Five Lifetimes of Surviving — Learning How to Thrive

I was born Hannah Lynn Fizell. That name never fit. It belonged to a child who could survive my family, not to the person I would become. I carried it because I had to. In my house, names — like safety — weren’t negotiable.

I used to watch my world through a hole in the wall. It started as the empty space where a screw had once been. To anyone else, it was nothing. To me, it became an observation deck. From there, I learned the sound of my father’s feet hitting the floor. I could tell by the rhythm of his footsteps whether the house was safe or whether I needed to disappear. Sometimes it was his breathing that gave him away. Sometimes it was the silence. I learned to make myself invisible. I learned to watch before I learned to speak.

For a long time I thought that hole was just another scar. Proof that something had gone wrong inside me. I don’t believe that anymore. It wasn’t where I broke. It was where I learned to see.

That watching is where this story starts, and it’s the same watching that eventually led me somewhere I never expected — five lifetimes back, and one long-overdue lesson I keep failing to learn.

Watching from the Hallway

I couldn’t understand why I was born into that house. I had raging jealousy of all my friends who had loving, supportive parents. I remember Chelsea and Stephanie, whose parents were kind, let them speak freely, let them question religious teachings out loud without consequence. I remember a girl named Lindsay whose parents gave her everything she needed and plenty she just wanted — movie nights, game nights, homemade elephant ears in the kitchen on a random Tuesday. I remember standing in the hallway outside rooms like that, baffled by the peace and the joy of it, wondering, why not me?

My father used to tell people I came out “with my dukes up” — fists already clenched, ready for a fight before I could even hold my head up. He said it like a joke. I heard it as a warning. From the beginning, I was something he couldn’t control, and in that house, being uncontrollable was dangerous.

There was one person who never needed me to be anything other than what I was: my grandmother, Nancy Sue DeSha O’Brien. I was her only grandchild, and she retired to be with me full-time — not around what I might become, but around who I already was. She had names for me. Apple Cheeks. Little Lighthouse. Her Reason. She could not hold me enough, and she defended my honor before I even had the word for it. If someone got my name wrong, she corrected them on the spot, because I was not a thing you were casual with. Everyone who knew her says the same thing to this day: even if she never fully understood me as a lesbian woman, she would have found a back door into my wedding and stood there with her hand on my shoulder anyway. Nobody has ever hedged on that.

She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer when I was still young. The adults around her said faith would be enough, and treatment was discouraged. God did not handle it. Before she died, from her bed, she left what my family called a blessing over me — spoken at the end of one life, over the beginning of another. I think about the timing of that sentence more than I used to.

That childhood ache — watching other families have the thing I didn’t, wondering what was wrong with me that I hadn’t earned it — turned out, much later, to be older than this lifetime. It took past-life regression to show me exactly how old.

Into the Deep Waters

I didn’t arrive at past-life regression looking for a belief system. I arrived there because traditional therapy had done what it could and then hit a wall it was honest enough to name.

I spent two and a half years in talk therapy and EMDR — Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing — and I don’t regret a day of it. It helped me work through individual memories, one at a time, and my therapist was wonderful, highly trained, genuinely invested. But it felt like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket. Every time we made progress, another wave rolled in. We kept circling back to the same handful of wounds, over and over, and the circles weren’t getting any smaller. For me, each EMDR session cost about a week of feeling raw, sometimes re-traumatized, before I had the bandwidth to face the next one.

Complex PTSD isn’t one trauma. It’s a lifetime of them, layered on top of each other. Eventually my therapist told me, plainly, that my needs were beyond her training. I still respect her enormously for saying that instead of stringing me along. Around that same time, a kind older woman I’d met — who’d gone through hypnotherapy herself — mentioned it almost in passing. At the time I thought she was just telling me her own story. Looking back, she was handing me the next chapter of mine.

Hypnosis was nothing like the stereotypes. No swinging pocket watch, no stage-show mind control. I was never asleep. I heard every word spoken to me, and I could have opened my eyes and ended the session at any point. What actually happened was that the constant chatter in my conscious mind — the part that scanned every room for danger and never stopped — finally went quiet. And where EMDR had left me carrying open wounds home for a week at a time, hypnotherapy sessions left me lighter. The memories, once surfaced, got put back properly instead of left raw until the next appointment.

What surprised me most was what my subconscious kept reaching for. It wasn’t interested in symptoms — the anxiety, the hypervigilance, the people-pleasing, the chronic ache in my body. It kept walking straight past all of that, back to root. And the root, when we finally got there, went back five lifetimes.

Abigail, Sweden

Five lifetimes ago, I lived as a girl named Abigail, in Sweden.

My mother in that life had been forced into an arranged marriage by her own controlling, harmful father — he owned her before her husband ever did. She tried to run once, to claim a life of freedom for herself. She was found and forcibly sent back. It was after that that she became pregnant with me. She wasn’t ready to be a mother, and she didn’t want to be one. What she needed, more than anything, was to be free.

She ran a second time. That time it worked. She got out, and she didn’t take me with her.

My father had never wanted the job of raising me — it had always been hers, by default, and when she left, he was forced into a role he resented every day of. He made me feel like I was too much. It wasn’t me. It was the job he never wanted, and I was the reason he was stuck with it. He was abusive, and he made it clear I wasn’t wanted. There was already a marriage being arranged for me that I had said, out loud, I didn’t want. Nobody asked me a second time. My room was upstairs, small and tight, with no mirror in it — as if even my own reflection wasn’t worth making room for.

I was neglected. I was in an abusive situation with an angry father who refused to be responsible for me, and no one ever came looking when things went wrong. The pain of it became all too much. I took my own life at twelve years old.

According to the notes I later took from Dolores Cannon’s work on this — the framework that gave language to what my sessions kept confirming — suicide is not accepted in the spirit world. Not as punishment, but as unfinished business: what you do to others in your life must be paid for. There is no free ride. Whatever you did in a prior lifetime will be causing problems in the present one. You are brought back in contact with the very same people you wronged. Destruction — including the premature destruction of a life — is treated as a natural but avoidable phenomenon, something to be healed rather than repeated. And death itself, in that framework, isn’t the thing to fear. It’s the fear itself that’s the great untruth. But the caution is specific and pointed: casting off a living body before its time doesn’t end anything. It generates energy that follows you to the other side, and it is never appropriate — a waste that isn’t tolerated.

In other words: the lesson doesn’t close just because the life did. It gets rescheduled. And you come back to the same circumstances, again and again, until you survive them and actually learn what they were trying to teach you.

I want to be careful here, because I don’t want anyone reading this while they’re struggling to hear it as a verdict on their pain. It isn’t “suicide is punished.” It’s closer to: pain that isn’t resolved doesn’t resolve itself just because the body stops carrying it. It waits. And the room gets rebuilt — sometimes harder than before, because an easier version wouldn’t have taught anything.

One detail I didn’t understand until much later in this work: the soul who was Abigail’s mother, the woman who ran and didn’t come back for me, is someone I know in this current lifetime. She’s since told me her own father — in this life — was her best friend, the person she felt safest with in the world. I have never once found a healthy father figure in any life I’ve looked back on. She knows the Abigail story now. It’s been hard for her to sit with, and I understand why — it isn’t who she is now, and it wasn’t even fully who she was in a different, later lifetime the two of us shared, which is its own story for another time.

Madeline

I came back. Not as a fresh start — as the same circumstances again, because that’s how it works. You return to the same room until you survive it and learn what you were supposed to learn from the original version of it.

The next lifetime I saw, I was born into a wealthy family. My father had me married off to a much older man who had essentially paid for me. I didn’t want to go. My mother didn’t want to submit to the process either, but neither of us had a say, and I was sent off with my new husband. I got pregnant by rape and gave birth to a daughter. I named her Madeline.

When an opportunity came to run, I took it. I grabbed what money and sellable items I could and ran with my daughter. We lived quietly in a hotel for a while, staying hidden, safe from being found and dragged back. I trained into a sewing job in a factory to support the two of us, and I raised her there — eventually moving us into a home with a woman who had extra space to spare. That woman is someone I know in this current life too: a woman named Ferry, someone who came back into my life through my community and took me in a second time, decades before either of us had any idea she’d already done it once.

I lived for my daughter. I raised her into a strong, independent woman who got to choose who she married — the exact freedom that had never once been offered to me. I would have thought that surviving the way I did, getting her out, building a life, would have been enough to fulfill the whole contract.

It wasn’t. There was one more piece I didn’t complete. I needed to learn how to thrive. Being safe and away from abusers is not the same thing as being home.

The Suffragette Twin

Once again, the same set of circumstances came back around, wearing a different century.

It was me and my twin sister this time, both of us set to be married off to men approved by our father. I wasn’t going to do it. I ran, and my twin followed me. This was during the suffragette movement — a period when unmarried, childless women weren’t supported by society at all. Women couldn’t hold jobs or open bank accounts on their own, and there was a whole movement fighting to change that. I joined the marches.

Eventually I got married anyway — to a man I actually described as my best friend — and had five children. He later proved not to be good for me, and we separated. My father, wanting to make things right in his old age, offered us his house. My kids and I moved in, and I raised and supported them the way I’d always needed to be supported myself.

When we reached the last days of that life in the regression, I was asked whether I’d been happy. I said I was happy for my kids. They married who they loved. They had children of their own who grew into their own families. I was happy that they were happy and safe.

I never became happy individually. I made everyone else’s happiness possible and never built any of my own. I never experienced thriving — only surviving, and doing it well enough to be proud of.

When we spoke directly to my subconscious about it, the answer was blunt: I could survive with the best of anyone, but I had never learned to thrive. I had spent that whole life believing my own happiness wasn’t the point — that it wasn’t about me. It was. I had the assignment upside down the entire time, and I was going to have to come back and try again until I got it right side up.

2026

Now here I am, in this life, in nearly identical circumstances — just dressed in a different century’s clothes.

I grew up in an abusive, far-right Christian cult family. I’m the oldest of five children. It was expected, inside that belief system, that I would be obedient to my father no matter what he demanded, ethical or not — that we would all get behind him regardless. I was being trained to become a useful, submissive wife: to marry a man he approved of, one who resembled him, and then be obedient and a servant to both of them for the rest of my life. I learned early to pick and choose which battles I could survive.

I moved out of my parents’ house when I was 19, in 2011, taking everything I could carry. The date happened to fall on my parents’ wedding anniversary — I didn’t plan it that way, but the irony wasn’t lost on me. My gift to them was no contact. My father came home early that day, expecting this to be a lesson I’d fail, telling me to go see what the world was really like and come crawling back in two weeks. I didn’t argue. I carried the boxes I’d been hiding under my bed for weeks and I never went back.

That same week, I lost the first real friend I’d ever made. Christian and I had met at a Tampa Bay Rays game — he took a french fry out of my bucket without asking and gave me a smirk, and we didn’t stop talking after that. He was secretly gay, engaged to a woman to keep his family’s love, and completely trapped between who he was and who they needed him to be. He ended his life the night before my own escape, writing letters to everyone he loved instead of coming to the church group we’d promised to build together — an “outcasts group,” he called it, for everyone else in that congregation who never quite fit either. I found out mid-way through hiding my getaway boxes back under my bed. His family scrubbed his social media and told everyone he’d been killed by Satanists rather than let the truth stand. I held his mother’s hand while she grieved, not knowing yet what she was covering up. It wasn’t until hypnotherapy in 2025 that I finally healed from that loss all the way through — the anger from it had been fueling a lot of my advocacy work in the meantime, which I don’t regret, but I did need to set the grief down to keep doing that work with any joy left in it.

Getting to college meant fighting for a dependency override on my FAFSA application — a brutal, months-long process required because I was under 24 and the form needed my parents’ signatures to count me as independent otherwise. My father refused to sign and ordered my mother not to either. She complied. “Sorry, Sweet,” she said — using my childhood nickname while actively closing a door in front of me. It was the one thing I’d ever asked them for beyond the basic obligations of raising a child. One painless, adult act of support. They failed it. I fought the override and won anyway, and went on to earn my degrees while still believing, mistakenly, that I still had a spiritual family back at the church I’d grown up leaving.

When I fell in love with my wife, Darlene, and came out as gay, that belief collapsed fast. We were outed to church leadership before we’d even had the chance to tell them ourselves. What followed wasn’t concern — it was an ultimatum. Supervised seating between the pastors. A mandated move into a halfway house typically used for addiction recovery. A “conversion therapy” program. Church control over my bank account. All of it available to me on one condition: leave Darlene. I gave myself one night to decide. By morning, the answer was no — no to surveillance, no to conversion therapy, no to a version of God that required me to erase myself to be loved. That refusal got us pushed out of Calvary Chapel St. Petersburg, and not long after, out of Liberty Baptist Church, the congregation I’d originally grown up in and the one place inside that world I’d ever felt something like belonging. I lost nearly everyone we’d loved and trusted, and every place of worship I’d ever called home, in the span of a few weeks.

What I found on the other side of that loss is its own long story — a dive shop that became my actual sanctuary, a first Pride parade where strangers held me while I sobbed without asking me to explain myself first, and eventually a small congregation at Pass-A-Grille Beach UCC, where a pastor named Marsha — who’d been pushed out of Calvary Chapel herself, for the exact same pattern of betrayal — proved just by existing peacefully in front of me that queerness and faith were never actually incompatible. The incompatibility had only ever belonged to the specific system I was raised inside.

Darlene and I moved in with her at the time, when I had nowhere else to go, and we leaned on each other through all of it as we built a life neither of us had been handed. As I went through past-life regression work for healing and started discovering this exact pattern reaching back five lifetimes, I understood something I hadn’t been able to name before: I’m in the last stage again. Once more, learning to thrive.

The Second Assignment

Trauma doesn’t always surface while you’re still surviving it. Sometimes it waits. Your mind protects you until it believes you can survive remembering, and until then, survival simply comes first. Healing requires safety, and for most of my life I didn’t have any.

I moved across the country to Washington in 2020, putting the most physical distance between myself and my biological family that I could manage. My address changed immediately. My nervous system took years to get the memo. It was only once my body actually registered that it had found a place to stay that the older trauma finally felt safe enough to surface and demand to be dealt with — first through EMDR, and then, when that reached its limit, through hypnotherapy and the regression work that eventually surfaced Abigail, and Madeline, and the suffragette twin.

Here’s what I keep coming back to: surviving and thriving are not the same skill, and it is entirely possible to master the first one across lifetime after lifetime without ever once being taught the second. Abigail didn’t survive at all. Madeline’s mother survived and even managed to hand her daughter a freedom she never got to have herself. The suffragette twin survived beautifully by every visible measure — a marriage, five children, a comfortable old age surrounded by family — and still died having never once experienced happiness that belonged to her individually, only the secondhand version borrowed from watching everyone else be okay.

You unlock something the moment you understand that staying alive was only ever the entrance requirement, not the achievement. That lands badly at first — you’ve spent decades, or in my case apparently several lifetimes, organizing everything around getting through, and it turns out getting through is the part everybody has to do just to qualify. Then it lands differently. It means there’s something after this. It means all those years spent in the corner of the room, holding on, weren’t the point of the whole life — they were the price of admission to it, and the door is standing open now. The hard part is done. Nobody tells you there’s a second part.

There is.

I’m learning it now, for what my subconscious tells me is the fifth time. And this time, for the first time in five lifetimes, I actually intend to finish it.

If this is your first time here: I write about growing up inside a controlling religious family, the years it took to build a life and a chosen family on the other side of it, and the hypnotherapy and past-life regression work that eventually connected all of it into one long pattern. This post pulls from the same material as A Place to Stay: The Long Way Home Through Trauma, Love, and Consciousness, my book that is out now on Amazon including Kindle.