Marnie's Testimony

Hello. I wish I could start this story as once upon a time or there once was a little girl, but instead it starts like this. A broken home, torturous abuse, fits of rage, and being stripped away from those I held dear to my heart are just a fraction of my childhood that strewn me into a forbidden lifestyle filled with fantasy, sex, and lust. My name is Marnie and I am a grateful believer who struggles with sexual addiction and eating disorder. My path to recovery started at Saddleback Church in November of 2000. I remember that night well. I crawled in broken and completely unaware of my reality. My view on life had become so distorted and my actions had become so out of control I don't think the anime himself could have kept up. That night I watched as people were smiling, hugging, and celebrating because it just so happened to be the ninth anniversary of Celebrate Recovery. I had arrived an hour early, completely unaware that the worship service didn't start till 7, so I sat and I listened to the band rehearse. I remember sitting there almost all alone with only a handful of people walking around and setting things up, but as I looked around tears began to form in my eyes and it was all I could do to blink them back. I didn't know what I was doing there. My thoughts were wandering and I had become so disjointed. Everything within me just wanted to get up and walk out. It was evident I was still in denial. I kept hearing the same thoughts repeating themselves in my head like whatever is wrong with these people is way worse than anything I could have done and whatever I've done I'm so sure I can fix it on my own, but for some reason I just could not bring myself to get up out of that chair and leave. I was startled as a man came up to me, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, oh excuse me, but this seat's taken. And as I looked around the empty room it took me a while to realize oh he's kidding, but you know just in those few words I felt a sense of comfort and relief. I felt welcomed and a little less out of place. That night I attended Newcomers 101 where for the first time I confessed my secrets. I managed to utter the words that had gone unspoken for years. I cheated on my husband. And moments after that I just began to sob. That was it. That was all I said. The woman who was leading 101 that night leaned forward, cupped my hands

into hers, and told me for the first time everything's gonna be okay. You have come to the right place. The sincerity in her voice warmed me. Long before I was born there was already turmoil brewing in my family. Before my first birthday my parents had finalized their plans to divorce. I was sent to live with my father and grandparents in Hawaii. Once I arrived my dad was conveniently absent. My grandparents were unofficially assigned to care for me as if I were their own. My fondest childhood memories are of the years I spent with my grandparents in Hawaii. They taught me about Jesus and by their example I learned Christian values. But thankfully they showed me what it was like to live in a normal family. My parents on the other hand were the opposite. My father was a functioning alcoholic who also had a wandering eye for women. I watched my dad move from relationship to relationship and watched as his addiction to pornography and alcohol grew. His complete disregard for his calling as a father allowed me to explore as a young child. I can remember being crouched in a corner attempting to smoke my dad's cigarettes and drink some of his beer. As a young girl curiosity took me by surprise one day when I was snooping around the house and found my dad's Playboy collection hidden in his dresser drawers. I felt as though I had just stumbled upon a secret and I ran out of the room but at the same time I was intrigued at the images I saw. Often my dad would take me to his girlfriend's house where I was abandoned in the front room propped in front of the television while my dad retreated into the bedroom with his girlfriend. I held a lot of resentment toward my dad for many years but a few years before his passing he extended the olive branch and we reconciled which I'm so grateful for. Had we not I would definitely be grieving him very differently today. Back when I was five years old I was sent back to California to live with my mother. For the next 11 years I would suffer at the hands of her physical verbal and emotional abuse. She has the personality of a raging alcoholic minus the alcohol. Mommy Dearest comes to mind. One unpleasant incident that sticks with me the most was when I was packing to go on a camping trip with my family friends. I walked in on one of her fits of rage and

I'll tell you her strike was hard and fast. She had slapped me in the face so hard that my tooth punctured my lip. Needless to say I had a huge fat lip and black eye the following day. I told everyone I had been eating and that my four kids slipped. She'd always apologize and say she hated what she had done, but in the next breath tell me I deserved it. I can't tell you how many times I ended up at the hospital as a young girl. I remember vividly my mom being sent out of the room and the doctors asking, did your mother hit you? And with a stoic face, my response always being a simple nod of the head, no. Throughout my childhood, I became a human pinata. Being choked and dodging mirrors, being thrown violently through the air were episodes that happened on a regular basis. I was beaten with inanimate objects like lamps, hangers, high-heeled shoes, and whatever else was at hand's reach. To cope with my dysfunctional life, I escaped into a fantasy life filled with lustful thoughts and pornographic images that were embedded in my mind. I would stay in bed for hours fantasizing about sex only to have the women from my dad's playboy collection playing some of those roles. My upbringing was filled with a seemingly endless amount of turmoil. I had no choice but to escape the insanity I was living in. Just before the start of my senior year of high school, I emancipated myself. At 17, legally, I was recognized as an adult. I moved out and I was on my own. I was determined to break the cycle of dysfunction I had been living with all my life, but it turns out I had become a product of my environment. Years later, I married my high school sweetheart in June of 98. Marriage started off difficult for us. Although we had dated for eight years prior to getting married, it almost seemed that in an instant we had grown miles apart, as if our years together had somehow been reversed. Our conversations were no longer familiar. Instead, we stuck to superficial topics. Hard times were beginning to materialize. We were struggling financially, and we were living with his parents. Bitterness and resentment started to paint an ugly picture as my visions of a normal lifestyle fell by the wayside. We went through months of arguing and a lot of broken promises. I felt like I was running in place. I felt like I was taking advantage of, disrespected, unappreciated. I felt like I had no voice and no control. I felt robbed of my dreams, but most of all, I felt emotionally bankrupt. It was then that my behavior exploded into an uncontrollable fury. My solution, adultery. Just 10 short months into my marriage, I cheated

on my husband. As my addictive lifestyle was starting to take shape, I took a new position at work, which would require me to travel Monday through Thursday. All of this free time away from my husband gave me the freedom to make my own choices, which set into my unhealthy behaviors. In my denial, life never felt so good. I was getting attention from men I hardly knew and who hardly knew me. Every day, I became more and more independent of my marriage. I felt in control. I was finally doing something I thought I wanted to do instead of having to live by someone else's rules. But in my heart, I knew something was desperately wrong. I struggled with the confusion about the Christian values I had been taught as a child versus what the world deems as socially acceptable behavior. I suddenly felt as if I only knew these childhood beliefs intellectually. For the first time in my life, my faith in God had been tried and shaken. And to be honest, at this point in my life, my relationship with the Lord was pretty non-existent. I ignored those feelings and instead replaced them with alcohol, anorexia, and adultery. I was now on a suicide mission devoted to a life of deception. My life had become intertwined with the very women I had been warned against in my childhood teachings of the Bible. Jezebel, Potiphar's wife, and Delilah. Ooh, Delilah. My life had now become a reflection of the woman whose greatest desire or an accomplishment in life was the destruction of the man who loved her most. My forbidden lifestyle progressed into a double life. I continued keeping up the variety of appearances that had sustained me throughout the years. At work, I was balanced, poised, and professional. I'd walk in the door with a smile on my face, walk into my office, shut the door, and act out with internet pornography in chat rooms. When I was with my college friends, I was the baby. I played the innocent, codependent Marnie, the good girl, the Marnie who never drank but mothered the rest of the bunch when they did. At church, I was the devout Christian, pseudo-listening from the concrete bench outside, but making sure my friends and family all knew I was present and accounted for. But the real Marnie, the uninhibited Marnie, surfaced after work hours where I would spend most of my free time at the bars with the good old boys club. I could tell a good dirty joke or two and just be one of the guys. The more I drank, the more I talked. The more I talked, the more I started blaming my circumstances for my behavior. My drinking buddies got the unvarnished story of how awful life was like for me at home. I became completely cavalier with a complete disregard and disrespect for myself and for those I loved. My insatiable appetite for more manifested itself in an attempt to fill the void

within me, only to find out that this beast of ugliness would in no way be satisfied. My form of self-furnishing and control was to starve my body both spiritually and physically. Body image became more important to me than anything else in my life, including the people I loved most. I was now on a quest for the perfect figure, no matter what the cost. Starving myself made me feel like I was making my own decisions. I put myself on a rigid diet which consisted of a handful of grapes each day and excessive amounts of diet coke. I decided what I put in my body. I decided what I would look like. I started working out obsessively, running between 12 and 15 miles a day. This lifestyle coupled with my sexual addiction left my body weak and out of fuel. I weighed a mere 92 pounds and with a sunken face was rapidly self-destructing. My addiction was now in full throttle. As I saw the scenes of my life unfolding, I became desperate to find freedom from my web of deception. I picked up the phone and I called Saddleback Church and they suggested I try Celebrate Recovery. During that time, I recalled the Christian values taught to me as a child by my grandparents which I had buried due to my anger and resentment towards God. He had finally gotten my attention. It was then that I realized I don't understand myself at all for I really want to do what is right but I can't. I do what I don't want to, what I hate. I know perfectly well that what I'm doing is wrong and my bad conscience proves that I agree with all these laws that I am breaking but I can't help myself because I'm no longer doing it. It is the sin inside me that is stronger than I am that makes me do these evil things. At this point, I had been struck with the sudden certainty that I had suddenly felt as if I had been hollowed out and the world as I knew it were slowly being erased. I didn't know how to reconcile these conflicting pieces of my past. The pain had finally become greater than the fear. I had reached my bottom. Two months after that first fateful night at Celebrate Recovery, a women's step study opened so I picked up a CR Bible and a set of Celebrate Recovery participant guides and began a pilgrimage through the 12 steps with women I could relate to and who could also relate to me and where secrets seemed all but impossible. At first, I kept myself at a safe distance. I would guard my secrets so that no one could use what they knew to hurt me. I also felt hideously ugly and the scars that had been left behind were visible to everyone but as I began to share for the first time, I saw women who just stayed silent throughout, listening without judgment. I began to grasp that this internal battle I was having was not uncommon. It was then that I started to understand how the pains of my past had played such a crucial part in my behavior. I started realizing that I was in a cycle

of addiction, that all my life I viewed men as objects and I was imitating what I had learned in my childhood and that I had kept so many secrets, childhood secrets, secrets in my adult life and secrets in my marriage and that by saying them out loud, it brought some truth to my reality that I had found comfort in the fact that I could not be perfect, that there was no such thing as the perfect marriage or the perfect body. Most importantly, I saw just how far I had fallen away from my relationship with Christ, that problems far too big for me to solve are piled higher than my head. Meanwhile, my sins too many to count have all caught up with me and I am ashamed to look up. I began exploring for myself this new uncharted territory at Celebrate Recovery. It was after working Principle 4 where I openly examined and confessed my faults to myself, to God and to someone I trust that true healing began. It was then that I heard God's promise of freedom and stopped acting out. It was then that I realized that whatever is covered up will be uncovered and every secret will be made known. So then, whatever you have said in the dark will be heard in broad daylight. As I laid my sins at the foot of the cross and turned from my addictions, God declared me not guilty. He blotted out the charts proved against you, he says, the list of his commandments which you had not obeyed. He took this list of sins and destroyed it by nailing it to Christ's cross. My husband and I did reconcile and our marriage sustained 23 years of marriage. He has since passed, but again, had we not reconciled like I did with my dad, I would be grieving him very, very differently today. As for my mom, I have found it in my heart to forgive her. There has been baby fruit that has blossomed as of late, and I am willing to take a chance on that. As I reflect on my life now, I thank God for his never failing truth and understanding. I look back at the journey I had to take through celibate recovery to bring balance to the chaos of my life. And although in a season of my life where the world seemed to make no sense at all, where my allegiance laid in the success

of my betrayals and the comfort of my sin, God has taken my tragedy and used it as a testament of my faith. Remember how I talked about how I grew up through the ranks of corporate America, how I would fly every week and in the absence of my husband, I found myself in compromising situations. Well, ironically, the very same pattern of flying that was instrumental in virtually destroying my life for so many years is now being used by God to restore me to wholeness. Today, I get to serve on the celibate recovery conference team. It is my privilege to travel to different cities nationally and internationally. My accountability team now spans across the nation as I have filled my life with godly women and men to whom I seek guidance from every day. And trust me, with an accountability partner in pretty much almost every state, there is no hiding anymore. This reminds me of God's promise that says, even though you are at the ends of the earth, the Lord your God will go and find you and bring you back again. You know, there was a time when I wouldn't admit what a sinner I was, but my dishonesty made me miserable and filled my days with frustration. All day and all night, your hand was heavy on me. My strength evaporated like water on a sunny day until I finally admitted all my sins to you and stopped trying to hide them. I said to myself, I will confess them to the Lord and you forgave me.

All my guilt is gone. Thank you so much for letting me share. you you you you you you