This story is one chapter of a 5-part series entitled “A Familiar fraud”; a lived experience submitted to Liven Elle with bravery and courage. Please do visit the Trigger Warning page if necessary, before engaging with this piece.
Click here to read Part 1
Click here to read Part 2
Click here to read Part 3
Part 4: Resistance
The invitation came indirectly. Someone had “had a dream.” Someone felt “led” to speak to me, in person.
I already knew something was wrong.
I prayed before I went – not for answers, but for steadiness. I asked God to keep me clear.
The peace I felt wasn’t instruction about what to say or how to act. It was confirmation that my unease was valid – that I was not imagining the danger I sensed, and that I didn’t need to override it to appear faithful.
When I arrived, the house was dark. Too quiet. I was led into a living room where several people were already seated.
Including him.
I understood immediately: this was not care. It was coordination.
They said they wanted to pray. Spoke about deliverance. About freedom. About things needing to be broken off me.
The prayers rose quickly – loud, urgent, layered over one another. Voices shifted between tongues and their native language, words tumbling out with conviction and speed. They prayed from the heart, with intensity and confidence, speaking as though authority itself could be summoned by force.
But the direction of the gathering had already been set.
His aim was decided before I arrived.
He had brought me there to be folded into what he was doing, not to be listened to. The prayers moved toward a conclusion he had already chosen, one where my consent was assumed and my resistance reframed as something that needed correcting.
There was no pause for discernment, no space for testing what was happening. The volume, the certainty, the collective momentum carried his intention forward, leaving no room for clarity to interrupt it.
He spoke what he called words of knowledge: specific, confident declarations delivered as insight. But they were off. Not close enough to be mistaken, not vague enough to be generous.
He named objects I didn’t own, spoke of possessions that held no meaning for me, warned me about gifts I had never received and relationships that did not exist in the way he described. Each claim landed with certainty, and each one missed its mark.
The details were wrong, but the confidence wasn’t; and that mismatch made the room feel unsteady. It wasn’t a revelation. It was an assumption, spoken loudly enough to sound like truth.
Then the atmosphere intensified.
He changed.
It wasn’t subtle. His body seemed to seize from the inside out – shoulders jerking, head snapping sharply from side to side. His eyes rolled back until only the whites showed, then fluttered open again, unfocused. He began shouting, not in sentences, but in fragments, sounds that scraped against one another, words breaking apart before they could land.
He kept saying he was hot. That he felt fire moving through his body. He shook his hands violently, as though trying to fling something off himself, then went suddenly loose, collapsing into himself, limbs slack, before snapping back upright again. At moments he looked too heavy for his own frame; at others, like he might lunge forward without warning.
Spit gathered at the corners of his mouth. His breathing came fast and uneven. Sweat broke across his forehead. The room watched him – not with fear, but with attention, as though whatever was happening inside him mattered more than anyone else present.
He said he was carrying things that didn’t belong to him. That they belonged to me. He claimed he could feel ‘them’ inside his body – heat, pressure, resistance, as though something had been lodged there and was now being forced out. He spoke as if he were the container, as if whatever was wrong in me had somehow travelled through the room and settled inside him.
And everyone let him.
No one interrupted. No one stepped between us. The praying continued, loud, urgent, layered over itself… while I stood there, watching him move closer without anyone stopping it.
I didn’t speak. Not because I didn’t know what to say, but because I was listening – not to the room, but to my body.
When he stood, the change was immediate. He lifted his hands, palms forward, stretching them out in my direction as if reaching for something that belonged to him.
My body reacted before I formed a thought.
I stepped back.
He stepped forward.
Not quickly. Not aggressively. But with a strange, hollow steadiness, the kind that doesn’t react, doesn’t hesitate. His body moved in short, deliberate advances, one step, then another, as if pulled forward rather than choosing to walk.
There was something vacant in it. Mechanical. His head tilted slightly, shoulders slack, arms hanging loose before lifting again. It was that inevitability, the slow, unbroken approach, that made my chest tighten.
I moved again, circling away, keeping distance between us. He followed, his movements uneven but deliberate, eyes half-lidded, attention fixed entirely on me. The room watched, voices rising and falling around us, but no one intervened.
When his hands lowered, drifting toward my stomach, something in me broke open.
Not fear.
Memory.
I pushed him. Hard enough that he stumbled backward and collapsed onto the sofa behind him.
“Don’t ever put your hands on me again.”
My voice was steady. Louder than I expected. Final.
The room went still.
Every sound dropped away. The praying, the movement, the murmurs, all replaced by a stunned silence. All eyes turned toward me, not with concern, but with shock, as though I had interrupted something sacred rather than defended myself.
Someone rushed to fill the silence. Words tumbled out quickly, nervously. They said he was only trying to remove what he had put there. That he needed to take it back. That this was part of the process.
That sentence did more than explain – it exposed the framework they were operating within. It revealed that, in their minds, my body was a site something could be placed into and retrieved from. That consent was irrelevant. That his authority, imagined or assumed, outweighed my autonomy.
It confirmed what I had already felt in my chest: this was not prayer. It was entitlement dressed up as intervention.
They resumed praying. Not over me, but over him.
Hands were laid on his shoulders. Voices lifted again. This time their attention shifted completely, as though the danger had always been him, not the man who had tried to reach into my body without consent. Again.
I excused myself.
I retreated to the bathroom for a moment, staring at my reflection, grounding myself in what was real: the cool tile beneath my feet, the sound of my own breathing, the knowledge that I had not imagined any of it. My hands were shaking as I pulled out my phone and started texting, reaching out to the people who knew me, who trusted my voice, who would understand without explanation. I needed to anchor myself somewhere real.
When I returned, they were still praying, but it had softened now, winding itself down, voices lowering as though something had reached its conclusion. I sat back in my seat and waited. I didn’t re-enter the moment; I simply occupied my seat until it ended.
When the praying finally stopped, they turned to me.
They asked:
“How do you feel?”
“Did you feel that?”
“Wasn’t that powerful?”
I nodded.
Not because anything had changed, but because I needed it to end. Because I wanted to leave. Because my chest was tight with anger and I didn’t trust what might come out of my mouth if I stayed any longer.
The nod was not in agreement. It was containment.
I waited for the moment to pass, for the room to settle, for the performance to finish.
Then I asked the only question that mattered.
“Can you give me scripture for what just happened?”
The answer didn’t come cleanly.
Instead, there was a pause filled with movement – someone shifting in their seat, someone clearing their throat. Then words, offered carefully. A verse was mentioned, vaguely, stretched beyond its meaning. Another followed, loosely connected, lifted from memory rather than context. None of it addressed what had actually taken place.
It wasn’t an explanation. It was deflection.
That was the moment clarity settled – not with heat or emotion, but with calm.
I knew exactly where I stood: outside of whatever this was, no longer subject to it, no longer available for it to be done to me again.
I left.
Liven Elle 
Leave a reply to A Familiar Fraud | Part Five: Truth – Liven Elle Cancel reply