I believed I was damaged.
I believed I wasn’t enough.
I believed people would eventually reject me if they really knew me.
I didn’t realize those weren’t my thoughts.
They were lies I had believed for nearly forty years.
Every decision I made flowed from those lies. They shaped my friendships, my relationships, my marriage, and even the way I saw God.
The Lie That Was Planted Before I Turned Ten
I grew up in an idyllic home.
My parents were pastors, and I never doubted their love and acceptance of me.
But before I was even ten years old, a neighbor stole my innocence.
And this had a devastating impact on my identity and self-worth.
All throughout my teenage years, I would allow friends to manipulate me, mistaking their attention for acceptance.
And time after time, I would wind up hurt and confused when they would walk away, because they didn’t need me any longer.
How One Lie Began Shaping Every Relationship
My brokenness had a direct impact on my dating life.
The only boy I was ever serious about was my first boyfriend, with whom I had planned to spend the rest of my life.
But the pattern I experienced with my friends was repeated with him.
What started as a fairy tale ended in his obvious disdain and contempt for me.
For the next 7-8 years, I flitted from boy to boy - never getting serious and never allowing them that close.
Stringing them along until they were hooked, and then cutting them loose before they could discover that I wasn’t as interesting as they thought.
The Relationship That Nearly Destroyed Me
I was in my late 20s when I began dating the man of my dreams.
He was a cowboy with blue eyes. He knew how to turn on the slight drawl at just the right time.
Our friendship was fun and exciting, but our relationship got off to a rocky start.
I saw the red flag, but I didn’t want to believe it - so I chose to look the other way.
That would prove to be a mistake I would regret for years to come.
I was in Bible school, so the first six months of our relationship were long-distance, but that didn’t stop the flood of verbal attacks I endured night after night over the phone.
Horrible names.
False accusations.
Irrational assumptions.
Always followed by tearful apologies and promises that he would change.
His manipulation cloaked me in a straitjacket that I mistook for love and adoration, and a year later, we were engaged.
What should have been one of the happiest times of my life became my biggest nightmare.
The Day I Realized My Mind Needed Healing
The verbal and psychological abuse only worsened while planning my wedding.
But having a strong support system in my family enabled me to end the engagement only four months before our wedding.
I wish I could say that this was the moment everything changed.
Yes, some things did change.
I met my husband. Got married. Had two babies.
Our marriage wasn’t terrible, but the brokenness was still there.
It was the third person in a marriage meant for two.
After years of sweeping pain under the rug, I began to realize that there was no more room under the rug.
Pain was leaking out.
Pain was leaking into my marriage.
Pain was leaking all over my children.
Pain was leaking into my friendships and my church family.
And pain had built a huge wall between God and me.
I wanted to change.
I realized I had become my own worst critic.
The voices that had wounded me were long gone.
But I had become their echo.
I was saying to myself what they had once said to me.
Looking back, I realize God didn’t heal me overnight.
He renewed my mind one step at a time.
And the process He walked me through completely changed my life.
Below, I'm sharing the exact journal exercise I used, the questions I asked God, and the Scripture practices that helped me replace decades of fear, shame, and anxiety with truth.
This is the process that completely changed the way I think—and it's the same one I'll be teaching inside this community.