Accounts
People go looking for help with this and some of them are hurt by the help. That is the other half of the crisis, and nobody is writing it down. This page is where the Project starts.
A founder of the modern deliverance movement, writing for the people who practise it. He is not a critic. He spent his life doing the work, and he put this in the manual.
“We may further wound the person in the process of trying to help.”
Francis MacNuttDeliverance from Evil Spirits, Chosen Books, 1995
Thirty years on there is still no standard, no complaints route, no body a person can go to afterwards, and no count of the ones who leave worse than they arrived. What follows is what that absence looks like from the floor.
Printed by a practitioner in his own book, as an example of what not to do. This is not an outsider’s account of the ministry. It is the ministry publishing its own worst case.
“The six women who were there were trying to deliver me of several demonic forces, without success, as they supposed. They yelled at me, threw me around and poured oil in my mouth to drink, and told me I spoke in ‘false tongues’ and needed deliverance from ‘familiar spirits’ from past generations.”
“It left me quite confused, frightened and tormented.”
A woman’s letterQuoted in Neal Lozano, Unbound, Chosen Books, 2003
Lozano’s own verdict on it: “Even if demons had left I would judge this as unsuccessful.” He is a Catholic deliverance minister. He prints the letter because he wants his readers to recognise the thing and stop doing it.
One account is not a finding. But it carries the shape the Project expects to keep seeing, and it is the reason this page exists before the accounts do.
This page is not an argument against deliverance. The Project’s position is that something real is happening to these people and that they are right to go looking for help with it.
It is an argument that the help has to be built. A person in this state should be able to go somewhere that knows what it is doing, keeps a record, and is answerable for what happens to them. None of those three things exists anywhere in the world today.
Write and tell us. Your own words, as long or as short as you like. Nothing is published without your say-so, and you can ask us to use no name at all.
The Project is building an open collection of first-person accounts, called Not Myself. Until it opens, this address is the way in. If you are in danger or in immediate distress, this is not the right place — contact your local emergency services, or find a helpline at findahelpline.com.
Every quotation here is given as its speaker gave it, from a public recording or a published book. Sources are held in the Project’s corpus and are given on request.
Accounts are published only with the account-giver’s consent. Where a group or an individual is named, they are offered a right of reply before publication. If you believe something here is wrong, write and we will correct it: hello@metanoiaproject.ie
See also a crisis in their own words — and The Black Paper, Part three.
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