Latest / Adventures in Adversity: an inspirational podcast / Ep. 70: Escaping abuse - Roseann Mayer's story - “Bones Beneath the Prairie: A Memoir of Survival”

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Ep. 70: Escaping abuse - Roseann Mayer's story - “Bones Beneath the Prairie: A Memoir of Survival” · Adventures in Adversity: an inspirational podcast

• 0:00
  OK, we are here finally, after some, let's see, a couple
• 0:06
  reschedules and some technical difficulties, I'm very excited
• 0:10
  to say we are live with episode 70 of the Adventures in
• 0:15
  Adversity podcast. Now, if you have been to this
• 0:20
  podcast before through Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, you
• 0:25
  know that we talk about real people who tell real stories
• 0:30
  about how they overcame adversity in their life.
• 0:33
  Today, that is no different. I am very, very grateful to
• 0:37
  welcome a new friend of mine. I think after all of our
• 0:42
  chatting, Roseanne Mayer, author of Bones Beneath the Prairie, a
• 0:47
  memoir of survival and redemption.
• 0:50
  So, Roseanne, thank you so much for being here.
• 0:54
  Thank you for having me. Of course.
• 0:58
  So we let's see, let's bring up, let's bring the audience up to
• 1:02
  speed on how did we meet? And then we're going to dive
• 1:06
  right into your story. And that's when I'm going to be
• 1:09
  quiet, which is my listener's favorite part when I stop
• 1:13
  talking. Be I, I wrote the book and it
• 1:20
  was suggested to me that I should try to find some podcasts
• 1:24
  that would because it was the month of the domestic violence
• 1:28
  month. And I came across yours and
• 1:32
  another one and I came across several, but yours, from the
• 1:35
  first moment I saw you, I knew that it was that was a that was
• 1:42
  one for me. Are your our hearts were aligned
• 1:46
  and I knew that you had experience with it, but that you
• 1:48
  were the podcast was real. What I heard from you was real
• 1:53
  and raw and not staged or performed.
• 1:58
  And for me, that was, I'm from Texas and this was a story that
• 2:02
  I never intended to write. And so I thought, oh, I have to
• 2:06
  connect with her. And then I thought, oh, I'm
• 2:09
  being a stalker. That's, you know what I love,
• 2:14
  dare I say I love stalkers of inspirational.
• 2:18
  I love inspirational stalkers that are like that are want to
• 2:23
  be on the podcast or get something from it.
• 2:26
  I love those connections. I I've been I've been a
• 2:30
  spiritual being and had God in my life for so long that I know
• 2:35
  that I know that I know when there's one of those.
• 2:37
  There was a brief period for about 20 years that I sort of
• 2:40
  said, see you later, God. And but this when I saw your
• 2:46
  podcast, I knew that he had something for me and it that he
• 2:49
  had something for you as well. And I and so in the first
• 2:53
  podcast that I saw was you and Sylvie, but it was the first, it
• 2:57
  was the first one, not the most episode. 41.
• 3:01
  I was like, oh, whoa, OK. And then, yeah.
• 3:07
  And then I heard Sam's, and that was like scientific.
• 3:13
  And. A little little, Yeah.
• 3:16
  Episode 29. And it was, it was inspiring,
• 3:20
  but it also went into deep trenches.
• 3:23
  My story's a little bit different.
• 3:25
  But anyway, I'm glad to be here. And I'm so tickled that you that
• 3:29
  we connected and that you asked me.
• 3:32
  Well, thank you for a listening to the podcast.
• 3:37
  I'm always, I always say whenever anyone says they listen
• 3:41
  to an episode, it never gets old.
• 3:43
  I'm like, oh, wow. Like, 'cause you know it it.
• 3:47
  I know the story so intimately after.
• 3:49
  And I'm like, wow, someone else took the time when everyone's so
• 3:53
  busy and you have all, you know, the world is.
• 3:54
  So I'm always like, wow. So thank you for listening to
• 3:59
  those. Sylvia adores you we've talked
• 4:01
  about. He's talking to her.
• 4:04
  No, we're all like commenting and sending each other love.
• 4:07
  And I think we're all similar type of women where we've been
• 4:11
  through an experience or two, maybe one that stands out in
• 4:17
  particular with certain kind of people that we came out of that
• 4:21
  experience forever changed and maybe an experience that we
• 4:28
  never thought we would ever encounter.
• 4:32
  Yeah. So with that, I just want to,
• 4:35
  and again, I say this to every guest because every guest I have
• 4:39
  is amazing. I'm going to brag about you a
• 4:42
  little bit and then I'm going to let you just tell your story
• 4:49
  about how you have turned adversity in your life into now
• 4:56
  You are 70 episode 70. You're an author.
• 5:01
  Amazing. So I'm just going to give a
• 5:03
  little bit of a background and then I'm going to let you go
• 5:07
  into the story. Does that sound good?
• 5:08
  OK, sure. OK, So Roseanne, as I mentioned
• 5:11
  for all of you, I'm going to put in the show notes where you can
• 5:14
  follow her on Instagram, her website where you can buy her
• 5:18
  book on Amazon. So Roseanne wrote a memoir, true
• 5:24
  story of growing up in West, TX in the oil fields, and you'll
• 5:29
  give us all the details where you have come through and
• 5:33
  survived narcissistic abuse, domestic violence, and you have
• 5:41
  really navigated that very tumultuous journey finding your
• 5:46
  faith. I think you have really open the
• 5:54
  door to kind of break some of that silence of generational
• 5:58
  silence, break the stigma of talking about things that
• 6:02
  you're, quote UN quote, not supposed to talk about.
• 6:06
  And I just commend you for A, telling your story, B, telling
• 6:15
  it in a way where you're so open, where you don't edit parts
• 6:19
  out, you know, that are very in your writing and in the way you
• 6:22
  talk about it and Instagram. And I think your purpose in
• 6:28
  getting to know you, and then I'm going to be quiet here.
• 6:31
  You wrote this and it poured out of you in an effort to make
• 6:37
  sense of what happened to you, but also to hopefully inspire
• 6:41
  anyone listening right now or anyone who reads your book that
• 6:44
  where they're at doesn't have to be where they stay.
• 6:48
  Yeah, right. For sure, for sure.
• 6:51
  Yeah. When I I went to my daughter's
• 6:54
  in Texas the end of June and for a 16th birthday party for my
• 7:00
  granddaughter and I came home July the 2nd and I thought, you
• 7:04
  know, I have an English lit background, went to Baylor,
• 7:08
  didn't finish, but at the same, you know, kind of thing.
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  And I always thought, oh, it would be great to write a book.
• 7:15
  There's a whole big long story in the book about a desk that
• 7:19
  the one of the poet laureates of Texas had that my grandmother
• 7:23
  had acquired when she died. She gave me the desk and said,
• 7:28
  you'll write a book someday. And you?
• 7:31
  Want to hold up the book? If you hold up the book, we can
• 7:34
  give our readers. There you go, Bones Beneath the
• 7:37
  Prairie. We're going to have a link right
• 7:38
  down below. Thank you.
• 7:40
  Want to interrupt there? OK, continue.
• 7:42
  Thank you. And I, so I came home and I
• 7:45
  thought, you know, I had this incredible childhood in this
• 7:47
  little bitty town that I think was magical.
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  Imagine, I mean, how many people in their life can say, my
• 7:54
  parents, we would go to a bridge party and a friend of ours had a
• 7:57
  lion in their house and that their son had brought home from
• 8:03
  college. So it was a magical, wonderful
• 8:06
  place. And I have always wanted to tell
• 8:09
  the story of this lovely little place.
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  So I started writing these short stories.
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  And as I began to write, God would have me remember things
• 8:20
  that, oh, when you went back to Albany this time, this was
• 8:25
  happening. You were running from this man
• 8:28
  you were doing. And I was like, OK, I'm 25 years
• 8:33
  out of it. I'm happy.
• 8:36
  I've been married for 23 years. I just was not a topic of
• 8:42
  conversation in my life. And it hasn't been for a number
• 8:44
  of years. And I thought, whoa, where's
• 8:49
  that coming from? Oh, God, this is kind of weird.
• 8:52
  And so I just started writing and in 17 days I had 65,000
• 9:00
  words. So and I, I never even it, it's
• 9:05
  going to sound really hokey, but I didn't know the flow.
• 9:10
  I, I didn't have an arc, I didn't have an outline, I didn't
• 9:14
  have Jack. It just came.
• 9:18
  So I knew that God was up to something and he has done some
• 9:23
  really weird things with me in my life and some things that
• 9:26
  I've had to recognize that were him.
• 9:30
  But I, I didn't know what I was supposed to do this.
• 9:32
  So my children and I have never talked about this and I started
• 9:40
  sending them chapters as my, I'm really close.
• 9:42
  I have a daughter who's your age and I'm really have been close
• 9:46
  to her my whole life. And I started sending them
• 9:50
  chapters that were really raw before I got an editor involved
• 9:56
  and probably way too explicit and things that she shouldn't
• 10:00
  have seen. And she was, she's very, I'm
• 10:06
  blocked out of her life at this point in time.
• 10:08
  So that's one of the but that happens with memoirist.
• 10:11
  This is not new. I am not perfunkeled by it
• 10:16
  because I believe that in God's time she will be able.
• 10:21
  It's really hard for them to recognize children of violence
• 10:26
  and abuse in in marriages process differently.
• 10:31
  And if they haven't processed it, which I never I never
• 10:35
  thought about that part of it and I should have what you were
• 10:39
  talking about with Joyce. Keep your stuff to yourself.
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  I and I wouldn't normally say stuff, but you keep it to
• 10:47
  yourself. And I never should have shared
• 10:51
  the raw and the explicit. And so I took a lot of that out
• 10:56
  of the book because it was unnecessary.
• 10:58
  It was necessary for me for healing.
• 11:02
  And so the book I wrote the book took about 3 weeks to edit it.
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  I self published it on Amazon and I, we, we, we live in
• 11:13
  Mexico, we're retired, we live on a fixed income.
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  And I thought, oh, this will be a nice way to earn a little bit
• 11:21
  of extra income. This would be nice.
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  Well, that wasn't at all what God had in the plan.
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  And so it's been an experience. The whole, the whole publishing
• 11:33
  thing was an experience, but it has caused me to write my just
• 11:42
  my guts out. I mean, I have never experienced
• 11:46
  anything like the desire to write two or three things a day.
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  And I overwhelm my Substack audience because I'm like
• 11:58
  exploding on them and saying here it is.
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  Wait, I got to tell you this. This is what happened today.
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  And a lot of really incredible things, even in the last two or
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  three weeks have happened that I told, I think I told you, I
• 12:11
  wrote yesterday about I went scavenging on Facebook and I
• 12:20
  know better. And I and I haven't done this in
• 12:23
  20 years. And God said, OK, Are you sure?
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  Well, and I don't need you to help me right now.
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  I'll just go in here and look at this and see and see if
• 12:35
  anybody's saying anything bad. And I see this picture of my
• 12:39
  ex-husband and I just fly into I haven't even thought about this
• 12:47
  human. And then I the next do all these
• 12:50
  have it was his birthday. And so here's all these people
• 12:53
  saying happy birthday. Well, I decide I have to troll
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  through all of those with God this whole time going girl.
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  It's like, and you're like, it's like, yeah.
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  It's stupid. It's.
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  You don't. And as you're doing it, you're
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  like, this sucks, but I'm looking.
• 13:10
  Yeah. And so then a ministry that an
• 13:16
  administer that we walked with for 10 years, his name came up
• 13:25
  and his PTSD and his new PhD title and his trauma therapy
• 13:30
  title came up. And I wanted to throw the
• 13:33
  computer across the room because I thought he knew.
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  He knew, he was involved, he knew, I told him he knew.
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  And so and so I sat in that and it was supposed to be one of the
• 13:51
  days that we were doing this and I was not in a good place.
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  So it was like God said, OK, saw it.
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  Are you done? Well, yeah, I guess.
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  So how'd that feel? It's like God's like, did you
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  like that? Yeah.
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  And and then I get this revelation that you needed to
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  see that for what it was. You needed to understand that
• 14:22
  sometimes people that you walk with align yourself with.
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  And it was, it was a revelation. And it was in a good way, much
• 14:33
  better today than it was. But for, I mean, I was stewing
• 14:37
  and brewing and this was, I can't remember what day this
• 14:40
  was, but we were supposed to do this.
• 14:41
  And I was like, I'm going to have to have more than tequila
• 14:45
  because it's fucking. Work, you know, it's very and
• 14:49
  it's really anyone listening that has been through and we're
• 14:54
  going to get into your specific story and obviously they can
• 14:58
  read your your full story in the book.
• 15:00
  But I think when someone, when you see a picture of someone in
• 15:05
  your past, maybe you're not on good terms with, you're like,
• 15:08
  oh, they're so and so like, and you kind of move on from it,
• 15:11
  like, oh, I haven't talked to them in a while.
• 15:13
  When you see a picture of somebody, and correct me if you
• 15:16
  feel the same, who you've experienced, who has abused you
• 15:21
  in some way, It's it's for me, seeing a picture is very
• 15:27
  jarring. Oh, yeah.
• 15:30
  I don't like it. I don't like looking at pictures
• 15:32
  of myself from certain times. I'm like, just I don't.
• 15:35
  And I've done the same thing where I go down and I'm like,
• 15:37
  why are you looking? Why?
• 15:38
  What did you think you're going to find?
• 15:39
  You found it. There it is.
• 15:42
  Oh, and why are they hanging out?
• 15:43
  Wow. Yeah.
• 15:45
  Exactly. Really.
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  And, you know, and I had to be like, bye, you know, Right.
• 15:52
  People just go la, la, la, la, la, la.
• 15:54
  Yeah. You.
• 15:57
  Want to get involved? No.
• 16:00
  And we never would have trolled before.
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  We would have never 20 years ago.
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  I wouldn't have had the opportunity, right?
• 16:07
  So it would have been and he, he's been so far in the past and
• 16:12
  my husband is incredible and I adore him.
• 16:16
  And it's been I didn't know how this would affect him because I
• 16:22
  talk about it a lot and we didn't do that when I met him.
• 16:27
  Oh God is hilarious when you read the book he set us up on
• 16:32
  match.com. I'm not kidding you.
• 16:35
  That's. That's How I Met my husband.
• 16:39
  Match.com, we didn't. Tell we didn't tell our
• 16:41
  children. I mean, because we were.
• 16:43
  I was like, Oh my God, Oh, you know, and and all this, I didn't
• 16:48
  see God doing it until I wrote the book.
• 16:50
  And then he's laughing with me saying, see, I told you I wasn't
• 16:54
  going to leave here for sake you, but I actually, I actually
• 17:00
  after all, let me go back for just a second.
• 17:04
  The purpose of the book was this in the end for me.
• 17:09
  I worked for a pastor at the height of this horrible thing
• 17:14
  that was going on my life and I, it was very violent.
• 17:18
  It was very our his lifestyle. He was a church person.
• 17:28
  I, the spiritual part of the abuse I've long not recognized
• 17:34
  and I've had to take some of that in and deal with that.
• 17:38
  The physical part of it, the betrayal, the pornography, the
• 17:43
  there was. So he ran the gamut and he was a
• 17:46
  con man on top of it. So all of that, I mean, more of
• 17:51
  a sociopath. And when I was listening to Sam,
• 17:55
  I thought, oh, this isn't mine. This isn't.
• 17:58
  I mean, yeah, some of it, but the violence made made it
• 18:04
  somewhat different. But anyway, all of that aside,
• 18:07
  that's really not why I wrote it.
• 18:10
  When you when you live through the situation that I did 40
• 18:14
  years ago, 30 years ago, 35 years ago, there was no language
• 18:18
  for it. There was no I've written a
• 18:22
  story on sub stack about there was no sign in the church on
• 18:26
  church bulletin board that said abused women this way you know
• 18:30
  with the. I saw that on your.
• 18:32
  Yep, Yeah, because. How many Bible studies have you
• 18:37
  been in since you've been on your walk that a woman has stood
• 18:41
  up and said my husband's beating the crap out of me?
• 18:45
  You know, I, I've been in two this year and nobody has talked
• 18:51
  about that. One of our women was is going
• 18:54
  through a divorce. But yeah, like I can imagine
• 18:59
  that that there was no like domestic violence awareness
• 19:03
  month. No, and in the church, in the
• 19:06
  church the S 30 years ago, it was really hard for men who were
• 19:13
  in leadership positions to not just say and I, I have no, I
• 19:20
  don't blame the church. I don't have any any animosity
• 19:24
  or any hurt toward the church. And the pastor that wrote the
• 19:27
  foreword to the book, when he read the book or read the
• 19:33
  chapters that I sent him, it made him very sad because he
• 19:37
  said you could have told me you could, I would have helped.
• 19:41
  And he's a trauma therapist today and he's in his 80s and
• 19:45
  he's wonderful. But he said I but I would have
• 19:48
  listened to both of you where this other person did not.
• 19:54
  And it's there wasn't there was no language.
• 19:59
  I get back to being there was no language for it.
• 20:03
  There were no books in the church library.
• 20:06
  There was no woman who was, who had lived and was an older woman
• 20:12
  who was wise, who knew the signs, who could say sweetheart,
• 20:18
  here's a book. See if you see yourself in here.
• 20:21
  So part of the reason that I wrote the book and that I would
• 20:25
  like to have it in every shelter for free, and I'm trying to put
• 20:29
  donors together with human donors, together with shelters
• 20:33
  that would take it. Even today.
• 20:38
  There are all sorts of books how to fix it, what it is, what it
• 20:43
  looks like, all of that, but none where a woman could go in
• 20:49
  and say, I tried to be honest. I tried to say he beat the crap
• 20:54
  out of me with a bedpost. That may not have been your
• 20:58
  experience, but the con, the things that happened to children
• 21:03
  and families and all of that, I tried to write it in such a way
• 21:08
  that a woman could recognize and say and then on the other side
• 21:13
  of it, because of my faith was part of it.
• 21:16
  And just to give you some more background, I didn't know
• 21:21
  whether or not I was going to tell the story when I decided
• 21:25
  the bedpost. Let's go back to the bedpost.
• 21:27
  That was the that was 20 years into the marriage and that was
• 21:31
  the day that I finally said it's done.
• 21:34
  I'm I'm done. I don't have any money.
• 21:37
  There was financial. He he had controlled all the
• 21:39
  money and my parents were gone. I had no backstop.
• 21:45
  There was nobody to help and his best friend, this narcissist,
• 21:52
  like many, didn't risk exposure and he didn't want to be
• 21:58
  exposed. So his best friend had come back
• 22:02
  into our life, and he was a psychotherapist and he was
• 22:07
  single. And he was this marvelous man
• 22:10
  and very nice and very kind, and he'd come back into our life.
• 22:13
  He'd been at our lake house the week before.
• 22:16
  And so the bedpost incident happens.
• 22:18
  The police get called. They're in the house.
• 22:23
  I covered the bruises. And when the police take him in
• 22:26
  the other room, he shows them where I have scratched and
• 22:28
  clawed and carried on. OK.
• 22:31
  So the next morning I decide I'm going to call his friend.
• 22:35
  I'm going to tell somebody, you know, and he's 250 miles away,
• 22:39
  so it's not like I'm having to tell my pastor, who I adore,
• 22:42
  that, you know, this is happening in my life.
• 22:45
  So I talked to him, and two weeks later, I left.
• 22:51
  I drove to my sister's, and my sister wasn't open to helping me
• 22:59
  that night. And I had all air, all my
• 23:01
  belongings and everything in the truck.
• 23:02
  So I went to a motel and I hid and I called him and he came.
• 23:07
  And that was the beginning of a a choice that I made to step
• 23:12
  into a world that I looked at God and said, sorry dude, I'm
• 23:17
  going for this. He makes me feel safe.
• 23:20
  My ex won't expose me. And I really thumbed my nose at
• 23:24
  God and I wrote a long essay about that this weekend.
• 23:28
  It's been really hard to admit my children looked at me as a
• 23:33
  pillar. I've always been very spiritual
• 23:36
  and. Yeah.
• 23:37
  That was really hard but so from that .2 years later it took me
• 23:44
  to get a divorce and that's a whole nother thing.
• 23:46
  He was pro SE. I have that.
• 23:48
  There's this whole courthouse scene.
• 23:50
  If you the courthouse scene, did you?
• 23:52
  Do you know what the courthouse scene is?
• 23:55
  I do not. I am not there yet.
• 23:57
  OK, the courthouse scene. The courthouse scene is we had
• 24:02
  been trying to get a divorce for two years.
• 24:04
  And I had met Ken the week before on match.com.
• 24:08
  And so at the end of the weekend with Ken, he had asked me to
• 24:13
  marry him. And I said, dude, I'm not
• 24:15
  divorced. And he goes, you'll be divorced
• 24:19
  by the end of next week. And he was a big, great man of
• 24:22
  faith, Ken. Was he at the next?
• 24:24
  Still is. And I said, BS no, I'm not
• 24:30
  giving up. I'm not ready to give up.
• 24:32
  I'm no. And so we had a court hearing on
• 24:34
  Friday. I go to the courthouse and I
• 24:36
  drive up to my lawyer's office. It's in a little bitty town in
• 24:40
  North Central Texas. And I drive up to the lawyer's
• 24:43
  office and their deputies. And I'm like, what's this?
• 24:49
  And so I step out of the car and the lawyer meets me and he says,
• 24:53
  what the hell have you done? And I said, I don't know which
• 24:57
  of what I I haven't done anything.
• 24:59
  And he goes, did you bring a gun to court today?
• 25:02
  Are you going to kill the judge? Oh, shit.
• 25:06
  No. Excuse me.
• 25:07
  No. What is what on earth?
• 25:10
  And he said, you need to come in my office.
• 25:12
  He goes, they need to search you and they need to search the SUV.
• 25:16
  What? So I go in his office and he
• 25:18
  says, your ex has called the judge and he said that you're
• 25:24
  very upset and that you're going to you've come to the courthouse
• 25:30
  to kill everybody. I never even owned a gun.
• 25:34
  I never held a gun. I So it was like, and course,
• 25:38
  they didn't find anything. And these two deputies escort me
• 25:42
  across the street into the courthouse.
• 25:46
  And now this is a week after meeting Ken, who says you'll be
• 25:48
  divorced. I'm not thinking about Ken.
• 25:51
  I am beyond integrity is the most important thing in my life.
• 25:58
  That's what's also really strange about this, that I
• 26:01
  allowed something like this to happen to me and I sat at the
• 26:06
  table and I've been doing this for two years with this guy,
• 26:09
  couldn't get a divorce. And I looked at the lawyer with
• 26:12
  these two deputies standing by this judge who was a Sunday
• 26:16
  school teacher in this little town that I respected a lot.
• 26:19
  And I just broke. And I said, I'm done.
• 26:23
  It's over today. I don't care.
• 26:25
  I don't want anything. I just want it over today.
• 26:29
  And it ended. But there's no if you have
• 26:34
  lived, and this is another one of the stories that you can't.
• 26:39
  I've had women in my life Now I'm 70 years old and I have
• 26:43
  women in my life since I wrote the book that I've walked with
• 26:47
  that have walked a similar road to me that never told me I'm a
• 26:53
  prayer warrior. I would have done anything for
• 26:56
  any of them. I'm going to cry.
• 26:58
  I would have. I would have.
• 27:00
  I would have held her hand, but none of us.
• 27:02
  And we've talked about it since. We've all said we didn't tell
• 27:07
  each other. We didn't.
• 27:10
  And it's because it's so humiliating.
• 27:13
  I mean, it's the most to have to tell a sister or a pastor that
• 27:19
  this is going on in your home is and and then on top of it, if
• 27:28
  you have any success. I didn't want to lose my home.
• 27:33
  I didn't want to lose the cars. I didn't want to lose the double
• 27:36
  income. Now I know that sounds vain as
• 27:39
  hell, but it's the truth. It's the, it's you're, you're
• 27:44
  uprooting your whole life. It's, it's not just leaving.
• 27:48
  You're literally, especially when someone's in control of
• 27:51
  finances and you know. And I thought I was crazy.
• 27:57
  I really did. I, I thought with this, this
• 28:02
  human being and I, I would have loved to have been on the
• 28:06
  broadcast with Sam because I would have loved to have heard
• 28:09
  his not analysis. I really don't care about that
• 28:14
  anymore. I I care about, I understand who
• 28:17
  this person was and so the person is not the the story
• 28:22
  anymore. The person God separated that
• 28:24
  yesterday or day before the story is about another woman and
• 28:28
  so another woman can see visually see that there are
• 28:33
  others out there and God carried me through it even when I
• 28:36
  thumbed my nose at him and said I'm going to walk right into
• 28:39
  adultery and I don't give two licks.
• 28:41
  This is what I'm going to do. He makes me feel safe.
• 28:44
  This the only way I can leave. I don't care that I know that
• 28:47
  it's wrong. I'm going to do it anyway.
• 28:49
  Yeah. And for how many women?
• 28:55
  Ashley Joyce walk in it and say I did this, it was wrong, but I
• 29:04
  did it and he carried me through it.
• 29:07
  He brought me to the other side of it.
• 29:08
  He gave me Ken on match.com in the worst hours of my life.
• 29:13
  And then it took me some time. When I married Ken, we lived in
• 29:17
  the country, so we and and he had this hunting business and a
• 29:21
  hunting lodge. So we lived 7 1/2 miles from
• 29:24
  town, no children in school. We worked on Sundays, church was
• 29:30
  out. So when you move into a little
• 29:33
  place in Texas, the at that point I was 47 and he was 52.
• 29:38
  If you don't have children in school and you don't go to
• 29:41
  church, your opportunities to connect or are they're just not
• 29:46
  there. So for 20 years, I never went to
• 29:50
  lunch with another woman. I never made a friend in this
• 29:54
  little town. It was just Ken and me and our
• 29:57
  hunting lodge and our friends. And through that, God did the
• 30:03
  healing. I didn't have Sylvie.
• 30:05
  I didn't have. I didn't have therapy because it
• 30:09
  was an hour away. Yeah.
• 30:13
  And I don't know that I was healing the first three years
• 30:16
  that Ken had to live with me. They were bad.
• 30:20
  They were real. I mean, I, I just ripped me out
• 30:22
  of this and went right into his arms and.
• 30:25
  You your your whole you could finally like when you're ripped,
• 30:30
  you're finally not being abused, and then you're you're you're
• 30:34
  processing. It's almost like your nervous
• 30:36
  system is like. I was mean as hell.
• 30:40
  I was mean and angry and furious and I left my peers.
• 30:44
  I was working for a visa at the time and I I said, oh, this is
• 30:49
  going to be great. I'm going to be the, you know,
• 30:51
  at the lodge and this is going to be wonderful.
• 30:53
  And so I divorced this, this person that I wasn't healed from
• 30:58
  and I married Ken and there but by the grace of God go I because
• 31:03
  he's such a wonderful human being.
• 31:08
  He taught me about unconditional love and I always thought God
• 31:13
  probably had conditions. You know, I'll I'll look if you
• 31:16
  do this and it's bull crap. OK, so.
• 31:25
  I'm sorry, I can talk. No, this is This is why I have
• 31:29
  guests. I love to just and I'm I'm
• 31:31
  always whenever a guest is talking, there's so many alleys
• 31:36
  we could go down. And in addition to you being on
• 31:41
  a panel episode with Sylvie, because I think it'll be any
• 31:45
  anyone who has gone through what you've gone through, what
• 31:48
  Sylvie's gone through the whole community of women just
• 31:53
  connecting around that. Let me ask you this.
• 31:56
  So you grew up small town Texas was there, and this might sound
• 32:03
  like a a dumb question, but growing up, did you, did you
• 32:09
  ever imagine that you would be in a situation where a man would
• 32:14
  treat you this way? Where did did you have what what
• 32:18
  was your expectation of what your husband one day might be?
• 32:23
  Did you have one? Because I know it.
• 32:27
  I'm just. I'm going to my parents were
• 32:32
  both very, very Type A. My dad went to Blake.
• 32:36
  My dad was boarding school from the time he was 8 years old.
• 32:40
  Worcester Polytech had three engineering degrees.
• 32:44
  So yeah. And mother went to Hockaday and
• 32:49
  then went to Baylor. So they were both boarding
• 32:51
  school kids from, from, you know, the family.
• 32:55
  That was what you did. And my dad was raised on the
• 32:59
  East Coast and came to Texas. He had been given some oil land
• 33:04
  and and came to Texas, met my mom and the rest is history.
• 33:08
  My mom was a Southern Baptist Democrat, my dad was a Northern
• 33:13
  Episcopalian Republican. And both of them driven to the
• 33:17
  gills. My mother integrated the schools
• 33:20
  as a school board member in 1960, so politics were always a
• 33:27
  part of. But all this to say, I was
• 33:29
  raised by these two very type A parents.
• 33:32
  I didn't see a lot of affection. They loved each other to bits.
• 33:39
  They were married for 41 years. My mother preceded my dad and
• 33:43
  death. But my expectation of marriage,
• 33:49
  Oh, let's just say that I was way more interested in 1973 and
• 33:58
  having sex than I was in getting married.
• 34:03
  But when you raised in this proper, prim and proper and my
• 34:07
  family was a family of means and so prim and proper and
• 34:13
  maintaining propriety was the most important thing.
• 34:18
  So I didn't have guardrails or the this Ken and his dad kissed
• 34:24
  each other on the mouth the first time I ever saw these two
• 34:27
  men. His father loved him, loved him
• 34:32
  and Ken, 75 today. So when I saw these two men do
• 34:35
  that, I'd never the only first time my dad told me that he
• 34:40
  loved me was when he was being wheeled into the operating room
• 34:43
  for his quadruple bypass that he didn't survive.
• 34:48
  So not a problem with them. They were just very driven and
• 34:54
  so I didn't have not only did the didn't have guardrails, I
• 34:57
  had no parameters and this guy was the sex was filed.
• 35:04
  Oh, my kids are going to die when they hear this.
• 35:10
  But hey, I it was 1973, the 70s seventy 475 and so and I, my
• 35:18
  mother had said if I ever find birth control pills.
• 35:22
  You're like, you just won't find them, no.
• 35:24
  Right. Yeah.
• 35:25
  Well, but I couldn't because she was a Snoop.
• 35:28
  And so we were having a lot of sex and I knew that I had to do,
• 35:35
  we had to get married, that I couldn't continue to do this.
• 35:39
  So I really kind of pushed him into that.
• 35:41
  He was going through a divorce. He had had an affair.
• 35:44
  He was having an affair with somebody else.
• 35:46
  We met. I wouldn't work for him.
• 35:48
  It was a mistake. But I didn't have I, I, I didn't
• 35:55
  even know what to expect. Did you?
• 35:58
  No, you don't know anything when you don't know anything.
• 36:01
  No, I mean like I, it's like, yeah, you see your parents,
• 36:06
  that's your model, but then you also every generation's
• 36:11
  different. Like I feel like every
• 36:12
  generation is more open and not, not, I'm just saying, I'm not
• 36:15
  saying ours is any better or worse.
• 36:17
  There's more you can go online and be like, how do I, you know,
• 36:22
  5 ideas to surprise my husband? Whereas before, like every,
• 36:26
  everything's available at your fingertips or yeah.
• 36:28
  Or you can get marriage counseling virtually.
• 36:31
  Whereas before it's like, can you even say the word marriage
• 36:34
  counseling? Like, and if you do, like, don't
• 36:37
  tell anyone like, you know, but it's like everything's changed.
• 36:41
  But I remember from a very young age just thinking when you get
• 36:48
  married, like, or when you meet a, a boy, like, all your
• 36:53
  insecurities will go away. Yeah, like anything.
• 36:57
  Rainbow. And I'm like, oh, yeah, when you
• 37:00
  meet the Prince Charming guy, then all your problems vanish.
• 37:04
  And I'm like, oh, they don't. You just have somebody to maybe
• 37:07
  help you through them or add to them if it's not a good person.
• 37:10
  But so, yeah, it's just I asked that because I'm like, I don't
• 37:15
  think anyone, whether they, whether they saw it modeled or
• 37:21
  not, says, man, when I get married, I hope my spouse, you
• 37:25
  know, like shit and abuses me. But I just, you never think that
• 37:30
  you're going to be the one that would allow that, did you?
• 37:33
  You would never think you'd allow that.
• 37:36
  No. And when my father and his best
• 37:40
  friend came and rescued me, one of the many times that they did,
• 37:46
  my father was furious with me because he couldn't, there was
• 37:50
  no, it couldn't. It didn't compute.
• 37:55
  And then when I would go back it he he struggled with it, It made
• 38:02
  him angry. I didn't see it.
• 38:05
  He would say that to me. And it's the same thing that
• 38:08
  happens when people just like the first thing that I usually
• 38:13
  get asked to somebody that's not been through it is why didn't
• 38:18
  you leave? You're really smart.
• 38:20
  You're really beautiful. Why didn't the hell didn't you
• 38:22
  leave? It's not that easy.
• 38:26
  It's not easy at all. And I, I had, I didn't want to
• 38:31
  be a failure. I thought that I was a new
• 38:38
  Christian. I'd been raised in the church.
• 38:42
  Same. I mean same thing except
• 38:43
  Episcopal Church and. Yeah, but like were you really
• 38:46
  like or start to do? No, no.
• 38:49
  No, no. And when I got saved and I went
• 38:53
  to Baylor, I got sent to Baylor because my dad, there were
• 38:55
  guardrails for me having sex. Oh, yes, yes.
• 38:59
  It's like they still had segregated dorms.
• 39:03
  Girls and boys didn't stay in the same dorms.
• 39:05
  So my father was like, no, no choices.
• 39:08
  I was accepted at Sophie Newcomb.
• 39:09
  I was accepted at Vanderbilt. But no, no, no, no, no, no, no
• 39:13
  sewing. You're not going that far away.
• 39:15
  And we're going where? Because they already knew.
• 39:18
  They already knew that I was a wild child and that I had, I
• 39:22
  mean, you know, it is what it is.
• 39:24
  It's and today it is what it is and at least I can be honest
• 39:28
  about it. Not to shock, but to say who if
• 39:32
  not me, who? Who is going to talk about
• 39:35
  things that only I experienced? And it was.
• 39:40
  I wish I had made better choices.
• 39:45
  Sure, I said. As I look at it today, as I
• 39:49
  seriously sit here with you and look at it, I can tell you that
• 39:54
  God had a purpose in all of it. No matter how bad it looks, He
• 40:01
  always knew that I would be a willing vessel, that I would.
• 40:06
  I would because He knows us. We were when we were formed in
• 40:10
  the womb. So He knew me.
• 40:13
  He knew I would be a willing vessel.
• 40:15
  And I can tell you there's a lot of that stuff that I wish I had
• 40:19
  made different choices. But he knew that I would make
• 40:24
  those bad choices, and he knew that at this point in my life,
• 40:28
  never dreaming at 70 years old, I feel 40.
• 40:33
  I've never felt. It's been a long time since I
• 40:36
  felt so alive and so received. Being here with you, the
• 40:44
  receiving of someone else's heart, the the being able to
• 40:49
  tell the story and pray to the good Lord that the book makes it
• 40:55
  into the hands of the people that need it.
• 40:58
  When you had Sam on I, I sent you a note and I told you that
• 41:01
  if you haven't read Scott Peck's book, The People of the Lie,
• 41:06
  it's 1982. I was divorced.
• 41:11
  I was married and living with Ken and my lawyer who'd been a
• 41:15
  business partner. She sent me this book and she
• 41:18
  said, Oh my God, you have to read this book because you're
• 41:22
  going to you're going to know because I told her all these
• 41:26
  stories when I was going through the divorce.
• 41:28
  She finally had to quit representing me because he
• 41:31
  violated her and her space and her family.
• 41:35
  That's a that's the story that's in the book.
• 41:38
  And so when she she sent me this book.
• 41:40
  And so you need it has Scott Peck was doing early work.
• 41:46
  He and Sam are the same ilk or the same time frame.
• 41:50
  And he was doing early work, but he was chronicling clients and
• 41:57
  experiences. So his is naming the thing and
• 42:02
  he's the first one. He may not have been the first
• 42:04
  one. Sam probably was that named
• 42:06
  malignant narcissism. And when I saw it and when I
• 42:10
  read it, I was like, Oh my gosh. But for the first time, I felt
• 42:15
  like I was out of it. And I, I, it was, it was
• 42:21
  wonderful. And I, when I lit, when I listen
• 42:24
  to Sylvie talk to you about, I know that I there's still bumps
• 42:27
  in the road, but some of these bumps have been me having to
• 42:34
  live this again after I had put it aside and shelved it.
• 42:41
  But it's, it's, it's been interesting.
• 42:43
  But it wouldn't have that led me to you, that led me to Sylvie.
• 42:47
  I mean, so God is busy opening doors and I just pray that I'll
• 42:53
  be able to find the donors and the shelters or the what
• 42:57
  wherever, church libraries. But.
• 43:01
  Have to have trauma trained. God hasn't called me to men and
• 43:08
  I know that men experience it. So I'm I'm not I don't mean and
• 43:11
  I meant to tell you from the beginning.
• 43:12
  It's on my note sheet. Yeah, I think like one out of
• 43:16
  three men say they've experienced that's they're very
• 43:18
  like for them to report is even more, you know, it's less
• 43:22
  common, but they're like, you know.
• 43:25
  Well, yeah, so I, I get it. And I just pray that I, I, the
• 43:32
  message that I've gotten from God is there will be people who
• 43:37
  will make sure that the books get in the hands of the shelters
• 43:43
  or the churches. And I just want a woman.
• 43:47
  If there's another book out there, if there's another, if in
• 43:49
  your listening audience, there's other humans that have written
• 43:52
  about their experience and their true life experience so that
• 43:56
  other women could see themselves.
• 43:58
  I I would welcome getting to know them and talking to them.
• 44:03
  And that's I can't. Believe I'm just.
• 44:05
  What? No, this is exactly what it's
• 44:07
  for. Like literally I can already
• 44:10
  think of, by the way, you don't even.
• 44:12
  Well, you know, Sylvie worked at a shelter in Livermore, CA, near
• 44:18
  us in the Bay Area called Shepherd's Gate, and she went to
• 44:22
  volunteer there's and it was funny.
• 44:25
  I was like, Oh my gosh, Sylvie, there's shelters here.
• 44:28
  Where are they? Like you just don't it's, it's
• 44:31
  happening in every community behind closed doors, whether you
• 44:35
  at every income level. Abuse.
• 44:39
  Is going each way abuse is happening.
• 44:42
  It's and you mentioned the circle of your friends how I
• 44:48
  mean there's so many questions I have for you.
• 44:50
  Like what if someone listening right now is like in a situation
• 45:00
  where they any where they're thinking maybe it hasn't even
• 45:06
  gotten physical yet. If it's gotten physical, I think
• 45:09
  that's a pretty clear indication you're being abused if someone's
• 45:11
  putting their hands on you. But do you remember how it
• 45:17
  actually like some of the signs that led that that the moments
• 45:23
  you realized, OK, this is not a healthy connection?
• 45:28
  Oh yeah, and it was early. Very.
• 45:30
  Dating we were dating and we were close to we were talking
• 45:37
  about marriage. His divorce was coming final and
• 45:41
  he had an airplane and he was going back and forth to San
• 45:45
  Antonio and he was still going back and forth to his former
• 45:50
  home where his wife, his ex-wife was.
• 45:52
  And it was just, I mean, this is two or three months in not I
• 45:56
  mean, we were, we were together in the biblical sense and and he
• 46:07
  was still carrying on with other women, his ex-wife, his mistress
• 46:13
  and me. And so one day his mistress
• 46:21
  called and I happened to answer the phone at the business where
• 46:24
  I'd gone to work for him. And when she when I, when she
• 46:30
  answered the phone, I just flat out told her.
• 46:32
  And now at this point, I don't know what he's capable of this
• 46:35
  at this point, I don't know. And I told her, I said I'm
• 46:38
  sleeping with him too. And she asked me to let her
• 46:43
  speak to him. And she told him, buzz off, I'm
• 46:47
  not doing this, whatever. And he came into the office
• 46:52
  where I was and he grabbed me and I had a 14 karat gold watch
• 46:58
  on that my parents had given me for graduation.
• 47:01
  And he just twisted it off my arm and he slapped me.
• 47:07
  He was livid. And some part of me thought I
• 47:12
  deserved it because I had. And he said you triggered me.
• 47:15
  Not in trigger. Wouldn't a word.
• 47:17
  He said you pushed my buttons. That was what we called it back
• 47:20
  then. And at that moment, and at that
• 47:25
  moment, it was for whatever stupid reason that I thought
• 47:34
  after that, that there was going to be anything good come out of
• 47:37
  this relationship. I have three wonderful children,
• 47:41
  but that is it. And when I was going back and
• 47:44
  surveying my life, I cannot tell you.
• 47:49
  I cannot name a good thing. There's no and my my children
• 47:55
  say it. No, two of my children say
• 48:00
  you're wrong. You're making this up you.
• 48:03
  There were happy times, there were good times.
• 48:08
  There were times they didn't live in the bedroom with me.
• 48:11
  They didn't live my life. And I've had a couple of PTSD
• 48:20
  trauma therapists review the book because my children, two of
• 48:26
  my children believe that it's a back of lies and, and, and
• 48:31
  that's difficult, but I'm, I'm not there.
• 48:33
  I'm way past there. But I wanted someone to read
• 48:38
  parts of it to be able to say to me, you are not crazy.
• 48:43
  These are lived experiences. No one could have written this
• 48:47
  with this clarity. Yes, you, you could have a
• 48:51
  writer could have studied and studied and studied and studied
• 48:54
  and tried to replicate this in a novel.
• 48:56
  But this is lived experience. This is breathed experience.
• 49:00
  This is so. But it was because I went back
• 49:03
  to all those old places in me, the old places that said you're
• 49:09
  imagining things. You're you're imagining things.
• 49:12
  OK, that's way off what you asked me.
• 49:15
  No, that is it. You're hitting on I'm nodding
• 49:17
  because everything that you're saying is what people who have
• 49:23
  been abused. You gaslight yourself because so
• 49:29
  you you had initially said people say, gosh, Roseanne, why
• 49:33
  don't you just leave like you are a strong, confident woman.
• 49:36
  It doesn't make sense if somebody is not treating you
• 49:39
  well, you just remove yourself, but they've clearly never been
• 49:44
  in the vicinity of a narcissist because like Sam said on episode
• 49:49
  29, Professor Vaknin, something happens when you're around these
• 49:53
  people where you you, they study you, they learn you and they're
• 50:00
  anytime like you had a quote about like the roses after the
• 50:03
  terror. It's the high highs, the low
• 50:06
  lows and then. The sex afterward.
• 50:10
  The cognitive dissonance where there's there he's beating you
• 50:15
  and then you're at a high, high, sorry, sorry, roses.
• 50:20
  And then it's the it's it's they say what happens in your brain
• 50:23
  is similar. It's like a drug trauma bond.
• 50:28
  It's not just like leave, it's not that simple and.
• 50:33
  And it should have been, it should have been.
• 50:35
  And I had a tremendous support system back then.
• 50:38
  I just didn't. My, my, my experience with love
• 50:45
  was performance because as long as I made fabulous grades, as
• 50:52
  long as I was living up to what, what their what they, what they
• 51:00
  wanted me to be a pharmacist because that was in 1970.
• 51:03
  Whatever the Frick it was, that's going to be how a woman
• 51:07
  can sustain herself and make a living.
• 51:10
  I wanted to go to drama school because I love the stage.
• 51:15
  I wanted the lights. I want to be an actress.
• 51:17
  And it was like, they're like, no, not happening.
• 51:21
  You're going to do this. Well, chemistry, it just didn't
• 51:27
  happen. But instead of but I learned
• 51:29
  that to get love, to get their attention, to get their
• 51:34
  affection, I had to perform. And so one of the things that I,
• 51:38
  I that was hard for me is that I think that I looked at him if I
• 51:42
  just perform a little bit better, if I'll just be nicer, I
• 51:46
  really, I really did at one point love him.
• 51:50
  There's no, I have no doubt about that.
• 51:53
  Yeah. But it didn't, that didn't last
• 51:57
  long. And then it was all about me not
• 51:59
  wanting to be a failure. I have a 80 something year old
• 52:04
  friend that was the wife of my dad's best friend who still
• 52:09
  lives in West, TX. And in my life I felt like that
• 52:15
  she's been critical of some of my choices.
• 52:20
  And so those that whole big bunch of my parents friends I
• 52:24
  steered clear of because my parents had nothing great to say
• 52:26
  about me during this whole thing.
• 52:29
  And he was running cons on them. So they they had lots of reasons
• 52:35
  to not like this person. But she was my first pay.
• 52:40
  I'm cry. She was my first paid subscriber
• 52:43
  on Sub Stack and she did an annual plan and she in her note,
• 52:48
  she says, because this story needs to be told.
• 52:54
  And I thought, holy Jesus, this is vindication.
• 53:00
  It was God saying to me, see, you know, they really saw you
• 53:06
  differently than your parents even saw you.
• 53:09
  And she was talking to me one day and she goes, oh, did you
• 53:15
  know about this person and their drug abuse?
• 53:20
  Oh, my God, no. So she has a whole different
• 53:24
  perspective of my life from where she sat.
• 53:30
  And in her life, she ordered two of the books and she had me
• 53:37
  write a note to somebody else in in the front of one of the
• 53:40
  books. And it's a friend of hers who's
• 53:42
  been through something similar and a surprise to me, but it was
• 53:47
  beautiful that she was the one that I was the most concerned
• 53:51
  about. That would be critical.
• 53:54
  Or tell me that, OK, that wasn't true.
• 53:56
  You don't remember? And yet she's your biggest
• 53:59
  champion, Yeah. And she's wonderful and precious
• 54:03
  and there's a lot of it that she doesn't understand.
• 54:06
  It's really hard for her. That whole group, that age
• 54:09
  group, that 80 something was a different time.
• 54:13
  And exactly what you said is true.
• 54:15
  We they, they become. It's become.
• 54:18
  Yeah. When I what?
• 54:19
  This is so silly when I got my period that my prim and proper
• 54:24
  mother handed me a Kotex box and said the instructions are in the
• 54:28
  box. You're like mom.
• 54:31
  She's. Just like but I had but you.
• 54:33
  Don't talk about it, huh? This is 1968.
• 54:37
  You don't just and no, and she was that was anything that had
• 54:42
  to do with that was, you know, we weren't going to go there.
• 54:46
  We weren't going to talk about it.
• 54:47
  Here's the box. The instructions are inside.
• 54:51
  OK, well, so there was nothing for me.
• 54:57
  If the affection had been there and it hadn't been performance
• 55:00
  based, maybe the pastor that wrote the forward would tell you
• 55:04
  that that's he kept telling me there was a there's a book
• 55:07
  called a performance trap. Do you remember this book?
• 55:11
  It's a nice book. It's like 60s or 70s.
• 55:14
  There's a book called A performance trap.
• 55:15
  That's an old psychology book. And Jimmy would always say,
• 55:20
  Roseanne, you've got to read that book.
• 55:22
  I mean, I'm, he goes, I, I believe your life is all based
• 55:25
  on performance. And I'm like and a real high
• 55:31
  achiever, always wanted to achieve and I so, but some of
• 55:34
  that had to do with what kept me and what you were talking about
• 55:38
  and what Sam said about they, they know.
• 55:45
  They can smell you, the narcissist.
• 55:47
  They're like who is highly empathetic and looking for
• 55:51
  validation. You all right.
• 55:52
  And then the ones that don't need it, yeah, you won't fall
• 55:55
  for my game, so I'm not going to.
• 55:56
  They find the two in the corner that are like.
• 56:02
  Yeah, yeah. And I was that and I was that
• 56:05
  and more. You know, I'm, I'm so thankful
• 56:09
  that God brought me on the other side of it and that I have been
• 56:13
  able to put it down on paper. I believe that my children will
• 56:18
  come around if they don't. This is God's.
• 56:20
  It's not mine. I take no ownership of it.
• 56:24
  I'm it's hard. Holiday season's hard because
• 56:30
  I'm not cut off at the pass and but God has a plan.
• 56:36
  And I've, I've had 70 years. This is where where you are in
• 56:40
  your walk is so important because when you get here, if
• 56:48
  you journal or if you make notes to yourself, your podcast is
• 56:51
  going to be your history to to some degree, yeah.
• 56:55
  But it's so important that you understand that all of this, all
• 57:02
  your experience has been so that you could be in that chair right
• 57:05
  now, so that you could hear hearts, speak to hearts, speak
• 57:12
  to women, speak to people. And it's only going to keep
• 57:18
  going. And when you get to this point,
• 57:19
  you'll look back and see the cinema of your life and and know
• 57:23
  that he had a hand in, he had a hand on you the whole time.
• 57:28
  That is such a cool way to the cinema of your life.
• 57:32
  Like that is thank you for your kind words.
• 57:35
  That that I I feel that way about this podcast, the way you
• 57:40
  feel about your book that like it, this, it comes out of you.
• 57:44
  And then the then, then the world is starting to like
• 57:48
  arrange itself to help more people hearing what what comes
• 57:53
  out of you, which you initially are like what's happening.
• 57:55
  But OK, I, I, I, I, the way you felt compelled to write this.
• 58:01
  I feel compelled to do this. You know, this thing where I'm
• 58:04
  like, and it's it's I love that you are creating a platform
• 58:13
  through your book and through talking about your book to say,
• 58:17
  especially as women, to speak to other women out there who might
• 58:23
  be doing the dishes, walking their dog, doing whatever,
• 58:27
  exercising, listening to this podcast.
• 58:29
  And I'm telling you, when I was going through my situation,
• 58:33
  podcast stories shifted me because I was like, I'm not
• 58:39
  ready to talk about this with everybody.
• 58:41
  But wait, what is this narcissism?
• 58:45
  Oh, shit, wait, what? And then it's just through
• 58:48
  talks. So I'm saying something that
• 58:50
  you're saying right now can trigger someone to tell somebody
• 58:57
  like. Don't you think that narcissism
• 59:00
  and the narcissist word I one of the things that I've learned
• 59:04
  with God is that labeling people is very dangerous and it's it's
• 59:09
  dangerous to me. I don't do it.
• 59:10
  And so I pulled away from the narcissistic label malignant
• 59:15
  narcissist. No, and and it's not a negative.
• 59:17
  It's just that I, I had to pull back from that because I think
• 59:20
  it's overused. And I think that it's, it's,
• 59:28
  it's really so much more than that.
• 59:32
  And we do have to give hopefully people exactly what you're
• 59:36
  saying. People, women, whoever they are
• 59:39
  and wherever they are will hear something that will cause them
• 59:44
  to say I'm not alone because I felt alone.
• 59:49
  And these friends of mine who've come up and, and, and told me
• 59:52
  and one friend who won't even I wanted to do a zoom and blur
• 1:00:00
  everybody and just talk because I have, I, if I don't dominate
• 1:00:05
  the conversation, I felt like that I could pull out of them
• 1:00:08
  and that we could have something tangible.
• 1:00:14
  And one said that that she absolutely wouldn't do it.
• 1:00:17
  She wasn't in a place. But it's taken till I heard you
• 1:00:21
  and Brie that I understood no, she's you and Brie, you and
• 1:00:26
  Sylvie that I understood that she's not there and she's she's
• 1:00:34
  a brilliant, brilliant woman. And I'm I was again just the
• 1:00:42
  people will come out of the woodwork.
• 1:00:44
  They will. But survivors don't, they don't,
• 1:00:47
  they don't comment on posts. So you, you still feel like
• 1:00:51
  you're wandering in the wilderness.
• 1:00:52
  Look at all my posts. Look at all my writing.
• 1:00:54
  No, because you're, you're trying to hide your paper trail.
• 1:00:58
  You know, that's the skunky awful part of this is that
• 1:01:03
  you're it's a constant, somebody said, at least with the name of
• 1:01:07
  the book being Bones, Bones Beneath the Prairie.
• 1:01:11
  If she put a paper back in the bottom of her purse, he might
• 1:01:16
  not see it. Doesn't say tips and tricks.
• 1:01:19
  Oh, right, like if somebody who if a spouse who found the would
• 1:01:23
  be like are you, are you trying to get help from me abusing you?
• 1:01:26
  Yeah, yeah. And and I didn't, didn't think
• 1:01:29
  about that. And there still are no signs on
• 1:01:33
  the bulletin board at church that say abused women this way
• 1:01:36
  or even a you know, so when I was coming up with this, trying
• 1:01:40
  to figure out how to get it into the churches, how do you even
• 1:01:46
  make it available when that's a topic that doesn't get
• 1:01:51
  discussed? I mean, even today, I don't I'm
• 1:01:55
  not in the church. I, we're not Catholic.
• 1:02:00
  So basically where we are in La Paz, that's all that's
• 1:02:04
  available. There's a couple of small
• 1:02:05
  Christian churches, but Ken and I read every day.
• 1:02:08
  We read the Bible every morning. We pray together.
• 1:02:10
  And that's not to sound pious. That's just us.
• 1:02:14
  And that's how we, that's how we connect.
• 1:02:16
  And totally, I just don't, I haven't quite figured out how
• 1:02:23
  God will use it in the church, which for me, that's where it's
• 1:02:29
  needed. I'm it makes me angry because I
• 1:02:32
  know that it's going to be so hard unless God there's a move
• 1:02:37
  of God to allow women to feel safe to talk about it in the
• 1:02:44
  church, because it's a still, it's still a male dominated
• 1:02:49
  entity. And I am all about the
• 1:02:52
  structure. I understand the word, but God
• 1:02:57
  does not approve of this kind of stuff and he doesn't want his
• 1:03:01
  daughters harmed. What happened?
• 1:03:05
  And there's so much that's changed in 30 years.
• 1:03:08
  I can, you know, I can look at you, I can listen to you, I can
• 1:03:12
  listen to Sylvie. And I know that a lot has
• 1:03:14
  changed, but I don't think a lot has changed in the church and
• 1:03:19
  and the church is where and church women of age.
• 1:03:25
  And the Lord talks about that in the Scripture about a woman of
• 1:03:28
  wisdom and a woman in her 80s with her silver hair.
• 1:03:32
  Those are the ones who have the ability to take something like
• 1:03:38
  this in. And because of life experience.
• 1:03:41
  Some of that is just the simple logic or the the that that you
• 1:03:45
  know that you know because you've lived.
• 1:03:46
  Yeah, seen all the stuff. Sure, sure.
• 1:03:50
  And then? No, but I think it's so I
• 1:03:53
  couldn't agree more. Because you, you need not only
• 1:03:58
  just because you've been around, but you develop through all the
• 1:04:03
  all these experiences. Like you literally change and
• 1:04:07
  you see, you go through stuff, you see your friends go through
• 1:04:10
  stuff. I'm glad you made that comment.
• 1:04:11
  I mean, I was raised Catholic, obviously very male dominated.
• 1:04:15
  And then IA couple episodes talked about like, you know, the
• 1:04:18
  things I thought were, were good and the things I thought were
• 1:04:21
  kind of like, I'm like, this is not for me.
• 1:04:25
  And I'm, I'm like a little I'm a little way too extroverted for
• 1:04:29
  this. But you know, I went through, I
• 1:04:31
  was baptized everything. And then I'm being sort of born
• 1:04:34
  again. I am all about now I'm studying
• 1:04:40
  the word. Women play a big role in he
• 1:04:44
  appears huge. First he I'm like, OK,
• 1:04:49
  interesting, didn't learn that growing up.
• 1:04:53
  And he used them in mighty ways. I I believe at this point that
• 1:05:06
  that God is raising up a mighty army of women warriors who are
• 1:05:12
  willing to step out into the mire and step out into the fire
• 1:05:16
  and say to hell with it of you, Lord, and I will be a willing
• 1:05:22
  vessel. I will be clay in your hands and
• 1:05:25
  I will go do. And when you start living this
• 1:05:29
  life that you're I mean this road that you're on, it is a
• 1:05:33
  hell of a lot of fun. He is so much fun and he he is
• 1:05:40
  so much fun and there's so many surprises.
• 1:05:44
  I can remember walking by people in the height of one of my
• 1:05:48
  charismatic lives and walk in a restaurant and him saying just
• 1:05:54
  walk by that person in the restaurant and put your hand on
• 1:05:57
  it. And I was all about it.
• 1:05:59
  Yep. And he said just pray, just walk
• 1:06:02
  by and tap them and just pray. And I mean, it was we were in a
• 1:06:05
  like a cafeteria. I'll do it all and I'm not
• 1:06:09
  afraid of it. But I went through a 20 year
• 1:06:11
  period of time that I was sort of like, I sinned deliberately.
• 1:06:16
  I said square to your face, God, no, I'm going to do this.
• 1:06:21
  I'm going to walk straight into this adulterous situation and
• 1:06:27
  I'm just going to do it. I know it's not right.
• 1:06:29
  I'm going to do it anyway. And then I thought he could
• 1:06:31
  never use me again. And I think that's the other
• 1:06:34
  biggest message of the book is look at all the crap that I've
• 1:06:39
  walked through and if God can use me, Oh my goodness, those of
• 1:06:44
  you who haven't had walked through some of this garbage, he
• 1:06:47
  can really use you. And he will if you'll if you'll
• 1:06:52
  let him and be available to it. This is a re rebirth for me too,
• 1:06:59
  Bree. It's it's this wonderful feeling
• 1:07:01
  that you know that he's moving inside of you and he's living
• 1:07:04
  and breathing and he's an Organism.
• 1:07:06
  And you I have I had hope, but this is different.
• 1:07:12
  This is youthful. This is invigorating.
• 1:07:14
  This is if I were to die tomorrow, I would die so happy
• 1:07:18
  and so peaceful and so joyous to be in his arms, but also to know
• 1:07:23
  that I stepped out and did what he asked me to do at the end.
• 1:07:27
  That's. Beautiful.
• 1:07:28
  They weren't afraid to say tell your story to like you said,
• 1:07:37
  just be real, right? That's that.
• 1:07:43
  And you say you feel so invigorated and like he's like,
• 1:07:46
  that's how I feel. And it's, I think there's
• 1:07:51
  something about after you come out of a situation where like
• 1:07:57
  you were abused in some way and to different degrees, whether
• 1:08:00
  it's emotional, physical, and you make it through and you come
• 1:08:05
  out and then you realize there's like a freedom in.
• 1:08:09
  I think before when you're like in an abusive situation, you're
• 1:08:12
  so cautious about how to be and how to like avoid land mines,
• 1:08:17
  right? Like, yeah, just don't like
• 1:08:19
  you're not going to win with fun.
• 1:08:20
  Just be quiet. And then when you're out of that
• 1:08:24
  and you have a good circle around you, you're like.
• 1:08:29
  I can, I can. Say whatever the fuck I want
• 1:08:32
  like I'm not going to get in trouble.
• 1:08:34
  Like they want me to say what I want because they're not trying
• 1:08:39
  to control me. This is amazing.
• 1:08:42
  And then by the way, if people don't like it, that's fine.
• 1:08:44
  But I got my crew and nobody's like trying to control me.
• 1:08:47
  It's beautiful. I loved your story about the
• 1:08:51
  wackadoodles, the. I kept saying because, yeah,
• 1:08:55
  you. Didn't call.
• 1:08:55
  That's not what you said. I don't I.
• 1:08:56
  Think I did the wackadoodles like I used to think, Yeah.
• 1:09:00
  Because those of us who've done this and who have get
• 1:09:04
  electrified by him moving can be real wackadoodles and can, can
• 1:09:11
  'cause people that have been OK, Episcopalians cast Lutherans,
• 1:09:16
  Presbyterians. And you see this woman that's
• 1:09:20
  there's, there's nothing in this world like going to a black
• 1:09:24
  church. Nothing, nothing.
• 1:09:26
  The gospel. Oh, just oh, and the whole and
• 1:09:29
  they're so real and they're so alive and they're.
• 1:09:32
  So when my mom was integrating the schools, so amazing, my dad
• 1:09:37
  has this, there were only six children.
• 1:09:39
  Let's don't I mean. But but still like right?
• 1:09:43
  And our house got egged and my dad, OK, here's this blue blood,
• 1:09:48
  highly educated human being, and he's horrified because my mother
• 1:09:52
  is stepping out into it. I mean she.
• 1:09:55
  Right, she's running the boat. 00 Oh, in the men in this little
• 1:09:59
  country town. Oh, they don't.
• 1:10:02
  She was. But.
• 1:10:02
  But 1960 just you have to really go go back there and I forgot
• 1:10:08
  where that that story was going, something that just went, what
• 1:10:12
  were we talking about? Because it was important.
• 1:10:14
  Oh, you're oh, where are we going?
• 1:10:19
  I must not have been that. No, no, I don't know.
• 1:10:22
  Well anyway, I know that. Oh, the just the Spirit.
• 1:10:26
  Oh yes, the wackadoodles. When you, if you go walk into
• 1:10:31
  when we were little and here's my dad.
• 1:10:33
  So just think about your education.
• 1:10:35
  And here's this man who has all these degrees and he's very prim
• 1:10:39
  and proper. And my mother would drag him to
• 1:10:41
  the black church on Sundays because she she was out to prove
• 1:10:45
  a point, right. So we would go and and I was a
• 1:10:49
  little bitty kid and it was like amazing and how.
• 1:10:54
  Much energy. And when and when I was going
• 1:10:57
  through 1 charismatic phase that I had a friend who was walking a
• 1:11:02
  female who was walking in ministry and excuse me, and she
• 1:11:05
  was walking in a black ministry. Oh my God.
• 1:11:08
  We'd, I mean, we were on the floor, we were rolling around
• 1:11:12
  and it was, I mean, it sounds Cray Cray, but we had a blast.
• 1:11:19
  Don't knock it till you try it. No, no.
• 1:11:22
  And so you're just fixing to walk into all these experiences
• 1:11:26
  and some of it is so false. I'm not, I'm making, but some of
• 1:11:30
  it is so false. And you have to be able to
• 1:11:32
  discern the difference. And I walked in some stuff that
• 1:11:36
  was really false. And so I'm not going to deny
• 1:11:38
  that. But he's still use me and he's
• 1:11:43
  going to use you in a eighty way.
• 1:11:46
  You just get ready, girl. You are like so making me so
• 1:11:51
  excited because when you say that when and anyone who's been
• 1:11:55
  listening to the podcast for the past, maybe like four or five
• 1:11:58
  episodes fade exactly, it's creeped its way in.
• 1:12:01
  And now I'm like, it wasn't the intention.
• 1:12:04
  Like I didn't even have a close relationship with God when I
• 1:12:06
  started it. And then it he was like knocking
• 1:12:08
  on my door. And now he's like front and
• 1:12:10
  center. But he was very patient.
• 1:12:13
  He's like, can I can I mean your logo now?
• 1:12:14
  And I'm like, yes, yes, where was I going with that?
• 1:12:20
  I don't even know how. Did you name the program stop?
• 1:12:24
  I want to know. What I was honestly, I was
• 1:12:29
  sitting well, I was at I was at a Christmas party.
• 1:12:33
  I'd had a one too many and I told my friend Sheeta that I
• 1:12:37
  wanted to start a podcast two years ago.
• 1:12:40
  She ended up leaving a microphone on my doorstep a
• 1:12:42
  couple days later. Coolest person ever.
• 1:12:45
  But the name that I actually, when I first adventures in
• 1:12:53
  adversity it, it kind of came as like a little download where I
• 1:12:57
  was like adventures and but I remember thinking like, Oh,
• 1:13:00
  let's this is not good. Like it's lame.
• 1:13:03
  Like people. When I would say it, I'd always
• 1:13:06
  kind of it was just like I felt like I was trying too hard.
• 1:13:10
  And now of course I've stepped into it.
• 1:13:12
  But it did kind of feel like when you said you someone,
• 1:13:18
  something said like put your hand on the shoulder in the
• 1:13:20
  cafeteria. It felt like do a podcast
• 1:13:22
  Adventures in adversity. Here's the microphone.
• 1:13:24
  I'm like, oh, OK, like, but not really knowing.
• 1:13:29
  Like when you're writing like, I don't even know how to do this.
• 1:13:32
  You know, and you and you. And so with your background,
• 1:13:37
  this is what was funny when I was hearing you talk about what
• 1:13:40
  you did in the world. Are you still doing that in the
• 1:13:43
  world? And.
• 1:13:45
  Still have a job? Yes, yes I do.
• 1:13:48
  But with that experience, adventures and in adversity.com
• 1:13:53
  is way the hell too long for a.com.
• 1:13:56
  I know, I know. I saw it.
• 1:13:58
  I thought, oh, this has to be gone because.
• 1:14:02
  I'm like, I look at it in adversity.
• 1:14:04
  I'm like, it's long. I don't even know what like.
• 1:14:06
  And then I remember thinking like I I just, it's been such a
• 1:14:12
  it's just really interesting. It almost feels like when you're
• 1:14:17
  at the lowest of low, you have no idea.
• 1:14:21
  And when everyone tells you like you'll come out of it and like
• 1:14:25
  and you're like, what are you talking about?
• 1:14:26
  How am I possibly going to come out of this?
• 1:14:28
  I feel awful. And like then you look up and
• 1:14:31
  these people have come into your life for these things happen.
• 1:14:33
  But let me ask you this when you were at the lowest of the low, I
• 1:14:39
  know you're obviously in a great place now.
• 1:14:42
  And do you remember if anyone listening is going through those
• 1:14:48
  abusive situations? Like, do you remember what you
• 1:14:52
  were holding on to or what kind of carried you through some of
• 1:14:55
  those really dark moments or things you would say to yourself
• 1:14:58
  to keep going? I prayed, I mean, I had, I was a
• 1:15:05
  new Christian, new at 1981, I think is when I was actually
• 1:15:11
  really saved. And I, I had AI had been
• 1:15:16
  involved in charismatic churches and in this Baptist Church where
• 1:15:20
  I'd worked. And so I had core beliefs.
• 1:15:25
  And so I just kept thinking I had made a vow.
• 1:15:29
  And of course you don't have anybody to talk to.
• 1:15:32
  So because you're not telling, right?
• 1:15:34
  And so I made a vow to God. I love God, I love Jesus.
• 1:15:40
  This is really good. I need to try to figure out how
• 1:15:43
  to be better. When I would go to therapy,
• 1:15:46
  which we did for 12 years, Bri, we went to therapy for 12 years
• 1:15:52
  and he would never let me talk about the bruises, right?
• 1:15:56
  And so this therapist, when I would go on days by myself and I
• 1:16:00
  was bruised and I would somehow indicate to him is Christian.
• 1:16:06
  It was Christian therapy, but he was a licensed psychotherapist.
• 1:16:13
  But I would even go down that road of, you know, there might
• 1:16:16
  be a bruise on my leg or can I show you something?
• 1:16:19
  And he would stop me because in Texas at that point they had to
• 1:16:23
  report it and I the court system is rigged in my opinion against
• 1:16:28
  women in these situations. My husband, my ex-husband was
• 1:16:33
  pro SE represented himself and he screwed me and tattooed me
• 1:16:37
  and used every. I was going about it with
• 1:16:41
  lawyers and with what money I had And he, he knew how to game
• 1:16:46
  the system because he was a gamer and a con man and.
• 1:16:49
  He would use the legal system. Yeah, And he would tell the
• 1:16:52
  judge, oh, she burned that down. She she burned those boxes up
• 1:16:56
  she came and hook, line and sinker and hook, line and
• 1:17:00
  sinker. And I never had a way to say it.
• 1:17:05
  And I there has to be some sort of equalizing.
• 1:17:09
  And I know that there's a movement afoot right now to try.
• 1:17:12
  There's a lot of women who are very unhappy with the core
• 1:17:15
  system because in family court it is really not fair to women
• 1:17:21
  who have come through the especially this kind of trauma
• 1:17:24
  and lived through it. And it's I knew the day that he,
• 1:17:30
  the, the lowest of the low was the night that he hit me with
• 1:17:34
  the bedpost and we had this huge 4 poster bed with these 4 foot
• 1:17:39
  mahogany. You know, the bed was 4 feet and
• 1:17:42
  then the the post was 4 feet off the ground.
• 1:17:45
  And he took it off and he laid into me and my kids came
• 1:17:50
  downstairs. And I think it was probably the
• 1:17:51
  first time that they'd ever heard us that it had ever gone
• 1:17:56
  beyond those doors. So I had high school age and one
• 1:17:59
  junior high, and they came downstairs and I was clawing and
• 1:18:07
  fighting and scrapping and I didn't care if I killed him.
• 1:18:11
  And I knew at that moment in my heart that one of us was going
• 1:18:16
  to die. I, I can honestly say I knew I
• 1:18:19
  was going to die or one of us. And because I was not opposed to
• 1:18:24
  killing him at that point, I thought, I'm not doing this.
• 1:18:28
  I'm not I'm done. I, I don't know what your
• 1:18:32
  problem is. And it was always the biggest
• 1:18:37
  danger with this human is confrontation or integrity are
• 1:18:44
  naming a thing that they did and his was this he was deeply
• 1:18:53
  involved in really scary porn. And here's this church member.
• 1:19:02
  How am I going to tell a pastor? How am I going to tell this man
• 1:19:05
  that I work for and that I love that these videotapes are in my
• 1:19:09
  closet and y'all are coming over here and having prayer group.
• 1:19:13
  I mean, it was, I was so EFTA, my brain was so scrambled and I
• 1:19:23
  not anymore. And I never ever thought that I
• 1:19:30
  would tell this story. But it's important and it's
• 1:19:35
  important. The lowest of the low was when I
• 1:19:37
  knew that one of us was going to die.
• 1:19:40
  And the only thing I had left was prayer.
• 1:19:42
  And this man out in the wings who was his best friend, who he
• 1:19:46
  would have never risked exposure to ever.
• 1:19:50
  And when I'm telling this man this whole thing, this is his
• 1:19:54
  best friend from childhood, they went through the Jesus movement
• 1:19:57
  together for pity's sake. And he was like, and they didn't
• 1:20:02
  have trauma training back then, right?
• 1:20:04
  There's no PTSD. This is 35 years ago, 40 years
• 1:20:07
  ago. And he was like. 30 years ago
• 1:20:11
  and he was like, you know this this, this sounds like lived
• 1:20:16
  experience. Are you sure?
• 1:20:18
  Are you going through the change?
• 1:20:21
  Have you had a breakdown? Are you having a breakdown?
• 1:20:24
  I mean this their logical things.
• 1:20:27
  This is not a man that he recognizes.
• 1:20:29
  My stepdaughter would tell you that this isn't the man that
• 1:20:32
  raised. It's like they can't people that
• 1:20:35
  they can't accept it. No, and it's hard because they
• 1:20:40
  they didn't see it. They have to admit, like they
• 1:20:43
  say with the flying monk or the people that won't admit it
• 1:20:45
  because they have to admit that they missed something.
• 1:20:48
  They somehow can't say that, you know so.
• 1:20:52
  And I would just like for women to be able to speak up, go find
• 1:20:58
  a woman, find a woman that has authority, especially in the
• 1:21:03
  word. If I hadn't had prayer, if I
• 1:21:05
  hadn't had the word, if I hadn't had that holding on to him and
• 1:21:12
  believing that something that I would get out of it, that I
• 1:21:17
  would escape, that I could escape.
• 1:21:19
  And I left without my children. I left.
• 1:21:21
  I, he, he went to the lake one weekend and I packed a Ford
• 1:21:27
  Excursion and it was this giant monstrosity of a vehicle and I
• 1:21:32
  loaded it with my bulldog and everything that I owned and a
• 1:21:36
  computer and a desk and a chair, everything so that I could stay
• 1:21:40
  connected to the work that I was doing.
• 1:21:42
  And I left and I left without my children.
• 1:21:47
  And I, that's the second question that I get asked.
• 1:21:51
  Leaving isn't neat Leaving. Leaving is what it is and
• 1:21:57
  everybody just needs to get over it because.
• 1:22:01
  Nothing about. Leaving is what it is, and my
• 1:22:03
  kids, even today, you know. Why did you do that?
• 1:22:06
  Why did we trusted you? Why did why did he do that?
• 1:22:11
  Like why did like you know, it's when you're being abused.
• 1:22:18
  I can't see how the ending would be anything but awful if even
• 1:22:22
  getting out because the abuser will make sure that it's naughty
• 1:22:26
  or Oh, excuse me, Mr. OK. Oh, OK.
• 1:22:31
  Hold on. He he he agrees.
• 1:22:33
  Hold on, Boba. He must.
• 1:22:40
  He smells cooking. No, it's and you know, and I saw
• 1:22:44
  that you like a lot of people ask.
• 1:22:47
  Yeah, why doesn't, why don't, why doesn't he just leave?
• 1:22:51
  Why doesn't she just leave? And it's most of the time the
• 1:22:55
  she and my she not wanting to leave was I had a beautiful 5000
• 1:23:02
  square foot home. I had all the stuff which in
• 1:23:08
  hindsight was a downfall, but back then, and it's probably
• 1:23:14
  this way today too. Yeah, you.
• 1:23:16
  I have a friend who said who? A sister, a prayer sister at the
• 1:23:20
  very end who said who? I told who said you must leave,
• 1:23:24
  you must go to a shelter right now, are you?
• 1:23:27
  You're like, hold. On Hello.
• 1:23:30
  I just just take a minute. Yeah, I'm not going to a shelter
• 1:23:34
  because that to me was poverty. Yeah.
• 1:23:38
  And it's not. It's so far.
• 1:23:40
  It's so far from the truth. But the but that's.
• 1:23:42
  The reality of what you think. Yeah, right.
• 1:23:45
  And, and you don't, you don't want that for your children.
• 1:23:48
  You don't want that for yourself.
• 1:23:49
  You want to try to figure out how you can manage this.
• 1:23:52
  But if I had stayed, he would have killed me.
• 1:23:55
  And because he was so close and he was so angry, he was having
• 1:23:59
  an affair. He was having an affair.
• 1:24:04
  And we went to counseling and he told the IT was a husband and
• 1:24:09
  wife counseling team at a pastoral center and he told them
• 1:24:14
  that he was leading her to Christ and that they couldn't
• 1:24:19
  stop monkeying around because he would lose her to Christ.
• 1:24:26
  And so I had the receipts by this time I had the credit cards
• 1:24:32
  because he just said then he told them no, it's over with.
• 1:24:37
  So the night that the bed pust happened is I had the receipts,
• 1:24:40
  I had the cell phone records, I had the and I laid it out on the
• 1:24:44
  bed because I finally decided I was going to confront it
• 1:24:49
  regardless of the consequences. But I really didn't think.
• 1:24:53
  You didn't think that was going to?
• 1:24:55
  Happen. Did you what Whatever your
• 1:24:57
  consequences were when you did the confrontation, I mean, they
• 1:25:01
  are shocking people. You actually don't.
• 1:25:05
  When you confront A narcissist, you think, well, we're just
• 1:25:09
  gonna like talk about because like, it's right here.
• 1:25:13
  You have the thing. But then.
• 1:25:17
  The group. Or three, right?
• 1:25:22
  I'm so sorry that this all happened to you.
• 1:25:25
  I, I should have been much earlier.
• 1:25:27
  I know you're OK now, but it's just, you know, it's just wild
• 1:25:33
  to me how how this just happens to people and you just, it does,
• 1:25:40
  but it's just. But we're rising up and we're
• 1:25:44
  giving voice to it. What you're doing is giving
• 1:25:47
  voice to it. It's giving a witness to it.
• 1:25:50
  It's giving a reality to people who've never been able to say it
• 1:25:56
  out loud. If I had ever seen a book, if
• 1:25:59
  anybody had ever handed me anything that I could have read,
• 1:26:03
  this woman went through this. And even if it been similar, at
• 1:26:07
  least I could have said I'm not crazy.
• 1:26:11
  That's. Losing my mind?
• 1:26:13
  I'm not. And because I know that you
• 1:26:15
  thought you were crazy. Oh, I thought I was like,
• 1:26:18
  because I would when we wouldn't get into arguments, she would
• 1:26:21
  actually say that never happened.
• 1:26:24
  You're imagining things. And I'd be like, what?
• 1:26:26
  And I and I would, I'd go, what are you talking about?
• 1:26:30
  And then I'd be like, wait, she said that.
• 1:26:34
  Fuck, but I don't know you, you said that and then, oh, here we
• 1:26:40
  go again. And you're like, no, like, and
• 1:26:42
  then you're like, forget it. And then you actually, because
• 1:26:45
  there's, it's so up and down you, you have start to have
• 1:26:47
  memory issues. It's a CPTSD thing where you're
• 1:26:50
  like, it's the gaslighting. And then it's just a, when
• 1:26:58
  you're confused, you're easier to manipulate And you know, God,
• 1:27:02
  I didn't know this until like 6 months ago that God doesn't
• 1:27:06
  speak. God doesn't create confusion.
• 1:27:08
  He's not a God of chaos ever. Never been the God of chaos,
• 1:27:12
  never ever. So and that should be the first
• 1:27:15
  indicator he it wasn't. I didn't realize, honestly, and
• 1:27:25
  all that I'd read, I didn't realize that he didn't want me
• 1:27:32
  not to be harmed. That's weird.
• 1:27:35
  But I didn't see anywhere in there that it said it just
• 1:27:41
  didn't occur to me. Yeah, I I guess I thought that
• 1:27:45
  he thought it was OK and I needed to work it out or I
• 1:27:48
  needed to get better or I needed to be better or I needed to grow
• 1:27:51
  or I needed to be this person. But it wasn't.
• 1:27:54
  That wasn't truth. That was false theology.
• 1:27:58
  And it, it's harmful. And I don't think that I'm alone
• 1:28:02
  even today, these women that have told me that they're,
• 1:28:06
  they're only one of them is even close to my age.
• 1:28:10
  The other ones are younger. And and the one that I told you
• 1:28:13
  is brilliant. This is a scholar.
• 1:28:17
  This is someone that did it just shocked me to my core when she
• 1:28:21
  told me. And I I can see some of her and
• 1:28:28
  her her background, knowing some of her background, that she just
• 1:28:33
  wanted to make it right. She she didn't want her family
• 1:28:37
  destroyed. She wanted to figure out a way
• 1:28:39
  to love this man so that everything would be better.
• 1:28:44
  And if I just love better if I just let him know.
• 1:28:47
  Yeah. And that was sort of the message
• 1:28:49
  from the church when this kind of stuff.
• 1:28:50
  Because then what? I don't want to talk about this.
• 1:28:53
  Yeah. Just.
• 1:28:55
  You can't love a narcissist and to heal, you can't there,
• 1:28:59
  there's no like you know what, there's some one liners from Sam
• 1:29:03
  Bachman's interview that I'm just I'll remember forever.
• 1:29:07
  He said narcissists. It's a it's a it's an absence
• 1:29:14
  masquerading as a presence like and their goal with you is to
• 1:29:19
  completely annihilate who you are.
• 1:29:22
  So they just use you to kind of there's no if you're truly have
• 1:29:26
  narcissistic personality disorder, you got to get out.
• 1:29:29
  They're not. They need Jesus in a different.
• 1:29:31
  There's nothing you can actually do.
• 1:29:35
  No, there's a really good book that's also from like 19.
• 1:29:42
  Oh gosh, it's so probably 197879 called Violence Against Women
• 1:29:48
  and a when this first started happening, I went to a Baptist
• 1:29:54
  Church. So this is I went to an
• 1:29:56
  Episcopal Church first. Oh, this is hilarious.
• 1:29:58
  You're going to just love this because you're the very
• 1:30:00
  Catholic, right? Yes, I'm a guilty Catholic.
• 1:30:04
  So yeah, born again. We no children.
• 1:30:08
  We've been married a couple years and he just beat the crap
• 1:30:11
  out of me and I didn't want to tell my family.
• 1:30:14
  And I believe Jesus, right? So and I'm and I'm, but I'm
• 1:30:18
  Episcopalian. So I go to the church by myself
• 1:30:23
  and I go and I kneel and I start praying and I'm sitting there
• 1:30:26
  thinking, please, Lord Jesus, let the priest come in.
• 1:30:29
  I need somebody to talk to. And it was the priest that
• 1:30:33
  married us. And you back then you couldn't
• 1:30:36
  get married to a divorced person in the Episcopal Church unless
• 1:30:40
  it was approved by the Bishop. So the Bishop had approved and
• 1:30:44
  this was now fixing to be the new Bishop.
• 1:30:45
  But he was the pastor and he was like, why are you here in the
• 1:30:51
  And I'm in the sanctuary right on my knees and because.
• 1:30:55
  Jesus said the people. Jesus said the people that are
• 1:30:58
  kneeling and. Crying, Yeah.
• 1:30:59
  But different from Catholicism, Episcopalians don't go, go and
• 1:31:04
  kneel. They're kind of pretty private
• 1:31:05
  about, you know, they're stuck. And he came in and I can
• 1:31:09
  remember telling him what had happened.
• 1:31:14
  And he said, oh, you need to go to therapy, you need to get a
• 1:31:17
  counselor. I mean, I'm not equipped.
• 1:31:20
  I this isn't you need to go. And it took me till.
• 1:31:25
  You had your toddler with you and you had a you were no.
• 1:31:27
  Had no. Children.
• 1:31:28
  No. Oh, this was none.
• 1:31:30
  There's no other part. This is before children left and
• 1:31:33
  I, I it took me a long time to forgive him when I went through
• 1:31:38
  because I thought you asshole. You're supposed to help me.
• 1:31:43
  You are supposed to have the hand of God, the heart of God.
• 1:31:47
  You're supposed to reach into a place.
• 1:31:49
  But Oh my God, no, we don't want this going on.
• 1:31:52
  You know, we can't. We can't.
• 1:31:54
  Oh, Lord. And she's from a prominent
• 1:31:56
  family. And what's going to happen?
• 1:31:58
  And no, we're not going there. And it was so wrong.
• 1:32:05
  There were so many missteps along the way.
• 1:32:07
  But God had a plan. And God knew that at this point
• 1:32:12
  that I would be his vessel and that I would hopefully help
• 1:32:16
  someone else see themselves in these circumstances and be able
• 1:32:20
  to say there are people out there that want to help.
• 1:32:23
  I, I am in a whole bunch of the narcissist and survivor groups
• 1:32:29
  on Facebook. Can I just say that there's a
• 1:32:34
  lot of hurting people in those groups that aren't healed and
• 1:32:36
  lead them and they shouldn't be And hello and.
• 1:32:39
  There's some, yeah. And.
• 1:32:40
  Pull out. No, And and Sam Bachman talks
• 1:32:44
  about that too, that like it's not all like in every space in
• 1:32:48
  church and and you got to like be careful who you're listening
• 1:32:52
  to and who's like in it to just get all this attention And who
• 1:32:55
  really wants you to get out of victimhood and move on to like
• 1:33:01
  survivor, not just like dwell in the, you know what I mean?
• 1:33:04
  And there's a whole lot of dwelling in the and I sound like
• 1:33:08
  I'm dwelling, but no, no, you're talking we're.
• 1:33:11
  Talking you're saying like, but no, it's it those there's so
• 1:33:17
  many people hurting and they're like looking for when you're in
• 1:33:22
  the depths of it, you're like, you need a reality.
• 1:33:25
  You have no sense of reality because they're they're your
• 1:33:28
  reality. Sam Bachtman says they the
• 1:33:32
  narcissist becomes your reality tester.
• 1:33:35
  So you actually don't, you actually don't know what's going
• 1:33:39
  on somehow. And people are like, oh, why
• 1:33:41
  don't you just leave? You're like, because I couldn't
• 1:33:44
  see straight or I didn't understand and I didn't know
• 1:33:47
  what narcissistic abuse was. And I wanted him to love me.
• 1:33:53
  I wanted to be loved. And I, I some of that, I've come
• 1:33:56
  to that. That was real important to me.
• 1:33:59
  I wanted to be loved. And once I lost my parents, that
• 1:34:03
  was, and I was young, I was younger than you are and I had
• 1:34:07
  lost both my parents. And that's a tough place.
• 1:34:10
  When they had been your support system, I mean, they had offered
• 1:34:15
  support. They had offered.
• 1:34:16
  We'll get you and the children out of it.
• 1:34:19
  Many years ago, many years ago, before he moved us to the city,
• 1:34:25
  when we were still living in the same town with my parents, my
• 1:34:31
  mom and dad came to me and said he's going to kill you and those
• 1:34:34
  kids. And I was like, oh, for Pete's
• 1:34:38
  sake, no, he's going to kill you.
• 1:34:41
  And we're going to get those kids.
• 1:34:44
  We're going to take those kids away from you, Roseanne, if you
• 1:34:46
  don't think about leaving him because he's going to kill you
• 1:34:52
  and I'm like, he's going to kill me.
• 1:34:55
  He's just a shit, you know, he's just mean.
• 1:35:01
  And when I saw the picture of him yesterday or day before,
• 1:35:04
  whenever this when I was doing my trolling, he's his image to
• 1:35:13
  me was the devil Incarnate. His everything about his he has
• 1:35:20
  he has dementia. So but I haven't seen him in
• 1:35:27
  years. And, and it was shocking to me
• 1:35:31
  and, and I can't say that I was sad, but it was, it was the
• 1:35:44
  realization that I, I have a lot of discernment and why I
• 1:35:54
  couldn't discern that is, is, I mean, it's just only by God and
• 1:35:59
  only by God that I survived it. And I'm now into repeating a
• 1:36:03
  whole lot of stuff. Sorry.
• 1:36:04
  No, I think honestly, I had a thought the other day that like
• 1:36:08
  when you said you're ready to be used as a vessel and the book.
• 1:36:12
  And for me, it's like the podcast and just all of a sudden
• 1:36:18
  stepping into this role where I'm like, I want to advocate for
• 1:36:23
  for men and women who are quote UN quote voiceless, meaning
• 1:36:28
  maybe they just can't speak up or they're too scared or they
• 1:36:32
  just are like, listen, I don't have a podcast, but can I like
• 1:36:34
  have can you talk about it so that people know about abuse?
• 1:36:37
  I'm willing to talk and I'm like, all of a sudden I'm like,
• 1:36:40
  what is this whole thing? And I and I was walking the
• 1:36:43
  other day and actually started like crying on my walk, happy
• 1:36:47
  cry because I go. I had like a download and it was
• 1:36:51
  from I'm starting to learn like what's from God because it's
• 1:36:54
  very clear. It was like.
• 1:36:56
  It is clear I needed. You to feel what what
• 1:37:00
  narcissistic abuse is before you could like help people through
• 1:37:04
  it. And then I was like, wait, what?
• 1:37:07
  Why would you? And then my first thought was,
• 1:37:09
  why would you want me to feel that?
• 1:37:11
  And then I was like, but I if that's what I'm hearing that I
• 1:37:16
  trust you because I'm out of it. And that would make sense
• 1:37:20
  because I'm enjoying this now. But OK, maybe maybe I'm seeing a
• 1:37:25
  purpose to this even though I'm so pissed that that happened,
• 1:37:29
  but OK. Like I'm starting to be like, I
• 1:37:35
  would be a better podcast host if I knew what that felt like.
• 1:37:38
  Yep. So, and I, it's just I'm
• 1:37:40
  starting to, I'm starting to hear things where I'm like, is
• 1:37:42
  that you or is that me? When you, when you step into
• 1:37:47
  your anointing, which is where you are, what you just said is
• 1:37:54
  the purpose for you, and that is giving a voice to the voiceless.
• 1:37:58
  These are heavy. These are heavy, heavy, heavy
• 1:38:01
  subjects and you have to guard your heart.
• 1:38:05
  You personally, I'm speaking right to you.
• 1:38:08
  You have to guard your heart. You have to find the joy yeah,
• 1:38:13
  don't let this get claw its way into your being.
• 1:38:18
  All of us that are unloading and that you're allowing to unload
• 1:38:21
  and I I really pray for your protection, enlightenment, your
• 1:38:29
  joy, your peace. You have it.
• 1:38:32
  You're just have peace and spades all over you.
• 1:38:36
  It's just like and, and the, the fire in your belly, the fire in
• 1:38:44
  your belly is just, it's contagious.
• 1:38:49
  It's it's like being enveloped in this wonderful human being.
• 1:38:55
  And I'm so tickled for you. And I don't believe God could
• 1:38:58
  have chose chosen could have chosen a better person.
• 1:39:05
  And he has he's planned this. This is you're the plan.
• 1:39:09
  You're part of the big plan. And I just think that the
• 1:39:12
  podcast is going to do nothing but grow.
• 1:39:15
  And I think there's going to be some sideways that you go when
• 1:39:19
  you're searching for direction because this is, man, I wouldn't
• 1:39:24
  want to talk about this all day every day.
• 1:39:26
  I mean, can you see how you can just get back in the mire?
• 1:39:30
  And so part of me wanting to be lighthearted, these subjects are
• 1:39:35
  really icky picky and awful and horrible.
• 1:39:41
  But I don't want anybody to go down into the bottom with me
• 1:39:44
  because I'm not there anymore. And I want them to be lifted out
• 1:39:48
  of the bottom. And I know that if I were there,
• 1:39:53
  I would be holding your hands and I would be saying shut this
• 1:39:57
  thing off because I'm just dying to pray for you.
• 1:40:00
  So I will pray for you from afar.
• 1:40:03
  Yes, we we're going to do what we're going to have to do is
• 1:40:08
  we're going to have to do an in person in studio panel with you,
• 1:40:12
  me. That would be fun.
• 1:40:14
  That would be amazing. And thank you for saying these
• 1:40:17
  things because I, I feel like it's such an honor to be doing
• 1:40:24
  this and hearing this. And honestly, like the heaviness
• 1:40:31
  of stories, like everyone I talk to has come through or is coming
• 1:40:37
  through whatever they're talking about.
• 1:40:39
  And so it's always like, yes, there are, it's heavy, right?
• 1:40:44
  And it's like, I hate hearing what happened to you.
• 1:40:47
  Like that's just awful, but it needs to be talked about because
• 1:40:53
  the alternative is these things are swept under the rug and sort
• 1:40:56
  of normalize or just like just don't talk about it.
• 1:41:00
  Whereas I think the lesson is talking about it is OK and the
• 1:41:07
  right people when you talk about it will circle around you.
• 1:41:12
  And even if there's just that one woman or that one man that
• 1:41:17
  can believe you, you need one person to believe you just to
• 1:41:24
  because you're you're you're you're when you're in this these
• 1:41:27
  dark situations, you don't know up from down.
• 1:41:29
  But here I am rambling again. See, I rambled.
• 1:41:32
  Oh, you're not. No, you're not.
• 1:41:33
  You're looking and you need validation.
• 1:41:36
  And I, that was what the word told me was that you needed
• 1:41:40
  validation tonight, that you're on the right track and you are,
• 1:41:44
  you are what one of the things that you can do your friend
• 1:41:47
  group, your, your forgive. I have this monitor that does
• 1:41:53
  this and I'm in Mexico. The, your and I, that's my boy,
• 1:42:01
  the enemy just jumped right in there.
• 1:42:03
  Your friend group, your friend group, your church friend group,
• 1:42:06
  your prayer group, your those, those women, they have to be
• 1:42:13
  your armor bearers. You have to trust them and your
• 1:42:18
  heart. You need to be covered in
• 1:42:22
  prayer. And I'm not.
• 1:42:25
  I'm not trying to be spooky spiritual.
• 1:42:26
  I'm just. But I, I, yeah, because I'm
• 1:42:29
  talking about stuff that's going to like, I feel like I'm, I'm
• 1:42:32
  poking a beer. You have and you have a husband,
• 1:42:35
  you have a family and you're opening doors and, and just just
• 1:42:42
  use those women as your armor bearers.
• 1:42:47
  Find one or two that you trust and know that they're praying
• 1:42:52
  for you before you start into one of these.
• 1:42:55
  I mean all the time I will be, but I you needed validation and
• 1:43:00
  you need to know that he has he is using you.
• 1:43:03
  You are pliable. You are doing everything that
• 1:43:07
  you're supposed to be doing right now and probably more.
• 1:43:11
  And it's very exciting and from this chair, from this
• 1:43:16
  perspective to get to for God to put you alongside somebody at
• 1:43:22
  this point in my life that you get to walk beside and pray for
• 1:43:26
  and watch grow. There's nothing like it.
• 1:43:30
  Nothing, nothing, nothing. It's the most incredible feeling
• 1:43:34
  on this earth, and I thank you, Jesus for it.
• 1:43:37
  I thank you for this time. I praise you for this time that
• 1:43:40
  we've had together. Lord Jesus, I love you so much.
• 1:43:44
  Oh my gosh. By the way, I got to call out
• 1:43:48
  Sylvie's watching this like she's going to be like, hey,
• 1:43:53
  she'll probably start crying. I just got full chills down my
• 1:43:55
  back. So that's a, that's like A and
• 1:43:59
  the temperature didn't change, so I got full chills.
• 1:44:05
  Ah. You just let him feel you just
• 1:44:07
  let him feel you up because he is busy doing it and you are
• 1:44:10
  this vessel that he prepared from your mother's womb.
• 1:44:14
  He just like me, except that you're in a different.
• 1:44:18
  Podcasts and Substack seem to have changed our world, and I
• 1:44:25
  feel that there's a great deal of goodness coming from both and
• 1:44:32
  that he is bringing, he's giving Warriors a platform, and I think
• 1:44:38
  you're going to have some. I hope that you get to meet
• 1:44:41
  Joyce. I oh, that's my goal.
• 1:44:43
  I've tagged her like I, I tell people I'm like, if she walked
• 1:44:46
  in right now, I'd be like. No, you just have fun with her.
• 1:44:51
  Just I know. She oh, she is just.
• 1:44:56
  Raw love that. Truthful.
• 1:44:59
  Love straight up. That's my kind of church right
• 1:45:03
  there. It's.
• 1:45:03
  Like, listen. Oh yeah, Oh yeah, there's.
• 1:45:05
  Nothing off limits. We're going to talk about it.
• 1:45:07
  No, no. And you could talk about
• 1:45:09
  anything with her. She could have been somebody.
• 1:45:11
  You could have gone and said we're fornicating in a massage
• 1:45:16
  parlor. I mean, you know, you could have
• 1:45:18
  told her. Anything and she'd be like
• 1:45:19
  y'all, y'all, y'all stop doing that.
• 1:45:21
  Or or. You know, that might not be a
• 1:45:24
  good plan. Yeah, why y'all doing that?
• 1:45:27
  She's the best, but you know, back in the dark ages because
• 1:45:30
  she's we're similar in age, right?
• 1:45:32
  So back in the dark ages, in the charismatic movement, she was a
• 1:45:36
  thing, but for male pastors? Oh, they weren't having it.
• 1:45:41
  She was a threat boy, because she was like.
• 1:45:44
  I'm here. They're like, who is this?
• 1:45:47
  And she never lost her 30. She never walked out of her
• 1:45:51
  power ever, ever, ever. And I just, I love her, but I
• 1:45:54
  love her differently from afar because I've gotten to watch her
• 1:45:57
  and she's just never been, nothing's ever fluffed her
• 1:46:02
  skirt. I mean, she just, she is who she
• 1:46:04
  is and she speaks truth to the darkness in a way that there
• 1:46:10
  aren't very many people. And I have some that I follow
• 1:46:13
  and that I like, but I'm careful with that too.
• 1:46:17
  Yeah, you have to get careful who you follow when you're
• 1:46:20
  learning. And I'm like kind of a, a ripe
• 1:46:24
  canvas here for like, oh, what? Because I there's not a lot.
• 1:46:26
  I I know the basics, but I'm like, I don't want to get the
• 1:46:30
  wrong information, you know, I don't want to get the right
• 1:46:33
  vibes. I'm not.
• 1:46:35
  There's false leaders out there and everything, right, Whatever
• 1:46:39
  you're into. Yeah, and you just have to guard
• 1:46:43
  your heart. That's why he says.
• 1:46:44
  That's why that word is there. And one thing about the book
• 1:46:47
  that I didn't say that it was on my little list was the book's
• 1:46:50
  not churchy and the book's not religious.
• 1:46:53
  And I didn't quote Scripture every other breath.
• 1:46:55
  And I can do it with the best of them.
• 1:46:56
  Yeah. God said no, specifically.
• 1:47:01
  No, it is to be raw and real and truthful and honest.
• 1:47:08
  And maybe that woman at the well who's never seen Jesus will come
• 1:47:14
  because you didn't throw scripture at her.
• 1:47:17
  And a lot of my prayer sisters would have sat me down, held my
• 1:47:21
  hand, prayed over me with every scripture on the planet, meaning
• 1:47:25
  all the good in the world. But I needed testimony.
• 1:47:28
  I needed a witness. I needed to know that he could
• 1:47:32
  hold my hand through this and that it wasn't just somebody
• 1:47:36
  saying, OK, Psalm 48, two or, you know, not that that's wrong.
• 1:47:41
  No, for those of us in this kind of mire, we need witness.
• 1:47:48
  We need truth. We need Joyce in all the ways.
• 1:47:52
  But Can you imagine where you are today?
• 1:47:56
  Go back two years. She would have been a
• 1:47:59
  wackadoodle. Oh, I've literally, oh, yeah.
• 1:48:01
  Like it's just like, I'm literally everything I said I'd
• 1:48:04
  never be like, what? But I'm like, no.
• 1:48:08
  When you experience the the transformation of what you feel,
• 1:48:13
  you can't deny that what used to seem wackadoodle is.
• 1:48:20
  Hey. It's changing me.
• 1:48:23
  And they don't judge the the real, the real.
• 1:48:27
  Ones don't. Don't judge the the fakes will
• 1:48:31
  are they will, but you can weed them out real quick.
• 1:48:34
  You are when I when I text you and I thought, Oh my God, I put
• 1:48:38
  this on her. I shouldn't have.
• 1:48:39
  I should have done. You are stepping in.
• 1:48:44
  I mean, you have grown so much in such a short time and your
• 1:48:49
  girlfriends and your prayer, they have to be excited.
• 1:48:52
  They're they have. To be like.
• 1:48:54
  They're I've got no friends around me that are just
• 1:48:59
  incredible, that are just like. You can tell.
• 1:49:02
  Wow. Those are the ones that are
• 1:49:04
  like, you know, they'll make fun of you with the best of them,
• 1:49:07
  but then they'll celebrate like they'll like be like what?
• 1:49:09
  You know, it's just like no filter, no filter.
• 1:49:11
  We should have a potluck. We should.
• 1:49:14
  We've already. Got like 10 people for you to
• 1:49:16
  meet, like Jade, Sylvie, Omaira, Michelle, Kaylee.
• 1:49:19
  Like all of us are the same. And yet all of us, when I look
• 1:49:24
  at all of us, there's all a story where you're like, what?
• 1:49:28
  No, not you. And you're like, yeah, we're
• 1:49:33
  all. Through the fire.
• 1:49:35
  And then, and then there's a quote about, and this reminds me
• 1:49:38
  of you and Sylvie, the type of woman that walks out of the fire
• 1:49:42
  and then walks back in with two buckets of water for those that
• 1:49:46
  are still in it, because you, God wanted you to reopen this.
• 1:49:51
  It kind of came out of you as hard as it's been, but you're
• 1:49:55
  walking back into the fire and you didn't have to.
• 1:50:01
  But it's so much fun with him. That feels I got chilled.
• 1:50:05
  Oh my God, body again. It's so much fun with him and
• 1:50:10
  it's so different and it's so free.
• 1:50:13
  I've never felt so free. And I know that Sylvie gets
• 1:50:19
  that. And I thought when I wrote what
• 1:50:23
  I did yesterday about walking back into the thing, I thought,
• 1:50:26
  she's going to be going, girl, you do better.
• 1:50:30
  Why did you do that? Because you know, you just were
• 1:50:33
  borrowing trouble here. But there's so much joy and
• 1:50:40
  walking with him. He's been hilarious in my life.
• 1:50:45
  He's done some wackadoodle, crazy ass things
• 1:50:49
  likethematch.com thing. I, I, I, I, I will tell you a
• 1:50:55
  story in private. This e-mail that Ken sent me.
• 1:50:58
  He is a cowboy from, from Wyoming, right?
• 1:51:03
  And he is very, he's 75, so he's very macho, old school white man
• 1:51:10
  rule kind of guy going to be saying this.
• 1:51:12
  So y'all cut this out. I'm going to tell you a story.
• 1:51:16
  Fill this out. So he sends me this e-mail
• 1:51:18
  because he sees my profile and I am going back to this little
• 1:51:22
  town where I grew up to help with these hunting lodges,
• 1:51:25
  right? Yeah.
• 1:51:26
  And he says, well, I'd like for you to have dinner with me and I
• 1:51:30
  will come to this little town. I'll come to Albany and we'll
• 1:51:33
  meet and you can take me to show me this hunting lodge where your
• 1:51:36
  friends have this hunting lodge. And then he goes on in this
• 1:51:39
  thing and this is like I'm working for Visa at this point.
• 1:51:44
  I have an education and we're going to go have dinner.
• 1:51:48
  And all my family lives in this town, so I don't want anybody to
• 1:51:53
  know, you know? And by Sunday night he said, I
• 1:51:56
  want you to marry me. I've prayed for you.
• 1:51:58
  I've prayed this was good. I've prayed for you.
• 1:52:01
  God sent you to me. We're going to be together.
• 1:52:04
  You're going to be divorced in a week.
• 1:52:06
  And I said bullshit, bullshit at you don't know what you're
• 1:52:10
  talking about, dude. And then when I went to his
• 1:52:13
  little ranch house where he was that next week after I divorced,
• 1:52:17
  I went to his little ranch house and it was anything but what I
• 1:52:22
  had lived. It was I had been looking at
• 1:52:27
  stock portfolios and what guys had and because I wasn't going
• 1:52:31
  to do this again. And he didn't.
• 1:52:34
  He didn't have anything Potter or window and he was just a
• 1:52:37
  cowboy and. But you just felt, I mean the.
• 1:52:41
  No, I was ready to leave. I wouldn't because I thought no,
• 1:52:45
  I. You were like, oh, this?
• 1:52:47
  This is it that the end of that because I thought it's so unfair
• 1:52:50
  my requirements for living. I want the big house again.
• 1:52:54
  I want the Escalade I want and this is not going to happen in
• 1:53:00
  this is so unfair. And, you know, so I was about to
• 1:53:05
  leave on that Saturday morning after I'd gone up there, after
• 1:53:08
  I'd been divorced for hours, and he kissed me.
• 1:53:13
  And he said, you're about to leave.
• 1:53:16
  I know you're about to leave. But he goes, I just want to tell
• 1:53:18
  you something. Who just kissed you?
• 1:53:20
  And I knew it was God. I knew it in my being that it
• 1:53:24
  was God that he kissed me. And he goes, I just want you to
• 1:53:27
  know that God's told me that you have a choice.
• 1:53:30
  You can either stay in the best thing that he's ever going to
• 1:53:33
  give you in your life, or you can go.
• 1:53:39
  And I sat there and I thought, hmm, do I trust I haven't been
• 1:53:49
  walking with God in while I've been doing all sorts of things I
• 1:53:53
  shouldn't have been doing. And in that moment I trusted
• 1:53:57
  him. And that guy in there took me on
• 1:54:01
  as a project for the first five years of our marriage that were
• 1:54:05
  horrible for him. And he just steadfast.
• 1:54:09
  But he's still he's a character you'd never you'd know he was a
• 1:54:13
  man of faith, but Oh my God, you did the jokes he tells Jesus,
• 1:54:18
  Mary and Joseph terrible. It's just and still to this day,
• 1:54:22
  he is the center of attention and he is wonderful and he is my
• 1:54:26
  world and I'm so thankful that God did that.
• 1:54:30
  But when you know his voice and I know that you're starting to
• 1:54:34
  starting. It to hear things, yeah.
• 1:54:37
  And you're going to know because I had no doubt.
• 1:54:40
  I knew. That's exactly what it was.
• 1:54:41
  I knew. And who and was.
• 1:54:44
  So when I tell some of these stories, the word wackadoodle
• 1:54:48
  comes to mind. No, but like you, you feel it.
• 1:54:53
  And so you're like, well, maybe the normal world is maybe the
• 1:54:58
  normal world's wackadoodle and this is just how it's supposed
• 1:55:00
  to be. But yeah, so in that moment, you
• 1:55:04
  it's like a life choice. Like do I want to?
• 1:55:06
  Do I want to trust God with this?
• 1:55:09
  It doesn't look right, It doesn't smell right.
• 1:55:11
  It's it's off, it's different. It's not what I had planned.
• 1:55:17
  It's not, I haven't been walking with you, Lord.
• 1:55:20
  I've been in adultery. I've been doing everything I
• 1:55:23
  shouldn't be doing. And why would you give me this?
• 1:55:27
  But I know it was. You earned it.
• 1:55:29
  I know what you did. But I also knew that Kenneth
• 1:55:32
  told me the week before that I would be divorced by Friday.
• 1:55:36
  And that Friday night I was at his house divorced.
• 1:55:39
  And I thought, oh, something's going on here, You know, I got
• 1:55:43
  that. My radar's up.
• 1:55:44
  And and then the next day I just knew I had to leave.
• 1:55:47
  I couldn't, I wasn't going to start over and not there, not
• 1:55:51
  with, not with that. And but we did.
• 1:55:54
  And we built from scratch, built a business after 20 years where
• 1:55:59
  we're able to sell it and retire and live here on a modest
• 1:56:04
  retirement. But that's that's why we're
• 1:56:08
  here. It's because it's so reasonable
• 1:56:09
  to live here and OK. No, and you're.
• 1:56:14
  Terrible. I feel like I'm just
• 1:56:16
  monopolizing. Well, you are the guest.
• 1:56:19
  That's the whole point, the. Time.
• 1:56:21
  It's Oh my God. This is OK.
• 1:56:24
  This is just the beginning of what will be.
• 1:56:29
  I know just it's going to be some steady voice on the podcast
• 1:56:36
  with Sylvie. Maybe this panel thing is God is
• 1:56:41
  knitting something together right now.
• 1:56:43
  I I just, I already know and it's going to be amazing.
• 1:56:47
  And I'm putting all of your information in the show notes.
• 1:56:53
  Thank you. Where where you can follow
• 1:56:55
  Roseanne, where you can purchase her book, which I haven't even
• 1:56:59
  finished reading yet, where you can connect with you on sub
• 1:57:03
  stack, let's see website, Instagram, Amazon.
• 1:57:08
  And I would really, really love for you to come back.
• 1:57:15
  And maybe even, I don't know, we'll have to, we'll have to
• 1:57:18
  just figure out something where you're coming back.
• 1:57:21
  There's a place on the website if they know of a ministry or
• 1:57:25
  have a ministry and want to register for free books, they
• 1:57:30
  just need to go and sign up and say how many they want.
• 1:57:33
  We've just started approaching shelters and and a couple or
• 1:57:38
  three ministries and all of them are hesitant.
• 1:57:42
  This is there's a real hesitant because I'm real quick to say
• 1:57:47
  there's no theology in the book. There's no doctrine in the book
• 1:57:50
  because it's not what it's about.
• 1:57:52
  And if you're not trained in trauma, there's a resistance to
• 1:57:58
  what the hell are we going to do this book?
• 1:58:00
  And why would we need this book? We're not seeing this in our
• 1:58:04
  body. You're not seeing it because
• 1:58:06
  you're not talking about it. You're not allowing it, allowing
• 1:58:13
  women to say abused women this way with a sign so that and
• 1:58:19
  they're not going to do that because they're all hiding.
• 1:58:22
  But you can't somehow we have to in and and so you and Sylvie can
• 1:58:27
  talk about this too. There has to be a mechanism.
• 1:58:34
  Groups are dangerous because there's lots of hurt still and
• 1:58:38
  then trolls and yadda yadda, yadda, yadda.
• 1:58:41
  Even in Substack, you can't believe the number of men to the
• 1:58:44
  number of women that subscribed to me Block, block, block,
• 1:58:47
  block, because they're looking that that.
• 1:58:52
  So I've gotten careful. So thank you for putting all
• 1:58:57
  that in there. My husband is coming in the
• 1:58:59
  garage and I think he's going to go, Oh my gosh, where did you?
• 1:59:03
  Was it bad? Did you?
• 1:59:04
  Oh no, no, this is and it's going to come together
• 1:59:06
  beautifully. We're going to put together so
• 1:59:09
  that people hopefully will hear something and just know that
• 1:59:13
  they're not alone. And again, Roseanne, thank you.
• 1:59:17
  I know I've made a lifelong friend and I can't wait for.
• 1:59:20
  I have to. No, I just appreciate woman to
• 1:59:24
  woman, we're going to we're going to do God's work here.
• 1:59:27
  And I don't even know what that means for me, but I know it's
• 1:59:29
  doing something and it's. Going to be fun.
• 1:59:32
  Yes. Thank you for having me so very
• 1:59:35
  much. I appreciate it and I look
• 1:59:36
  forward to the next time and I look forward to meeting Sylvie.
• 1:59:39
  We and we're going to meet in person.
• 1:59:40
  We're going to have to make it. Happen.
• 1:59:41
  OK, OK. All right, Roseanne.
• 1:59:44
  Well, goodnight and until next time.
• 1:59:47
  Thank you. Bye.
• 1:59:49
  Bye.