See here for Part 1 and here for Part 2.

Now that you’ve done the prep work for facing your spiritual bondage, it is time to undertake the hard work required to break free.

Why is there hard work in a faith based on grace? Because, as you mature as a Christian, you progress from God constantly taking care of things miraculously to Him stepping in mostly when you cry out for help solving unsolvable problems. This reflects how a parent handles all logistics for a baby but not for an older child.

Hence, your early victories in Christ may be largely passive, but eventually God is going to guide you through the difficult task of facing and overcoming your spiritual brokenness. He will be by your side every step of the way, but like the Israelites conquering the Promised Land, you must be willing to face what stands in the way of your spiritual inheritance and overcome it by faith.

Some people, even Christians, will find this approach intolerable, preferring to either wallow in despair or turn back to containment or minimization techniques that have never secured true freedom when they’ve been tried in the past. That’s because escaping spiritual bondage requires the courage to face things you’ve previously decided not to face and to confess things you’re scared to confess. While you should feel compassion for yourself about the factors outside of your control that led you into bondage, you mustn’t disavow your role in your bondage or refuse to take responsibility for freeing yourself.

Fortunately, this path will always be available to come back to when you’re ready for it. Unfortunately, until you do so, you won’t find true freedom any other way (any technique or process that works will be relatively close to this one), so you will be stuck where you are until you return.

One thing’s for sure: you’re not going to get what you want just by wanting it really hard. Most good things in life can only be attained through diligent effort, which in this context doesn’t mean willpower, but rather determinedly applying yourself to the process of escaping bondage. If you can decide that you’re not going to rest until you have the freedom, happiness, joy, and sense of purpose promised you in Christ, rest assured that you will attain it.

Note: Victory will not be achieved solely by removing all the external circumstances that tempt you. No matter what, you will always have trials and difficult seasons, and you must learn to deal with them as God intends, not through sinning. The good news is that you can be like Jesus, who encountered incredible challenges but was never dragged around or bullied by them. Even being murdered could only keep Him down for three days.

Step 7: Come Clean

Once you’ve accepted and made peace with your current situation, it’s time to come clean to those you’re accountable to and apologize for any harm you’ve caused others. This includes coming clean both to God and to other people.

Sincerely apologizing to God is the highest priority (as we’ve discussed previously) and is the definition of what “repentance” is. Acknowledging and confessing your violations of God’s laws and goodness are critical to moving onto a new path. Also, because God is forever anxious to reconcile with sinners, He promises to accept your apology and help you move forward without judgment or condemnation. As David says in the previously mentioned psalm of confession, God will never despise a broken and contrite heart (Psalm 51:17).

Next comes the hard part of confessing to others. True repentant apologies are scary, because you cannot control how the other person will react, and you must respect however they choose to respond, no matter how angry or unforgiving they may be. If you find yourself demanding (either in your head or out loud) that the other person forgive you simply because you apologized, then you aren’t truly apologizing.

Furthermore, confessing out loud makes it obvious how gross our pattern of sin truly is. After all, sin thrives by festering in the concealed cesspools of our wicked hearts. When we bring it into the light to disinfect it (1 John 1:7), it becomes obvious how paltry our justifications and entitlement mentality truly are.

Ever tried to explain logically and dispassionately to someone out loud why it was OK to violate their trust or harm them without cause? It comes out pretty wobbly and weak. At any rate, at this point, you’re leaning into the idea that there are no such valid justifications and that you’re taking complete responsibility for your failings. Having to confess to others is such a painful experience that you won’t readily go back to something that would make you have to confess all over again.

Now, you don’t have to share every detail, nor do you have to disclose everything to a loved one right away if you still need help getting a grasp on the situation and how to address it. You can use discretion in what you share or delay a full disclosure until later, as long as you adhere to the following guidelines:

• In the end, your loved one or victim must be completely aware of how you’ve harmed them, at least at a high level (again, you don’t need to share every detail).
• You are not kicking the can down the road and attempting to put off confession indefinitely but are rather using wisdom to determine the appropriate time to confess.
• You cannot delay at all if doing so would make it awkward or difficult to get the help you need from others (professionals and/or allies).

When you confess, make amends as possible, seek forgiveness, and pursue reconciliation. Accept that you may not get perfect understanding and a lack of consequences but still hope that God would move others to show you mercy and compassion. Understand that in the worst cases, you may have done enough damage to a relationship to make it permanently injured or irreparably broken. The one relationship you won’t lose is your relationship with God, who will never leave you nor forsake you, which means you can be strong and of good courage (Deuteronomy 31:7-8).

Step 8: Fast

Now that you’ve confessed, it’s time to halt your sinful habit once and for all.

Seem a bit sudden? Like you haven’t gotten to the meat of the treatment approach yet? The truth is, typical addiction treatments are backwards, because they seek to remove triggers in order to heal the addiction. In reality, you need to conquer the addiction first, because you can never ensure your equilibrium won’t get unbalanced beyond your ability to handle it. Breaking the bondage is the easy part – dealing with the underlying problems afterwards is the hard part.

How do you break the bondage? With a three-day fast. I have used the technique developed by Frank Viola with great success. Follow every step to the letter in How to Break an Addiction.

This process will create a disconnect between you and your sin, reconnect you with God, and give you the power to stop engaging in your sinful habit once and for all. It also demonstrates to both God and yourself how serious you are about this.

At this time, if you haven’t already, you need to fully cleanse your environment of the source of your sin, any associated paraphernalia, and any unhealthy relationships or arrangements that encourage or support your sin.

Note that the three-day fast is a one-time thing for each spiritual bondage. You will not need to do this regularly. I occasionally fast for shorter periods of time to get answers from God on difficult topics I am wrestling with, but a full three days should only be needed when you intend to alter the trajectory of your life.

Be sure to understand: once you’ve broken the power of your bondage and have the ability to refuse to engage in it, you will start suffering when you experience triggers for your bondage. After all, you have not healed the underlying problems yet – that happens in the next three steps. Until you fully resolve the issues that drew you into bondage in the first place, you are going to be in pain when you experience something you used to soothe with your bondage.

However, with most bondages, you can now “stop using” and simply endure the pain when it comes and goes (and it will go if you relax and turn to God in prayer). Now, there are some bondages (like food) where the sin is based not so much on what the behavior is but rather what it represents in your life, and, in these cases, it is not always immediately clear what it means to “stop using.”  In other words, your goal may not be to quit sugar completely, but to only eat anything your body prompts you to eat in response to a genuine feeling of hunger, sugar or not. Similarly, you may not need to cut off toxic people in your life completely but rather set up and enforce healthy boundaries.

For objects of bondage that are inherently sinful (like pornography), you can and should quit completely at this point. I assure you, once you solve the underlying issues, it will not be difficult to “stay clean.” In the meantime, 1 Corinthians 10:13 promises that with every temptation that comes upon a Christian, God makes a “way of escape.” If you seek God in prayer when you’re tempted, now that you’ve fasted and broken the power of your bondage, He will show you how to endure it.

Of course, if you choose to return to your bondage in the face of a powerful temptation, you don’t need to yank the train off the tracks. Remember, this is a journey. Recommit yourself to pursuing God above all else and use the techniques in the next step to analyze the temptation and heal from whatever drove it. If you have performed your three-day fast, you still have the power to say no. You will only need to fast again if you have not merely relapsed but actually given up on this entire journey for a time. If you have remained committed to the healing process, you can simply pick yourself up and keep on moving forward.

I would highly recommend not “measuring your sobriety,” by which I mean keeping a precise log of the last time you used your bondage of choice. This technique merely produces shame and a sense of starting all over if you decide to go back to your bondage, even for a single day. If you have been on a healing journey for a while, and God presents you with some internal pain that you are too afraid to face and thus choose to escape from using your bondage instead, your journey does not start over. It continues forward uninterrupted, with you now tackling the new obstacle you hadn’t been forced to face before. Do not reset the clock on your sobriety.

It’s critical to understand that spiritual freedom is about being, not doing. The goal is not to stop engaging in your sinful habit, but rather to become the kind of person who neither wants nor needs to engage in it. This is hard for us, because “becoming” and “being” are hard to measure and quantify. From the outside, a person white knuckling a temporary sobriety might look the same as someone enjoying complete relaxation and freedom from their sinful impulses, but the internal experience is completely different. Don’t worry about measuring your success, other than by how close you feel yourself drawing to God through this process.

One technique that you might find helpful in dealing with temptation and overpowering impulses is the F.A.S.T.E.R. relapse awareness scale. This scale helps you recognize when you are headed for a major temptation before you get there. If you can spot the signs ahead of time, you can head it off at the pass by reorienting yourself in prayer and in the truths I will discuss shortly about God and your bondage.

Remember: If you fail or fall, God is not ashamed of you. He does not condemn you (Romans 8:1). Instead, He pities you as a father pities his children (Psalm 103:13). He loves you. His love is immeasurable (Ephesians 3:17-19), and He is near you in your broken heartedness (Psalm 34:18). He will heal your broken heart and bind up your wounds (Psalm 147:3).

Important note: if you’re going to use stop using an addictive substance, be aware of any hazards you might encounter. With alcohol in particular, you may have to taper down and not quit cold turkey, or you could suffer serious side effects. Educate yourself about the effects of withdrawal.

Also, remember that you don’t have to do this alone. There are plentiful resources of therapists, recovery programs, support groups, etc. However, you need to have a clear understanding of their role in your recovery. Most recovery programs and providers don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle put together to properly deal with addiction, so if you start using their services without intentionality, you may flounder in a state of despair and stagnation, or even define yourself by your addiction and feel hopeless.

Instead, identify resources who can help you explore and understand trauma and the patterns of addiction you have developed as a result (discussed in the next three steps), or provide you with medical assistance for tapering off an addiction (like methadone or nicotine patches), or help you get in touch with your walled off emotions, or provide pastoral care or helpful life counseling, or just be an ally and friend as you address your problem. Seek out the helpers you need and use them wisely.

Step 9: Confront Your Guilt

If you did something evil at some point in your past, then unless you know how to use Christ’s atoning sacrifice to wash the scarlet stain of sin as white as snow (Isaiah 1:18), you are going to be left in a state of unresolved anxiety and unhappiness, which I refer to as “guilt.” In this case, you engage in spiritual bondage in an attempt to disconnect your psyche from these feelings.

Let’s consider the options for dealing with your guilt:

• Option 1: Suppress it and refuse to acknowledge it. This is unhealthy, because you know deep down what you did, and you cannot obtain freedom and health by denying your past.
• Option 2: Force yourself to believe that your actions weren’t wrong. Of course, to be intellectually consistent, you would have to reprogram your mind to convince yourself that your actions were morally acceptable and that you’re willing to live a life in which you cannot be angry at anyone who does the same thing.
• Option 3: Force yourself to believe that there is no such thing as right and wrong at all. In this case, to be intellectually consistent, you cannot ever be mad at anyone who harms you or your loved ones in any way. That’s a very hard road to go down. 
• Option 4: Create a double standard, where it’s OK for you to do what you did but not for anyone else to do it. This requires an extreme and permanent arrogance and haughtiness, because you have to believe you’re special and the rules that apply to others don’t apply to you.
• Option 5: Try to move on and live with no regrets. Unfortunately, you can’t truly live with no regrets because, deep down, humans understand that justice must be served.
• Option 6: In Christianity, the substitutionary atonement (Christ dying for our sin) allows for justice to be served while saving us from suffering the punishment we deserve. When you repent, you experience God’s forgiveness, and your debt is wiped clean. You no longer carry it around with you, because your sin has been removed from you as far as the east is from the west (Psalm 103:12). At that point, you will begin to feel convicted to make things right with whomever you have wronged. To deal with this, simply pray for God to make clear to you what you must do to make amends. You may need to confess, apologize, restore something taken, repay a debt, etc. Once you have done that, you will be completely free from the feeling of guilt and will be able to move on.

Right now, you may be experiencing deep confusion, because if you converted to Christianity later in life or were raised with a twisted version of Christianity, your belief system of origin may have proclaimed that what you did was morally acceptable, even though you knew instinctively from the Law of God written on your heart that it was wrong, and you haven’t yet reconciled the disconnect. Studying the Bible will help you figure out these moral contradictions.

Furthermore, there may be “reasons” you sinned, which explain why you did what you did. But reasons are not excuses. You can exercise compassion toward yourself without rejecting the fundamental responsibility all men have to obey God 100% of the time. You must still repent and work through your wrongdoing.

At this point, you should have abandoned preventative soothing, and therefore you are feeling impulses to sin when circumstances or thoughts trigger your buried sensation of guilt. Thus, to uncover the source of your guilt, you must wait until you are triggered and then analyze the thoughts or circumstances you experience when triggered.

It may be helpful to work with a professional (counselor, therapist, pastor, etc.) to accelerate your investigation, as well as to help you learn healthy coping strategies for dealing with overwhelming feelings that might come up as you dig into your past. Important: Don’t go it alone for major issues, don’t stop medical treatments without consulting your medical team, and always get immediate help in serious situations (like calling a hotline if you feel suicidal). Focus on getting a care team you trust, and then you’re responsible for organizing your care properly and using whatever input they give you in a wise manner. You will only go wrong by not firing someone you don’t trust or by letting someone else, even someone well intentioned, determine your care for you (unless you’re a minor or dependent, in which case your parent or guardian can take a leading role).

If therapy seems shameful to you, think of it merely as hiring someone who specializes in processing and healing from trauma. You would hire a doctor if you broke a bone because, unless you are a doctor, you do not specialize in healing broken bones. Similarly, you are not born knowing how to deal with a damaged psyche, so hire a professional. Just be sure to avoid anyone who insists that you disavow all guilt and renounce all moral responsibility for the picture you’re putting together around your bondage.

Once you have identified the source of your guilt, you simply apologize to God, acknowledging that you had no right to sin (no matter how understandable it may have been) and asking Him to apply Christ’s sacrifice to your spiritual debt. You may have to do this several times as new layers and nuances of guilt come up, but soon you will feel a sense of release and freedom, because Christ’s sacrifice does cancel out our guilt.

Once you feel that release, you may still have subsequent attacks of guilt and condemnation. Find Bible verses that reference the cleansing power of God’s forgiveness and recite them to yourself as a mantra in those moments. Psalm 103:12, Isaiah 1:18, and Romans 8:1 are good examples. You need to convince yourself that your repentance really has freed you from the burden you were carrying. And, because it’s true, you will not have tension and stress brewing under the surface anymore from an unacknowledged truth buried under a comforting lie.

Step 10: Confront Your Shame

In my parlance, guilt is the pain of remembering something awful that you did, while shame is the pain of remembering something awful done to you. Both are the result of trauma, which is an event or action that causes ongoing psychological harm.

Regarding shame, our sense of identity is much more passively determined than we often realize or like to admit – in other words, how people treat us communicates to us how we deserve to be treated. When others treat you like you’re worthless, particularly in your formative years, you come to believe (often unconsciously) that you are worthless, and you end up feeling suppressed, inferior, and/or helpless.

Shame-inducing harm can be active (abuse) or passive (neglect). It can also be individual (inflicted on just you) or collective (inflicted on an entire group you belong to). Let’s look at some examples of trauma that can induce a sense of worthlessness:

• A parent who disregards or abandons his or her children is telling them they are worthless (individual neglect).
• Parents who spend their earnings on alcohol over the material needs of their children communicate to the children that they are worthless (individual neglect).
• Any authority figure who physically or sexually abuses a child is communicating to them that the authority figure’s emotional or sexual self-gratification is more important than the child’s dignity, and hence the child is worthless (individual abuse).
• A nation that invades, conquers, and exploits another nation communicates to the people of the colonized nation that they are without inherent dignity and are therefore worthless (collective abuse).
• Avaricious politicians who betray and exploit their constituents to amass money or power are telling the people they are supposed to be representing that they aren’t worth protecting (collective abuse or collective neglect, depending on circumstance).
• A racial group that discriminates against another racial group is treating the latter group as if they are of less inherent worth than the former group (collective abuse).
• People who grow up in impoverished neighborhoods or ghettos have been left behind by their own politicians and citizens from other locations within the same nation, thereby growing up being told they are not worth helping out (collective neglect).

Shame therefore comes not from mistreatment, but from accepting what the mistreatment says about you. The mistreatment itself is not the source of your ongoing suffering, but rather your impaired sense of identity. Anyone who has dwelt for a long time on a negative comment made offhand by a complete stranger knows how hard it is to cope with the harmful behavior of others. This is the key to shame: how you think about yourself is dependent on how others treat you. It is not in your control – it is in the control of others.

The key to conquering shame is not to shut out the harmful message, but rather to override it with a higher priority message. Think about if, while growing up, a kid at school insulted you, and you felt bad. However, when you got home, you told your father, and after listening thoughtfully, he explained clearly and rationally why the kid who insulted you was completely wrong, what his real motivations for insulting you were, and how you could best deal with his abuse in the future. Your initial wounded identity would be upgraded and matured to a level that could now deal with insults of a similar nature without being harmed again.

This is what God can do for us, if we let Him. Jesus was mistreated worse than anyone else in history (because He was sinless and didn’t deserve anything negative that was ever directed toward him, much less a brutal martyrdom), but He knew who He was and whose Son He was, so He died with His head held high. In fact, on the cross, He was not only not wounded by His murderers, but He prayed for them as they were murdering Him (Luke 23:34). That is what the highest level of identity security looks like.

Interestingly, radicalization exploits the concept of identity security. Religious extremists and cultists give systemically oppressed or neglected people a sense of worth and dignity, which is why people willingly blow themselves up or set themselves on fire for a religious cause. The same is true of political extremism or recruitment into gangs and mobs. Such radicalization serves no good in the hands of the wicked, but a healthy and godly version of this is what you will use to overcome any spiritual bondage that is rooted in shame.

To do this, you must first acquaint yourself with what the Bible says about you and your inherent worth. You must learn how humans are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-27), which is the foundation of our inherent worth and dignity. You must learn that God pities Christians as a father pities his children (Psalm 103:13). You must learn that the very hairs of your head are numbered, because of how much God values you (Matthew 10:30-31). You must learn that nothing can ever separate you from God’s powerful love for you (Romans 8:38-39). Search the Bible or use Bible study aids to find more such verses (there are plenty).

Then, as with guilt, wait until you are triggered and see what thoughts and feelings come up. Whatever comes up, spew out all the darkness within you: “I am worthless, I am selfish, I am stupid, I am careless, I am dirty, I am damaged, I am [fill in the blank].” But then, speak to what the Bible calls your “being,” which encompasses your mind, psyche, and body, and tell it, “But God loves me anyway.” I call this “applying kindness to the wound.” When we affirm to ourselves our worth in God’s eyes, we rewrite the lies we were told through the neglectful and abusive ways we were treated as we grew up. This gives us strength to overcome compulsive behaviors, as the pain and darkness we are medicating with our compulsions become less frightening and intense the more we see ourselves from God’s perspective.

As you speak to yourself, adapt the declarations to match the pain. So, if your father told you that you were no good, then say something like, “Even though my earthly father told me that, my heavenly Father thinks I was worth sending His Son to die for. He loves me dearly, cares for me deeply, and watches over me day and night. My earthly father was wrong when he said that to me. It’s OK that those words wounded me as a child, but I know now that it was a lie. Even though my earthly father was a disappointment, I can still have an incredible relationship and bond with my heavenly Father, first in this life and then forever in the next.”

Note that modern affirmative techniques focus on self-love or self-affirmation, but God’s love is what’s important. After all, the worst people in the world on some level slavishly love themselves. Our self-love is not what matters. What matters is that the perfect God tenderly and kindly loves and cares for us. Our own love cannot override the lies that trauma has embedded in us, but God’s love can.

Now, this process will not be easy. You have to look your pain in the face instead of seeking to soothe it with a hit of your compulsion of choice. But every time you face the aching pain inside and soothe it with the truths the Bible teaches you, the pain recedes. Eventually, it will become decreasingly intimidating and increasingly manageable. Then, to the extent that your bondage was grounded in shame, you will find freedom from it.

Once again, as with guilt, consult a professional as needed to accelerate your investigation into the wounds of your past. Just be sure to find someone who supports this particular approach to overcoming your shame. You can also research meditative practices if you need help connecting your conscious mind with your body (e.g., controlling your breathing or tensing and untensing parts of your body) and/or psyche (e.g., clearing your mind and letting go of thoughts that pop up and consume your attention).

Note also that a major misconception about Christianity amongst those who don’t know the faith well, because of the many false versions of Christianity in America, is that Christianity is all about piling guilt and shame onto believers or using guilt and shame to control their behavior. On the contrary, as a new creation in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17), you are freed from guilt and shame. The Bible clearly teaches that maturity of Christian faith is about living this freedom, not being beaten over the head by abusive spiritual authorities about all your sinful impulses and personal failings.

Important clarification: Tragic occurrences (such as natural disasters or no-fault car accidents) can also induce shame, even if they weren’t caused by anyone in particular, because they violate your inherent dignity and worth as a human being. In this case, you still override your shame by understanding your value in God’s eyes, but you also need to wrestle with the idea of seemingly senseless death or suffering. I would encourage you to review Tackling the Hard Questions Head-On for help.

The Validity of Feelings and Emotions

This approach of overriding shame with higher-level truths is an example of what the Bible refers to as “being transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2). Replacing the lies of the world with the truths of God in your personal belief system and internal worldview is essential to replacing sin with righteousness and spiritual slavery with liberty.

A major blocker to this is the assumption that our feelings and emotions are always valid (we want to “speak our truth”). But beliefs can be misguided and can thus produce inappropriate feelings and misplaced emotions.

Let’s look at an example of how this might work:

1. Physical stimulus: I see a cop’s lights and hear a siren and realize I’m being pulled over for speeding.
2. Belief: I am entitled to drive as fast as I want to wherever I’m going.
3. Feeling: I’m being wronged by this cop, who is getting in my way.
4. Emotion: Anger at the cop.

A different belief can produce a different feeling in the exact same situation:

1. Physical stimulus: I see a cop’s lights and hear a siren and realize I’m being pulled over for speeding.
2. Belief: Speeding laws exist to keep everyone on the road safe and protect all families in the community, and it is only right that I obey them like everyone else.
3. Feeling: This cop is justified in pulling me over, and I’ve gone and caused myself a big hassle and expense.
4. Emotion: Disappointment in myself for breaking the law and anger at myself for the hassle and cost of dealing with the ticket.

Note that Western culture, including Western Christianity, is often very anti-emotion. It classifies many emotions as “bad.” However, all emotions were created by God for specific reasons and, when combined with correct beliefs (those stemming from a biblical worldview), are always helpful. Every emotion has a purpose. For example, anger exists to motivate you to combat injustice (you are angry when something that isn’t right occurs), and grief exists to help you process the pain of loss.

Therefore, if your emotions are unhelpful, the problem isn’t the emotion, it’s the crooked beliefs leading to misguided emotions. For example, as shown above, someone with a strong sense of entitlement may get angry at anyone who threatens their autonomy, no matter how justified the latter may be in doing so. You must fix such bad beliefs and learn to feel all appropriate emotions, no matter how negative they may be.

Grief and Forgiveness

When processing the harms of your past, you will inevitably be faced with the reality of the ideal upbringing or childhood you were denied through the harm you faced. This represents a loss, which is what the mechanism of grief is designed for. Anytime you have lost something, such as a life you wished you could have had or a loved one or a job or your health, you must grieve it.

God designed grief to be the emotional equivalent of vomiting: you have something emotionally toxic inside of you that you must expel to recover to full health. Unfortunately for Westerners, it’s impossible to grieve without crying. Stoicism will leave you perpetually poisoned, just as if you suppressed your vomiting reflex after eating bad food. You don’t have to grieve publicly if you find it too embarrassing, but you must certainly do so privately.

I recommend using a process I call “turbo-grieving,” which involves getting it all out quickly, going through the anger and the bargaining and the moaning and the weeping and the despair as fast as possible. It’s very intense, but I’ve been able to grieve significant losses and disappointments in sometimes as little as an hour just by completely giving in to every aspect of the grieving process, no matter how unpleasant. When I’m done, I feel at peace and able to shift my focus to the good things I’ve been privileged to experience, rather than continuously dwelling on the negative.

Of course, occasional sadness and feelings of loss will continue past the end of your grieving. Make sure you always let yourself cry when the impulse comes upon you, even if you have to excuse yourself to a private place to do so.

In addition to grieving, you must forgive anyone who has harmed you. God does not simply recommend this, He demands it (Mark 11:25-26). This does not mean accepting or justifying the behavior of the one who harmed you. Instead, it means stepping into the comfort and healing that God offers you. Without forgiveness, you can never be truly healed, nor will you be able to let go of your anger, hatred, and bitterness.

If you struggle with forgiveness, remember that one of two fates awaits the one who harmed you:

• They will understand the true extent of their wrongdoing and feel stricken with guilt, repenting to God of their evil ways. They will then receive the healing and divine forgiveness neither you nor they deserve.
• They will suffer an eternal punishment so horrible that if we truly understood it, we wouldn’t wish it on anyone, no matter how much pain they’ve inflicted on us.

Once forgiveness and compassion have been extended to the ones who harmed you, you have grieved the losses of your past, and you have communicated to your psyche that you are worthy, full of dignity, and beloved of God, and that any harm speaks to the weakness of the one who harmed you and not to your own inherent worthlessness, you should experience freedom from shame, and you will no longer need your spiritual bondage to combat it.

Step 11: Confront Your Life Stressors

Once you deal with any guilt and shame that underlie your bondage, you will have freedom. However, if you’re not careful, you may find yourself returning to your bondage to deal with a completely different emotional or spiritual problem (compare Matthew 12:43-45). To find freedom again, you must deal with the new problem.

Unlike a wound from your past, life stressors are very much in the present. You are again dealing with something that feels overwhelming and unconquerable, but this time the situation is ongoing, rather than a past unprocessed trauma. It could be something in your marriage, family, work, health, finances, relationships with friends, etc. You must address the fact that at some point you began sinfully soothing yourself instead of facing the stressor that won’t go away.

The approach to this type of bondage should be familiar at this point: quit your preventative soothing, wait until you are triggered, and notice what causes you to want to soothe. This time, however, you are not merely processing an old trauma but are facing a present problem with courage. You must recognize something unhealthy in your life that you have failed to deal with.

For example, you might be experiencing mistreatment, exploitation, harm, or abuse. You may feel trapped in a situation or taken advantage of by a partner, an employer, a friend, etc. Alternatively, you might be experiencing some kind of pain, either physical or psychological (like boredom or loneliness). No matter what, you must find a way to deal with the problem without escaping into the soothing power of your spiritual bondage.

Note that the problem may not be fixable solely by your own power. That is where God comes in. With man, fixing your situation may be impossible, but with God, all things are possible (Matthew 19:26). You must therefore turn to God in faith and pray to Him to make a way where there is no way, much as He made a way in the Red Sea by parting the waters after Moses led Israel out of Egypt. Be sure to persist in prayer and “annoy” God into granting your request (Luke 11:5-13; Luke 18:1-8).

Regardless of whether God needs to make a way or whether you simply need to confront something scary head on, God will ask you to take a leap of faith and do something you are anxious about or afraid of doing. This is because the true cause of your suffering is often not your external circumstances, but rather your lack of agency. It is rare for your situation to be something truly inescapable where you are playing no role in your suffering, even if you don’t realize it.

Therefore, God may instruct you to walk away when you are afraid to leave, set up boundaries and require others to treat you with respect, or change your perspective about a situation that seems hopeless. He will challenge your assumptions about what you are truly required to put up with or what cannot be solved when He provides His guidance and support. Then, once you take the initial action He asks you to take, He will move circumstances around you to create your path forward as needed, perhaps calling you to step out in faith additional times before the problem is resolved.

As God moves you toward deliverance from the overwhelming situation you have been using bondage to avoid, your confidence and faith in God will grow, and you will find yourself with a decreasing need to be soothed, which will reduce and eventually eliminate your reliance on your spiritual bondage.

Additional Notes on Guilt, Shame, and Life Stressors

In the last few steps, I have focused primarily on processing and moving forward from the past. However, the battle against spiritual bondage is fought in three dimensions: past, present, and future (see Revelation 1:8). You need to transition from healing your past to organizing your present and securing your future. How to address your present and your future is not the focus of this particular article, so I will simply provide a high-level overview of each here as a starting point:

• The present concerns your areas of responsibility. God has entrusted you with responsibilities in areas such as faith (your relationship with God), family, friends, work, etc. As you heal from your past, you must learn from the Bible how to properly satisfy your various responsibilities and focus on fulfilling those responsibilities over pursuing your own selfish desires.
• The future concerns your personal ministry. Spiritual bondage is a major blocker to spiritual maturity, which moves you beyond your own concerns and turns your attention toward how to help others find and grow in Christ (Philippians 2:3-4). Doing the hard work of overcoming your spiritual bondage becomes more bearable as you increasingly see the vision for what God wants to do with your life. Ask yourself (or work with a spiritual coach to figure out), “If I were freed from my bondage today, what would I be seeking to accomplish tomorrow?” Much as Jesus was tempted in the wilderness, you must face your own temptations and overcome them before being commissioned to ministry. You will not attain a “purpose-driven life” or sense of deep fulfillment, nor will you feel a deep and constant connection to God, until you free yourself from bondage by the power of the gospel. But when you do, you will.

More things to keep in mind through this process:

• Constant prayer is an absolute necessity to getting free. You will need to continually reorient yourself toward God and seek His help to deal with setbacks and obstacles, whether external or internal.
• There is scientific evidence emerging that suggests that unresolved trauma can be passed down from generation to generation. If you find yourself struggling with guilt or shame that doesn’t appear connected to your own life story, this may be happening to you. Simply allow it to come out with the language that feels natural and repent of the guilt or override the shame as if it were your own.
• Even when you have committed yourself to Christ and desire to obey God, your flesh will still seek strongly to perform sin, as described in Romans 7:14-8:17. You escape the power of the flesh by trusting in God, repenting, and doing whatever God reveals to you to do in response to prayer. Even when you have obtained freedom from spiritual bondage, your flesh will continue to occasionally tempt you, though less frequently and less powerfully over time. However, you need no longer identify with the flesh and its desires, and if you persist in holiness in your temptation, it will leave you for the time being, as Satan left Jesus in the wilderness (Matthew 4:11). Still, some level of struggle with your flesh is inevitable for the remainder of your earthly life.
• Because of the ongoing temptations of the flesh, you must make a regular practice of systematically stamping out sin in your life and rejecting false beliefs that support any sense of entitlement you may have. A technique I find helpful is to visualize the object of a sinful desire being put inside of an idol (for me it is a wood pillar with a spherical knob at the end), then I throw that idol onto a bonfire, and then I repent and pray to God to forgive me for turning to an idol instead of Him for comfort. Every time I do this, the power of the pull of that object of temptation becomes weaker. Eventually, when you do this to everything that has tempted you in the past, you “clean out your closet” and experience significant relief from temptation. Note that this sequence repeats Jesus’ overcoming of the devil in Matthew 4: Jesus becomes “hungry,” the devil appears with a temptation, Jesus chooses to reject the temptation, the devil flees, and then angels minister to Jesus, removing the hunger.
• You can’t always be fully healed from the repercussions of certain forms of bondage, but you can definitely break a sin cycle and let the passage of time and the deaths of several generations erase it from your family’s history. God turned the curse of death incurred by Adam’s sin (Genesis 2:17) into a blessing when He drove Adam and Eve from the garden (Genesis 3:22-24), thereby protecting them from living forever in a state of decay. Adam and Eve in their lives would never be able to escape their brokenness completely, but they could keep their descendants from experiencing it if they acted as responsible parents and rulers, thereby removing it from the earth as much as possible.
• David was a faithful man for his entire youth, a man after God’s own heart (1 Samuel 13:14). But it only took one day of carelessness and indulgence of sin for him to jeopardize everything he had built. His sin with Bathsheba cost him three sons (Bathsheba’s eldest, Amnon, and Absalom), a trusted advisor (Ahithophel), a nephew (Amasa), ten concubines, plus more besides. The Christian life is one of constant vigilance and carefulness. Remember: you are always one day away from failure (see 1 Corinthians 10:12), because even when defeated, your flesh will always be urging you to return to your bondage like a dog returning to his vomit or a sow, having washed, to her wallowing in the mire (2 Peter 2:22). You end up in trouble when, despite having experienced victory for a long time, you decide to go along with your flesh as you did before.
• If you pursue victory over sin with all your strength and in complete obedience to God, you will not experience daily suffering forever. You will have seasons of peace and healing, and even when God leads you back into the fire to refine you in new ways, you will never again descend to the lowest depths you experienced in the past, so long as you continue to cling to your Father in Heaven.
• Internet filtering for sexual bondage can be helpful, but remember that you also need to fix the underlying issue. Otherwise, you’re just going to find workarounds somehow.
• Accountability partnering is typically done wrong. You will not overcome your bondage simply through fear of the shame of admitting you failed. You must be on a process of self-discovery and facing your demons. If that’s your goal, then you can ask others to encourage you or go on a parallel journey with you.
• A healthy life is not as pleasurable as sin in the short term (Hebrews 11:24-25). However, you won’t want sinful pleasure once you have achieved spiritual maturity. You will find great freedom in not constantly hungering after your sin of choice once you have escaped your bondage.
• This whole process takes time, especially if you are escaping your first bondage (you may have more than one). Be patient and trust in God. He is teaching you to trust Him.

Step 12: Go Back for Others

As you experience victory, your final step is to go back and teach others to find freedom for themselves. This follows the Bible’s model of transmitted healing: First, Jesus came personally to heal others. Those others were then to preach their healing to others (2 Corinthians 1:3-4), who would preach that healing to still others. In this way, God will heal the world.

We live in a time of great psychological pain and suffering, where many people are searching for purpose and meaning. The reality is that purpose and meaning are found in service to others (Matthew 20:27-28). You should start by pursuing your own healing, but once you succeed, you must spread it to others, because other people matter as much as you do.

This is the ultimate message of the life of Jesus: He, being a perfect model of maturity as God, spent His entire life in service to others, never once exploiting others for His own pleasure or gratification, and ultimately dying for the good of all mankind. He invites us to replicate such care and concern for those around us.

It also doesn’t hurt that the best way to learn is to teach. Nothing will solidify your understanding of how to move into freedom like explaining it to others.

Two notes:

• Be careful not to get entangled in the sins of others when you get involved in their lives to help them. The Bible warns about this (Galatians 6:1).
• You can help others by offering knowledge, compassion, encouragement, and reasonable assistance, but do not enable them. Remember, we must all bear our own load, and if they are not taking responsibility for their own healing and liberation, you cannot do it for them. Always hold those you’re assisting accountable, though you should never condemn them.

Afterwards

Once you have completed steps 1-12 for your first spiritual bondage, repeat 2-12 until you have escaped all your bondages.

Once that’s done, congratulations! You will now be living in a constant state of connection with God and will desire at all times to obey His commandments and His callings on your life. You will deeply trust Him and know He is good. Enjoy your freedom from spiritual bondage and your unimpeded ministry to the Lord!