From Survival to Sovereignty: Stories, Systems, and the Quiet Work of Becoming Whole (What I Learned from Lela Tuhtan)

When I started writing The People of the Sign and The Hardness of the Heart, I didn’t yet understand how much those books were doing for me.

On the surface, they were my attempt to make sense of an unusual life: international kidnapping as a child, custody battles, religious extremism, a global church split, and later, a gut‑wrenching divorce and an autoimmune diagnosis that was supposed to put me in a wheelchair by forty. I wanted to document what had happened, to trace how a boy formed in one story could slowly, painfully learn to inhabit another.

But there was something else going on.

By telling my story my way—not as a sensationalized Netflix drama, not as fodder for someone else’s agenda, but as a carefully, sometimes painfully, told narrative in my own voice—I was doing therapy I didn’t have language for yet. The act of narrating became an act of reclaiming. Of saying: “This happened. It matters. And I get to say what it means.”

Those early books were my attempt at what my recent guest on Created in the Image of God, coach and writer Lela Tuhtan, now does professionally. Only she’s far better trained and much more deliberate about it.

Talking with Lela about her work—helping high‑functioning, high‑impact people unlearn inherited stories and step into what she calls sovereignty—did something inside me. It put a frame around things I had stumbled through on instinct. And it reminded me why the work of story—who tells it, how we hold it, and how we let it change—is not a luxury, but a spiritual necessity.

The Black Sheep and the Watch

Lela grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, the child of hard‑working, second‑generation immigrants from Slovenia. Her father was an electrician; her mother a teacher. They were, in many ways, the embodiment of the old American dream: pick a respectable job, get into the union, stay loyal, and the institution will take care of you.

Along with that came a particular story about security:

Security is external.
A “good life” is anchored in one long, stable trajectory.
You choose something that is both acceptable and “safe,” and you don’t rock the boat.

They wanted her to choose work she was passionate about, yes—but only if it checked those boxes.

So she did what dutiful children do. She became a teacher. And she was good at it. For nearly a decade, she poured into students and colleagues. By every visible metric, she was “on track.”

Then, around 2018–2019, something in her began to shift.

She enrolled in coaching training with Co‑Active and started seeing a few clients on the side—other educators, a handful of individuals. And a realization nagged at her: there is another way to work.

She loved teaching. But she also loved the freedom, intimacy, and depth of one‑on‑one coaching. And she saw that the old family story—security as a single employer, a pension, a gold watch—no longer fit the person she was becoming.

One image from our conversation captured the old paradigm perfectly. At an end‑of‑year dinner, the retirees at her school were honored. They’d put in 30–40 years of service. They were given a plaque and a watch.

Her husband leaned over and whispered, “Is this what you want?”

The question landed with force. Not because the path was dishonorable—it wasn’t. But because she knew, in her bones, she was not called to spend 40 years in one institution for a watch.

Soon after, she realized she was the “black sheep” in the family story—the one called to break a pattern. And yet her parents, to their credit, supported her as she began to step into something they didn’t fully understand.

When she finally left teaching to build her own coaching practice full‑time—in early 2020, just before COVID upended the world—every conditioned reflex in her screamed: Go back. Take the safe job. The schools need teachers. The system is begging you to plug back in.

But something deeper—call it Spirit, conscience, inner truth—kept saying: Stay. Trust. Keep going.

She did. She invested in mentors. She sought training not only in coaching but in eco‑psychology. She made use of institutions as resources, not overlords. She offered complimentary sessions, drew on her background in English and editing to serve others, and wasn’t afraid to both invest in herself and be generous.

Within a year, in the middle of a global upheaval, she had built a six‑figure practice.

The “how” of that matters less than who she became in the process: a living example of someone who has moved, as her episode title puts it, from survival to sovereignty.

Stories and Systems: The Worlds We Build from Within

As Lela worked with more clients, a pattern emerged. Her people came from all over the map—medicine, academia, law, tech, design. They were often objectively successful, at least on paper. But internally, something was off.

The story they were living didn’t fit the person God (or, in her language, Source) had actually made them to be.

One client—a lawyer from a family that had the same “security script” as Lela’s—illustrates this. In her world, there were two north stars: become a lawyer or a doctor. Those were the “secure,” respectable paths. Anything else was, at best, a hobby.

From an early age, she had signs this wasn’t right. As Lela walked her back through her history, a line of red flags came into view:

Migraines during law school.
Hives before exams.
Persistent illness after long stretches of work.
A deep, quiet dread every Sunday night.

Her body had been saying “no” for years. She just hadn’t been taught how to listen.

By the time they started working together, she was on the verge of a medical leave. Still, part of her clung to the old story: “So what if I don’t love it? I just want to feel safe. Why can’t I just make money and do this job?”

Together, they began to take the story apart:

Who told you this was the only respectable path?
What did you actually love as a child?
What happens in your body when you imagine staying in this career for the next 30 years?
And what happens when you imagine something else?

Once some of the inherited narrative was cleared away, something remarkable happened. Long‑buried desires, memories, and inclinations surfaced:

She remembered how much she loved to write.
Her draw toward healing work—not as a Western MD, but through acupuncture, massage, therapy.
The way she naturally “tended” to friends’ emotions as a child.

Over a couple of years, she let go of the legal career completely. Today she’s in training to become a therapist. She’s in an improv workshop. She’s writing, creating, playing.

The external system she moves in is changing because the internal story changed. As Lela put it, “It didn’t matter if they were 25 or 65, in medicine or design—what mattered was that they were willing, and that they understood their story was not their identity.”

That line—we are not our stories—is one she returned to at the end of our talk. It’s also where her upcoming book title, Stories and Systems, comes from.

We inherit stories. Then we build systems—families, companies, institutions, nations—on top of them. Change the story, and over time, the system shifts.

If that sounds abstract, consider how Scripture frames it.

In Genesis, the serpent doesn’t punch Adam and Eve. He doesn’t wield a sword. He introduces a story:

God is holding out on you.
He’s not really good.
If you take matters into your own hands, you’ll be like Him.

Once they swallow that narrative, everything else follows. Fear. Hiding. Blame. Cursed ground. Pain in childbirth. Thorns and thistles. Systems of domination and exploitation that we, to this day, are still trying to untangle.

When God asks, “Who told you that you were naked?” He is, in essence, asking: Who did you allow to narrate reality for you? And what did it cost?

Lela’s work, in a very contemporary setting, is about returning to that question. Who told you that security only comes from a certain title? Who told you that success must mean self‑betrayal? Who told you that your worth is measured by your LinkedIn profile, your resume, your billable hours?

And what systems have we built, collectively, on those lies?

Witness, Grief, and the Slow Work of Sovereignty

One of the most powerful shifts in my own journey came when I realized that I was not only the protagonist of my story; I was also, in some deep sense, the witness.

Yes, a kidnapped boy, a young minister, a man with a crippling diagnosis. But also the one who could step half a pace back and see: “Oh. This is the narrative I’ve been living. This is how I’ve been interpreting what was done to me. This is how my own beliefs—about God, about success, about wealth—have been attacking me from the inside.”

In my case, one of those beliefs was that material success was inherently corrupt. “Rich people are evil,” the script went. Greedy. Stingy. Not generous. That story shaped my choices, my health, even my immune system, which turned on my own body.

Changing that story—slowly, with God’s help, and through a lot of trial and error—changed my life.

Lela’s language for this move is “sovereignty.”

Not sovereignty as rugged isolation. Not as egoic control. But as the grounded, quiet authority that comes from knowing:

I am not the sum total of what happened to me.
I am not the voice of shame or fear in my head.
I am also the one who can witness my stories, feel my feelings, and choose a different path.

She told a story about a client who embodies this struggle. He’s in full collapse:

Going through a divorce.
Father of three.
A business that once made him a multimillionaire now crumbling.
Deep in debt.

He’s an “exponential” person—someone who can, as she put it, move mountains. Which is part of the problem.

“If he moves mountains from a place of misalignment,” she said, “that can be really dangerous.”

His instinct, like so many high‑powered people, is to fix, hustle, overfunction. To slap a bandage on a gaping wound and call it healing.

Her work with him has been to slow him down:

To actually feel the grief, shame, fear.
To stop trying to outrun the fallout.
To stay present, even when everything in him wants to escape.

As he does that—sits with the discomfort rather than numbing it—something surprising is happening. His capacity to feel joy is increasing alongside his capacity to feel pain. And out of that deeper feeling, genuinely new ideas are emerging:

Clearer visions for how to rebuild his business with integrity.
Better ways to speak with his ex so they can co‑parent well.
A different sense of who he is, apart from the past success and present failure.

This rhythm—witness, grief, new story—is at the core of Lela’s practice.

As she wrote recently on her Substack, when we sit with uncomfortable feelings instead of immediately narrating or escaping them, old stories can simply dissolve. Their grip loosens. We discover that we are not, in fact, the narrative. We are the one watching.

In spiritual terms, you could say: we move from identifying with the false self to resting, however briefly, in the image of God within us.

Created in the Image of a Story‑Teller

By the end of our conversation, Lela said something that pulls this all together:

“We are not our stories, right? We’re connected to something so much bigger than that… When we get quiet and you’re just in the witness state, that’s us being one with God, being one with Source. All the narratives fall away and you’re just engaging directly with reality—with what’s real.”

That doesn’t mean stories don’t matter. They do. We are, as she put it, storytellers and meaning‑makers. Our words, our interpretations, deeply shape our reality—and the systems we build.

But they are also provisional. Even the best stories eventually need to be shed, composted, re‑told. Otherwise they become idols.

Which brings me back to my own books.

Telling my story, imperfectly and incompletely, was essential. It helped me stop being a character in someone else’s script and start becoming an author. But even those books are not the final word. There are still layers to unpack, beliefs to examine, griefs to feel. Interviews like this one with Lela are, for me, not just content; they are part of my ongoing healing.

And that, I suspect, is true for many of you reading this. You have stories—about who you must be, what security is, what God is like, what success requires—that you did not consciously choose.

Lela’s work is one way of saying: you have more agency than you think. You have more sovereignty than you’ve been told. And there is a God who is not threatened by your becoming more like Him in that regard.

We are created in the image of a Story‑Teller.

The question is not whether we will have stories. It is whether we will keep mistaking our current one for the whole truth—or whether, with courage and grace, we will step back into the witness seat, feel what we’ve been running from, and allow a truer story to emerge.

You are created in the image of God. And God loves His creation.

— Wade

If this reflection on stories, systems, and sovereignty resonates, subscribe or share it with someone who feels trapped in an old script. And if you’d like to explore more of Lela’s work, you can find her at lelagrace.co and on Substack at “Lela Grace.”

Sneak Peek: Next on Created in the Image of God

This week on Created in the Image of God:

Sunday May 10, at 7:00 AM US Central, I’ll be interviewing Dalia Mogahed—scholar, researcher, and one of the leading voices on Muslim communities. She’ll share her journey from Cairo to the United States and how she came to understand herself as an American Muslim. We’ll talk about faith, identity, and pluralism in a world often shaped by fear, headlines, and misunderstanding.
Tuesday May 12, at 8:00 PM US Central, I’ll be joined by Michael Gungor—musician, author, and creative mystic. We’ll explore his conviction that we may be seeing reality upside down, and what it means to live in tune with something deeper: from creativity and suffering to love, being, and the quiet “yes” at the center of existence.

Join us live—and in the meantime, keep listening for the deeper story beneath the one you’ve been told.