E67 She Thought She'd Left. A Panic Attack in Costco Proved She Hadn't. | Susan Stirling

She thought she had left. She had walked away from the church, built a career, created a new life. Then a panic attack in a Costco in the early days of the pandemic stopped her cold — and told her the truth. She had left the building. But the building had never left her.

Susan Stirling is the author of Velcro Kisses: Prophecy, Trauma Bonds, and Reclaiming the Narrative. Her memoir traces a journey that begins in childhood — growing up in the Canadian Rockies with a mother who became born again, attending house churches in the early 70s where end-times prophecy and rapture anxiety were the backdrop of ordinary life.

From those early years, Susan learned to split herself in two: a spiritual self driven by fear, and a normal self that got on with living. That split would follow her for decades.

The book moves through a frightening solo trip to Australia as a teenager with no plan and no hostel booked, arriving at a racehorse ranch with every internal alarm screaming and no language to act on it. It moves through the pull of a large group awareness training and the psychological fracture that followed. It moves through 25 years inside a prophetic church community, where Susan led a successful dance ministry, built a business fuelled by Rhema words and prophecy, and slowly lost access to her own discernment. From the outside, her life looked like a testimony. From the inside, she had almost no autonomy at all.

What Susan and Anne explore in this conversation is what so many people discover only in hindsight: leaving is step one, not the whole journey. The real work of deconstruction often doesn't begin until years later — triggered, in Susan's case, by a global pandemic, a supermarket, and a heart that finally said enough. Through EMDR and the practice of building what she calls a coherent narrative — taking scattered scenes and putting them in order so the brain and body can finally register that it is over — Susan found her way to something she had been looking for her whole life. Not transcendence. Not breakthrough. Just herself.

This episode is for anyone who left something and thought they were fine. For anyone who grew up with fear-based religion and still feels its weight. For anyone whose internal alarm system went off and they had no language for what it was saying. You are not alone. And you did nothing wrong.

Find Susan on Instagram @seeingsusanstirling or Substack @seeingsusanstirling

Resources mentioned:
Velcro Kisses by Susan Stirling — available on Amazon and wherever books are sold
Rachel Bernstein's resources and Healthy Healing group https://ilumn8.life/op/lgat-recovery-group/
A Practical Guide to Life After a Cult by Chris Shelton https://ilumn8.life/op/what-now-book-chris-shelton/
Beyond the Line Studio (Patreon): https://www.patreon.com/cw/BeyondtheLinesStudio

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