Abusers, in league with each other, have created a secret place where they stash all their victims

A dream I had in 2012. The dream depicts how abusers have been in league with each other to create a hidden place where they stash their bewitched victims.

The Dream

A survivor I used to help years ago comes back to visit me. I’m living in an old double-story mansion which used to be lived in by a wealthy old woman who inherited it from her gentry ancestors. All the grand furniture and curtains fittings are there, but the owner has been gone a long time ago and the house is not well-cared for now. The layout of the house is extraordinary; there are rooms and doors and passages all over the place that you wouldn’t expect. Many of the rooms are enormous.

The survivor who’s visiting me is going to stay overnight, so I put her in in one of the grand upstairs rooms.

In settling her into the room for the night, I try to turn out all the lights in her room. There are many small lights, semi-concealed behind complicated wooden carvings in the walls. It’s difficult to discover where all the switches are for these lights.

In feeling around for the switches I find a warm pipe, obviously a heating pipe, part of the concealed heating system of the house. I’m surprised at its warmth, because I thought all the heating had been turned off in the rooms that weren’t being regularly used. I find a small panel on the wall here too, and discover that it is actually a door, quite narrow, too narrow for anyone except a thinly built person to pass through.

I open the narrow door and behind it there’s a tiny room chock-full of a four poster bed. The main sleeping part of the bed is crammed full of quilts. But when I look up, I see there is a top layer of the bed, like a second bunk or a mezzanine above. I feel up there: — uugh! there is something warm and soft, like flesh. I crane my head up to see. There are people lying up there! Many people. Crammed together like sardines. Men and women.

I say something, and a man answers in a very groggy voice.

I realise they are all drugged to the eyeballs and are probably being kept there secretly, against their will.

I’m angry and I want to find the person who is responsible for this atrocity. Almost as soon as I start looking, a buxom woman approaches me. She is warmly business-like, competent and sensible, like a teacher-librarian or a social worker. She looks like she would be kind and fair if you were a person of goodwill, but if you stepped out of line she could be stern and strict. She presents as a solidly respectable professional who would always act humanely, but wouldn’t take any nonsense. “Can I help you?” she asks me. I tell her I’m trying to find the person responsible for all those locked up people…

Almost before I’ve finished asking my question, I know it’s HER. She is the one responsible for locking away all those people. That’s why she approached me so confidently — to put me off track so I wouldn’t suspect her. I just know it is her. No doubt whatsoever.

Then I’m standing on the top of a wooden fence, seven or eight feet off the ground. I am able to balance there. When I occasionally feel that I’m losing my balance, I ask God and He helps me regain my balance. I’m grasping this social worker woman by her hair, violent shaking and hitting her body repeatedly against the fence, slamming her as hard as I can against the fence, over and over again, to punish her and to force her to expose the truth. Then I suddenly know: — SHE’S NOT A WOMAN, SHE’S A MAN. I pull her clothing down and up to expose her genitals and sure enough there it is, a penis and testicles. I am disgusted and furious.

I can’t say this interpretation is ‘from the Lord,’ but it feels right to me

The people who are drugged and packed into that hidden room, almost un-discoverable, are the victims of abuse all over the world who are living in the fog that their abusers have laid over them like an invisible net. They are drugged to the eyeballs, but it’s also like they are under an evil spell. And, they have been deliberately concealed.

The abusers are all in league with each other, and have created this hidden place where they stash all their victims. They even make sure that the heating pipes to this little room are working, so the victims don’t die of cold. The abusers want to keep their victims alive — alive enough to still be useful targets for the abusers to wreak their evil ‘pleasures’ on, but not alive enough to wake up and set themselves free.

In preparing to write my book Not Under Bondage: Biblical Divorce for Abuse, Adultery and Desertion, I read theological commentaries and journal articles on the doctrine of divorce. I spent years researching what other people had said about the doctrine of divorce.

Feeling around the carved ornate woodwork of the grand room is what I was doing when I was reading all those books and articles about the doctrine of divorce, trying to understand how other interpreters had ‘cut the cake’, trying to figure out what was wrong or missing in each of their interpretations, and what was the true way of cutting the cake of the disparate divorce scriptures scattered throughout the Old and New Testaments.

All I knew was that the former interpretations must have been at least somewhat faulty, because none of them gave indubitable permission for divorce for domestic abuse, and God would (indeed must, by His loving and righteous character) permit divorce for victims of domestic abuse. I was feeling my way round those theologians’ arguments, trying to find, by feel, by tentative pressure here and there, where their arguments didn’t stand up. The carved woodwork gave way to a subtle pressure at one point, a panel moved – and it wasn’t a panel, it was a door! And behind the door were all those sad, suffering souls!

The social worker woman who is really a man is an archetype of all those abusers who pass themselves off as nice people who would never harm anybody! She is dressed as a woman to put people off the scent of who she (he) really is. It’s the disguise of the wicked one, purposeful camouflage, classic misdirection. It’s what all abusers do, only this man does it to the nth degree, even passing himself off as the opposite sex. Gender inversion is perhaps the ultimate way of thumbing your nose at God.

In another way, the social worker represents all those people in the church who just don’t get it about our abuse experiences and who want to shush victims up with dismissive prayers and sentimental ‘counselling’. These people preen themselves on ‘what good ministry they are doing’.

A third interpretation of the social worker is that she represents the pseudo-advocates, coaches, and mental health professionals who claim to be educating and supporting victims, but are teaching dangerous ideas. Let me give you some examples of bad teaching by pseudo-advocates. Some are teaching that porn consumption is not necessarily sinful, and that porn is only an issue if you feel it is damaging the relationship; this teaching contradicts Matthew 5:28. Many advocates are berating victims for failing to set boundaries; those advocates don’t understand coercive control, nor do they teach that before a victim sets boundaries it’s important to do safety planning, because once she sets boundaries, the abuse will probably escalate. Many advocates use victim-blaming language such as calling female victims “codependent women who enable their abusers”.

The way that I am standing on the fence and not losing my balance represents what I am trying to do at A Cry for Justice. The fence is precipitous — if I fell off on either side, I would be getting it wrong.

What would ‘falling off the fence’ look like? I might get too focused on the suffering victims and the social justice agenda, at the expense of scripture and the primacy of the gospel and the necessity to be born again in Christ. I might get overly focused on the controversy about gender roles in the family and the church. I might get bogged down in ministering to individuals, and forget the big picture of fighting the battle at systemic levels. I might get out of sorts with my helpers and fall off the wall because we’ve not dealt with a little personal injury or misunderstanding. I guess you, dear reader, could think of more things that could cause me or us to lose our balance and fall off the fence. That’s why prayer is so important, to help maintain balance.

How do I interpret the part where I’m smashing the hideous ‘woman-man’ against the fence? Certainly I’m furious about what the abusers are doing. But it’s also showing how the abusers and their allies need to be severely dealt with in order to stop domestic abuse.

Lastly, the survivor at the beginning of my dream. In real life (not in the dream) I did not see her progress toward recovery or a closer walk with Christ. She represents the women in 2 Timothy 3:6-7 – “For among them are those who creep into households and capture weak women, burdened with sins and led astray by various passions, always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth.”

I know there will always be some victims like her. But not all survivors are going to be weak and vacillating, repeatedly falling back into worldly passions and traps. Some survivors learn, truly wake up — and they progress upward, closer to Christ, as they recover from the traumas and build more righteousness into their lives. Among those who wake up and do not turn back will be some who develop into astute, vigorous, valiant survivors who join the battle in calling for justice, righteousness and truth.

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I first shared this dream in a comment I made at Ida Mae’s blog in 2012.

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Further Reading

For sheep who are stepping forward as shepherds

We will all be judged for our deeds, so let us keep on planting seeds of truth.

Beyond Boundaries, by Andrea Aleksandrova — discusses how advocates are berating survivors for not setting boundaries.

The western church is asleep. The Great Resignation from the false churches is proof of that fact.

Why did Paul call abused women ‘little-women’?