An Introduction To Soul Fragmentation

In a number of other articles, I have discussed various aspects of inner healing, deliverance, spiritual gifts, and even physical healing, but many of them relate in some way to some basic functions and dysfunction of the soul. I will attempt, here, to provide a basic introduction to soul fragmentation: what it is, how it works, how the enemy uses it to afflict us, and how applying the redemptive power of Jesus to these soul fragments promotes inner wholeness.

Soul fragmentation is a protective mechanism in our soul that is designed to help us deal with difficult emotions, pain, and even physical trauma. The soul takes all of the difficult feelings, balls them up, attaches them to a small portion of the soul, and then separates it from the main core of the soul. This puts the emotions at a bit of a distance and allows the person to continue to function in life in spite of trauma or emotional difficulty. It usually happens when we are not able to properly cope with a situation, which is why fragmentation tends to happen more in children and less-often as adults. By the time one becomes an adult, we usually have developed methods of dealing with difficult situations and the emotions associated with them, so fragmentation tends to happen less frequently. However, it is possible for fragmentation to occur at any age.

The best way I can describe this process is if we think of the soul as a gemstone. When a major issue comes up, the soul-gem pushes all the negative emotions into a corner and breaks a chip off itself, letting the chip with the bad feelings float nearby. That chip is a soul fragment. Now imagine that someone came by and took a hammer to the gem. A bunch of tiny chips would break off of the stone, but there would still be a main core of the stone that, if perfectly reattached, all the chips would fit back in place. A good way of thinking of an emotionally unhealed adult is like the gemstone with a bunch of chips. Each piece has somewhere it belongs, and all of them are able to attach back to the core of the gem. In the analogy, the core of the soul, which is sometimes known as the “presenting personality”, is that big core of the gem. Basically it’s you, the one reading this article and generally living your life.  While this is a little confusing, this is all happening on the inside somewhere, in what is essentially an inner dimension. It’s a little difficult to describe, exactly, but we typically refer to this inner dimension as “the system”, and it is where all of these fragmented portions of the soul reside. It’s like if someone had a weightless space where the soul-gem lived and the fragmented chips all orbit the core of the gem in this space.

As mentioned above, the core is the main person, you. All of the other little chips, however, carry memories and feelings from events in one’s life as well, and are also parts of the soul. Inner healing that works with fragments and alters helps these chips get healed of all the painful emotions, and then oftentimes will help them reattach to the core of the soul. Keep in mind here that the soul is basically comprised of the mind, will, and emotions. The curious thing about this is that because each portion of the soul is a legitimate part of one’s personhood, each fragment has its own portion of not just emotions, but of mind and will as well. This means that each portion of the soul can exercise its part of your God-given free will, and because it has its own portion of the mind, it can also think. While this can be a little confusing to those who aren’t used to this concept, it plays out in how the soul actually functions. Scripturally speaking, the term “heart” is usually connected with the soul, not just the physical organ that moves blood around the body. Hebrews 4:12 says, “For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.” If this passage is to be believed, then the heart has both thoughts and intentions (intention=will), not just emotions.

In the short term, there are no significant implications of a soul fragment having its own thoughts and will, but think about what happens if someone experiences trauma as a young child and it goes unmanaged until someone is in their thirties or forties. That fragment has had three to four decades of independent thought derived from free will and time to develop and grow. As a result, his or her thoughts and actions don’t necessarily line up with the core. Usually this only presents more minimal problems, comparatively, but in some cases the different parts are able to access the body and sort of “take charge” either in conjunction with or instead of the core. This is where we see what is more commonly known as DID, or Dissociative Identity Disorder, where someone has what we refer to as “alters”, short for “alternate personalities”. While very few people have what clinicians would diagnose as DID, to a certain degree it is a meaningless diagnosis considering all humans who have ever lived other than Jesus have or have had fragmented parts of their soul. Yes, everyone has fragments and alters, referred more generally as “parts”.

While this may be hard for some to swallow, here’s why all this matters. When the soul fragments and those emotions are walled off, they are still connected to the core, almost like there is a string attached and those fragments float out in the ethers nearby. Those fragments still have an influence on what the core of the person thinks and feels. The enemy likes to use soul fragmentation as a means of influencing our thoughts, emotions, and actions by tormenting and afflicting the parts, who in turn pass those things to us.

To explain, let’s pretend that the soul is a business group who own a building, and every employee is a voting member. For every situation in life the supervisor takes a vote, and everyone decides what decisions to make. When extreme emotional problems arise, however, it’s like someone piped a poison gas into the building. The supervisor activates the emergency filtration system, and all the poison gets piped into one room, and that room is sealed from the outside. The problem is that the room the poison gas was put into was an employee’s office, and he was still inside. The poison doesn’t kill him right away, so as time goes on and situations come up, he still is involved in the voting, except the poison muddles his thinking and he constantly makes bad decisions. Now, imagine that as time goes on more and more incidents occur, and more and more employees get walled off in rooms full of poison mist. Over time, the number of employees who are still voting but making bad decisions increases to a noticeable level. This is essentially what happens over time, and is part of why soul fragmentation is an issue. The fragmented portions of the soul are still connected to the core, and influence daily life but from an unhealthy standpoint.

To make matters worse, demons target fragments and alters because they are easier to afflict that the core of the person. If we go back to the soul-gem analogy, remember that we have those fragments floating in space orbiting the core, and each one is attached by a string. When demons afflict a fragment, they are usually trying to create fear or anxiety or some other negative issue, and because the fragment is connected to the core, those feelings travel up that string and the core starts to feel that fear or anxiety or other feelings too. This is where irrational fear comes from. Everyone has fears that are not based on bad things that have happened to us. People rarely have been injured by clowns, but sometimes they cause inexplicable fear anyway. That fear encounter is actually a part that is experiencing that fear, usually with demonic torment involved, and the fear travels up the string until you are feeling that fear as well. This is why the fear is unexplainable, but you still feel it anyway. You don’t have the bad memory—the part does. You don’t have the thoughts of fear or concern, but the mind of the part does, so while you aren’t having fear-thoughts, you suddenly have irrational fear-feelings, and become affected by it.

When we get “saved”, and Jesus comes into our hearts, what happens is that our core gets saved, and oftentimes a number of fragments do as well. However, typically not all fragments get saved at that time. While this is sometimes difficult for people to understand, and even harder to accept as truth, Isaiah 61:1 offers us some keys. It says, “The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners . . .” The term “brokenhearted” can also be translated as “those whose hearts have shattered into pieces”. If we recall again that the heart refers to the soul, it is talking about soul fragmentation. Jesus comes to un-shatter our fragments and bring us healing. However, consider the rest of that verse—Jesus proclaims freedom for captives and release from darkness for prisoners. Sometimes fragments and alters are not just captive, but are imprisoned in darkness by the demonic somewhere inside the system (or at times outside the system).

The Bible refers to “strongholds” of the mind, and if we take it more literally, think of demons setting up an enemy fort inside the system somewhere. These fragments get captured and imprisoned inside the fort, and sometimes get brainwashed into working as guards. When Jesus comes into someone’s life, the core gets saved and Jesus basically sets up His own Kingdom inside the system. The job, then, is for Jesus to take all the captives and prisoners and bust them out of the strongholds and bring them into His kingdom. For whatever reason, this doesn’t all take place instantly for all parts when the core receives salvation, so it can often be a process of gradually getting more and more parts saved and set free. This is also why when people preach about “grace” and the “finished works” of the gospel as being all one needs for freedom in Christ, sometimes people still struggle and it feels like the gospel isn’t working the way it is supposed to. The thing is that it is working, it’s just that some parts are still captive and haven’t been influenced by the power of the gospel yet.

When I first understood this fact, so many things started to make much more sense. You see, I am a firm believer that everything has to make sense, and that if something works one way for one person and another way for another person, there are definable reasons why that is the case. If one person gets set free from problems by receiving the gospel but someone else is still having major struggles in that area spite of receiving that same salvation message, there have to be other factors at play that influence why those two people have different experiences.

Mind renewal is a key part of receiving the life of Christ. When we renew our minds as Romans 12:2 tells us, we get to enjoy and experience the good things God has for us. However, we have to remember that fragments each have a portion of our mind. And by mind, I’m not saying that each part occupies a portion of the brain. A friend who is a trained psychologist told me that it is believed in modern psychology that all fragments and alters (he refers to them as “ego states”) are located in the hypothalamus. What I am saying is that the mind and brain are different entirely. The mind is an other-dimensional reality where we have thoughts in some inexplicable way, whereas the brain is the physical means by which we experience those thoughts and they influence our body to perform certain actions. The portion of our mind that is our core is usually the one directly accessing the brain, but every other fragment and alter also has their own mind, or portion of our total mind, and they have their own thoughts. It’s a little bit like how the Bible says that we have the mind of Christ, not I have the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:16).

When we get saved we renew our mind (that of the core), but the mind of each part needs to be renewed as well (and ideally eventually integrated into the core in most cases). Once each part’s mind is renewed, typically whatever the issue was that was brothering one will evaporate, demons sometimes leave automatically as they are unable to remain any longer, and the person experiences true and lasting freedom. Failure to recognize and address this is a major barrier to walking out all God has for us, but when we understand how the soul works, get fragments and alters freed from demonic strongholds, get the negative emotions they carry healed, and then get them to renew their portion of our mind, then freedom flows. Oftentimes, as this happens we can integrate them back into our core self as well, so there is no longer an “us” but we become an “I”.

One objection to this teaching is that we are somehow nullifying or making weaker the power of Jesus to set people free through the “simple gospel” by making things confusing or complex, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. The fact is that the “simple gospel” only ever has a certain measure of effectiveness at causing permanent life change in an individual. While some might find that offensive, it’s a fact. I don’t know that anyone reading this has ever met someone who never has a negative thought, struggle, or life issue. Jesus is the only one who was never fragmented in soul. Certainly I believe that in Christ we can become fully integrated once again, but Jesus is the only one who never had that problem, and never had issues outside of people who were demonically influenced to attack him. The rest of us, in spite of having instant salvation, still have to walk out an ongoing sanctification process. I suggest that ongoing sanctification work is in part the gradual freeing of fragments and alters.

I actually agree with people who teach the “finished works” message that the “simple gospel” is all we need, but that’s only under the condition that every part of the person actually gets to experience that transformative power of the gospel. That not-happening is why some people can struggle with issues over time in spite of repeated attempts to renew their minds and “get” the gospel message. It’s because the problem isn’t with them (the core), it’s with another part. Why would Isaiah 61:1 say that Jesus binds up the brokenhearted in the emotional realm, and then suddenly in the same sentence repetitively twice talk about setting physical people free. Captives are those who are taken unwillingly or unlawfully, while prisoners are those who have committed wrongdoing and are captives lawfully, but in context I suggest this is all taking place in the soul realm. If there weren’t any captives or prisoners in the soul then the Bible wouldn’t reference them, but since it does reference them, then we should probably pay attention.

This is an overview of the basics of soul fragmentation: what it is, how it works, how the enemy uses it to afflict us, and how applying the gospel to each parts sets us free. There are special cases where people have significantly more fracturing than others, typically in cases of government-sponsored mind control or Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA), but this is a general overview of how the soul functions to manage painful emotions, how the enemy uses that, and how the gospel sets us free. I have written numerous other articles on the subject as a whole, and if one wants to learn more about the subject I encourage you to read any of the articles in the Fragments, Alters, Parts, and DID category.