How A Survivor Healed and Reclaimed Their Life After Human Trafficking?- Dr. Marianne Thomas

Human Trafficking. Survival. Healing.

Dr. Marianne Thomas, a survivor of human trafficking, shares her powerful journey of survival, resilience, and forgiveness. She opens up about the emotional scars left by exploitation and how she found the strength and faith to rebuild her life.

As founder of My Name, My Voice, Dr. Thomas provides counseling, mentorship, and advocacy for trafficking survivors, emphasizing the importance of support systems, education, and trauma-informed care. Tune in to hear her story, gain insight into recovery, and learn how survivors can reclaim their voice and purpose.

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Book: Why I Survived; Where Survival Becomes Strength

The background music is written, performed and produced exclusively by Char Good.
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Transcript

www.ineedblue.net. 

Please note I need Blue does contain sensitive topics, which could be triggering.

Please seek help if needed. And remember, you always come first. Today's guest is Dr. Marianne Thomas. She is here to share her story of surviving human trafficking and childhood abuse, including sexual, physical, emotional, financial, and spiritual abuse. Dr. Thomas used her lived experience in education to provide counseling and mentorship for abused and trafficked youth and women for over 15 years.

She has a PhD in behavioral psychology and an MA in Mental health Counsel. Marianne is the founder and president of my name, my Voice, a collective of lived experience, experts who provide education and ongoing consultation for organizations who want to build a new or grow their existing anti-trafficking program.

She is also a public speaker who helps people overcome self-sabotage by talking about forgiveness. Marianne, thank you for being my guest today and welcome to the I Need Blue Podcast. 

Marianne: 
Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here today. I appreciate this opportunity. 

Jen:
Absolutely. You know, I wanted to share something with you that happened on February 16th of this year, so a couple of months ago I was listening to the.

There was a undercover human trafficking bust in Florida that led to over 200 arrests, and it was a rescue mission of 24 suspected victims. There were 89 suspects arrested for soliciting prostitution and 111 prostitutes arrested. So when you see stories like that, what goes through your head? 

Marianne:
I think I know the story you're speaking of.

I frequently work with law enforcement while they conduct these undercover operations, and so I'm right there as they arrest the girls or boys who are arrested for prostitution. So right away we can identify, um, if they are a victim, which in my mind, they all are victims. Not many of them are, are ready to identify at that moment.

We are able to get services for people right away. We connect them immediately with social services. There are other providers there because I'm a connector, not a provider. We connect them to providers right away. They're able to talk to someone like me who has sat in those chairs, who has felt that feeling, who has, you know, wondered what happens next.

And so I'm able to sit with the girls and guys. Talk to them in the moment. It's a lot going on in an undercover operation. And so bring some sort of peace to what is happening in that moment and explain what's happening next. And if they are able to identify, if they are able to, um, to come forward with anything at all, then usually we're able to get their charges dropped.

We're able to, um, have them released. Sometimes they have to go to jail for a little bit. Often it is for their own protection while we go after the real bad guys, right? Florida is leading the nation. Um, Tennessee is right there with us on our work in the anti-trafficking movement, and so I'm very proud to be a part of all that.

Jen:
It's awesome. That's amazing. I'm so glad that we talked about this because a lot of times we see the news story, you hear about the arrest and you're like, oh, thank goodness they're safe. But in all honesty, we don't know what happens after that. So when the majority of the times when you are connected with somebody who has, who has just been rescued, what is that person experiencing?

Marianne:
Well, we don't say rescued because that gives people like a savior complex. Right? We also say recovered because the same thing. It seem, it makes it sound like someone else did all the work for. So what we say is exited when we exit the life or when we exit human trafficking, so that way we get to own the power of that move.

When I encounter someone who is exiting, it's scary. What you're doing is you are asking a person to change everything they have probably ever known. Because what I do know about human trafficking is it begins in childhood. It does not often begin in adulthood. It does, but not often. It's usually something that carries over from childhood, from childhood abuses.

Um, so even if you weren't trafficked until you were an adult, chances are you had all of those childhood abuses that led you very vulnerable for trafficking. When we look at all that. A person has experienced abuse, someone like me our entire lives, and so when you first come to us and tell us, you don't have to live this way, we do not believe you, right?

Because that is all we know. People who want to help us are often met with resentment or outright anger or irritation. Or just we dismiss them because we don't think we need help. We think this is what my life is, right? And we don't really recognize that there's a different life that we can have.

Jen:
Absolutely. Thank you so much for saying exited. I think that that's an appropriate word for what is about to, to transpire for that individual. You just talked about how a lot of this occurs in childhood, and we are here to talk about your lived experience that also began in your childhood, and if you're okay with it, can we talk about your experience?

Marianne:
Yes, we can. My first documented abuse was at two months old. So when we talk about children, um, never really having a chance in a different life, that's what we're talking about is our abuses start so very early that it really is all we know. My family looked normal on the outside. If you would've seen us anywhere.

We looked normal. I had a mom and a dad and a bunch of brothers and sisters, um, and we went to church and I went to a private school and I'm sure we looked like the perfect little family everywhere we went, but inside the house was much different. My dad was very good at. Portraying one image to the world as a business owner, as, um, a leader in a church as a lot of things that people looked up to, but in the home, he was very violent and, uh, very cruel in the way that he treated all of his children.

That abuse was a physical abuse when I was two months old and it started there. I don't have a lot of memory. I think that's a blessing that I don't have a lot of memory of some of those earlier things. I have very vivid memories of some other things that I would gladly give away if I could, but he started abusing.

Sexually before kindergarten. I can't tell you how old I was, but I know it was before school. That was part of it, and I was his favorite during that time. So while he was sexually abusing me, he was also calling me pet names and giving me special favors and. Giving me, you know, things my brothers couldn't do.

I was the golden child, right? All of that was happening at the same time, which was very confusing for my poor little brain and understanding what love is, what a father should be, right? And then a day came where my mother put a stop to it. It wasn't until I was seven years old, um, that she put a stop to the sexual.

That is when the physical abuse really took off. And so again, in my developing brain, what I was learning is if you give sex to somebody, they won't hurt you. And if you don't give sex to somebody, they're going to hurt you really bad. And so that is the message I was taking in throughout childhood from my father, the person who should have loved me and protected me, and, and done all of those things when I met my first trafficker.

Easy pickings, right? We say that they go after the vulnerable. They don't want to snatch somebody who's going to scream and yell and, and throw a fit, right? What they want to do is they want to slowly push boundaries and pull somebody away from anybody safe. Well, I didn't have anybody safe. The only safe people I had were people at my church or people at my school.

And so when I met this boy, I was walking home from school one day. I went to a private school. He went to the public school. I was walking home from school. I knew who he was because I had been at the public school, gone back to the private school. Um, I knew he was popular. I knew he played sports. I knew, I knew who he.

And as I was walking home from the bus stop, it was quite a long walk, and he said, uh, he had pulled up in his car and he said, Hey, do you want a ride? And I said, sure. And he had three friends with him and I didn't think anything about it. Jumped in the car, right? They're just teenage boys. I was 15 years old when this happened.

They gave me a ride home. When they got to my house, they said, Hey, we're just gonna go over to this guy's house. Do you wanna go with. And I said, sure I do. And I think I'm being invited to like the cool kids' house. This is going to be, you know, something special. I thought, this is awesome cuz they go to public school, so, oh, it's a little dangerous too.

Right? So I had all of that in my head, but I was excited to go. I really thought. They wanted to hang out and be friends. And um, that very day was the very first time that I was trafficked. That day I had to have sex with two of those boys, and that boy who picked me up became my first trafficker, and he continued to bring his friends to me.

Coerced me to have sex with his friends saying things like, I'm your boyfriend and if you love me, you would do this, and because this boy gave me a ride to your house, we owe him, so we have to pay him. And so you have to do X, Y, z. And that's how it started for me. And I think a lot of people don't recognize that trafficking doesn't have to involve cash, right?

A lot of people want it to involve cash, but it's the exchange of anything of value. So safety, security, love, shelter, food, right? Those are all things of value that can be exchanged for a human being. So that's what he was doing to me during this time. I, my poor brain started to explode, right? Because I couldn't wrap my head around everything that was happening.

I didn't want it to happen. I also didn't know how to make it stop happening. I was very afraid of my dad finding out because my dad was so violent. And so I had all of this going on. I started, um, Skipping school, I started, uh, skipping everything and not going to church, not going to school, and I was very involved in my church at the time.

But I started pulling out of society completely. I would physically fight my mom when she tried to make me go to school. Um, I got kicked out of the Christian school during this time, and I had to go back to the public school when I walked into the public school for the first time. And I had been there before.

I had gone back and forth. But I hadn't been there in a while. And when I walked in, I found out that everybody knew the public school. Everybody was talking about what I was doing and what a dirty person I was and calling me all of the names associated with that. So from that first day on, I was also being attacked at school from girls who would physically come up and attack me, um, saying that I did this or that boys who would come up and want to.

Join in on what they had heard about and it was awful. And so I just stopped. I stopped going and I refused, but I love school. And so around this time, my dad decided that I was a problem child. And I can understand that I was refusing school, I was fighting my mom. I was screaming, yelling, doing all those things, but I was doing all of those things as a natural response to someone being raped.

Right? That's a natural response. Um, my father kicked me out of the house, um, and eventually had me emancipated. I was 15 years old, and so I had to then figure out, Where to live, how to live, what to do. And so that was my first real jump into what the street life is like, because up till that point I'd been very sheltered in a lot of ways.

Not in the home, but outside the home. And so that was my first time, um, being homeless. Um, experiencing survival sex, where you have to trade your body in order to have a place to sleep or food to eat, something to, to take care of your, your person or for safety. And so that was a big part of my life for a couple, for about a year, I got away from my original trafficker because I was homeless.

He just couldn't find me anymore. This was before cell phones, right. And so I was just gone. And so that part was kind of a. I went across the country and back. I made it back to Florida again. I was very resourceful out in the streets. And then at the age of 17, I was back in Florida. I was working three jobs.

I had a full-time job. I had a part-time job, and then I was babysitting on weekends and evenings. I was doing my best to pull it together as much as a 17 year old can. I was babysitting one evening and I met a boy at the bowling alley where I had taken the kids while I was babysitting. I thought it would be more fun than sitting at the house.

And so we were at the bowling alley and there was a boy next to me who was kind of flirting with me, commenting on my bowling, and he was about my age. I didn't think anything about it. And then the phone rang again before cell phones. The phone rang at the bowling alley, and they made the announcement.

This person come and accept this phone call, please. Well, the name they said was the name of my first trafficker. And so that stopped me cold. And I was like, oh no. And so I kind of looked around and I didn't see him, um, but the guy who was next to me went and answered the phone. And I thought, okay, that's weird.

And so when he came back, I just asked him, I said, Hey, I know that person. I said, you're not that person. Why did you just go answer that phone? And he told me, he said, oh, that's, he goes, that's a friend of mine, but he's really a dirtbag. He's cheating on his girlfriend right now. And I don't like that he does that, but that's why I answered the phone.

It was his girlfriend looking for him. And he tells me this whole story about how it's his friend, but he's really a dirt bag and he doesn't really like, And so I thought, oh, okay, well you know that he's not a decent person, so this seemed okay that night. He had asked me for my phone number, but I didn't have one cuz I was homeless.

And so instead we had agreed to meet at the beach the next day. We lived in a beach town, so we met at the beach the next day and agreed to meet again the next day. And that third day I moved in with him. At first, it was a normal relationship of what if that can be normal at 17, moving in with somebody in three days, but it seemed like a regular boyfriend and girlfriend.

But again, that then changed, and then it was well. This friend did this for us, or we need to pay rent, or we need this, and so the whole cycle started again. I wish I could say it stopped with him, but it didn't. Um, I followed that pattern for quite some time. I was with him for several years. Then when I left him, there would be, I would have some space sometimes where it felt like I was getting my life together, and then I would meet another guy and be back in the same pattern again, and then I would find some space and then maybe I'd meet a nice guy and that would.

Even weirder, because I really didn't know how to handle that. My second trafficker, I had dabbled in drugs before him, but he helped me solidify that, and so I became addicted to cocaine, which lasted about a decade even when I was trying to be. What I thought normal was I and date normal guys, whatever that meant to me.

Back then, I also still had this drug habit, so I also had all these other things going on. I started having children at the age of 19, and so I was. Dragging kids along through all of this, through my addiction, through unhealthy men, whether they were traffickers or just abusers. My kids had to live through all of that.

And then finally, I thought I had it Like I thought, I thought I got it this time, right? I had dated a nice guy for well over a year. I had gotten off cocaine and, and drugs, all of the other drugs that go along with that. Sometimes I thought I had it. I thought, we've got this. I had a couple of kids at the time, um, and he was a good father figure, role model to them, and so I really thought I had it.

I thought, okay, I thought I was living a fake life because I felt like I had to. Pretend and to act to fit in in his world. And it felt strange to me, but I thought if I can just do all the things that I see like his sisters do or his mother do, then that means I'll be a normal person and this will all be fine and we can live happily ever after.

And that was my plan. However, I still had all this brain stuff that was not going well, and so I pushed him pretty far away. Pretty good. And. I did some, some horrible things and he's still a kind person to me at that point. When I had pushed him away and he was trying to decide, you know, whether or not that was something he wanted to try again with me.

I met another guy and this guy wasn't talking to me. He had gone and taken some real space. He'd gone all the way to Alaska, so he took space and my dad was back in the picture at this time. At times in my life, I would reach out to my parents and try to have a relationship, and it always went badly. But at this time, I had been in a pretty bad car wreck and I had these two little kids, and so my parents had allowed me to move in with them, with my kids for the summer.

My dad had asked me if I wanted to go country dancing. We both like country music and we were getting along. It was some weird space in our relationship where it seemed like we were friendly without any sort of abuse or manipulation. I thought we started going dancing on Friday nights together, my dad and I at this country bar, and we didn't stay late.

Neither one of us could stay up that late, but we would go and have a good time. During that time, I met a guy at the, at the bar. He seemed like a nice guy. He met me with my dad. That seems wholesome on the outside, right? He had a mom and a dad. He had a normal family. He had, um, a child of his own. He, he seemed pretty normal and so the relationship with the other guy was fizzled and not working.

And this guy and I became friends and we started as friends and I got to know him and we would hang out with our kids. And he knew there was this other guy somewhere in the background. You know, and he dated, whoever he dated, we were friends, right? We hung out. It was fun, and we talked on the phone and we got to know each other.

And then sometime after the other boy and I had decided this was not going to be, The new guy from the bar and I were talking and he and I decided, let's try this. We get along so good. Let's do this right. We got together and we had children, and we got married and everything looked good, and then. There wasn't any money he had been working, he had been doing, um, his best, you know, he had a child from a previous relationship that was a strain.

He had to pay a lot of money for that. There was a lot going on and he had been doing, I think, his absolute best in that first, uh, year or so, two years. And then after my final child was born, we had been living on money I had gotten from my car wreck, and he had been working during that time too. And then when the money from my car wreck ran out, he decided he did not want to go back to work and he decided he wanted to just go to the gym.

We right, we decided that I would go to the strip club and dance for two weeks to pay the rent. That was the plan is that I was gonna go to the strip club. He had known I'd been a dancer before that had been part of my trafficking story. And so, Felt like no big deal. Nobody will know. I'll just sneak into the club for two weeks, make enough money for rent and for what we need, and then he'll go find a another job and, and we'll go back to normal.

I went to that club and five years later I was begging him to let me leave. I was begging him to let me leave. I was. Begging him to please go get a job so I could quit. I was telling him that it, I literally said to him, this takes a piece of my soul every time I have to walk in there. It was also my first time doing it sober ish.

I mean, I drank, but I was off all drugs. You feel it a lot differently when you can't numb it out. A lot of people think, oh, well, you're just a, a dancer, just a stripper. No one, no one is just a dancer. That's not how those clubs work. Um, I know what the movies look like, I know how people portray it. I don't care if it's the Fanciest Club or the Dirtiest Club.

There is Sex for Sale in every single one of them, and you have to pay to work at them. So when I walk in at night, I already owe about $150 the minute I walk in the door. So I have to at least make $150 to walk back out the. If there's not customers for dancing, if nobody wants to see you dance, you have to do whatever you have to do to make that money.

At that time, I had four children to support and a husband, so I had to make enough money to pay the rent for the four children and the husband to keep food on the table. My kids all played sports. I had to pay for. All those registration fees, all the shoes, all the equipment, all, somebody had to pay for that.

And my husband was not working at all. He might get a job for a month and then he'd quit the job and he would say things like, well, I have to be at the gym three hours a day, so I. Work doesn't really, you know, I can't get a job. There's nobody who will hire me for those other hours and things like that.

And he would also use manipulation by saying things like, you know, if you were a good mom, your son would have the best cleats. If you were a good mom, your son would be able to do. Y Z I only had boys, so if you were a good mom, your son would do this. And he would use that to get me to go make more money.

And all I knew is I'd never had a normal family. And so he must be right. He must be telling me the the truth. And so all I wanted to do was do the best that I could. And I was doing everything I knew. Luckily there was somebody who saw that I did not need to be in the life I was in. Um, and it was another guy.

He was a strip club at the DJ who never asked anything of me, became my friend without expecting anything in return, right? All of those things. But he became my friend because I had gotten so angry and so violent by this time, all the violence that was thrown at me, I was throwing back at everybody else.

I was horrible to my children when they were growing up. I was violent to my children growing up. I was violent to my partner's, boyfriend's, husband's, whoever they were. I was violent to customers in the club. I was angry and taking it out on everybody. And so at the club, I was known for fighting the customers, not the other girls, but the customers.

And so it was nothing for me to pick up something and hit somebody in the head with it. And so the DJ was like, you're going to get arrested and probably get a shutdown, so you need to stop. And so he kept having me sit in the DJ booth so I wouldn't fight people. And so I would sit in the DJ booth. Well, he did his thing.

And he was in college at the time, so he would be doing his math homework and I would sit there and say, that's not right, and I would tell him what to do. I had, um, dropped out of school. Um, I think the last time I went for a full year, might have been ninth grade, but I think ninth grade was really only part of a year too.

So it might have been eighth grade. That the last time I was a full year there, but I dabbled in and outta school. My second trafficker made me get a G E D because he said I was an embarrassment to his family without it because they were in education. I got my G e D because of him and I, I have thanked him for that sense.

I had nothing, right? I had nothing, but I liked numbers. I always liked math, and I just remembered what I had learned, and so I was helping him with his math homework and helping him with his math homework, and he kept saying, I think you should go to college. I was like, no, no, no, I don't think so. And he said it over and over for four years.

He kept telling me, I think you should go to college. Finally. I don't know how he convinced me or why I finally listened. But he had to literally walk me through it. So he had to take me to the school, show me how to register. He had to show me how to take a placement test. He had to show me how to go find books.

He had to walk me to my classroom on the first day of school because I literally would've chickened out any time, any step along that way. He did all of those things to help me leave that life. After that first semester of school, I realized I could do something different, and I never, ever went back to that life again.

I left my husband. I took all those kids, and I learned how to be poor, right? I learned how to have absolutely nothing. I learned how to feed kids from. Buy one, get one free pasta. At Publix, I learned how to be homeless with children, um, and try to use the social services that are out there, which are never near enough.

But I had to learn a whole new way of living. And that's what people don't understand about us, is they think once we walk out of that life, everything should be perfect. Right? We. The awful part behind and that's great, but the new life we're stepping into is so much harder because we knew what that old life looked like.

This new life is whole. It's different. We don't know what to do, how to act, how to behave, how to dress, what to, and everybody expects us to know things. I left the life at 32. A 32 year old woman with four children, you would expect to know an awful lot about how the world works, right? I knew nothing, and so people would look at me and expect me to know how to do things, and I would get frustrated inwardly.

I would never show that I couldn't do things right. I would always fake it till I couldn't figure it out, but that shame that you carry. Why don't I know how to do this? Every other 32 year old knows how to do this. Every other mom knows how to do this. What's wrong with me? Right. There's a lot of that because we have to learn so many things that we didn't get to learn cuz our brain was so busy surviving.

Jen:
Wow. That's an amazing story. The first thing that really surprised me is I think a lot of people think human trafficking is a child and an. Right. Yours was a teenage boy. So that right away was like this aha moment. It's like, wow. That was eye-opening. Definitely. So thank you for, for sharing that and then through your story, I find myself rooting you on. I want you to find somebody to love you. You know what I'm saying? Which was the same thing I'm sure you were looking for, but you had a very distorted view of love from how you had been treated and how you assimilated things. Tell us where you are today. 

Marianne:
I jumped into that whole school thing.

I figured this seems like something I know how to do and I can do it well. And so I jumped in, but because I didn't know how to ask for help. My school, if you look at my school record, it looks a little crazy cuz I kind of took this weird path. I just took classes that sounded interesting to me. I knew that they had to add up to a degree, but I didn't realize that you're supposed to just take those classes, right, and that there should be some efficiency to the process.

And so I would just take anything that sounded interesting. I spent about a year and a half just taking math and sciences for a while. So I, I bounced around. At first I thought I wanted to be a lawyer. I wanted to change the system. I wanted to change things, um, for, for people who like me. And then I was like, Hmm.

I took my first psychology class and I was like, wait, this makes sense. This is starting to sound familiar to me in understanding what the brain does. And so I just started taking more and more of those classes, which led me to the degrees that I have. Those classes started adding up to degrees and school started saying, okay, you've taken all these classes here.

Please leave our school. Go somewhere else now. And so that's how I ended up going on and getting more degrees is because I would just soak in as much as I could. And that's why my degrees sometimes people go, those don't match. I'm like, I get it. Yeah, I get it. You know, it wasn't on purpose, but it makes sense for me.

And while I was still in school, because my master's is in mental health counseling and you have to take internships and stuff like that and learn how to be a counselor. And so with my internships, I started at the Salvation Army. And by me, they had a huge program. So they had the Bureau of Prisons and Department of Corrections and a women and children's shelter and a drug facility.

And I was like, these are my people, right? I get this. And so as I'm still studying, I'm also sitting in an environment where I can observe people who are living a life that I had lived. And I'm watching all that they're doing and I'm going, oh, I did that and I did that, and I did that, and I did that, and I started putting a lot of the pieces.

But it wasn't until I was working for the Salvation Army and I was sitting in a training on human trafficking and I was sitting with my good friend. We're sitting there, we're learning what human trafficking is, and they're going down all the lists, you know, the commercial exchange, you know, force fraud, coercion if you're over the age of 18, and they're talking about what all of human trafficking is, and I'm checking off every box, every single box, and I'm.

Oh, uh oh. Because up until that point, I would've told you that I chose bad men. I would've told you that I chose bad behaviors. I would've told you that I did things for my family. Never in a million years would I've pointed the finger at those men ever at all, including my father, right? That was just how life was.

And so it was sitting in that training when I was like, oh. Oh, okay. This is what this is. And then I started wrapping my brain around that and jumping into counseling to put some more pieces together with some help and have accountability for the changes I was making in my life and on this journey. And then I worked in programs for quite some time.

I, uh, ran um, what is called the gold standard of safe homes for minor girls who have been trafficked in the state of Florida. I ran that for close to five years and love doing that. I, um, Was one of the first members ended up overseeing the entire program of what is the largest, um, anti-trafficking mobile program in the state of Florida.

And so I've had my hand indirect care for quite some time. It is a lot of work and so I left my last job last year and started my own company called My Name, my voice. And what we are is a collective of lived experience experts, a collective of people like me, girls and boys. Um, and we do public speaking where we educate people about what human trafficking is.

But we also go to organizations and help them do their anti-trafficking program better. I helped a church begin a drop-in center. They had a strip club outreach program and they. Place for those ladies to come to. So I help them build a drop-in center that they have now, and they're doing well with that.

And right now, where you see me right now, I'm at an organization called One Purse. And what they do, it's fascinating, they take high-end purses, right? People donate them, they sell them online, and then all of that money goes to scholar. For people who have survived human trafficking, they're one of the organizations who provided me with a scholarship back in the day.

And so, um, they've now hired me to come here for the summer while their c e O is on a sabbatical. And so I get to hang out here for the summer and help this program that already invested in me. And this is absolutely amazing that I can see my whole life come full circle. 

Jen:
 Thank you for sharing that because I was gonna ask you, you know, what was the moment you realized that you had been trafficked, that you had been abused, that aha moment right now that you are, you're helping all of these other individuals, do you get triggered?

Marianne:
 Every day. I have to tell people all the time, it's up to me to control my triggers.

Right? It's up to me to cope with my triggers. It's up to me to figure all that out. Now, people who care about me should try to not poke that bear, right? But for the average person, you're going to, you're going to, because you can't, 32 years of abuse, right. Plus, The years after that when I was trying to leave it and I was still in all those messed up situations trying to figure things out.

Right. All of that. It's almost impossible for you to be someone who doesn't remind me of something. Right? Right. And so that's just a reality. Wherever I go, I can see something that reminds me of a house, a room, a plant, a, you know, whatever's around me. And that's. It's up to me to know how to deal with that.

There are certain things that maybe I avoid because I know it will be triggering. You'll find this to be true with a lot of girls and guys like me. Things like, um, holidays. I go to church, I believe in Jesus. And um, but I sure don't go at Christmas and I don't go at Easter, and I don't go at Mother's Day and at Father's Day because those family events can be overwhelming.

I don't do that. I avoid things. Are going to be painful for me. We have anniversaries of certain traumas, right? During that time, the people who know me best know, Hey, during this season, this is a, a tough time for me. This day is a tough time for me. This week is a tough time for me. And so they know, you know, if I'm a little short with you, maybe I'm going through something, you know, maybe that's not, you know, my usual lovely self, right?

And so, but I, I'm to a point where I can have those conversations. And then still something will pop. That triggers you, that never triggered you before, and all of a sudden triggers you in a moment and never triggers you again. Like for example, I was talking with some staff one day and somebody offered me a piece of black licorice.

I like licorice. I've never had a problem with licorice. It also used to be my dad's favorite candy in that moment, the minute they said black licorice, I went cold. I could feel it. I could feel the panic start and I had to talk myself through it. And I was like, what? What? That's never happened before. And you can see to this day, I can say it all day long.

It doesn't faze me a bit. So it was just that one in the moment. So either maybe it something else was in the back of my head already. That led me a little bit more susceptible. I'm also a huge proponent of self-care, so. If I'm not taking care of my physical body, I know that I'm more susceptible to other triggers too.

So I'm very good at like today bringing up my story and sharing my story can be potentially triggering. So I did my usual morning. I went to the gym. I did some yoga. Um, and my plan for after this, I had already told everybody, all the staff that after this I'll either go for a walk or treat myself to a coffee cuz I've been off coffee.

And that will be, you know, how. I processed through the after part of this. 

Jen:
Can we talk, um, cuz we talked about this in your introduction, the self sabotage and forgiveness. 

Marianne:
I love to talk about that. I was mad at my dad, right? Rightfully so. I was mad at my dad, but my anger at my dad was holding me back from relationships.

Health for my own self, right? Because anger only hurts me inside me. It doesn't hurt that person. My dad was off living his life. He could care less that I was mad, right? I was only hurting me. And so I had to learn the art of forgiveness. And it was a process, decade process, right? And I had to go through it one at a time.

Forgiving my dad, like walking through that with help, with counseling, with, um, mentors. Um, you need all of that in your life if you're trying to change your life, right? And so I had to learn how to forgive people so that I was not stopping myself from, like you said. I want that, that person one day. Right.

That is exactly what I was looking for, is I was looking for that family. Not necessarily the man, but the family is what I was trying to recreate always. And I never could. Every time I did, I, it was going horribly wrong. And because that is the goal, well, the family part might be a stretch cuz we're not having babies anymore.

But because that is the goal, that that's what my heart has always desired. I was never going to get that if I held onto the anger to my dad. Right? I was never going to be a good partner if I held onto that anger. I was never going to be a good partner if I didn't let go of those men who, who weren't good husbands, right?

I had to be able to forgive them in order to be a wife one day, if that's in my path. But even to be in a relationship. And so I took a long time of my life, years and years of not dating at all, of only working on me. Um, and then I would try to go on a date and I'd be like, oh, nope, nope. Go back to working on me.

And so I would do that and I kept that pattern for quite some time where I just didn't date people because. I was like, I've got to figure this out, because I didn't want to find that nice guy like I had had before, and then spew all that garbage on him too. I had already seen myself do that to somebody, and I didn't wanna be that person again.

I was grateful that that person forgave me. I was, I don't wanna do that twice. My goal was to figure it all out. Before I actually tried to start dating. Then I spent a year where I said, I'm just dating Jesus, right? Because guys started coming to me saying, well, I think you should date me, and I'm like, Hmm, I don't think so.

And I kept feeling unhealthy. People were still gravitating towards me, which tells me something about me. Either they think I'm going to fix them or I'm still unhealthy, right? Either they've seen me pro progress and they think I can help them progress or. I still have stuff to work on, and so I, I took a year where I said, I'm just gonna date Jesus, so people would quit asking me.

So, and that, um, gave me that space to really figure it out and outline, what am I looking for? Because I hadn't done that before. You know, what, what, what I want in a partner, what attributes, what characteristics, you know, I like to get up at at five in the morning. I like somebody who wants to get up at five in the morning too, right?

I like somebody who wants to get up and go to the gym, and I'd never thought about those things before. I'd never thought about what I wanted in a mate. I'd only thought about how I could be a good mate, and so I started thinking about what I wanted in a mate. I'm like, I've worked on me now let's figure out what I want.

And then after that is when I was like, okay, I think now I'm ready to start dating. I think I'm ready to figure this out now. And I wish I could have made that a reality show, cause I think it would've been very entertaining, but probably, um, not nice to the people I was dating. 

Jen:
So I love that you say you dated Jesus for a year to really figure out, you know, what it was that you wanted.
We're never really alone. Like God is always there with us, but we don't always realize that life kind of takes over. And I've recently gotten him back to church myself, and so I understand that relationship and I appreciate it. So I'm so glad that Jesus was, you know, part of your journey here as well.

Marianne:
I was raised in a church, so I always had that background. I thought God was probably mad at me for quite some time and we didn't really talk right. But in my healing, what I've discovered is that I couldn't have survived that life. I can, I could name several times that I should have been dead, that I almost was dead, and I'm sitting right here right now.

I know I've beat the. So many of my survivor sisters are no longer with us or are still struggling with addiction, or are still struggling with whatever. I was blessed with this brain. Nothing about my past says I should have these degrees right now. So there's a reason that he gave me this brain. He wants me to do something with it.

And you can't forgive. I, I don't know how people forgive without Christ. I just don't. Not that it made it easy, right. But it was what I had to fall back on because I was able to fall back on. He sure forgave me because in all that trafficking, in all that abuse, yes, it was horrible what people did to. But I also did horrible things to other people, right?

I took all that was thrown on me and I threw it on everybody around me, and I also want forgiveness and grace for all of that. I had to wrap my head around. I need my kids to forgive me. I need my family members to forgive me for certain things. I need friends to forgive me for things that I did. I need other survivors to forgive me for things that I did.

So if I am looking at who I am now and thinking that I'm worthy, whatever that means, right, of forgiveness from those people, then how can I look at my traffickers, my husbands, my, those people who hurt me so badly, my dad, how can I look at them and not offer the same forgive. It's not right and it's not fair.

It's not what Jesus would do. And so I had to figure that out. I had to figure out how I was going to get past that. Now that doesn't mean I wanna hang out with them, right? That doesn't mean that we're gonna be best friends. But, um, I can say that with my ex-husbands at least, uh, we have a friendship.

Where we can, we can be in the same room. We can, we can, you know, talk. We can, if our kids want to get together, we can all be together. And it's not weird for anybody, but. I'm also not gonna go to dinner with them one-on-one. Right, right. You have boundaries. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Healthy boundaries. I love that.

I'd like to end with some words of comfort that you could share to somebody listening who maybe can relate to your story. Sure. To anyone who relates to any piece of what I've said, I see you. It doesn't have to be the same story, the same experiences. What I know is that how we think and how we feel, and our emotions and our behaviors are very similar, even if our stories look different, even if we look different.

And so I want you to know that I see you and that you don't have to do this. You just don't. It's gonna be hard and it's gonna be ugly, and you're going to want to run back a million times and probably will run back a million times. But you keep pushing forward because it is so beautiful on this side.

Jen:
Oh gosh. I love that, that it about brings tears to my eyes. When you say, I see you so many times. You feel alone. Yes. And unseen. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Unseen unheard. You don't know where to turn. I think that's amazing. Thank you so much for sharing that. 

Marianne:
This has been a good experience. I don't even think I need the coffee, but I still want it, so I'm so glad it was positive for you.

Jen:
 I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your story, and thank you for being my guest today. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Absolutely. This is Jen Lee with the I Need Blue Podcast.

Remember, you are stronger than you think. Thank you for listening.