Content note: this testimony involves childhood ritual abuse. Details are kept to a minimum. If you are a survivor, please reach out to someone you trust or a trained counsellor. You are not alone, and you are not beyond healing.
For generations, the women in Joanne’s family had passed down a secret religion, and she was meant to be the seventh high priestess. But as a small child standing before a bonfire, she says, she was not alone. God was with her, and He made her a promise she never let go of.
Today Joanne lives in New Zealand with her husband and two daughters. In this episode of the God’s Truth Podcast, she shares with Abigail Smith how Jesus protected her through the darkness, how buried memories came back, and how forgiveness and deliverance set her free. What follows is her account.
A hidden religion in the bloodline
On her mother’s side, Joanne says, the family followed an old pagan religion that came from Scotland. It was passed down through the women and involved rituals to ancient gods, including Molech and Baal, the same gods the Bible warns against (Leviticus 18:21). Her grandmother was the coven’s high priestess and was proud that Joanne would be the seventh generation to hold the role.
Strikingly, she says, her grandmother and other members also went to church, dressed in their Sunday best the morning after a ritual. Joanne warns that people like this sometimes attend church not to worship but to weaken faith and to mock.
Joanne and her mother both rejected the path, so the family used holidays and moments when her mother was away to take the girls. Joanne says she was groomed for the role and suffered serious abuse until around the time her grandmother died, when she was entering puberty. She chooses not to go into detail. “It was pretty graphic,” she says simply.
“I’m with you”
Her clearest memory of God comes from the darkest place. At four or five, standing before a bonfire at a ritual, she remembers God being with her and speaking to her heart: “I’m with you. You’ll be fine. Sometimes you have to go through these things, but you will be fine.” In words a child could understand, He told her to reject what was happening around her, and gave her a promise. “I believed in that promise,” she says.
Soon afterwards, a neighbour who had once been a missionary started a Bible group and invited Joanne’s mother. She gave her mother a Bible, which she devoured, and typed out a little book of children’s prayers for Joanne. “That’s when I realised how much Jesus loved me,” Joanne says, “and He was my safe place.”
Why didn’t God stop it all? Joanne does not pretend it is simple. “Evil is in the world,” she says, “because of free will.” But He never left her (Psalm 23:4).
When the memories came back
For decades, Joanne says, a curse of silence kept her from remembering. Until she married and had children, “I would have sworn on a Bible” that none of it had happened, even though the signs were there. Then her two little girls, the same ages she and her sister had once been, did a “stranger danger” course at kindergarten. Joanne felt a surge of anger, knowing it would not keep children safe. “It’s like God unlocked something,” she says, “and I remembered.”
At first she thought she was losing her mind. But when she and her sister later compared memories they had never discussed, they matched. “That confirms for both of us that we’re not nuts.” She gently suggests that for some people, persistent nightmares can be buried memories trying to surface.
Forgiveness first
Counselling helped her to a point, but Joanne needed spiritual healing too. Her husband found a deliverance minister, Rita, on YouTube, who agreed to walk with them, and whose books guided them step by step.
The process began with forgiveness. First, Joanne pictured her grandmother and told her what she had felt as a child. Then she forgave her. “Before you can receive any deliverance, you must forgive,” she says (Matthew 6:14–15). Unforgiveness, she believes, gives tormenting spirits permission to stay. “I forgive for selfish reasons. It sets me free.” She also had to forgive herself for things she was forced to do as a child, and she prays for her sister’s healing, trusting that “His timing is always perfect, not ours.”
Deliverance came in stages. One day, as a recording of Psalm 27 played, something manifested, and her husband led a deliverance that lasted more than two hours. It threatened and blustered, she says, but it was powerless against the blood of Christ. Each session left her exhausted, but freer. “It doesn’t happen all at once,” she says. “It’s a process.”
“You’re Mine”
Joanne mostly hears God’s voice, while her daughter tends to have dreams. When her daughter was being tormented by spiritual attacks linked to her workplace, she dreamed a serpent kept snapping at her. The next night, she saw Jesus, first in the distance, then right beside her. He said: “They can snap all they like, but they cannot touch you. You’re Mine.” The attacks stopped.
Joanne also credits God’s protection for her survival of a serious car accident about twenty years ago. “I shouldn’t be walking or talking,” she says. “Well, God had other plans.”
Practical steps for protection
Joanne believes Christians can be oppressed, harassed and influenced by spirits even when they are not possessed. Her advice:
- Close the doors. Stay away from tarot cards, mediums, horoscopes and anything New Age.
- Read your Bible, and write down what you learn.
- Pray Psalm 27 in times of trouble (Psalm 27:1). “They hate it.”
- Fill your home with scripture-based worship, even while you do the housework.
- Put on the armour of God every day (Ephesians 6:10–18).
- Dedicate your home to God, praying through each room in Jesus’ name and covering it with His blood.
- Seek emotional healing as well as deliverance, “otherwise you’ve only got half a job done.”
Her heart is for survivors. “You don’t have to live with this forever,” she says. Jesus came “to set at liberty them that are bruised” (Luke 4:18), and God, she says, always uses it for good.
Resources mentioned
- Books by Rita Cavezas, the deliverance minister who helped Joanne: 12 Prayers for Self-Deliverance (volumes 1–3), A Personal Guide to Daily Spiritual Battle and Claim Your Healing
Scriptures in this episode
- Psalm 27, the Lord is my light and my salvation
- Leviticus 18:21, Molech
- Psalm 23:4, I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me
- Matthew 6:14–15, if ye forgive men their trespasses
- Ephesians 6:10–18, the whole armour of God
- Luke 4:18, to set at liberty them that are bruised
- Genesis 50:20, God meant it unto good
- Revelation 12:11, they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb
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