#008: Testimony & Transformation: The Woman at the Well

This episode brings a powerful witness to hope for healing for all individuals and couples no matter the circumstance. Anthony and Melissa share their personal & marital testimony of how God took them out of the grave and into His abundant freedom. Their vulnerable testimonies reflect on the difficulty in overcoming dysfunctional family systems, generational abuse, childhood sexual trauma, same-sex attraction, and much more. They authentically share their hearts in hopes that others feel less alone, and that they too can let go and let God into the darkest, and deepest places where it seems light has yet to touch, knowing that hope is here, and healing is on the horizon. 

Following the personal testimony, Anthony and Melissa share the biblical testimony of The Woman at the Well. After reading the scripture verse, they invite listeners to enter into a deeper reflection and powerful guided prayer meditation, inviting participants to encounter Christ in a new way that will leave a lasting impression and forever transformation.*

✨ Key Takeaways

• Testimonies serve as a witness of hope and healing.
• Generational patterns and traumas can impact personal identity and ways of relating.
• Healing is a lifelong journey that requires effort, intention, and support.
• Faith plays a crucial role in the healing process.
• Vulnerability is essential for true connection and encounter.
• The importance of bringing wounds into the light for healing for integration and regulation to happen.
• Christ's love and mercy are central to personal transformation.
• The journey of healing can lead to deeper intimacy in relationships to Christ, and with each other.
• It’s never too late to begin being honest with yourself. 

Episode Extras

⬇️ Download the Booklet here

🎥 Watch The Chosen scene of The Woman at the Well

📖 Download Anthony & Melissa’s eBook Testimony He Makes a Way here

👉 Visit our website to find support for the journey ahead!

♥️ And please share this with a friend and leave a review!

*Episode Correction: the Samaritan woman was known to have 5 husbands, and the last one was not her husband (not 4 as mentioned in this episode).

Transcript

Melissa (04:54)
In the book of Revelations 1910, it says the witness of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy. So we pray that the testimony we share tonight is a witness of hope, healing and restoration, that if God can do it for us, he can do it for you as well. We're going to share testimony and we'll share our stories separately, toggling back and forth. Then we'll be transitioning into a guided prayer meditation on the woman at the well.

inviting you into deeper prayer and reflection.

So with that, we are going to get started with the testimony and Melissa is going to begin.

So I want to start by sharing the word testimony with you and what it means. A testimony is a proof or demonstration of some fact.

evidence, a witness, one who attests, this testimony that I share with you tonight is me personally attesting to the transformative power of Jesus Christ. And I could go in many different directions with my story, but tonight I'm going to focus more broadly on the healing that I encountered years ago within the first five years of our marriage and continue to encounter to this day as I've discovered my true identity in Jesus Christ.

not as broken, but as beloved, and as a daughter of a good Father in heaven who loves me and tells me that I am inherently good and that my life, my personhood is a gift, just as he tells each one of us. So though I carry many wholesome and good memories of my upbringing, I was raised in the Catholic faith. Praise be to God, we were churchgoers.

but I was born into a very broken family system with its own unique generational patterns. And unfortunately, this system was built on dominance and dysfunction, where fostering real authentic connection was a threat to the false power that it was built upon.

Throughout my life, I experienced many moments of interpersonal betrayal and neglect, as there was a lack of emotional intelligence and literacy in the home, or a healthy co-regulation, one could say. And repair was often not mirrored to me, so it was quite foreign.

Emotional intimacy was not something that I had really experienced at a deep level or understood until well into my adult years, I would say even into my marriage.

Control and manipulation were common threads that were interwoven throughout my upbringing. And when I was a young girl, I was known in school for having a terrible tic, for profusely apologizing over the smallest things. As I got older, I was able to process this more deeply. And really, I was often sorry for even existing, as I felt like I was a burden or a liability to others.

And deep down I experienced the sense of not being wanted, of not being deeply known, understood, or seen.

Much of that stems from the traumatic experiences of sexual abuse that I had suffered from multiple relatives. Because it began at such a young age, it was something that caused me to live in and out of a state of disassociation. And it left me with many fragmented parts and memories from the past.

There was an overexposure in my life to disordered sexuality, and an underexposure, or maybe even an avoidance, of being taught that my body is sacred and holy, and that my sexuality is a gift.

I didn't understand the gift of my femininity until well after I was married, which made it extremely difficult for me to experience healthy, secure attachment and left me with many identity lies. This made it hard to develop a strong sense of self through the developmental stages of my adolescent years and young adult years, let alone the first few years of marriage while navigating family life.

To most on the outside, I would have seemed like a typical adolescent girl, a Catholic school girl, church youth group attendee, eager to be involved in programs. I was a lover of the arts, I still am, all the things that kids do. However, underneath that, there was something so much deeper going on that I was internalizing and could not interpret myself.

as I was not able to fully process that until later in my life at a time that God had ordained. I was battling depression, fear, feeling abnormal, and holding many disordered behaviors and patterns that stemmed from this great interior dysregulation that surrounded my body and soul. There are many complexities to this subject, particularly surrounding generational wounding.

as it usually encompasses an entire family system, and the deception can even spread into communities. Blinders and deep dysfunctional patterns are often very present in homes where abuse is happening. I should note that we all come from some form of generational sin. We are all fallen

And these disorder generational patterns can occur in any family, from unhealthy ways of relating to emotional neglect, to divorce, alcoholism, or other addictions, infidelity. Many of us experience traumas in our life, either big T or little T trauma, as Sister Emiriam James Hyland would say so well. In other words, we experience a wounding of sorts.

For me, the discovery and understanding of my own wounds left me with a piercing pain, but also an undeniable truth about myself, which is the truth that we all hold and that we are made as dignified whole beings with pillars to self or parts to self, emotional, spiritual, physical, intellectual, social,

and sexual and that all of us are undeniably body and soul composite. You can't separate the two. And that we are undeniably made for God himself.

These open wounds affected many foundational aspects of my life and development from my childhood into my adult years and even into my marriage and parenthood. I was suffering greatly with deep bondage to sin and under a great level of oppression. Although I was highly functioning on the outside, my soul was very sick. I was very blind internally in spirit and I cried out often to God, save me.

and heal me from what I knew to be wrong, disordered and sinful.

But I didn't know how to access those deeper layers of self, nor did I have the tools. And I could not see compassionately into myself the way I needed in order to heal. I was exiling many parts of myself because they were too upsetting for me to even sit in

I secretly loathed myself and my body and found myself in many unhealthy relationships with men. But by the grace of God, because He loves us so much and desires wholeness and healing for us, even in such a state as that, He sent me the first safe man in my life, my husband, Anthony.

After marriage and having our first child, I finally sought the help I needed. I began to see more clearly that the patterns that I internally carried, that often manifested in unhealthy ways externally, that those patterns were really my body's way of speaking to me. My soul crying out for some dots to finally be connected and for integration to happen.

It was telling me a story and I was ignoring it over and over and essentially betraying myself in the process as I had learned how to cope and protect myself from such deep levels of pain, such as the hard truths of what I had experienced. I had many parts that were left unhealed and remained under the surface as trauma can often do that to us.

When we don't have the proper tools or safe persons present to accompany us along the way, we can get stuck. And this often suppresses experiences or false beliefs or identity lies into our system even deeper.

This is a coping mechanism that helped me survive the decades of unhealthy living and barriers to thriving. But now, being newly married at the time, I was in a new state of life and with a man who was finally safe enough for me to begin to heal, for the cycle to not perpetuate like it was and for the pain and the sorrow, the deeper symptoms to bubble to the surface and finally be exposed. God was making me new.

and I didn't even fully know it yet. I went through many years of intensive trauma recovery with a certified psychotherapist who was also Catholic. And I know now that I was living with what's known as childhood developmental disorder. And I suffered severe symptoms of complex post-traumatic stress syndrome, or what's known as CPTSD.

Over the years as I healed, I began to see that the body in which the Lord gifted me with is very wise and that the Holy Spirit within me has infused my flesh with knowledge beyond understanding. I witnessed miracles in my time of healing and many levels of personal healings that are in a sense indescribable. Through years of sessions, I had experienced trauma leaving my body.

I worked memories out of my flesh that were stored for decades and symptoms and ailments I was suffering from began to dissipate over time. Some quickly and others more progressively as recovery is a process and healing is a forever journey for all of us. It was a new way of living for me and it was costly in many ways, not just financially, but a commitment of time and we were raising a family.

It also required change from me personally. As I began to see my life more clearly, the need for a cleansing out of the old ways and an acceptance of the new followed. And it required a conversion. This is still very present in my life as the Lord continues to renew and restore it all in His time.

But this new place that I was sitting in for many years was also full of pain and sorrow as I began to grieve the loss of what was lost and not fully lived. The grief came in layers and it still does sometimes as any crosses in life bring us, but we know that on the other side of grief is hope. St. Paul tells us, but we also glory in our sufferings.

because we know that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance character, and character hope. And hope does not put us to shame because God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. When we take our wounds seriously, whether they be small or great, we begin to bring things into the light.

We are called to bring what's been in the darkness into the light because when we do this, God's justice has its place. And we give him permission to reign in our hearts, in our homes, in our communities, and to restore what's been lost and what's been broken. You can see in your booklet the etymology for the word restore, to give back, to build up again, to rebuild, to renew.

or to make firm, to cure, to heal, to bring back to a vigorous state. And I love the connection here because in the word resurrection, if we look at the meaning of the word resurrection, arising again from the dead, but it also says to be restored.

This calling to heal isn't just for me, but for all of us as Christ died, for every single one of us to be restored in the fullness of his love and mercy. Our apostolate, the abundant Catholic, is based off of John 10, 10. I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly. And right before then in the gospel, Jesus says, anyone who comes before me,

is a thief who comes to steal, destroy, and slaughter. So Jesus is the only one who sets us free.

There is no other route but Christ, himself, that leads to life. I think so many times we can forget this.

So once I began to take my wounds seriously, eventually my husband did too. And during a very difficult season in our marriage as we were raising a family with small children, and also me committed to this intensive recovery work, it had become increasingly aware that his addictions were taking over, which had made it a constant area of contention in our marriage. And I always intuitively had a sense that there was something going on.

with him that I couldn't quite put my finger on. And no matter how hard I tried, it would never budge.

So I began to pray fervently for him, and I entrusted him to Our Lady. I remember placing a small green scapular under his pillow like any good Catholic would do. And I trusted in the Lord, because that's all I had, was just a little bit of hope. Things were so bad in our marriage that my recovery therapist at one point said she couldn't see me anymore until we took the time to get more stabilized.

in order for me to proceed forward with the work that I had begun. We were nearing collapse and were struggling to remain afloat. Anthony will fill in the rest momentarily with his testimony and how we are where we are today, doing the work we're doing and raising our beautiful family. But in it all, God has provided a new way of life for us to live, in an intimate relationship with Him and in union with Christ.

We are given so many graces in the sacraments. They truly are our lifelines, even in the sacrament of marriage, of vocation. And in our faithfulness to Him, to living out the truth totally, fruitfully, faithfully, as we allow God to remove the barriers and impediments we hold within us, this is how we become set free.

We don't know the plans the Lord has for us in our sufferings, but we do know what he asks of us. And though it's not easy, the joy that comes in the morning is a great part of the mystery of our faith, of the resurrection of hope, as Christ has triumphed over death and leaves us as new creations in him. Henry Nowen, a prolific author and writer, says so powerfully,

Nobody escapes being wounded. We are all wounded people, whether physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually. The main question is not how can we hide our wounds, but how can we put our woundedness to the service of others? When your wounds cease to be a source of shame and become a source of healing,

we have become wounded healers. Jesus is God's wounded healer. Through his wounds, we are healed. Jesus' suffering and death brought joy and life. His humiliation brought glory. His rejection brought a community of love. As followers of Jesus, we also allow our wounds to bring healing to others.

And my hope is that for you today that we can do just that.

Alright, I'm picking up where Melissa left off. So, at the time, ⁓ there was much turbulence in our marriage, and things were getting progressively worse. Fights were getting more frequent, and as Melissa was working on healing from her past wounds, I found myself distancing more from her and isolating. One night, we were in a bad fight, and I was feeling at a loss for what to do. So I said a prayer to the Lord and asked him,

what he wanted me to do. I told him I would do whatever he asked. Very clearly he spoke into my heart and he said, you have to tell her. And I thought, but if I tell her that will surely add fuel to the divorce fire. However, I took comfort in knowing that if I told her and ended our marriage, at least she would know all of me and there would be no more secrets.

What the Lord was referring to in this moment was the fact that I had kept a secret from Melissa well into our marriage.

When I was between the ages of 13 and 14, I fell into unwanted same-sex experiences that created a deep wounds surrounded by much shame that I carried with me. Having these negative sexual experiences during such a tender and formative years as a young boy left me carrying the struggle of same-sex attraction, or SSA.

This is a part of myself that I deeply despised and I learned early on to simply compartmentalize it, leave it in the past and forget about it. This is what was modeled to me as my family often avoided issues. They simply swept stuff under the rug and moved on. I made an unholy vow that I would never tell a soul about the sexual acts I engaged in and the struggle with SSA that I carry.

I was going to take this to the grave with me. Believe it or not, I actually thought this was the right thing to do as a Catholic man.

What I didn't know is that when we bury things, we only bury them alive. If we don't go back to the places of woundedness to invite Christ to heal those places, they continue to manifest throughout our lives in negative ways.

As things were becoming more difficult in our marriage and I was isolating more, my addictions increased. I was falling back into pornography, my drinking was ramping up, and I was falling into sexual sin. At times when my wife was raising our children and healing and needed me the most, I was becoming more more distant and clinging to my numbing and coping mechanisms.

Finally the day came for me to reveal the truth about my past and my current struggles to Melissa. The Holy Spirit was very present in this moment and Melissa was able to be present for me since she had already processed so much of her own healing.

God's timing was perfect in this. It was a beautiful moment for both of us, as difficult as it was. We felt like that was truly the beginning of our marriage because now everything was brought to the surface and exposed. Nothing remained hidden. There was a great amount of relief accompanied by shock as there were never any outward signs that I struggled with SSA.

Though we passed this major milestone, bringing all things into the light, my addictions and struggles did not subside. And the strong sense of betrayal began to enter Melissa's heart. She began to question everything about me, her marriage, what's true, what's not, how could you lie to me?

The year that followed the disclosure was one of the hardest years of our marriage. Things began to get turbulent, and divorce was on the table once again. And one evening, during an awful argument, Melissa felt Christ's hand on her shoulder and he said, you need to get out of the way and let me take care of

She was very confident in this instruction of the Lord. the next day she packed up the kids and left for a few days to give me the space that I needed. Though I was quite numb to the fact that my family had just left, that very evening I fell into a deep despair. I would say this is my rock bottom.

For the first time, I was really pondering on what was happening in our life. I was laying in my bed and I started sobbing hysterically.

And I cried out, Jesus, I can't do this anymore. I need you. And in an instant, I felt his presence. I physical sensations all over my body as if a flood of grace, love, and mercy was completely covering me. Then the Lord began to speak truths into my heart. He said, Anthony,

The SSA that you've been carrying your whole life, that you've despised so much. This is not who you are. I say who you are. You are mine and I am yours and your identity lies in me.

Then he said, I know that SSA has been an anchor dragging you to hell for so many years. I'm not going to take that away from you. Which is funny because that was always my prayer, is Lord, just take it away.

And he said, but we are going to change it. And no longer is this going to be an anchor dragging you to hell, but it is now your cross that if you carry well and unite it with my cross, it will become your key to salvation. And those deep wounds that you carry, my glory will shine through them. After all this, he ignited my heart on fire and I was filled with the Holy Spirit and a zeal that has never left me since that night.

This ended up being a powerful encounter with Christ that totally transformed me. As a cradle Catholic, I always heard that Jesus loves me and my identity is in him, but really never truly understood this, or maybe didn't even believe it, perhaps due to the shame and the struggles that I carried and listening to the whispers of the enemy. I've been a devout Catholic my whole life, and prior to this, I was always trying to earn my identity in Christ, thinking,

The more I do, the more he would love me. This is unfortunately a common misconception that many of us fall into.

Now I am living confidently in my identity in Christ, and the things I do now come from an outpouring of that identity. I am reminded of one of my favorite quotes from St. John Paul II, We are not the sum of our sins and failures, but we are the sum of the Father's love for us. The sum of the Father's love for us is beyond numbers, it is infinite.

In this moment, Jesus also renewed my mind regarding my Oftentimes I consider the cross to be some sort of physical ailment or chronic disease or something of that nature. Not something that the world is actively supporting and encouraging people to do. In some strange way, I am now thankful for my cross. Though it is a heavy one,

He brought me a wonderful wife to be my Simon and helped me carry that cross.

We haven't experienced an abundance of fruits since that night. The Lord turned everything around over time. He and healed our marriage. He gave us two more children that otherwise would not have been here had we divorced and gave in to the enemy's lies. He's freed me from the chains of addiction, alcoholism, and pornography. I've been sober three years now from alcohol.

After years of intentionally seeking truth and gaining restorative tools for our marriage, he brought me into the Encounter School of Ministry, which really helped shape my understanding on identity in Christ, hearing the voice of God, learning about the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and how to activate them. This became a vital training and growth period in preparation for the mission that God has us on today with the abundant Catholics.

Healing is a forever journey and our marriage here on earth is meant to bring us to heaven. The greatest thing is that Christ brought Melissa and I into a deep intimacy with his heart and in turn a deeper intimacy with each other. And now he's called us to go out and share the good news so others may experience it as well.

So now we're going to pivot the evening into scripture reading. Thank you for listening to our testimonies. I know they aren't light by any means, but we share it with you today in hopes that it touches you in some way, or you can at least share it with others. So we're going to delve into reading the scripture on the woman at the well and the guided prayer meditation for you, because it is lent.

And this season of Lent is about transformation. We want to avoid just doing Lent out of doing it and checking a box. We want to invite Christ to transform us. So we're gonna walk with you tonight into a deeper way of inviting him in.

And what we shared was a personal testimony. Now we're going to share with you a biblical testimony of transformation. So as we get going, you're welcome to read along from the booklet or you're welcome to close your eyes and listen. And remember that this is something that you can read over and over again. it's quite long.

but we really felt the Lord telling us to read it in its entirety. It's actually known as one of the longest recorded conversations in the New Testament, and it's only found in the Gospel of John. But we felt called to share it with you tonight in prayer. So this is a work of the Lord for you tonight.

So Anthony is gonna begin by reading it and then we're gonna enter into the guided prayer meditation.

this passage is from John 4 verse 1 to 42.

Now Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that he was gaining and baptizing more disciples than John. Although in fact it was not Jesus who baptized, but his disciples. So he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee. Now he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar. Near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob's well was there.

and Jesus tired as he was from the journey sat down by the well. It was about noon. When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, will you give me a drink? His disciples had gone into town to buy food. The Samaritan woman said to him, you are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink? For Jews do not associate with Samaritans. Jesus answered her,

If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water. Sir, the woman said, you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father, Jacob, who gave us the well and drank it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?

Jesus answered, everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life. The woman said to him, sir, give me this water so that I won't get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water. He told her, go call your husband and come back.

I have no husband," she replied. Jesus said to her, you are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is that you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true. Sir, the woman said, I can see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the

place where we must worship is in Jerusalem. Woman, Jesus replied, believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know. We worship what we do know for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the spirit and in truth.

for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth. The woman said, I know that Messiah, called Christ, is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us. Jesus declared, I, the one speaking to you, I am he.

Just then his disciples returned and were surprised to find him talking with a woman. But no one asked, what do you want or why are you talking with her? Then leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, come see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah? They came out of the town and made their way toward him. Meanwhile, his disciples urged him, Rabbi, eat something.

But he said to them, I have food to eat that you know nothing about. Then his disciples said to each other, could someone have brought him food? My food, said Jesus, is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work. Don't you have a saying? It's still four months until harvest. I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields. They are ripe for harvest.

Even now the one who reaps draws a wage and harvests a crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together. Thus the saying, one sows and another reaps, is true. I sent you to reap what you have not worked for. Others have done the hard work and you have reaped the benefits of their labor. Many Samaritans from the town believed in him because of the woman's testimony.

He told me everything I ever did.

So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them. And he stayed two days. And because of his words, many more became believers. They said to the woman, we no longer believe just because of what you said. Now we have heard for ourselves and we know this man really is the Savior.