Lana Savchuk’s raw story reveals the hidden spiritual battle behind mental strongholds and why willpower alone will never be enough.
Savchuk had given her life to Christ, married a pastor and started a new life in a new city. By every measure, things should have been good. But something had gone terribly wrong.
“I started to be a completely different person,” Lana Savchuk told her husband Vlad on his podcast. “It started with the feeling of loneliness, then severe nightmares… I felt something was sitting on me. I would come to church, I couldn’t pray anymore.”
The woman her husband had dated was warm, faith-filled and full of life. The woman he was now living with was consumed by jealousy, riddled with hatred toward others, and so tormented in her sleep that he would wake her up to rescue her from the dreams.
“As a husband,” Vlad admitted, “when I met you, that’s not who I encountered during our dating time. So we get married, and now something switched.”
A Perfect Storm for the Enemy
She had moved three and a half hours from her family, stepped into the unfamiliar role of a youth pastor’s wife, planted herself in a new church with no friends, and was trying to figure out marriage — all at once.
“The devil took advantage of the lowest point of my life,” she says. “He knew I couldn’t figure this out on my own.” The stress of that life transition, she believes, activated something that had been lying dormant — a generational pattern of rejection and loneliness she had never been forced to confront before.
To order your copy of Lana Savchuk’s new book, Change Your Mind, visit Amazon.com.
It’s a principle many overlook: you can go 15 or 20 years without repeating a destructive generational cycle, then one major life change can awaken it overnight.
What They Tried That Didn’t Work
In those early years, Lana’s first instinct was to blame herself. “I am such a horrible person. How could I become this person?” she recalls thinking. “I am probably… a bad person, and that’s it.”
Vlad, by his own admission, didn’t help. “I was embarrassed, you know, of your behavior,” he said.
He tried practical fixes, even attempting to get her sister to relocate, hoping familiar company would lift Lana’s depression. Nothing worked.
The typical advice, which is to pray more, think positively, just push through, fell flat. “When it’s more spiritual,” Vlad observes, “the typical advice that works on general issues just usually doesn’t work.”
Deliverance: The First Half of the Coin
When Lana eventually received prayer for deliverance, there was no dramatic manifestation — no screaming, no falling. Vlad came home expecting a transformed wife and saw what looked like the same problems.
However, Lana knew something had shifted at the deepest level. “I felt like the prisoner that held me captive was gone, but I was still in the prison,” she explains. “The Lord gave me a chance to fight back, which before my deliverance I didn’t have.”
Before that prayer, she had been frozen. “People would tell me, well, just fight for yourself. But I couldn’t lift a finger.” Deliverance, she discovered, doesn’t remove the battlefield. It unties your hands so you can actually fight.
Renewing the Mind: The Second Half
What followed was years of deliberate, sometimes painful mind renewal. Lana would sit in her car before college classes and force herself to read the Word of God out loud.
“I’m not going to lie, this was painful to hear,” she says. “Half of me was battling, saying, ‘This is so useless, it’s not going to help me.’ And another part of me would say, ‘continue to fight.'” She describes it as spoon-feeding herself the Word of God — forcefully, faithfully, one day at a time.
The nightmares didn’t stop instantly. The sleep paralysis didn’t vanish overnight. But they became less frequent, less intense, until they almost completely stopped. The hatred toward people slowly gave way to genuine love. The heavy jealousy lifted.
“When I started to experience the presence of the Holy Spirit,” Lana says, “the hatred would be leaving me, and the feeling of love for people would just pour into my heart.”
Two Sides of One Coin
The lesson Lana wants readers of her new book, Change Your Mind: How to Break Mental Strongholds, to walk away with is this: true freedom requires both deliverance and mind renewal.
“If we want to walk in true freedom, we must experience both,” she says. “Deliverance removes the oppressor and gives you a chance for a fight. Demolishing strongholds and renewing the mind is how you actually walk out of the prison.”
For those who feel trapped, Lana’s story is a reminder that the person you were created to be may be closer than you think, all you need is to reach out to God.
Abby Trivett is a writer and editor for Charisma Media and has a passion for sharing the gospel through the written word. She holds two degrees from Regent University, a B.A. in Communication with a concentration in Journalism and a Master of Arts in Journalism. She is the author of the upcoming book, The Power of Suddenly: Discover How God Can Change Everything in a Moment. For interviews and media inquiries, please contact [email protected].
