A Living Framework for Survivor-Led Faith and Trauma Research By Raya Faith
Preface
This work is born from the lived experience of captivity, not from observation of it.
It rises from within the long corridors of coercion, where survival depended on coherence, containment, and unspoken discernment.
These pillars are the beginning of a living ethical framework — written not for institutions but for those who carry captivity in their bones. They are not prescriptive; they are invitational. They seek to guide therapists, spiritual directors, and survivors in creating spaces of safety that do not replicate the very dynamics they aim to heal.
Together, they form the architecture of captivity-informed care — a framework where Real Jesus meets the nervous system, where safety is sacred, and where freedom is remembered cell by cell.
You may read this in sequence with:
Captivity-Informed Code of Ethics — Foundational Pillars
1. The Clean Container
The foundation of captivity-informed ethics is presence without personalization.
A clean container is one where empathy is expressed through regulation, not relation.
There is no merging, mirroring, or “me too” storytelling; only reverent witnessing.
The therapist or companion holds the space without placing themselves inside it.
Safety is defined by what remains unmerged.
2. The End of Repairing Broken Containers
Survivors are not responsible for holding together spaces that cannot hold them.
To keep trying to fix unsafe systems only deepens captivity.
Healing begins the moment a survivor stops bleeding for belonging and chooses to walk away from what is not whole enough to rest in.
Containment must be mutual, not sacrificial.
3. The Incubate Response — The Fifth Trauma Response
Beyond fight, flight, freeze, or fawn lies the incubate response:
the sacred survival instinct to preserve life by holding the unbearable inside,
to protect hope until safety returns.
In captivity, incubation becomes chronic.
In freedom, it becomes creative — the survivor learns to hatch what was once hidden, gently and in their own time.
4. The Braid Theory — Mapping Complex Activation
Trauma within captivity is not linear; it is braided.
Each strand — grief, fear, loss, hope — runs through the same nervous system,
often indistinguishable until safety allows them to separate.
Observation of these threads, rather than suppression, becomes the work of integration.
Naming the braid is not pathology; it is prophecy — the nervous system’s way of mapping truth.
5. The Body as Archive and Altar
Captivity survivors carry theology, memory, and meaning in the body itself.
Cells hold liturgy; fascia holds fear.
The task of healing is not to reject the body but to sanctify its remembering.
Through trauma-informed faith practice, the body becomes the meeting place of Real Jesus and the nervous system — the site of living resurrection.
6. The Ethics of Presence and Pace
All work must move at the speed of safety.
The therapist or guide must resist the cultural pressure toward catharsis, progress, or exposure.
In captivity-informed ethics, stillness is not avoidance — it is containment.
Safety is not comfort but capacity: the shared ability to stay present without intrusion.
7. The Theology of Freedom
Every captivity-informed principle returns here:
freedom is not granted by systems; it is remembered within the cell.
It is imprinted in the body from birth — the divine inheritance that cannot be erased,
only obscured.
The work of healing is the work of remembering:
not that we were once free, but that freedom itself was written into our design.
Applied Reflection — The Inversion of the Code
What happens when the language of healing becomes the weapon? The Cannibalism of Light bears witness to the most dangerous inversion of care — when trauma-informed principles and spiritual language are used not to protect but to possess. It exposes how empathy can be mimicked, ethics can be performed, and sacred trust can be devoured under the guise of safety.
→ Read: The Cannibalism of Light — Mapping the Spiritual Narcissist
The Gentle Rise 