My guest in part 1 of this episode is Rebekah Wen. Rebekah will share her story and testimony of growing up disconnected from her identity and purpose, how she found it and how you can find yours too. This is one you’re not going to want to miss.

Part 2 of this story can be heard in the next episode.

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Transcription - From Torment to Identity and Purpose (part 1)

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Today I have a guest who will share her story and testimony of how she found her identity

in purpose and how you can find yours too.

This is one you're not going to want to miss, so don't go anywhere.

Welcome to the Fatherhood Challenge, a movement to awaken and inspire fathers everywhere,

to take great pride in their role, and a challenge society to understand how important fathers

are to the stability and culture of their family's environment.

Now here's your host, Jonathan Guerrero.

Greetings everyone, thank you so much for joining me.

Rebecca Wynn is here with me to share her story of how she grew up disconnected from

her identity and life purpose and how she found it.

This is going to be a powerful story, so buckle up.

Rebecca, thank you so much for joining me on the Fatherhood Challenge.

Thank you so much for having me.

Rebecca, let's start from the very beginning.

What is your story of how you found your identity in purpose?

Well my story actually begins back before World War II in the early 1930s, even before

then, on my father's side of the family where Ashkenazi Jews, and so sometime in the early

like first 1000 years BC, my family was taken from Israel and brought up to Germany into

the modern day Rhine River, that area, at Suiustis lives, and over hundreds of years they

had built a community, and my family, they were the rabbi and the religious leaders in

the community.

In that time my family were, they were serving the Lord.

And there are records like obituaries that were written for my great-great-grandmother,

she passed away in 1933, and there are obituaries that were written by the German population

of the city where they lived.

And those obituaries paint her in a very loving way.

She was a powerful woman of prayer who was known for being loving and kind and nurturing

to absolutely anybody who came to her, which is, she had no problem reaching out to them

regardless of their faith.

And so this was an obituary that was written by the German population, not by the Jewish

population in that city.

The next account of my family is from the Crystal Night, and it's an account of my relatives

being dragged out into the streets and beaten as their house was burnt down.

The synagogue was burnt down, the cemetery was destroyed.

That was obviously Crystal Night, so a few years after that, by 1942, all of the people

in my family, my father's bloodline, who were 50 years old and younger, they had fled

Europe.

They left everyone who was 50 years old and older in Germany.

And the result was that all of the elderly people in my family were killed in camps.

And since that time in my father's bloodline, absolutely nobody has been a believer in

Christ or practicing Judaism.

He has been financially successful or physically healthy.

And I believe very strongly that their choice to abandon the elderly at that time brought

some kind of a curse on our family that we no longer protect, took some kind of protection

away from us on a generational curse level.

And that filtered down to me many years later.

So my parents divorced as an infant.

I was five months old when they had finalized their divorce.

The reason that they divorced is because there were a lot of reasons, but domestic violence

was the main one.

So I spent my first year of life growing up in a shelter for battered women with my mother

and siblings.

So from a very early age, my mother was very religious.

She was a believer.

She clung to the Lord through all of these situations, but my father was a hardened atheist.

And so I grew up seeing these polar opposite identities, these polar opposite worldviews.

And my mother was a Republican.

My father was a liberal.

I was just like, they had nothing in common.

So I grew up, I learned very quickly that I had to be a different person when I was with

my mother versus when I was with my father.

So with my father, I grew up hearing Bible stories, listening to adventures in honesty,

praying before we go to bed, before we eat all these kinds of things with my father.

If he saw us praying, he would beat us.

If we had anything Christian, the Bible or anything that we brought to his house, he

would destroy it.

And at his house, we were surrounded with new age things, with witchcraft, with a lot of things

that were even, a lot of D and D and things that were basically soft core pornography.

When you get into those like artwork and everything, that's out of the world, a lot of anime

and things like this.

And then as we got older, that progressed into things like more explicit things like Austin

Powers and those movies he thought they were the best means ever.

I remember watching them when I was knee high to a grasshopper.

For me, this divide created a feeling of constant grief and anger.

And from a very early age, I started to have some very strange things happening from a very

early age, even though I was not sexually assaulted or anything as a very young child.

But from a very early age, I had a very keen awareness of all things sexual and how all of it

was interconnected and worked and everything.

And I believe that I was given that awareness by spiritual forces because from a very early

age, I was tormented by spiritual forces almost every time I went to sleep.

I would have incredibly vivid and violence and disturbing dreams almost every single night.

So by the age of four, I basically knew everything that I know as an adult.

I've gained no new knowledge since that time, even though I'm now married with children.

So the reason I bring that up is to set the stage to say that I was just a very, there was

something wrong from a very, very young age.

But no one in my family clued in on that.

My father definitely, he thought there was nothing strange about this at all.

And my mother, she had had her own emotional things happening and she really wasn't able

to recognize these kinds of problems, even though she was praying she wasn't able to focus

on them.

So by the time that I was five years old, I had developed constant migraines.

I would have migraines every single day.

And I would, I would just hide whenever I had them.

I never told anybody that I was in pain.

I never asked for medicine or anything.

I would, I would just hide under tables or any dark places and try to listen to quiet things.

And it wasn't until we visited a distant relative that noticed my behavior.

She was a psychologist and she noticed my behavior and she thought that's a little weird.

And so she was the first person to ask me why are you, why do you hide in dark places all

the time?

And so, you know, I told her that and that's how my parents found out that I was even having

these problems.

And the reason I bring that up is to show that for some reason by that age, I had decided

that I could not be a burden to my parents.

Even though I was in debilitating pain, I would still not go and tell them that there was

anything wrong because I didn't want to be an emotional burden.

I didn't want to be a burden to them at all.

Fast forward a few months after that time, my, my maternal grandmother was a missionary

in Guatemala.

And at some point in time, we went down to visit her and we went to a Mayan temple and something

happened at that temple.

There was some kind of a spiritual entity that I would say latched on to me because from

that point on, I had much more severe nightmares.

I became, at that point, I became afraid of the dark.

I became, I began to see things more than just like when you're asleep.

I began to see things like shapes and apparitions and shadows and tall men and things and even

when I was awake if the lights were even dim, I would begin to see these strange, strange

shapes and then even during the daytime.

And something within me said, this is not normal, but you can't tell anybody.

So I never did.

I think on some subconscious level, I knew that something was wrong.

And so I remember very distinctly, my mother remarried when I was seven years old and that

was sort of the end of my like parent trap dreams.

If you remember the movie parent trap for these two children, trick their parents into getting

remarried.

My older sister and I had always entertained those illusions with our parents.

And so when they had both remarried by that point, that was the end of that dream and

that really pushed me into a place of anger and depression because I realized I would never

have a complete family.

At the same time, around that age, the series, the movie, the left behind series came out and

my mother wanting to be a strong believer in teachers and truth, she showed it to me.

And I of course had a lot of questions about this movie.

And one of the things that I knew was that my father was not a believer and that my mother

was.

And that in this movie, the believers got to go to heaven and the non-believers had to

suffer and go to hell.

And so I remember very distinctly asking my mother, does that mean that my father, my dad,

would go to hell?

And she said, yes.

And my immediate reaction to that was to completely reject God and faith and anything to do with

him because I did not want anything to do with this God who would divide my family and

send my father to hell.

I didn't want anything to do with that.

And so I started going into a downward spiral.

About that time I started developing anorexia.

While I would starve myself, I would weigh myself or measure myself with my mom's measuring

tapes.

And if I was too big, then I would stop eating for a few days until I got to the size that

I wanted to be.

Shortly after that, I started to have out of body experiences where I would literally be

laying down or relaxing or something.

And I would leave my body and I would see my body on the bed or wherever I was, but I would

not be there.

I would be out flying around and I could look around my house and see what other people were

doing and things like that.

And so I started to have just have these experiences.

I never sought after it.

I never thought about what it was.

I just thought it was sort of a cool thing I could do.

After those started, my dreams started to become significantly worse.

And they started to become more physical where I could actually physically interact with

these entities or they could physically interact with the world around me.

They could do things like move things around my room, like move things off my bed.

And so I became very paranoid about how to protect myself from them and keep my, I'd never

told my parents.

They just thought I was a really weird little kid who was maybe OCD or something because

I had, I would arrange the room in very specific ways so that I could keep myself safe.

So I would put my bed in a corner of the room and I would line both sides where my bed

met the wall with blankets or pillows or things to create a barrier that completely blocked

that gap between the bed and the wall.

And then my blankets had to be all tucked in and then the lights had to be just exactly

the right way only specific lights and only the door, the doors had to be in exactly the

right position.

Some doors could be open but some doors must be closed but some doors had to be like part

way open.

So I had these really specific requirements based on where I had seen entities or what they

had touched or moved or how the clothes they had gotten to me.

And so I trained myself not to move in my sleep to always lay on my side with my back against

the wall so that I could always see everything that was in front of me or that I could see

the entire room at the drop of a hat.

So that started when I was about nine years old.

If I go back to this, this question, the sexual things that were happening at that time,

although it's an uncomfortable subject, I think it's something people need to realize is

I from a young age was being abused by a female relative and growing up when I would have

sleepovers or something with my friends.

Every single one of them would become sexual until I had my first friend at about 12 years

old and she was the first one that I ever had where nothing sexual ever happened between

us.

And so at this age of like nine, this was just the world that I lived in where I thought

everybody lived with these constant tears and I thought having sexual relationships with

literally anybody who was close enough in proximity without adults supervision was totally normal.

And on some level, I knew that there was something wrong with that because I never wanted to

tell adults about it and I knew that I knew that it was something I shouldn't tell but

it's not like anybody told me you can't talk about this.

It was just something that I knew instinctively I couldn't tell anybody.

But I wanted to point out that I was homeschooled so I was under adult supervision almost all

the time and I was still having these things happen and nobody knew they just thought that

I was mentally there was something mentally wrong.

Nobody bothered to ask about it or check about it.

Sometime after about I would say about 10, 11 years old or something, my friends and I

wanted to play the game Bloody Mary and I would urge any parents not to let their children

play around with things that are summoning spirits in any context.

After playing the game of Bloody Mary, although I would nothing necessarily happened during the

experience, after that time I began to notice that faces did start to change when I would

look in the mirror or at pictures, the faces would just change and so I stopped looking at

mirrors even to look at my own face.

Especially the change would always start in the eyes so they would start to become more

and more black and it would be like these large black, I guess almost like a portal or something

of vortex was opening and it would grow from the eyes, it would grow across the face and

the mouth would become like the lips would become thin and dead and start pulling back and

start opening up and I knew on some level that if I ever let the whole face change whatever

it was would either come in or I would pull me in or something like that.

But this started to happen every single time I would look in a mirror so I stopped looking

at mirrors at all. If I had to look in a mirror or if I had to look at someone I learned to

never look above their nose so I would look for nose and mouth down and that would be the

closest I could get to eye contact.

So obviously I was deeply troubled and then I finally hit my pre-teens and all those

craze or hormones and everything kicked in and one thing that I'm sure now if I had been

taken a specialist or something I would have been diagnosed as being on this spectrum at

some point because by the time I was in my teens I had never been a very emotional girl.

I've never been interested in the same thing other women were.

I was always a tomboy, I was always interested in self-discipline and self-control to the

point where as a child if I felt like I was going to lose my temper I would grab my ears

and I would pinch my ears with my fingernails until the pain and then I would focus on

the pain until it overruled the emotion so that I could control myself in the situation.

So I started doing that as a child and as I grew up I just became more and more obsessed

with this idea of self-control and because I became more obsessed with that I became more

I had less understanding towards people who did not have emotional self-control namely

the other teenage girls in my family and even my mother.

By this point I had really seen a difference in the way that men and women were treated and

I saw men as being very strong and nobody would treat men the way I was treated because if

I could back up a little bit that feeling of grief only grew with time and it became so

intense I defined myself as trash and disposable and meaningless and worthless and unloved

and despite my mother's best efforts that only grew with time and so as I grew older and

older I began to define myself more and more as this trash but I decided at some point

that I did not want to bring more pain into the world than was already here and so I couldn't

stand the idea of making other things feel like trash and so I wanted to have a feeling

of control over myself and over my surroundings and the strength like you couldn't hurt me

so that all the things people said and did that we're hurting me would bounce off and

I viewed masculinity as armor and so I decided as a pre-teen that I wanted to become a man

and I even started saving up money for a sex change which is shocking to me because at

that age when I was that age nobody talked about transgender I'd never heard of it you know

it wasn't it wasn't a topic no one talked about these kinds of things at all but somehow

I got it in my mind that it must be possible and I wanted to achieve it so I started saving

my birthday money to become a man so that I could protect myself and have that self control

and have that armor and have some kind of self value but all of these insecurities and

these fears and this constant feeling of grief it just grew and combined that with pure

prepubescent hormones and everything I slipped into a very deep depression and after about

a year or so of that I decided that I couldn't handle it anymore and so one day I decided

to make a deal with the devil and I literally prayed something long lines of you know I'll

say I'll give you my soul if you make me stop hurting and it was like instantaneous I had

no feelings just completely emotionally numb I wasn't happy I wasn't sad I could feel

anger but that was about it and I went on like that for about a year or so but I knew because

when you're completely emotionally numb and then your relatives or something they do something

that should be funny or should make you happy you still have to put on a face you still

feel like you're obligated to put on a face and show them you don't want to walk around

like a robot all day right yes so I tried very hard to put on this act like I could feel

something but I had been I couldn't anymore and so I tried to at some point I sort of realized

I wanted to be able to connect and I couldn't and so I tried to fill that void in other ways

and so I dove headfirst into pornography and this was the beginning times of YouTube and

everything but I found I would just go to the public library because remember I was homeschooled

I didn't have my own cell phone or access to internet but I would just go to the public

library and find things on the shelves there or you know just go to YouTube or like fan fiction

websites or whatever and I would find however much I wanted to my heart's content and even

though our computer was in is in a public part of the house it nothing deterred me it wasn't

important I could find ways to get around it to be creative so I started to dive into that

because I wanted to have some sort of sensations or emotions or something and this at this time

these entities that were attacking me they became more more violent and much more involved

in sort of my fantasies and things so that everything just became more and more and more twisted

I don't want to go into too much detail about that but there came a point where I knew that

that if I didn't if I didn't get some kind of control over the things that I was imagining

or the things that they were teaching me somebody was going to end up seriously hurt and I began

to become exhausted because I was trying to on some level I think my mother's prayers were trying

to lead me to the light because on some level even though at this point I was a practicing

satanist I completely rejected everything to do with my mother's faith I was a kind of kid

that if my mom took me to a church I would carve pentagrams into the bibles and write you know write

expletives' and you know I was the kind of kid that the other good little Christian kids would

all run away from and their parents would in their little homeschool community the other parents

would see my see me and see my mom and say well whose whose kid is that like what's around

with them what are they you know what are they what how are they abusing her you know this kind

of thing but my mother was leading us every morning in worship and prayer she was every

single day praying for us and it was just I think that's what kept me from completely falling off the edge

so at about 13 years old my mother's prayers really bore fruit I think there was a concert in town

a large Christian concert that I was boycotting and I was shaming anybody who went and one of my best

friends was forced to go by her mother and she came back saying oh man was amazing there was this

amazing band that's playing on the radio and you really I liked their music because they were playing

on secular radios and they were like this heavy metal band and I loved it and she was like yeah I got

one of their CDs here you can borrow it and so here I am I'm sitting down doing my homework and

I am in a cold basement it's the middle of winter it's snowing outside like this is a cold

room and it's concrete floors you know like it's a cold little space and I'm sitting there doing my

homework I'm listening to this music and I suddenly had this realization that they were talking

about God and I thought no they're not people like me cannot talk about God like and so I picked up

the CD cover and I looked at them and they were dressed in black and I was dressed in black and you

know they had they had their scars their scars were obvious I was like well so are mine and then I

thought what are they doing talking about God like God doesn't want broken people like me.

This concludes part one of my conversation with Rebecca Wins that she tells her testimony.

We're going to continue this testimony into part two in the next episode.

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Fatherhood Challenge. If you would like to contact us

listen to other episodes find any resource mentioned in this program or find out more information

about the Fatherhood Challenge please visit thefatherhoodchallenge.com that's thefatherhoodchallenge.com

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