04/06/2026
I almost didn't post this.
But I've spent enough years hiding. And hiding almost buried me. So here it is — the real story. All of it.
Before 2014, I was living a double life that I didn't even fully recognize as one. I was in circles where drinking was completely normal. Church circles. "Christian" circles. I gave my life to God Sunday after Sunday — at the altar, with tears, with sincerity — and walked right back into the same patterns, the same lifestyle, the same numbing. Not because I was faking. But because the environment around me looked no different from the world we said we'd left. Nobody was being transformed. We were just performing a transformation.
The drinking wasn't rebellion. It was survival. It was what happened when your nervous system is constantly under the pressure of a faith culture that demands performance, that speaks in the language of the law of attraction and calls it anointing, that tells you that you are enough, that you are powerful, that you just need to speak it and believe it and manifest it — while underneath all of that, you are a woman who has never been told the actual truth about grace.
The stress. The fear. The broken promises. The lies. The constant pressure to be more, to be further along, to have a testimony packaged neatly enough to become a platform. I drank because I was drowning, and no one around me had a life preserver that was real.
In 2014, I hit rock bottom. My drinking brought me to a place I could not come back from on my own. I ended up in a mental institution. Stripped. Exposed. Empty. And even there — even in that place — God did not leave me.
But I wasn't ready yet. The surrender hadn't come yet.
On November 15, 2018, everything changed. My husband and I surrendered — really surrendered — together. Not a Sunday altar call. A genuine, broken, this-is-all-we-have-left moment before God. That same year, we lost everything. Not just things. Everything. Our home, our stability, the life we had built — gone. And as devastating as that was, I now understand it was God dismantling what could not stand so He could build something that could.
On January 1, 2019, I became sober. That date is sacred to me.
On May 26, 2019, we packed what we had left and moved. New state. New beginning. New chapter. Nothing but God and each other and the wreckage He was already turning into something.
And that's when Life Anchor Center began to take shape.
The only problem was — I was building it inside a charismatic environment I didn't yet have the eyes to fully see. I was surrounded by "Christian" life coaches and speakers and leaders who were pushing women to open businesses because your testimony is your calling, your pain is your platform, it's already in you, just unlock it. And yes — it is true that God redeems our stories. That part isn't a lie. But the way we were doing it? The timing? The theology underneath it? It was off. Deeply off.
We were mixing the law of attraction with scripture and calling it faith. We were naming and claiming and decreeing and declaring and calling it the Holy Spirit. We were trauma-bonding in small groups and calling it community. We were being told God told leaders things about us — things that kept us loyal, that kept us giving, that kept us dependent on a voice that was not His.
I built in that space. I invited women into that space. I didn't know yet what I didn't know.
Then I started to see it.
And when you finally see it — when the curtain pulls back, and you recognize the doctrine for what it is — the grief that hits you is unlike anything I have words for. I'm not talking about being disappointed in a church. I am talking about the grief of 40 years. Forty years of a faith that was mixed, distorted, and in many ways used against me. At 50 years old, I sat in the rubble of everything I thought I knew about God and had to ask from the very bottom: Who are You, really? Was any of it real? Can I trust anything I believed?
There is no book for that.
I looked. There is no support group for leaving charismatic theology and entering into scripture-rooted, expository, Reformed faith. There is no roadmap that walks you through the deconstruction of 40 years of emotionalism and spiritual manipulation and helps you land somewhere solid. You just have to walk it. In the dark. Angry. Grieving. Triggered by worship songs that used to make you cry, because now you hear the manipulation in the lyrics. Triggered by phrases you used to say to yourself. Carrying PTSD from the very thing that was supposed to bring you peace.
In 2023, we left. And once you leave, you cannot go back. Not because of pride — but because the truth, once it is seen, cannot be unseen.
I had to shut everything down. The groups. The retreats. The gatherings. The programs. Not because I stopped believing in God. But because I was finally learning who He actually is — and I was too raw, too angry, too in the middle of my own reconstruction to lead anyone else through anything. You cannot be someone's anchor while you are still learning that the ground beneath you is solid.
For a while, I hid. I thought maybe if I disappeared long enough, people would forget I was ever there. The shame of having been inside something harmful — and having invited others in — is a specific kind of grief that is hard to explain. The pushback from people still inside it who believe you've lost your way, who think your discernment is rebellion, who have no category for someone choosing the Word of God over the feeling in the room — that pushback is real, and it is exhausting, and it has cost me relationships I loved.
But here is where I am today. Standing in front of you. Telling you the truth.
I still ask God, "Is this You?" more than I have answers. I still don't fully trust my own decisions. I still hold people at a careful distance while my trust slowly, slowly rebuilds. My nervous system is still healing from decades of a stress response that never got to rest. And there are still days when I ask God: Am I even supposed to be doing this? How can a woman still in the middle of her own healing be a Biblical Counselor?
And every time, His answer is the same: Because of My mercy. Not yours.
That is the only reason I am here. Not my strength. Not my healing being complete. Not my theology being perfectly sorted. God's mercy. Undeserved, unconditional, completely unearned — that is what has held me together from rock bottom in 2014, through surrender in 2018, through sobriety, through starting over, through leaving what was familiar but false, through grieving 40 years, through learning what the scriptures actually say when no one is using them to control you.
From addiction. From a mental institution. From bad doctrine and broken churches and a faith that had to be dismantled completely — to here.
Life Anchor Center is not a polished ministry with all the answers. It is the place I built because God would not let me stay quiet. And it has been rebuilt — not on hype, not on charisma, not on a personality or a platform — but on the Word of God alone.
If any part of this is your story — the double life, the performing faith while quietly falling apart, the circles that looked holy but left you more broken, the grief of seeing it for the first time, the hiding, the shame, the exhaustion — you are not alone. And you are not crazy.
There is a faith that holds. There is a God who is not a formula or a frequency or a force you can manipulate with the right words. He is a person. He is knowledgeable. And He meets women in the rubble — even women who helped build the rubble.
I'm back. And I'm more honest than I have ever been in my life.
— Marisely
📍 Life Anchor Center | Biblical Counseling
🔗 Link in bio or drop a comment below, and I'll reach out personally.
