Something Was Wrong - S21 Ep11: (3/4) [Jubilee] Words of Knowledge

Episode Date: August 22, 2024

*Content Warning: strangulation, physical, mental, emotional, and financial abuse, domestic violence, suicidal ideation, self harm, sexual abuse, religious trauma, cultic abuse, and cults.  *Sources: A Look at the Megachurch That Calls Redding Home: Bethel Church. (2019, June 20). The LAist. https://laist.com/shows/airtalk/a-look-at-the-megachurch-that-calls-redding-home-bethel-church Bethel Church. (2019, December 20). Resurrection Prayer for Olive Heiligenthal. https://www.bethel.com/news/olive-heiligenthal Bill Johnson: Creative Miracles At Bethel - Part 1. (2011, January 11). [Video]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=shared&v=2PzttaVImCY ​​ The Evangelical Parents Of A Young Girl Who Died Are Using Social Media To Ask For Her Resurrection, by Tanya Chen and Stephanie McNea for Buzzfeed (Dec. 2019): https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tanyachen/evangelical-parents-of-a-young-girl-who-died-social-media  Bolz, S. (2014). GOD KNOWS YOUR NAME: Translating God (Prophetic Moments) [Video]. https://youtu.be/i3O3nEbniQw?si=PL9SrHby1nCJ4sQX Wilson, D. (2008). Finger of God [Video]. https://wpfilm.com/media/finger-of-god/ *Resources: For a list of related non-profit organizations, please visit: http://www.somethingwaswrong.com/resources National Domestic Violence Hotline  https://www.thehotline.org/  Follow Something Was Wrong: Website: somethingwaswrong.com  IG: instagram.com/somethingwaswrongpodcast TikTok: tiktok.com/@somethingwaswrongpodcast  Follow Tiffany Reese: Website: tiffanyreese.me  IG: instagram.com/lookieboo  [e-mail]  The SWW theme Song is U Think U, by Glad Rags.  The S21 cover art is by the Amazing Sara Stewart.  

Oh, hey, how's it going? Amazing. I just finished paying off all my debt with the help of the Credit Counseling Society. Whoa, seriously? I could really use their help. It was easy. I called and spoke with a credit counselor right away. They asked me about my debt, salary, and regular expenses,

gave me a few options, and help me along the way. You had a ton of debt. And you're saying Credit Counseling Society helped with all of it? Yep. And now I can sleep better at night. When Debt's got you, you've got us. Give Credit Counseling Society a call today. Visit no more debts.org.

Something Was Wrong is intended for mature audiences, as it discusses topics that can be upsetting, such as emotional, physical, and sexual violence, rape, and murder. Content warnings for each episode and confidential resources for survivors can be found in the episode notes. Some survivor names have been changed for anonymity purposes. pseudonyms are given to minors in these stories for their privacy and protection. Testimony shared by guests of the show is their own and does not necessarily reflect the views of myself, broken cycle media, or wondering. The podcast and any linked materials should not be construed as medical advice, nor is the information a substitute for professional medical expertise or treatment. Thank you so much for listening.

I was at the church. It was a Tuesday night. I was on the phone and I was crying to my mom and I was telling her, I don't think I'm going to be able to finish my internship. I think I'm going to have to come home. I was really devastated by that idea just because everything that I had done so far to get here, I've already suffered so much. And I really just wanted to finish this program.

I wanted to finish my third year and I'm crying to her telling her, there's no way that I'm going to get past this. At that moment, after I got off the phone, Ted came up to me and he told me, I'm really sorry for over-listening to your conversation. I'm sorry if that makes you upset, but I heard you say that you needed a place to live or else you were going to have to leave. And I took it upon myself to call my friends. They live in a house. They're a sweet family. They're in their 60s. They have two daughters. One of them's a missionary. So they have a bedroom available. I asked them if you could live with them for the rest of the year, and they said yes, and that you could live there for free.

Our friendship grew. From then on, it was very fast. He ended up asking me out on a date. The way that that happened was one night I was texting him, and there was a snowstorm. It was absolutely horrible. There was ice everywhere. The roads were so unsafe, and I had told him that I was hungry, and I didn't have much food to eat at the house. He ended up showing up and had fries. He had driven in the snowstorm and knocked on my door late at night, and he ended up sleeping on their couch. He was very big on these thoughtful gestures,

and to me, it just felt like I was finally getting everything that I ever wanted. Someone to care for me, someone to prioritize me, someone who truly, truly loved me and was sure about me because of my boyfriend that I had had at Bethel, where it was this will they won't they, Ross and Rachel type of situation. To have somebody just be so sure that they were all about me was very different. He ended up asking me on a date and I was excited but also nervous because he was 30 and I wasn't extremely attracted to him.

Not my like typical type. But to me I was thinking at the end of the day I want to marry someone who has a good heart. I had just read this book about like being single and finding your spouse. I read it maybe a couple months before I met Ted. It was all about how you should not marry based on looks. I was hype on this train of looks don't matter. You should just absolutely look for the heart of a person and that's what you should base your entire picking process on when it comes to a spouse. I felt like God was answering my prayer at that time. He ended up picking me up for our first date. He took me to a bookstore. He got me a Chronicles of Narnia book, which I

loved at the time. And then he took me out to a very, very expensive restaurant. I just felt like he was treating me like a princess. I always think back to this time. It might be hard to understand, but I really valued vulnerability at the time. And I had told him, my first year revival group pastor, she was very big about burying your soul to people and being very vulnerable. and how beautiful that that was. So on our first date, I had told Ted that that was something that I really valued was people being vulnerable. So on the way home from our first date, he was like, I have somewhere I want to take you. I was like, okay, where are we going? He ended up taking me to the capital of Harrisburg. He walked me up the steps. I had no idea what we were doing. And he said, I just wanted to take you here

because I had a really special moment one time with my friend here. He had met me when I, I was in a really dark place and this place has always meant so much to me because of the circumstance that I had had and this friend was really here for me. And I just wanted you to know a part of my heart and a part of who I am. We had our first kiss and it just felt like I was in a movie. This is everything I could have ever asked for. He's being so vulnerable. He's being so sweet. He's doing all of the things that I could ever have hoped for when we had our first kiss. On our first date, he told me he was in love with me. I was like, I feel like I'm living a dream. From then on out, it was so extra. He loved me so loud. I know that it's so embarrassing now to think about, but I remember we would

be like walking down the street and he would stop people and be like, I love this girl so much. After church, we would often go to Buffalo Wild Wings. And I remember one time at Buffalo Wild Wings, he stood up, made the entire restaurant be quiet, and said, I just want to say that I love this woman. I'm like blushing and so embarrassed. But he would do stuff like that all the time. He wanted me to know how much he was in love with me. I ended up liking it. My sisters, they always joke with me because I don't really get embarrassed in public if I need to get in front of a crowd and say something.

or if I'm in a group and an announcement needs to be made, I'll be the one that does it, or if we need to order takeout, I'll call. I really credit being a cult to why I'm able to do that, because you learn to not be embarrassed. I put myself out there, and it was every introvert's worst nightmare. And it kind of like gets beaten out of you. I mean, after the 50th time. Did you feel like you guys had a lot in common with the age difference?

I'd say our spirituality was the biggest thing that we had in common. we were not that similar as far as like things that we liked and done. Like I do remember there being a definite gap in the type of shows that I grew up watching versus what he grew up watching because of our age difference. But we had a lot of fun. I've always said I really felt like he was my best friend. I had a lot of good memories with him when I look back on our relationship. I never think to myself, wow, I was so madly in love.

It wasn't necessarily like that. I thought that this was what was best for me. And he made it very easy. Any sort of doubt I had about the age difference or attraction or logistics of life, I was able to pretty much quiet that just by like how loudly he was loving me. I remember one time, this is so cringy. He like ran outside. And I was like, where are you going?

And he said, I'm going to lasso you the moon. I was soaking it up. Mr. Charisma and the cool girl from Bethel, did you feel like everybody was shipping you like once you started dating? People were all about our love story. They were like, these people have to get married. It was definitely in the air that people felt that way. So no pressure at all.

No pressure. It seemed like everybody loved him. So I had no reasons not to. Well, when you start with an I love you on the steps, walk to remember kickoff, I'm assuming that that's going straight to marriage. Yeah, we were very much marriage focused immediately. And I mean, we were talking about engagement rings very quickly.

He was just like, I'm ready. I'm 30. I've been waiting. And there was also, he was a virgin. He had waited his entire life to have sex. And there was this sense of after everything that I've been through with Bethel where I felt like I was a horrible person. I was gross and used goods.

I was no longer a sticky tape. It felt like he was doing me a solid almost. I felt lucky because I was like, wow, this pure man who's 30 years old and he waited for me. I didn't wait for him, but he loves me anyway. Thank God he loves me. I'm such a sinner. I still had a lot of self-hatred from the year before, and it felt like I barely deserved him in a way. I was living my hallmark dreams.

People thought that he was so genuine. He was very big grand jestry and it wasn't just towards me. He would do this for me because he was in love with me, but there was also this story, it had happened the year before I came. As time goes on, I view this story differently because he loved to tell this story. So now I'm like, I think that this story happened so that you could tell people that this happened. There was a student, I think she was in her 40s and she was, She had been in an abusive marriage.

Essentially, Ted, on Valentine's Day, she had already been divorced and she felt really lonely. And he asked her if she would want to, as friends, go out to eat so that he could treat her very well because he felt bad for her. He ended up taking her somewhere, got her all dressed up. He had orchestrated this thing where, like, the class showed up to this restaurant and was giving this woman roses. And he wanted her to know that the entire,

school loved her and was supporting her through this divorce. How long did you guys date before like the prophetic words happened? Ted and I had been dating a couple months and things had been going really well. He was very love bombing and things were progressing very quickly. So we were already talking about marriage. We were talking about how we thought that we were supposed to be together. During this time, I was working at this cafe down the road from the church. which was called tomato pie cafe. I was a hostess there, and I really liked my job. Luckily, I'd gotten away from this dangerous graveyard shift diner job that I had had.

The church would always have these conferences where they would bring a lot of famous prophets, quote unquote, who would come and tell us what God was doing in the world, tell us what God was going to be doing in our lives. It was almost like a magic trick in a way. They would get on stage, and they would call people out with these things called Words of knowledge where they would say, you with the blue sweater, stand up, and they would call them out and give them a prophetic word in front of everybody. You feel very special. You feel very picked, and you have full belief that this anointed prophet knows what he's talking about. So there was this

conference that was going on that I hadn't been attending, but because Ted was working at the church, the day before, he had had a friend get called out by this prophet. And, And the friend wasn't there at the time. So Ted got the guy on the phone and said, this prophet just called you out by name and said he is a word for God for you. And he ran up to the prophet and gave him his phone. And the prophet prophesied over Ted's friend in front of the entire congregation on the phone. Fast forward to the next day. This prophet got on stage for the second day of the conference.

And he said, where is that guy that brought me the phone yesterday? I want to talk to the guy that brought me the phone. So Ted stands up and you have to imagine there's hundreds of people in this auditorium. It's very electric feeling. Everybody's waiting on the edge of their seat to see if they're going to be the ones that are called out by this prophet. He called on Ted and he had him stand up and he said, The guy who handed me the phone. Is he here this morning?

When you handed me the phone last night, I saw 50, but I know that 50 is Jubilee year. and there's something about God's giving you a Jubilee. What does that mean to you? Oh, your girlfriend's name is Jubilee. That's awesome. Well, God's giving you this girl. And when we ordered the food this morning, by the way, this is a huge, huge advertisement

in the midst of prophesying, and it's a prophetic advertisement. That tomato pie cafe place is, like, Level 10 awesome, and we've been eating there for the mornings. Does she have something to do with the tomato pie cafe? Does she work so? Okay. Jubilee from tomato pie cafe.

When you hand me the phone, I saw it's your Jubilee time, and I felt like the Lord said he gave you a gift of Jubilee. Now I understand it. I feel like the Lord this year, he's going to start to set your life into a direction that you're going to feel so solid in the direction he gives you. And I feel like you're saying, pursue what you find the best and the most beautiful,

not just in Jubilee, but also in your career. Because I feel like you can get stuck in a lesser career because you won't feel qualified in being a dreamer for a bigger career. path that God has for you. He has a great calling on your life and you need to have the courage to step into it. And he's going to give you something this year that will be a process builder towards the bigger and the greater that you couldn't have dreamed of or imagined, but you ask God for Ephesians 320, which is beyond what you could dream for or imagine. And he's going to

give it to you this year, even in your relationship with Jubilee. So bless you. Thanks for bringing me the phone. Everybody's like, whoa, that's crazy that God told this prophet the Jubilee is supposed to marry Ted. He went on to prophesy a bit more about his career and stuff like that, but this was definitely the talk of the conference. It spread very quickly. I was working at tomato pie cafe down the street, and all of a sudden I started getting text messages from my friends saying, oh my gosh, you won't believe what just happened. They called on Ted and they told him that God is giving you to him and that you guys are supposed to be together and that you guys are going to get married. My phone just started blowing up with people telling me this good news.

It honestly got so much bigger than I could have ever expected because here I am running the to-go side of this hostess cashier job. And so many of these church people would come there for the lunch break for the conference. A bunch of these conference people started calling tomato pie cafe and they were saying, is Jubilee there? Is Jubilee the girl who God said that Ted is going to marry? Is she working right now? We want to come see this girl that is going to be with Ted. And everybody was weirdly invested in this love story, in this prophecy. So for the entire rest of the day, I felt like I was famous. It was a very weird feeling. Everybody wanted to talk to me. Everybody wanted to know about our relationship.

You know, at that time, I was happy with where we were. I thought that we were, I thought that we were on a good path, I was already feeling like we were going to be together. I think a lot of that came from the fact that my parents, I'd always heard the story of when they first saw each other from across the room at church. They both knew that they were going to marry each other. It was love at first sight, and that is what I grew up being told. So from a young age, I'd always prayed that when I meet the person I'm supposed to marry, that I'll just know, that it won't even be a question that it will just be so confirmed that I am supposed to be with this person. So what more could you ask for for one of the most highly respected prophets in this circle to call you out by name when

he doesn't even know you and tell you that you are meant to be with the guy that you're seeing? I was super happy. I was like going to the back room checking my phone every five seconds. I was texting my parents saying, you're never going to believe what happened. It was honestly just such a wild time because I felt so lucky and so chosen. Not only did I feel chosen by Ted, but I felt that God was listening. I felt like God saw me. I look back on all of this now and it's sad to see that these memories are so tainted by what I know to be true now. In hindsight, I know that everything that that prophet said was on my public Facebook page. I just fell for it. You just don't know to look for those sorts of cons or those type of people,

because who thinks that a man of God, this prophet who's supposed to be so highly esteemed, is going on your Facebook page. What's crazy is he knew Ted from the day before because of the phone situation. He could have easily gone on Facebook and seen my name, that we were in a relationship, that I worked at tomato pie cafe.

All of that stuff was public information. So when I really started to unpack all of this and deconstruct what happened to me, I found lots of blog posts of people saying that similar things happened to them, that the information that he had given during these prophetic words that they thought were straight from God and such confirmation were also on their public pages. I had read this blog post from this woman who was at an Azusa conference, which was this big thing that happened maybe 100 years ago, and they said that God's spirit was poured all out over Azusa Street.

I think it's in L.A. So they always go back there and they do these huge conferences at Azusa. And there was this woman who had posted, this prophet had called her out and had mentioned that she had four children. He said, I see that you have four children. You live on this street. He knew all this information about her. But what's so interesting is that she had five children.

He was wrong. And when she looked back at her Facebook page, she noticed that her Facebook page only mentioned four of her children. And there was no trace of that child. It makes you think, how self-aware are you at how evil you're being. Once I left this culty church and I started to unpack everything, I definitely believe that there are different levels of deception going on. You do have people.

who are giving harmless prophetic words that maybe they're like 50% sure are from God. And they're not trying to be false prophets. They're trying to step out in faith. There are people who are just misguided. And then there's people like this prophet where I'm like, no, you are actually conning people with no thought to the damage that you are doing to people. I could not have been more convinced that it was 100% what was happening. Because when you have someone give their stamp of approval on these big,

profits. You just really believe them. As far as real life consequences of this prophecy, I really did stay because of this prophecy. Oh, hey, how's it going? Amazing. I just finished paying off all my debt with the help of the Credit Counseling Society. Whoa, seriously? I could really use their help. It was easy. I called and spoke with a credit counselor right away. They asked me about my debt, salary, and regular expenses, gave me a few options, and helped me along the way. You had a ton of debt. And you're saying credit counseling society helped with all of it? Yep. And now I can sleep better at night.

When debts got you, you've got us. Give credit counseling society a call today. Visit no more debts.org. I was very loved up and loved bombed by Ted, but that facade did start to fall during our engagement. And I really do think that I would have called off the wedding had this prophecy not happened. I think it was a month between when the prophecy happened to when he proposed. This was already in process at the time, if I remember correctly,

but Ted actually flew all the way to Texas by himself. I wasn't even there when he met my family for the first time, so that he could ask my dad if he could marry me. Were your parents impressed? So impressed. They thought he was so godly because we're from San Antonio. They took him to the river walk and he was going up to someone who was homeless and praying for them.

They just thought that he was great. My inner circle, my friends, they were thinking, are you sure? They kind of got weird vibes, but everybody was just supportive. They felt like if this is what's meant to be, then we support it. And he seemed like a nice enough guy at the time. So he flew down, asked my dad for permission, and then he flew back a couple days later. It was a couple weeks later when the proposal happened. And the proposal was so over the top exactly what you would expect from. a love-bombing relationship. We were on the Harrisburg Bridge after we went out to eat.

As we were walking, I noticed people from the church on either side of the bridge, to the left and to the right. And every single one had a rose. I'm going to try not to cringe so hard. But I loved Disney. So when they handed me a rose, each one said a Disney quote. The whole thing was drama. at the very end of the bridge, I stopped, and he had found some guy to play thinking out loud, which was a very big deal at the time from Ed Sheeran.

So he was like serenating us on the bridge and he proposed with a Cinderella quote. When I said yes and when we kissed, fireworks started going off. This just totally fed my delusions because he did not plan the fireworks. That was not supposed to happen. He was surprised by them too. There was a baseball stadium not too far away, and they were doing fireworks at the end. The second that he proposed, we kissed, fireworks started going off, and everybody was like, it's a sign from God.

God is blessing your engagement. So I was just living in this delusional bubble of, this is so meant to be. We started dating on January 31st, and we were engaged by April 10th. So it was very, very fast. How old were you again at the time? I was 20. I couldn't even drink yet when we got engaged. We called our parents and we told them the plan was because we got engaged on April 10th. I was going to go back to San Antonio. I was going to start wedding planning and that he was going to move to San Antonio in August. So we were

going to be long distance for a couple months, which felt undoable because we had been so inseparable at that point. Leading up to that, we did have a few weeks together after. after school ended. I was so excited to be done with this internship because I did not enjoy my time there. I was already feeling done with the charismatic circle, even though I was totally still fully buying into this prophecy stuff. I was just not really enjoying that church in particular and had been hurt by Bethel at that point. We spent a lot of time together before I moved. And this is when I started to notice the red flags. There were so many times during our engagement where I felt so uneasy.

I was feeling, do I know this man? Is this the right relationship? But I was brought back and anchored to this prophecy of, well, God told me. So obviously, this is meant to be. Ted thought that he was never going to die, ever. He genuinely believed that he was going to live forever. We used to have arguments about this. I remember we would have conversations just about what would happen if tragedy came.

I forgot why, but like the idea of life insurance came up at one point during our engagement. He was like, oh, I would never have life insurance on me because I'm never going to die. I would be like, cool, but what if you do? I'm left with our children. He would just say, you're going to raise me from the dead. honestly Tiffany, I carried so much anxiety over this. I would literally lay awake at night and be like, someday Ted is going to die.

He has all this faith that I'm going to raise him from the dead and I'm not going to. I am going to have to grieve and then also feel guilty that I did not raise him from the dead. I felt such a weight of I'm literally not going to be okay when he dies because it's going to be my fault and I let him down. It sounds like he felt like he was god-like. Is it like we're so great that we're Godlike and we can literally raise the dead because we are filled so much with God's presence?

Yes. And I think that comes from in the New Testament, there's something about we're like children of God. I think somewhere in Acts that says something like, I give you these gifts for like you to do too. One thing that Bethel was really big on was we are co-creators with God. We are the children of God. God has left all of the gifts that Jesus. had to us, we just need to tap into them. No, you're not as good as Jesus because you're sinful, and Jesus is the only one who isn't sinful. But everything that Jesus did, you can do. Every single

thing that Jesus ever did, Ted could do that. And he really believed that. And a lot of people in the church believe that at Bethel. Now that I've deconstructed and have had some time to think on these beliefs. I think that one of the reasons that Bethel and a lot of these churches are so toxic is these people do have a God complex and the church sanctions it. They really feed into it. It's super dangerous because they think they're as powerful as God and as Jesus. In hindsight, there were so many red flags. One of them being, Ted had not dated many people before and the people that he did date, I think the longest one that he dated was maybe two or three months, and he had told me that she was absolutely insane. She was actually a student at the school. He had told me that this girl had hurt him so

deeply. She had told him that he was a coward and that he was never going to amount to anything. When he told me that he was getting all teary and telling me these horrible things that she had said to him, and I just thought, oh my gosh, she's so horrible. How could anybody say that to like such a wonderful man? And in hindsight, you do start to think, well, I wonder what you did to make her say that. I wonder, did you hit her? Did she call you a coward because you were being abusive? What did you do to her? One thing that I feel very strongly about now is when people talk badly about their exes to take

notice of it and to make sure that it's not a pattern that they're saying that about all of their exes. My current husband, he's friendly with all of his exes and they all love him. They all ended on good terms because he's a walking green flag. They don't have anything bad to say about him. But when somebody is slandering their exes, you should definitely dig deeper to try to figure out why they're saying that. One thing that happened, and I want to be so delicate because mental health is very real,

and I'm not trying to make fun of it or tease anything at all. But I think that this is when I started to realize that I wasn't getting the full picture of what I was entering into. I started to notice that he would talk to himself a lot. So if we were out shopping, walking from the grocery store to the car, he would be whispering under his breath all the time. And he would look angry when he did it. It almost looked like he was fighting with somebody in his head. I was confused. I didn't know what was going on. I didn't say anything at that point because I was a little scared and taken aback by it. When I would ask him, he would tell me, I just like have such a big imagination. I was imagining that I was wrestling or I was imagining that I was like in this movie because he was such a film buff. I was just daydreaming and you don't want to crush somebody's spirit. So I dropped it at that point. But it was something that was really, really ongoing. I think the moment for me that really made my stomach sink was I went over to his apartment one day. And I was in his room.

while he was taking a shower and all of a sudden I started hearing these noises coming from the shower. I don't even know how to describe it like video game noises, kind of like Star Wars noises, but it was really loud. This was not quiet whispers. I just remember going cold. My whole body like blood drained and feeling really confused and didn't know what he was doing. I was also kind of like, Do I have the full picture? I did end up mentioning that to him, and he got defensive, and he told me he was like a creative genius. I just have a very big imagination, and you don't understand me. When he finally did come to Texas, I started working at this retail store.

I really loved working there, but I remember there was this one really embarrassing time where I was by the cash register, and my coworker came up to me, and she said, oh, my gosh, there's this guy outside. and he's like swinging his arms and he's yelling and I don't really know what's going on. I looked outside and I didn't tell her at the time, but she later found out that that was Ted. The only way he explained it, though, was really I'm being creative essentially. Yeah. I'm very creative and you don't understand me. And he would also say, Albert Einstein talked to himself and nobody understood him and he was a genius. So he was putting himself in this group of,

I am a creative genius and you don't appreciate me. And I'm going to change the world. The anger with it. For me, that's what was scary. Here I am with this guy. I think that our love story is ordained by God and I really, really believe this. But at the end of the day, I am a 20-year-old girl engaged to a 30-year-old man

and he looks angry and he's talking to himself. And red flags are. flying, but I kept being rooted to this prophetic word from the prophet. I started convincing myself, well, maybe I'm just judgmental. Maybe I don't understand him. Maybe I am too rooted, which this is something that the church says all the time. Don't be rooted in the world. You should be rooted in God. So I'm thinking, well, maybe I'm too on planet Earth. Maybe I should appreciate these other things that he's experiencing and doing. I'm sitting here thinking like, maybe he's a creative genius. I don't really know. Another thing that started during the engagement, and this will go on

to be a bigger piece later on, but I started having health issues. I started getting really tired. Whenever we were walking around the grocery store, I started getting chronic pain and chronic fatigue. I started seeing some doctors to try to figure out what we're going on. This is the beginning of my health issues. Looking back, I genuinely believe that my body, was screaming at me, that this entire situation was wrong because I do believe that our bodies are so connected to our emotions. I think that my doubt and my fear was manifesting in my body, and my body was literally like kicking and screaming, do not do this. And it only escalated as our relationship went on. But that even started before we got married. The engagement was a stressful time.

He did end up coming to San Antonio and he ended up getting an apartment about 20 minutes away from my parents' house. And we lived separately because we were doing the whole don't have sex before you get married thing. We decided that we were going to get married in Denver, which was kind of random. It was a destination wedding because we wanted to go somewhere where his parents could go. They lived in Wyoming and it was about a six-hour drive and that was the nearest big city that we thought would be a good city to get married in. My family trucked from Texas. to Colorado for the wedding, and we ended up having an 80-person wedding. The stress was high. I mean, anybody who's ever planned a wedding, you know that there's just so many details. It's honestly

such a nightmare trying to coordinate everything from a different state, and I'm trying to make it the best wedding ever, because I believe I'm only going to be married one time. This has to live up to my dreams. I think when things really, really started to go wrong, it was about a week before the wedding. I was outside in the parking lot of the apartment that he was in. He was standing outside of the car and I was sitting in the car. I don't remember what we were fighting about, but probably just stressful details of the wedding. And all of a sudden, he banged his arm and hit the top of my car. And he said, fuck you, you fucking bitch. And started screaming at me. I was so terrified and I had never seen that side of him.

ever. I had never seen him get angry like that. I started sobbing and he just kept yelling at me and eventually things calmed down, but I did not know what to do. Something, which is so interesting, given the life I ended up leading, back in youth group, they would tell us, write a list of everything that you want in a husband. Make a detailed list for God. Let him know and know. for some reason, ever since I was a kid, the very first thing on my list, it was so important to me that I would never marry someone with anger problems. And I don't know where that came from because that wasn't something that I was raised in either. I just knew that I would never be able to handle that. So when I'm sitting in this car and this 30-year-old man who I've been dating for maybe eight months at this point says, fuck you, you fucking bitch, a week before our wedding, I had to be a no idea what to do. I think I said, I just need to go for a drive and I drove to Best Buy and I sat in the parking lot and was just crying, trying to figure out what to do because on one hand, I have the entire church blessing me. I have God telling me to marry this guy. And then on the other hand,

I have this thing inside of me saying, you can't marry someone angry like this. I think it really started to hit me. How am I only seeing this right now? I know it's a lot. I know it's a lot of takes longer to really know somebody, but I thought that I would have seen these signs sooner. I didn't want to call anybody in my family. I was afraid that they would tell me that I couldn't marry him. I knew my family, and I knew that they wanted the best for me. So I ended up calling my pastor. He was going to marry us and meet us in Denver, and I told him what happened. He said that maybe we should call off the wedding and that he thought, maybe you guys should push it back. maybe you should go to counseling and work through some things before you get married.

And I think having somebody tell me that, be the one to suggest it, put me on the defensive. Even though I was already kind of thinking it, once he said that, I was like, oh, no, we're definitely getting married. The panic started to hit me. All of your friends and family have booked flights. People are spending thousands of dollars. This wedding has already cost your family like $8,000 plus dollars, and it's half a lot. happening next week. Everybody has their outfits, the flowers, the cake, everything's been bought. You're getting married. All of a sudden, I start going on the defensive. And I'm like, he was really

mad. I didn't handle it the best either. I started to make a lot of excuses for him. I decided to go through with the wedding. And I think our pastor friend was nervous about it going forward. I just told him, I want to move forward with this. So this ended up being kind of a deep, dark secret that had happened before the wedding, I didn't tell people close to me. But I look back on this moment and just think to myself, the fact that I was so worried about putting people out, it's so in my nature to be a people pleaser. I don't really regret anything in my life because my life has made me me.

But on the other hand, you definitely shouldn't have married him. That was definitely a sign to not go through with it. I was already so in it at that point. So we did go through with the wedding. We went to Denver, and it was a beautiful wedding. It was everything I ever wanted. The honeymoon, unfortunately, is when it started to take a turn for the worst again. That was the thing with Ted.

It was never good for that long. We could have like a month where nothing bad happened, or maybe two months where nothing bad happened, but it would always come back. It was always on this cycle. And sometimes it was shorter. Sometimes it was every day, every couple weeks. But on the honeymoon, here I am thinking we're on cloud nine. Oh my gosh, we were in this God-ordained marriage.

And I got a call from my parents telling me that my grandpa had some sort of infection and he was in the hospital. And they were afraid that he was going to die. I was just obviously very concerned about my grandpa. We went to Disney World for our honeymoon. And I was checking my phone and texting my mom and asking how my grandpa was. One time, Ted ran into Trader Joe's to go get us some groceries. And I was in the car and I thought, okay, now would be a good time to call my mom and ask for an update on my grandpa. She told me and Ted got back in the car.

I was crying and I was saying how worried I was, how I was afraid that my grandpa was going to die. He unleashed on me. He blew up and told me that my family had no respect for me and no respect for our marriage. How dare they be contacting us on our honeymoon to tell me about this? It was inappropriate that I was emotional about my grandpa, possibly dying. This is when a lot of that deep-rooted behavior came from where it was me versus your family. I should be the number one priority. You're not prioritizing the marriage.

You don't understand that when we got married, it's me and you. You left your parents. per the Bible. You know, there's some Bible verse about leaving your parents' house and starting anew or something. And he would always say, you just don't understand that this is how marriage is. I would tell him, this feels unreasonable. When we got back from the honeymoon, I think it was maybe a few weeks into marriage. He told me that I wasn't allowed to go out with my dad anymore to go out to eat, which is something that my dad and I had always done was go out to dinner once a month or once every couple months and just catch up. He told me that it was inappropriate to go out to eat with my dad,

that I didn't understand that this was the way marriage was and that he was the man in my life now. I was supposed to leave my dad behind. It does make me really emotional because there was this air that Ted always held over me of, I'm so pure, I'm so much better than you because I waited until marriage. I forgave you for your misdeeds before you met me. And when it came to my dad, it felt like he was suggesting something perverted. He really would make me feel so shameful about just having any sort of relationship outside of him. I really did push back on that. And I said, well, I don't think that that's right. I think that you're wrong. We had gotten some counsel from friends that I had talked to and other married couple.

saying we should find a compromise. So nobody was really pushing back on how crazy it was that he was telling me I wasn't allowed to go to eat with my dad. The compromise that I ended up coming up with was that I promised that I would only go to lunch with my dad whenever Ted had plans. That way, I was not taking any time away from our marriage or our relationship. Looking back, it's just so crazy that he demanded that of me. that that seemed like a valid compromise.

I was just very confused because it felt like such a flip. When we were dating, it felt like he really respected my dad. And this started to show up in other relationships too. Surrounding men, I was very close with my cousin, Josh. And as time went on in our marriage, he would get really jealous of my cousin. We were pretty much raised together. He was essentially a brother to me. Ted had told me that it was inappropriate to be texting.

my cousin after 9 p.m. I should not be texting a man that late at night, and I'd say that's my cousin. He would just sexualize relationships around me a lot and make me feel like I was doing something wrong by just having community or family. I think that a lot of that came from the fact that Ted was adopted and an only child, and he didn't really grow up around other people. So I don't really think he had a strong sense of family. And I think that he felt threatened by my family and he felt threatened by the relationships that we had. As time went on, he would have moments of truth where he would tell me why he was behaving the way that he did and things would start to make sense. This was a lot later on in our marriage, but he did end up admitting, I don't want you to be close

with your family because I know that if you're close with them, it would be easy for you to leave me. They would help you if you wanted to leave me. He was so forthcoming saying, I'm isolating you, essentially, because if you have a support system, then you can leave. He wanted to make sure that I was fully dependent on him. He didn't really want me to go to college. He didn't really want me to have a career. He was very much like, let me just provide for you. You can be a stay-at-home wife, a stay-at-home mom.

I did work part-time the majority of our marriage, but he was very adamant that I didn't need to work, despite the fact that we were super broke and in debt, I 100% did need to work, but it was to hold it over me. He was a part-time substitute teacher, which barely paid anything. He had access to all of our finances, and I didn't really have any of those passwords, and I was just taking his word for everything. I started to catch him in lies in the early parts of our marriage when we were in San Antonio. He would say that he got a subbing gig that day. He would get all dressed up in his substitute attire, leave the house for eight hours and come home.

And I caught him more than once not going to work. And he literally was just like out somewhere doing something else. I don't think he was cheating on me or anything like that. I just think he was being lazy. He eventually started becoming an Uber driver. As the months went on, I started to start. to get sicker and sicker. My chronic health problems really started to ramp up. I ended up being diagnosed with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. I was in such a bad place that I couldn't

even walk around the grocery store for 10 minutes without needing to stop. I would get stabbing pains in my fingers and my hands and my legs and I would literally just lay in bed at night and cry myself to sleep because even if I was laying down and I was resting, I was still in pain. I've really read a lot of books since about how our bodies are connected to our mental health. I read this great book called The Body Keeps the Score, which essentially healed me later. At the time, I was just living in such a traumatic atmosphere. Things started to ramp up as abuse does. I remember there was one day where we were in our bedroom. We had been arguing, and he lunged at me as if he was going to hit me, but he didn't hit me. And this is such a complex.

common story that I hear from so many people because they want to be able to say that they didn't put a hand on you. I didn't actually hit you. You're being dramatic. It's the power and control of them wanting you to know that they could hit you and that they could hurt you. When he lunged at me, I got so scared. I didn't have my shoes on and I ran out of the apartment. It was late at night and I was running through the parking lot, crying. He was chasing me and I'm hiding behind a car. It was the most dramatic thing in the world. I had this out-of-body experience feeling like I was living in a movie. Like, this did not feel like my life. How is this the Christian guy that I thought I was getting this man of God? And I'm scared of him. I'm afraid that he's going to kill me. I'm afraid that

he's going to hurt me. He would say the most vile things because I had been sexually abused when I was younger and a lot of women in my family also went through stuff like that and had PTSD. He would say, you're just a victim like everybody else in your family. You're so pathetic. Woe is me. I was sexually abused and you expect people to feel bad for you. He would definitely make me feel bad about my past. He would hold my past against me and tell me my pastor was right about me and that if we ever got divorced, I would just be a whore and I would just sleep around. What a harsh juxtaposition from the love bombing stage that you were in at first. Yeah, it was very traumatic because it was such an opposite of the way that he had painted himself

before. He had painted himself as this guy who wanted to love everybody, who wanted to love God, who wanted to change the world. And it felt like an immediate shift as soon as we got married. Later on he started calling me a whore, and he also called me Jezebel, which it's the worst thing that you can call people in these religious circles. Jezebel is mentioned in the Bible, and I think she's a tempteress or she's manipulative and evil. All the bad things that a woman could be is what Jezebel was in the Bible. I felt isolated from my family, and I didn't have my church around me anymore. We had left them in Pennsylvania, and we were trying to build this life in Texas. here I am three months into marriage and I'm on the verge of divorce right now. Also not wanting to

be outside of the will of God because on some level I believed that this was God's will and I believed that you're supposed to forgive people. Say he had lunged at me. I would be crying the whole next day. He would want to touch me and be physical with me and I'd be like you literally called me a whore yesterday. How am I supposed to want you to ever touch me again? I just felt so tormented. He would turn it around on me and he would say, well, I said, I'm sorry, you're not forgiving me and you're not showing God's forgiveness. And now this is a forgiveness problem. So it was always turned back on me that I was the one being ungodly. I was the one who didn't know how to show mercy. There was another abusive incident where he took a jacket during a fight and he started to hit me with this jacket

and then he pinned me down on the bed and he spit in my face and was cussing at me. Afterwards, I would say, you hit me. And he would say, I didn't hit you. The jacket hit you. You feel crazy. You feel confused. Am I in an abusive relationship? He hasn't left bruises.

He's not slapping me. He's not punching. me, but you just know that you're living in violence. I did end up going to therapy at one point. We had gone to a marriage counselor that was connected to the church. She could pick up that I was scared of him. She pulled me aside and asked me if I was scared of him and we didn't end up going back to her. I ended up getting individual therapy because I was really struggling emotionally at the time. My therapist ended up telling me that she felt scared for me. I had not even told her the abusive things that he did. It just shows that good therapists can pick up on things. We were at

Barnes & Noble, and I was in a lot of chronic pain, and I was on the verge of tears. I was just feeling really sick, and he brought a chair all the way from the cafe to the middle of Barnes & Noble and was like, sit down. And I said, I don't want to sit down right here. Can you please go take it back? He was like, sit down, and he was really adamant, and we had this big argument. I was telling my therapist about it and she told me that she was worried for me because he sounded controlling. She could pick up on that. I just wanted to feel validated because he made me feel so crazy all the time. So I ended up bringing up to him like, my therapist thought that you were being controlling. This is what she said about that circumstance. And he told me that he didn't want me to go to therapy

anymore. I wasn't allowed to go to therapy anymore and I don't think I saw a therapist for the rest of our marriage. He later said that the reason why he didn't want me to go to therapy was he was afraid that the therapist would say that he was abusive and that I would leave him. That was taken away for me as well. Everything was just so bad. He was taking out all of his feelings on me. He was saying that he felt unfulfilled, that he didn't like being a substitute teacher. We were talking with our friends after that fight where he had hit me with the jacket. I was crying to them and we were telling them that our marital problems had gotten very bad. And they gave us some interesting advice.

They told us to move to Atlanta. They said, the reason why he's so upset is y'all's family is coming between you two. They knew that Ted was being controlling about my family. So the family was causing problems. And to make it better, we should move. And then also Ted could pursue film in Atlanta. We just needed to get out of San Antonio. that would fix things.

If Ted felt good about himself and felt good about his career and didn't feel so insecure, then they thought that his behavior would stop and that our marriage would get better. I was scared of him, but at the same time, I did sometimes feel like we were best friends. We were still living life together and going on dates, and there were still some good times. We took it seriously, and that night we decided that we were going to move to Atlanta, and we did within a couple months. We packed everything up and we moved to Atlanta without any jobs. He said that he was just going to Uber.

We were going to be background actors and try to get on the production side as well. That was just a crazy adventure, having gone from California to Pennsylvania back to Texas, and then now we're moving to Atlanta. I did feel hopeful. I felt like maybe this is going to be a fresh start. Maybe he'll stop taking things out on me. if he feels good about himself. It's crazy that my time in Atlanta

was some of the best and worst years of my life. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, stay safe, friends. Something Was Wrong is a broken cycle media production, created and hosted by me, Tiffany Reese. If you'd like to support the show further, you can share episodes with your loved ones, leave a positive review,

or follow Something Was Wrong on Instagram, at Something Was Wrong podcast. Our theme song was composed by Gladrags. Check out their album, Wonder Under. Thank you so much.