean to be one with God and as perfect as Jesus through understanding and believing in my identity in Christ. I believed I could move mountains with commands of faith, and I did see physical reality change before my eyes through applications of that truth.

As a very young, zealous believer who had found God to be absolutely real and trustworthy, I watched physical miracles of healing happen regularly. I even saw vehicles instantly repaired by commands of faith. I regularly watched gold dust appear on people’s bodies out of thin air after a prayer of faith. I saw drug addicts and alcoholics set free on the street with no withdrawal symptoms. Still, deep down, I had heavy emotional woundedness which I couldn’t seem to do anything about.

I worshiped passionately, meditated in scripture and stood on the promises of healing and freedom in the word, prayed and fasted, believed for healing, believed doctrines, etc., but so many of my deep inner hurts didn’t budge an inch as a result of any of that.

I came to find far greater breakthrough for myself and others by learning to apply more in-depth knowledge and wisdom in partnership with Holy Spirit to intentionally heal deeper hurts. He has called us to a participatory role. He has called us to learn how to exercise the authority and inheritance he has given us in Christ.

It has definitely been a process, with lots of trial and error along the way, but there has been continual and awesome progress. I love seeing actual transformation in people’s lives rather than just a showy spiritual touch on the surface, especially when folks are desperate for real change.

 

WHERE THE “PARTS” COME IN

Healing for people’s fractured parts was a basic element of Jesus’ mission statement in Luke 4:18 where he quoted Isaiah 61, “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, he has sent me to bind up/heal the broken hearted…” The word for “broken hearted” there in the Hebrew is “Shabar,” which means to be shattered into many pieces.

Jesus came to heal and to bind together those who have been shattered into many pieces. Many today are finding this to be literally true, that most (if not all) people have been shattered into many fractured parts, and that these parts need to be healed and joined back together for the person to experience wholeness. This not only became an important part of my own journey in healing, but it has become a key aspect of my ministry to others today. I run into way more need than I can possibly meet.

I began learning about this subject while searching out answers for folks who were dealing with more difficult issues than myself. I was led to answers in this area, finding along the way that I needed the same kind of help. I was never anything close to meeting the diagnostic criteria for DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder or “Multiple Personality Disorder”), which is what people typically think of if you start talking about fractured parts. People imagine things being way too extreme.

I just had pain deep inside that I didn’t seem to be able to do anything about, which I knew was limiting my ability to walk out all I was meant to be. I had painful emotions which I didn’t seem to have any control over through any discipline or choice of my own, didn’t have the ability to cast out or declare healing over to any effect, or even any ability to walk through standard inner healing tools I knew about. I had tended to keep this pain walled off deep inside me.

I had gotten used to suppressing those emotions and doing my best to live without awareness of them, but the Lord was calling me to get real with my heart. I had learned to live a pretty disciplined life, but now I was learning that the Lord was looking for authentic access to my heart (so he could heal me), not just disciplined and dutiful performance.

As I began to open up to these long walled off areas of my emotions and memories to people, just trying to bring things out into the light in an attempt to counteract the powerful and irrational shame and fear which I felt over things from a younger age, there were times I felt like I was shifting into a different persona.

Still, that experience was not anything like what you see in a DID case where a totally different personality takes over someone’s body, who has totally different memories and awareness which the main personality has no access to. I had not been through the kinds of extreme trauma people typically associate with having parts. (But what do they know, which is part of my point.) Mine was a more subtle experience.

These were some areas I found in my own life which would not seem to be touched by any standard “Christian” practices, but where fractured parts would need intentional ministry for me to experience healing.

 

WHAT HEALING HAS LOOKED LIKE

Some of my own nearly instantaneous healing experiences were so dramatic that I felt I could barely relate to ways I had perceived myself and the world around me only seconds prior. My emotions and perspectives changed that significantly, that instantly during larger integrations, and this happened not once, but multiple times during my process.

In one early healing session, I remember two men from a ministry team calling up a certain fractured part. Immediately, I was in another state of mind experiencing that part’s consciousness. I was seeing into the spiritual realm as clearly as we normally see into the natural realm, and I had a sensation of being spun rapidly.

Above my head (my part’s head) was this Star-Trek looking contraption with flashing lights all over it, and it seemed to be responsible for the spinning. As soon as I shared this, one of the team members prayed for the sci-fi looking device to be destroyed. Immediately, the rapid spinning sensation stopped as the overhead contraption disappeared. Their opinion was that this device related to “programming” which goes on during ritual abuse (though I had never been ritually abused).

They questioned this part of me and led it in prayer for healing and integration. It was quickly walked through a few steps of healing and then integrated. It’s hard for me to describe the feeling of integration because it isn’t like anything else I could reference, but I would say it was like there was significantly more of me after the experience. I felt like I had new capacities and a stronger sense of self-awareness.

For the rest of that day, I also had a feeling like I was being spun in the opposite direction than my part had been spinning during the session. This was probably because this part was so used to being spun the one way, that being still now felt like spinning the other way. There was quite a sense of oppression being lifted from me during that ministry time also.

The explanation I was given about the ritual abuse (RA) related contraption was that some RA programming gets put upon people without a need for physical contact when rituals are done through astral projection. Searching into materials on ritual abuse years later, I also found out that spinning is a known RA technique to create dissociation.

These are just pieces of information and are interesting. I don’t think I can draw hard conclusions about exactly how I got all those fractured parts or why my healing process was more complicated than I would have expected. I can think about the possibility of high levels of emotional duress in the womb or as an infant due to the fact that my parents were both very wounded and one of them was a hard drug addict.

I can’t totally explain where my stuff came from. I’m glad I didn’t need to figure it out at all to get tremendous healing. Miraculous transformation is much different than figuring yourself out.

Most of my healing sessions were more subtle than the one I just described, yet the results were not always more subtle: emotional issues were instantly resolved, the way I felt around people and related to them suddenly changed and became healthier, and I found rest in areas where I had tended to be driven and stressed out before.

I recall another session where many of my parts were being brought out from all kinds of different hiding places: underground, underwater, caves, dungeons, etc. One was even trapped in a dungeon and had a territorial spirit connected to it by a giant insect-type stinger stuck into its back. (This was dismantled easily through a quick prayer, and the part was also quickly brought out of the dungeon just as easily.)

In order to work with the large crowd of parts, the minister used an older, more whole and stronger part as a liaison, who he called up via word of knowledge by the name “Steven.” I just went with it and allowed the thoughts and impressions within me to come to the surface to be shared with this minister, and pretty soon the session was off and running.

Interestingly, when I was very young (kindergarten or so), I had tended to make up stories about a person named “Steven/Stephen,” (I would pronounce the name “Steven” but spell it “Stephen.”) and this person would have all sorts of adventures in my young imagination. He was basically like a main character in an action/adventure movie. I’ve since seen that people tend to create parts according to what was in their imagination at the time.

This fractured part of me who responded to that name felt very mature, turned out to be a great communicator for the rest of my parts, seemed to flow in discernment and prophecy like nobodies business, and understood ministry to parts very well. (This was a few years into my journey, and I had already gotten some experience working with that stuff for myself and others.)

As the young adult I was at the time, I wondered if this may have been my “ministry part” who I would switch into when I really wanted to let go of awareness of everything else in my life to just flow in the Spirit. He seemed to be me at my best in that area. It was all so easy for him.

Steven was rattling off discernment after discernment of what was going on among the rest of my parts, identifying issue after issue among the younger parts and what the Lord wanted to do for them, then what needed to be done next, etc. The minister leading the session mostly had little to do as this part quickly pointed out how the Lord was saying this and healing that and so on, just as if he’d done this all a thousand times before.  (Neither I nor “he” had done this a thousand times.)

More parts, single, in pairs, or in entire groups, were called together from various places, brought out of hiding places, or rescued from captivity, to join the larger crowd as I watched it all unfold. Steven would identify the types and colors of clothes they were wearing and what problems those colors represented, how the Lord was ministering to those parts to change all the clothes to white (representing spiritual purity), and/or simply describing the various issues they were being healed from and how that was being done.

The large group of parts, including Steven, were all healed from various issues and integrated within that short (roughly one hour) session. It made a significant difference for me.

During that whole session, I had no sense of “switching,” or of actually becoming somebody else as “Steven” talked through me. I was still just me, still experiencing the normal thoughts and normal, stable emotional states I would typically experience in the better parts of any given day. I was just allowing whatever/whoever was inside me, in an environment of Christ-centered prayer and faith, to put thoughts and impressions in my mind, to answer questions, and to share information. As a result, I did experience a dramatically noticeable healing in my mind and emotions as the session came to a close.

There were times during my overall process when I would pray for my parts without others’ help, perceiving them in the spirit and asking the Lord to walk them through healing in various ways, leading to their integration. I would tend to notice a shift taking place inside, and in the case of larger parts or groups of parts, I would experience a sense of confusion for a few hours afterward as integration was being processed. After those more significant integrations I would tend to notice more of a sense of confusion at first, but then positive changes in my life later on.

 

UNEXPECTED RESULTS

Those are a few examples of how instances of healing and integration for fractured parts looked in my process. Overall, it was tremendously valuable in bringing healing to me in many areas. Most of these were areas which I had no idea that I needed help in, but which I only discovered had become different/more healthy after they were healed. Some of what I was healed from were things I had even thought were positive qualities, that is until I found that they were suddenly changed (for the better) after integration.

In other words, this was not healing which came from analysis of memories or of personal problems. These were not issues related to my conscious thinking, but issues within deeper aspects of me needing to be healed, which I had no conscious control over or even thinking about whatsoever at the time.

One unexpected result of all this in my life was the fading away of the driven intensity and performance orientation typical of my previous persona. I became much more laid back. I no longer felt such a deep need to “have it all together” to be OK with myself. I became content to be someone in the middle of a process. I became OK on a deep level to just receive grace and love despite the fact that I still had many issues and even sins. I no longer felt the need to always be accomplishing something “great” for the Lord for me to be happy with who I was.

I had previously been so intense about evangelism and about moving in the miraculous, about prayer and Bible study and all the things that made me a “radical Christian.” Now, I realized that a good portion of my intensity came from a place of brokenness, a place of trying to make up for a deep wound now suddenly healed.

After healing parts, I could just accept myself as a human being who was loved even though I wasn’t perfect, and could enjoy relating to others on that level much more, rather than seeing them as objects who I was duty bound to rescue from the perils of righteous judgment and spiritual darkness. I wasn’t perfectly healed from perfectionism, but I was suddenly a lot farther down the road than I had been, and the change was at a level much deeper than my conscious thinking.

(It also could have been good to have gotten more help for my conscious thinking at the time, especially in the area of doctrines I’d been taught.. I continued to struggle with a certain amount of perfectionism off and on for a long while as a result of the more surface level issues which still weren’t resolved. But, major positive changes.)

Healing like this may take away a decent amount of our motivation to live up to an idealized standard. We may lose our motivation to get a certain quota of souls won or miracles accomplished for the week. We may lose our need to finish the latest 40 day fast or other such “radical sacrifice.” We likely become OK with being weak in many areas and with facing the fact that we are even failing in a lot of areas, knowing that Daddy still loves us and is with us. Really, this frees us much more to receive grace where we are really at, and to walk out the destiny the Lord has for us, even if it may not be something flashy or high profile in popular opinion because we are no longer seeking to prove something to others or ourselves so much.

For a period of time while walking out healing in this area, I even felt like a child and related to people in a very childlike way. This was not well received by some of the legalistic, performance driven types around me. They seemed to think I was wussing out and backsliding. I wasn’t running the hamster wheel they were running on anymore.

Some pressured me to get under their guilt-driven performance trips again, but I don’t think I could have done that if I had tried. It was like all I could really do was to enjoy the fact that God loved me, regardless of what my performance looked like to others or to myself, just like a simple child. Maybe that was a processing phase because I came to balance out somewhere in between those extreme states (driven perfectionism vs. simple childishness) as time would go by. I still had tons of progress to make in many other areas of healing over the years since, but this in itself was major breakthrough.

Healing looks different for different people, and I have yet to find someone whose process has looked exactly like mine. I’ve found that all kinds of emotional issues can be resolved through healing fractured parts: severe depression, overwhelming fear and anxiety, out of control anger, shame and low self-esteem, the feeling of being powerless and helpless in daily situations, and much more have been turned around, sometimes 180 degrees through just this area of ministry.

As I continued praying with folks and working with their fractured parts, I found that many, many people were able to benefit.

 

SO WHERE DOES ALL THIS “FRACTURING” COME FROM?

It seems that trauma at an early age is likely to cause one to develop more heavily fractured parts. Some of the most heavily fractured people I’ve worked with were test tube babies or those whose parents were mentally ill or extremely violent and abusive on a regular basis. Some have been abused in cults from an early age. On the other hand, many who have not been through such things also have many parts needing serious healing.

There tends to be some difference in the nature (intensity?) of the parts found among those who were severely traumatized at the youngest ages when compared to the nature of the parts of those who weren’t. Also, the complexity of the system that the parts form in those two groups tends to be different. One group seems a bit more like “parts lite,” yet there are still going to be issues which will mostly not be healed any other way than through intentional ministry to them.

This is just the same as if you wanted to heal the sick physically. If you just wandered around town reading the Bible and worshipping but not intentionally praying for anyone, you would tend to see very few, if any healings. Yet, those who really learn their authority in Christ and how to move in physical healing, intentionally praying with sick people often, tend to see many healings. I have friends who report about a 70% success rate at that, and it mostly has to do with simple faith, a learning process in the beginning, and consistent intentional action.

Things work exactly the same way with inner issues. You will most likely get so much more done with a little basic know-how and intentional action as opposed to aimless wandering. Also, I think the success rate tends to get a lot higher than 70% when praying for inner issues. (The inner issues can be necessary to resolve to get progress in stubborn physical issues, which accounts for much of the 30% failure rate among [excellent] purely physical healers.)

Many would like to think that these deeper issues are just getting healed on their own, without anybody doing anything about them. We would usually like to think that what the church is doing is working, that the broken are being healed if they just follow the programs. My experience is that this is mostly not the case though.

Most of what I see is that Christians are remaining wounded, and many of them are being aggressively persuaded to believe they are all healed up just because they believe a doctrine, even though they obviously aren’t. The “fake it till you make it” approach isn’t helping.

I see a lot of people giving up on real healing and transformation because they’ve believed all the messages and done all the popular Christian things the best they’ve known how to for so many years, yet their deeper issues haven’t changed. Either that or they are experiencing the fallout of all the wounded Christians who are abusing each other and destroying relationships even though they still think their spiritual answers are working. It can all be very disillusioning.

Many think of fractured parts as only being found in the most extreme cases, such as the ritually abused or those diagnosed with DID (dissociative identity disorder), considering it a phenomenon that only psychologists are capable of ministering to. I’ve found that to not only be the farthest thing from the truth but a mentality directly responsible for leaving multitudes stuck in a place of brokenness. Many stagnate because they don’t know how to access or minister to these parts of themselves where their deep woundedness really lives.

As I’ve gained more experience and understanding over the last 15 plus years, I’ve come to believe that fractured parts are there to be found in everyone (to different degrees) and that healing them is one of the things necessary for our personal progress. Among those I pray with from many states and countries, I find that there are issues in people’s lives which simply do not get healed in any other way. This is something the body of Christ needs to learn and apply to the massive numbers of people who need it everywhere we look.

Again, this is a matter of whether we will allow the Lord to continue on with that basic aspect of his mission statement in Isaiah 61:1, “to heal/bind together those who are shattered into many pieces.” This is one aspect of the fulfillment of Jesus’ High Priestly prayer in John 17, that we would all be “one” as he and the Father are one, that the world may know that the Father sent him. We must come into healthy unity within ourselves before we will be able to have healthy unity in the body.

 

FINAL NOTE:

If you are reading this over the internet, on a computer, or on a cell phone, please do not demand clear biblical examples of healing for fractured parts, since there are no clear biblical examples of the internet, computers, or cell phones. Good luck with being Amish.

John said there were many more things Jesus did which weren’t recorded, so many that the world couldn’t contain the books if it were written down, and Jesus also said there was much more for Holy Spirit to teach us beyond even that.