He Restored Me to My Right Mind

Years ago, I read the story of the demoniac in Mark 5 and felt chills run through me.

I knew this man. Not literally, of course. But I knew something about living among the tombs.

I knew something about being so wounded, so dysregulated, so lost in survival that the person God created me to be seemed buried underneath addiction, trauma, shame, and behaviors that frightened other people—and sometimes frightened me.

Back then, I didn’t have the language I have today.

I didn’t know about trauma and the developing brain.

I didn’t understand hypervigilance, dissociation, attachment wounds, or what prolonged abuse can do to a child’s nervous system.

I didn’t know that a brain exposed to terror can become exquisitely trained for survival while struggling terribly with ordinary life.

I just thought something was wrong with me.

And then I met this man in the Bible.

The Man Among the Tombs

Jesus and His disciples had just crossed the Sea of Galilee. It had been quite a night. A violent storm had nearly overwhelmed their boat. The disciples—experienced fishermen—were terrified.

Jesus was asleep.

They woke Him crying, essentially, Don’t You care that we’re dying?

Jesus stood and spoke to the storm. “Peace, be still.” And suddenly the wind stopped. The sea became calm.

I love that story because today I understand something I couldn’t have understood when I first wrote these words: Sometimes the storm is outside us. Sometimes the storm is inside us. Jesus is not afraid of either one.

When they reached the other side, another storm came running toward Him. Only this storm was a man.

He lived among the tombs.

He screamed.

He cut himself with stones.

People had tried to restrain him with chains, but he broke them.

Imagine what the community saw when they looked at him.

Dangerous.

Crazy.

Unmanageable.

Possessed.

A problem.

But I wonder what Jesus saw, because trauma has taught me something important: Behavior tells a story.

Sometimes what looks like rebellion is survival.

Sometimes what looks like rage is terror.

Sometimes addiction begins as an attempt to regulate unbearable pain.

Sometimes a person isn’t asking, What’s wrong with me? Their nervous system is asking, Am I safe yet?

That does not mean destructive behavior doesn’t matter.

Healing includes truth.

It includes responsibility.

It includes learning different ways to live.

But shame has never been a very good healer.

Jesus did not stand safely at a distance and shout instructions at this man. He moved toward him.

I Knew What It Was Like to Live Among the Tombs

When I first read this story, I began to sob. Because I remembered myself at thirteen.

I remembered the streets.

I remembered being sexually exploited and abused.

I remembered drugs.

I remembered believing that dying might be easier than living.

I remembered being functionally illiterate and carrying so much shame that I couldn’t imagine becoming anything different.

I survived ten years on the streets.

For years I interpreted that story primarily through a spiritual lens—and I still do. I believe evil is real. I believe spiritual warfare is real.

But today I can see another layer, too. I was a traumatized child. My brain had learned survival long before it learned safety.

Some of the things I later hated about myself had once helped me survive.

Hypervigilance kept me watching.

Dissociation helped me leave emotionally when I couldn’t physically escape.

Drugs could numb what I didn’t yet know how to feel.

And relationships could become places where I searched desperately for safety, belonging, value, or relief.

None of that made the destruction harmless. But understanding it changed the question. Instead of only asking, What is wrong with me? I began learning to ask, What happened to me—and what does healing look like now?

Eventually, another question became even more important: Who does God say I am?

Jesus Saw the Man

There is a moment in this story that I cannot get over. After Jesus healed him, the people from town came out to see what had happened. And there he was. The man they had known as dangerous and uncontrollable was sitting there, clothed and in his right mind.

In his right mind.

Those words undid me when I first read them.Because somewhere inside me was a young woman desperately wondering whether there was a right mind left to restore.

There was.

There is.

Today we call part of that healing neuroplasticity.

The brain can change.

New pathways can form.

A nervous system trained by danger can begin learning safety.

We can learn to pause rather than react, connect rather than isolate, grieve rather than numb, tell the truth rather than hide, and remain present in our own bodies rather than having to escape them.

Healing doesn’t erase the story. It changes what the story gets to do with the rest of our lives. And for me, that healing has never been merely psychological. It has been profoundly spiritual.

I began discovering that God was not disgusted with the traumatized, addicted, frightened girl I had been. He wasn’t standing at a distance waiting for me to clean myself up enough to approach Him. He was already moving toward me.

“Please Don’t Leave Me This Way”

I sometimes imagine the demoniac looking at Jesus with whatever part of himself that was still able to hope, saying: “Please don’t leave me this way.”

I understand that prayer. I have prayed it in a hundred forms.

God, please don’t leave me this angry.

Please don’t leave me this afraid.

Please don’t leave me needing to numb myself.

Please don’t leave me believing that I am worthless.

Please don’t leave me unable to trust love.

Please don’t leave me confusing chaos with connection.

Please don’t leave me trapped inside what happened to me.

And He hasn’t.

Healing for me wasn’t one dramatic moment followed by a perfect life. It has been a journey.

Therapy.

Recovery.

Community.

Truth.

Boundaries.

Repentance.

Forgiveness.

Learning to recognize what my body is telling me.

Learning that I can tolerate painful feelings without escaping them.

Learning to receive love without waiting for it to turn dangerous.

Learning to take responsibility for the ways my own woundedness affected other people.

And over and over again, discovering the relentless love of God in places I once believed He could never enter.

Then Jesus Did Something Strange

The healed man wanted to get into the boat with Jesus. Of course he did! If somebody had just given me my life back, I would have grabbed onto that boat, too. But Jesus told him to go home. “Go tell people what the Lord has done for you.”

I used to think that sounded almost cruel. Now I think I understand it differently. Jesus wasn’t rejecting him. He was returning him to his life.

Trauma had stolen his community.

Shame had stolen his identity.

Bondage had stolen his voice.

And Jesus gave them back.

The man who had once been known by his symptoms was now going to be known by his story.

I know something about that, too.

I went back to school.

I learned to read.

I started working in the mental health field.

I eventually began working with people whose lives looked as impossible as mine once had.

I became a mother.

An author.

A speaker.

I have spent decades sitting with people in prisons, treatment centers, churches, recovery groups, and rooms all over the world.

And I have watched God do again and again what I first saw in Mark 5: He sees a human being where everybody else sees a problem.

A Life Is Worth More

There is another part of this story that still troubles me. After the demons entered the pigs and the herd was destroyed, the people asked Jesus to leave.

A man had been restored—and they were worried about what his restoration had cost them.

I remember thinking when I first wrote this piece: A life is worth so much more than material things.

I believe that more strongly now than I did then.

A traumatized child is worth the inconvenience of creating safety.

An addicted person is worth treatment.

A struggling family is worth honest conversations.

A survivor is worth believing.

A person who has harmed others is worth being called into truth, accountability, repentance, and transformation.

Nobody is disposable.

That doesn’t mean everyone is safe.

It doesn’t mean boundaries disappear.

It doesn’t mean reconciliation is always possible.

It means human value remains even when human behavior has become terribly broken.

Jesus never confused love with the absence of truth.

Neither should we.

He Restored Me to My Right Mind

I am 70 now. And when I look back at the young woman who first wrote this story, I want to reach through the years and tell her: Cheri, you have no idea what God is going to do with you.

You are going to heal things you don’t even have names for yet. You are going to understand that your brain was not trying to destroy you; much of the time it was desperately trying to keep you alive. You are going to discover that survival is not the end of the story. You are going to learn that healing does not mean pretending the past didn’t happen. It means the past no longer gets to decide who you are. And you are going to discover something even more beautiful: Your right mind isn’t simply a calmer brain.

It is becoming able to live present.

To love.

To tell the truth.

To receive love.

To make amends.

To laugh.

To create.

To rest.

To recognize danger without believing everything is dangerous.

To know that your value was never determined by what was done to you—or by the things you did while trying to survive.

And spiritually, it is learning to see yourself more and more through the eyes of the One who crossed the water for a man everybody else had given up on.

That is recovery to me.

Not becoming someone else.

Becoming more fully the person God knew was there all along.

The man in Mark 5 was eventually sent home to tell his story.

So was I.

And I am still telling it. Because somewhere there is another person living among their own tombs—addiction, trauma, shame, grief, pornography, rage, depression, perfectionism, codependency, or simply the exhausting work of pretending to be okay.

And maybe they need someone who has been there to tell them:

There is still a right mind beneath the chaos.


There is still a life beneath the survival.


There is still a person beneath the shame.


And there is a God who has not turned away.

He didn’t turn away from that man.

He didn’t turn away from me.

And He has not turned away from you.

Always remember that God is crazy about you… me too.

(From Cheri’s new book, The Relentless Love of God… Tapping Out for Mercy. For more information, email her at truestepoffice@gmail.com).