Near the beginning of my ministry, our pastor invited me as an elder to assist him pastorally with a woman we will call Marilyn. She had recently come to Christ in a dramatic way after having been badly traumatized for most of her life, including thirteen years of chronic mental illness, which included frequent, forced admissions for extended periods to psychiatric hospitals.

Although Marilyn’s story is unusually dramatic, it provides important insights for pastors and laypeople alike. Marilyn’s testimony can help better understand the struggles some people experience on their way to deliverance. People with different backgrounds can experience demonic infestation in a variety of ways. This is just a single story, but it is authentic. It is one of many stories that confirm the spiritual dimension of the biblical worldview. While many people are helped by medical care and by mental health programs, there is still the possibility of other factors troubling a person, which may be healed only by the deliverance Jesus Christ offers.

Here’s the story of Marilyn:

Childhood

My earliest childhood memories are filled with fear, for there was nowhere I felt safe. I still shudder when I think back to when I was six and became the victim of a traumatic occult ritual. It left me with physical scars, but also with many more emotional wounds. (This may sound bizarre to most readers. For some general info on this kind of extreme abuse, see Appendix).

My whole world changed, leaving me feeling different from all other people I knew. From then on, I lived in the shadow of an oppressive spiritual entity. Afterwards, I was threatened with death if I ever told anyone about it, and my fears increased even further.

I grew up in a dysfunctional family. My father was an alcoholic, which imprisoned everyone in our family in his world. Whenever dad came home, the whole family was scared, for whenever he was ucdm , he would go wild, with a look in his eyes that haunted me all the time. Even at school I would suddenly become sick with fear at any memory of that look in his eyes, so sick that sometimes I was sent home—to be with my father!

Sometimes, I would hide in the closet, but even there I was not safe because he knew where I was, and he would force me, through the door, to open the closet. Because I never knew what to expect, I was constantly tense and anxious. 

The kids at school noticed my uneasiness and my tendency to isolate myself. But they knew my father was an alcoholic, which was reason enough to avoid me. So, I built my own world, in which the only person I had contact with was a friendly, understanding imaginary woman. I often just heard her voice, but I had seen her several times in real life as well. Because I had met her in unusual circumstances, I never wondered who she was or why I was connected to her. It just seemed she understood me. I could tell her anything, for she seemed to know me better than anyone else. She even knew of things I’d never told anyone. Her presence assured me that I needed no one else besides her, not even friends of my own age.

Youth

When I was eleven, I was the victim of an even more horrific ritual, which was so painful and horrible, it’s still hard to describe. This abuse left me with many wounds, with physical and psychological scars that I had to carry for the years to come. So, when the female voice told me to put an end to my life, I agreed with her. Anything would be better than continuing to live.

I will not explain all that happened in our family, but tragedy compounded my injuries and my sense of bondage, when, on his eighteenth birthday, my older brother and his friend died in a car accident. Our grief was unbearable. It was then that my epileptic seizures began.

My father could not handle the death of his son, and, to make matters even worse, he discovered he had developed throat cancer. Knowing he did not have long to live, he kept threatening to kill us before he died. I lived somewhere between fear and desperate hope. I begged Saint Mary to put an end to this nightmare, and I kept praying for either my father’s or my own death.