When the vessel itself becomes the medicine, its purity determines whether healing can take place or reenactment repeats.

To enter sacred work with survivors of captivity trauma is to step barefoot upon holy ground.
This is not work for the unexamined or the unhealed.
Your ego must be healed enough to be safe; your presence must have done its own ethical work before touching another’s sacred story.

You are not the rescuer.
You are not the savior.
You are not the hero of the healing.

Captivity-informed ethics demand a clean container — one without intrusion, without projection, without performance.
There is no spiritual bypassing here, no claiming of glory or comfort in the suffering space.
Your task is reverent containment, not catharsis.
Your empathy must become regulation, not relation.

The survivor is the expert of their own lived experience.
You must maintain the humility to remember: you are not the authority in the room.
You are the listener of waters you could not survive stepping into.
You are the one learning what you’ve never even read about.

In captivity systems, survivors were trained to read every hidden cue to survive.
They do not need your similarity; they need your stillness.
They do not need your story; they need your steadiness.
To make yourself safe is to honor their nervous system — to meet it without taking from it.

Safety in captivity-informed care means this:
You regulate yourself before entering the room.
You hold what is yours so the survivor can finally release what was never theirs to carry.
You understand that their coherence is not consent, and their calm is not peace — it is survival.

This is the ethical work of those entrusted with sacred stories.
It begins with humility and ends with reverence.
It centers the Real Jesus, who heals without intrusion, interprets without hierarchy, and stays without control.
Let’s be clear: Real Jesus gets the glory for the survivor’s resurrection — you get the privilege to witness it.
He alone restores — cell by cell, truth by truth — the freedom that was always meant to live within us.

May every healer remember — the holiest work begins not with speaking, but with staying clean enough to listen, so your presence does no harm. 🌿

— Raya Faith

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