FamilyLife Today® Podcast

Sliding Into Addiction

with Bob and Karrie Wood | April 15, 2013
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Dennis Rainey talks with Bob and Karrie Wood, leaders of the Celebrate Recovery Ministry at Fellowship Bible Church in Little Rock, Arkansas. Karrie tells how she slid into an addiction to alcohol and bulimia and suffered silently from sexual abuse.

  • Show Notes

  • About the Host

  • About the Guest

  • Dennis Rainey talks with Bob and Karrie Wood, leaders of the Celebrate Recovery Ministry at Fellowship Bible Church in Little Rock, Arkansas. Karrie tells how she slid into an addiction to alcohol and bulimia and suffered silently from sexual abuse.

  • Dave and Ann Wilson

    Dave and Ann Wilson are hosts of FamilyLife Today®, FamilyLife’s nationally-syndicated radio program. Dave and Ann have been married for more than 38 years and have spent the last 33 teaching and mentoring couples and parents across the country. They have been featured speakers at FamilyLife’s Weekend to Remember® marriage getaway since 1993 and have also hosted their own marriage conferences across the country. Cofounders of Kensington Church—a national, multicampus church that hosts more than 14,000 visitors every weekend—the Wilsons are the creative force behind DVD teaching series Rock Your Marriage and The Survival Guide To Parenting, as well as authors of the recently released book Vertical Marriage (Zondervan, 2019). Dave is a graduate of the International School of Theology, where he received a Master of Divinity degree. A Ball State University Hall of Fame quarterback, Dave served the Detroit Lions as chaplain for 33 years. Ann attended the University of Kentucky. She has been active alongside Dave in ministry as a speaker, writer, small-group leader, and mentor to countless wives of professional athletes. The Wilsons live in the Detroit area. They have three grown sons, CJ, Austin, and Cody, three daughters-in-law, and a growing number of grandchildren.

Karrie tells how she slid into an addiction to alcohol and bulimia and suffered silently from sexual abuse.

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Sliding Into Addiction

With Bob and Karrie Wood
|
April 15, 2013
| Download Transcript PDF

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Bob Lepine: There are unhealthy ways that people go about trying to satisfy the deep longings of their soul - ways that can lead to dependence or addiction.  That's what happened with Karrie Wood and with food.

Karrie: Very early on, what starts as a little curiosity or an instant choice – for instance, I just felt insecure so I thought what else can I do? I thought I'd have a snack. And what ends up happening is in that snack I found comfort, and so it started to become a pattern, and once it became a pattern it became the addiction.

Bob Lepine: This is FamilyLife Today for Monday, April 15th.  Our host is the President of FamilyLife®, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine. We'll learn today how Karrie Wood wound up looking for love and a lot of other things in all the wrong places.

And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us on the Monday edition.  You know, I remember - I don't know if maybe this was a couple of decades ago - but it seems like the word "dysfunction" became kind of the big buzzword. Do you know what I mean?

Dennis: I do.

Bob Lepine: I mean, you’d turn on Oprah or Dr. Phil – well, let’s see; Dr. Phil wasn't on then - but Donahue or whatever the show was in the afternoon, and it was always about some dysfunction of your family. The reason I remember this is because my mom at the time was laughing about this. She said, "Every family is dysfunctional, aren't they?"

Dennis: Yes.

Bob Lepine: I mean, at some level we're all dysfunctional, so what's the big news story that you grew up in a dysfunctional family? We all did, right?

Dennis: I remember you coming into the studio one day and saying that very thing – you quoted your mom, and we both agreed the Bible is about people who are dysfunctional.  Another word is sinful. They've made wrong choices. Bob, you and I have been talking about doing a series of broadcasts for folks who are recovering from an addiction or recovering from some sin. And frankly, that pretty much captures about 100 percent of us, doesn't it?

(Laughter)

Bob Lepine: We're all in recovery. In fact, discipleship in Christ is really recovering from our patterns of sin that have been with us since birth, right?

Dennis: At least it is for me. That's what I've been doing. And we've invited a couple to join us on FamilyLife Today - Bob and Karrie Wood, who I go to church with at Fellowship Bible Church. Bob, Karrie, I've been looking forward to having you on the broadcast.  Welcome to FamilyLife Today.

Karrie: Thank you.

Bob Wood: It's so great to be with you today.

Dennis: It's good to have you guys. Bob and Karrie head up a ministry, just a little ministry that started out at a small, little insignificant church out in Southern California called Saddleback Community Church, called "Celebrate Recovery." It’s a ministry to people who have – well, they’re recovering from relationships, drugs, alcohol, sexual abuse, any number of issues.

Bob Lepine: And one of the reasons the two of you have such a heart for this is because it's a big part of your own background. In fact, Karrie, when you were 24 years old, you reached a point in your life where you kind of came to the end. Life wasn't working, and you didn't know how to make it work, right?

Karrie: That is very true. In fact, I was currently teaching. I was teaching kindergarten, and I felt that my life was always going to be full of sadness and despair; life was always going to be hard. You know, I really had this philosophy in my life that life was not going to be good. It was always going to be troublesome; it was always going to be difficult; and I was never really going to experience happiness.

Bob Lepine: Were you a pessimist or were you depressed? What was going on?

Karrie: I think, at that time, I just felt completely lost and broken. There wasn't much to me anymore. I was in an abusive marriage and my life at home was very dark and very troublesome. When I was at work, I kind of shut myself down and didn't really relate to anyone.

I forgot who Karrie was. I completely lost who she was. I stopped making my own friends; I pushed away my family; I stopped doing the things that were fun for me. I just became so engrossed in trying to make my family life at home peaceful and keep it on momentum and do well by it, but I really worried that this was all life was going to offer me.

Dennis: Karrie, did you escape to something? Usually when people are in that kind of desperate pain, they run from that darkness, as you described it . . .

Karrie: Absolutely.

Dennis: . . . toward something that masks or hides their own hurts. What was that for you?

Karrie: Absolutely. There were actually two things. One was one I had brought with me all through my childhood. I started it when I was age seven, and that was an eating disorder specifically known as bulimia. I focused everything on my weight. If I could achieve that American lifestyle of thin and beautiful, then everything else around me would be well.

I also thought that the chaos in my marriage was difficult for me so I thought if could focus on that I could make it through life. The thing I added, though, was joining my husband in his addiction with alcohol, mainly to make peace. I felt like if I couldn't beat him I may as well join him, and drinking throughout the evening just so that I could make it through the evening whole and peaceful and all at the same time hating it.

Dennis: Yes.

Karrie: But I didn't know any other way to get through what I was going through at that time.

Bob Lepine: Let me rewind the tape here because to start with an eating disorder at age seven is pretty unusual. Would you describe your early childhood as troubled?

Karrie: Very much so. I grew up in a divorced family. My parents got divorced when I was four. My dad was an alcoholic. His sin made him choose a lot of bad choices from marital affairs to being absent from our home. I would go to bars with him and just sit. . .

Dennis: Now wait; wait a second!

Bob Lepine: Not when you were four years old, right?

Karrie: When I was very young, yes. He and I would go to a bar and we would just sit there, and he would drink while I sat with him.

Dennis: Why did he take you to a bar? Do you have any idea?

Karrie: No, I really don’t know. I think that’s all he knew. He also came from a background of pain and hurt. That was his way of coping and that was his way of spending time with me. He didn’t know how to spend time with me any other way.

Dennis: Do you remember sitting there in that bar and looking around? What did you see?

Karrie: I remember it being very dark with very weird lights. I felt very alone and it was just a very eerie, uncomfortable feeling.

Dennis: Did it feel unsafe?

Karrie: Very much so! Very much so.

Dennis: So, here you were with your daddy, watching him get drunk. I assume he would drink to the point of being inebriated?

Karrie: Yes, I would imagine so, but I don’t know for sure.

Bob Lepine: And this was a regular part of life for you?

Karrie: It was.

Bob Lepine: Where was your mom in all of this?

Karrie: My mom was having her own bout of depression with it as well and not knowing herself any other way to go. At some point she finally said it was enough for her and for me and wanted to do everything in her power to do right by me and make our home safe. So they ended up getting divorced when I was four.

Dennis: Did you go with her?

Karrie: I did, and my dad actually left the home, and my mom and I continued there for a period of time but things got tough financially. We needed to find new ways to survive that way, and so we ended up moving to another state with some friends of hers trying to make ends meet and, unfortunately, the gentleman that lived next door was not the most healthy man, either.

During that time I experienced sexual abuse from him and physical abuse from him, and I realized later there was an affair there but, as a child, what I mainly understood was, “Why is this strange man hurting me? Who is he in my life?” I knew he wasn't my father, yet he was a disciplinarian in my life, and I felt very troubled by that.

Bob Lepine: You are five or six years old at this point?

Karrie: At this point, I was in third grade.

Bob Lepine: And is the memory of the first time you were sexually abused seared in your memory?

Karrie: Absolutely. I mean, I can picture the time of the day; I can picture where I was; I can picture my emotion; I can picture him coming into the room; I can picture it as if it was happening right now.

Bob Lepine: And what were you thinking as a third grader?

Karrie: Absolute terror, absolute terror! I wasn't sure what he was going to do.

Dennis: Karrie, you'd actually been exposed to something your father had done like that when you were five years old?

Karrie: That is correct. What had happened was my dad had come home early when I was with a babysitter from one of his drinking bouts, and I had, unfortunately, witnessed him trying to sexually abuse my babysitter and witnessed that when I was about four years old.

Bob Lepine: Okay, I'm adding up everything you've described so far, and there is a lot there.

Karrie: There is.

Bob Lepine: At age seven, you began binging and purging with food?

Karrie: At age seven, at that point, we had moved away from this family. We had moved then into a home of my grandparents. My grandmother was an alcoholic, and her moods were so up and down, I didn't quite know how to deal with that. I was also very young, so I didn't understand it, either. I just knew to isolate, and so while I isolated I ate. It was over that time when my mom approached me to ask me if I was overeating and what was going on in my life because she really cared and wanted to help me with that.

Dennis: This was back before these subjects really became hot topics in the culture.

Karrie: Absolutely.

Dennis: I mean, a seven year-old little girl having a problem with food - there was a lot going on emotionally in you because of everything Bob was talking about. You had also been emotionally and verbally abused by your father, and so you turned to food as a place of finding control and a way to comfort your own soul.

Karrie: Absolutely. It was the one thing I could control in my life.

Bob Lepine: Explain that a little bit, because as a seven year-old you're not making a conscious choice thinking, "I'm going to feel better by eating," but somehow there was something in your mind saying, "If I eat I will feel better." What's going on there?

Karrie: I think that's the cunning and baffling part of an eating disorder - very early on, what starts as a little curiosity or an instant choice. For instance, I just felt insecure so I thought, "What else can I do?" I thought I'd have a snack. What ends up happening is in that snack I found comfort and, all of a sudden, I realized this could work. So it started to become a pattern and once it became a pattern, it became the addiction.

I didn't understand all of the hurt that I was feeling from all of that abuse, and so I did know that having a snack made me feel better, and since I couldn't control anything else around me, I knew I could control me. And the one thing I could control about me is what I ate or did not eat.

Dennis: You know, what I want every parent to hear in the midst of Karrie's story is that a little girl's heart was made to bond to a mommy and a daddy. They need that relationship, and when that kind of healthy relationship doesn't occur, that really is a setup for that little girl to run to other – well, to food, the opposite sex; there's sexual experimentation with the same sex that's occurring all because of the desperation of the human heart.

Hearing a story like yours, picturing a little girl - it causes me, as a dad, just to have a check to say, you know, we, as fathers, have been commissioned with a very important assignment. We are to love our children in such a way that we don't provoke them to anger; we don't provoke them toward an addiction of food or boys or alcohol or drugs but instead meet the needs of their souls.

Bob Lepine: You know, truly, if you think of it this way, it's like a scab or a scar on the soul of a little girl - what you've described – the failure to bond with a mom or a dad or some of the other things you were experiencing. Any little girl is going to look around and say, "What can I put on the scar on or on the scab to make it feel better?"

You were looking at food and thinking, "Well, this is helping. I feel a little better after I've eaten it," but the cycle that begins with bulimia is you would eat and then, at some point, you said, "This is not good," and so you'd start purging. What was it that made you think, "I need to throw up?"

Karrie: Well, what's amazing about bulimia is that it’s the act of eating and purging, but purging doesn't always mean throwing up. It could be an absence of food for a period of time; it could be diet pills; it could be excessive exercise; it could be a lot of different ways of removing the food that your body just now took in. And, for me, it wasn't so much the vomiting, it was the starvation. I would go eat for a while, and then I would starve for a while.

Where all that stemmed from was the physical, sexual, and emotional abuse I had experienced from these past men which I realize, even talking with you today, comes from that need, like you said, of the little girl wanting her dad. So I would trust these men because I thought maybe they could fulfill that father figure in my life.

Dennis: Here’s the thing about a little girl who has a perpetrator who takes advantage of her. It begins to sever the ability of the human heart to trust.

Karrie: Absolutely.

Dennis: To trust in a male; to trust in any kind of friendship, including God.

Karrie: Very much so.

Dennis: That’s why our friend, Dr. Dan Allender, who is a counselor who’s written a great book called The Wounded Heart, said that sexual abuse is “the hardest stone the devil of hell can throw at a human being.” Just looking into your eyes, Karrie – even though you’ve recovered a great deal from all of that experience – you can tell just the momentary reliving of that, you’re hit again by the stone.

Karrie: It’s a scar on my soul. That’s the difficult part; learning to allow God, little by little, to restore that scar. It will forever be there, but I’ve learned to use it for God’s glory and that’s the best part of it.

Dennis: Yes.

Bob Lepine: So, again, to put this in context, you had grown up with, first of all, a family that's disintegrated, the experience of sexual abuse, the experience of emotional and physical abuse at the hands of your father, watching him as an alcoholic, and now you're starting to have some unhealthy patterns with food. What was the next chapter for you?

Karrie: The next chapter during that time was my mom had met a new potential husband. Unfortunately, he was an alcoholic as well, and my relationship with him didn't start off well. There was a lot of emotional abuse from him. They did soon marry, and they were married for about 11 years. And during that time his alcoholism caused him to make a lot of bad choices, and he became sexually abusive; not necessarily by touch but by his words and his comments.

Dennis: I've read your testimony, and you said in your testimony that he had a “constant inappropriate use of sexual remarks directed towards me.”

Karrie: Yes.

Dennis: What's behind that?  Why would a man do that?

Karrie: I can't answer that for him, but what I can say is that when it got to a very inappropriate level, I was in early high school and becoming very self-aware of my growth, and he would make comments that were inappropriate about who I was, how I looked, and what I should wear, almost as if I was a woman not connected with him at all; forgetting that he was a father figure in my life.

Dennis: Did he try to dress you in a provocative manner?

Karrie: He felt that some bathing suits should have been in a different format than some of the ones I was wearing.

Bob Lepine: So he wanted you to be more sexual than you were comfortable being?

Karrie: It wasn't until you just said that that I realized that's exactly what he was thinking.

Bob Lepine: I also have to ask you this - your mom and your dad had divorced when you were four years old. Your dad had been an alcoholic. I would think if your mom was ever in a position again where she is looking at a potential mate, a drinking problem would be a red flag: “Been there, done that, don't want to go back to that!”

Yet you know and I know that, oftentimes, instead of walking away from that kind of thing, instead of turning from it, the next husband winds up being very similar to the first one – same kinds of issues, same kinds of problems.

Karrie: Absolutely.

Bob Lepine: Why is that?

Karrie: Well, I have learned from my own experience that when I don't fully look at what lies underneath – my own wounds, my own pains, the things that drive me - that I'm going to continue a pattern. I know that I chose an alcoholic husband early on in my life because I had not yet dealt with all of the pain and the scars of the alcoholism I experienced along with the physical, sexual, and emotional abuse.

Bob Lepine: It's kind of like that's how you'd grown up, knowing how to relate to people who acted that way.

Karrie: Exactly, and physical appearance was everything for me in this marriage.

Bob Lepine: And he was a good-looking guy.

Karrie: He was, but he would tell me what to wear, how to have my hair . . .

Dennis: Like your stepfather did.

Karrie: Exactly. So to me that was normal. It didn't feel right; it still hurt tremendously, but it was familiar.

Dennis: Karrie, I really appreciate your honesty and being willing to share your story because it really reminds dads of what God has commissioned them to do. It is a sacred trust. . .

Karrie: Absolutely.

Dennis: . . . a sacred trust. When a man goes against that trust and breaches the trust, the damage, as our friend, Dr. Dan Allender says, goes deep.

Karrie: Yes, it does.

Dennis: It goes to the soul. We talk to hundreds of thousands of people here on FamilyLife Today. We may be talking to a man right now who may be abusing his daughter. We may be talking to men who may be abusing their daughters, not sexually or verbally or emotionally in quite the same harsh way that occurred in Karrie's life, but they may be doing it by neglect, just by not being there.

I think the challenge of the day for a dad is to recalibrate, pull back, and ask the question: “What has God given me? What assignment in life has He given me?” And, you know, if you've got your own stuff and you've got your own addictions (maybe it's pornography; maybe it's alcohol; maybe it's sex, I don't know – we've all got our challenges) you may need to get involved in a small group of men like Celebrate Recovery in your church where you begin to get real, get honest, and find a way to begin to reconnect the heartstrings with a little girl and maybe with a little boy.

Bob Lepine: You know, we're also talking, probably, to a lot of adult women who had some level of this in their background, and they've never stopped to consider the way that scar on their soul continues to mark their behavior today, mark their choices today; how they just kind of reflexively reach out in wrong decisions because of the scar that is there.

You know, if you had a leg wound, you'd begin to walk with a limp and, after a while, it may be that your leg heals up, but you still walk with a limp. . .

Dennis: Have a limp.

Bob Lepine: . . . because you just got used to it.

Dennis: We all have limps.

Bob Lepine: That's right.

Dennis: And, you know, that's what the ministry of Celebrate Recovery is all about, and one of the reasons why I wanted to have Bob and Karrie and, trust me, Bob has been in the studio here with us.

Bob Lepine: But remarkably quiet.

Dennis: We're going to get his story later on in the week. I wanted to do this series of broadcasts not just to minister to you as a listener, but I believe God is hand-selecting a group of listeners who need to start this remarkable ministry in their local church.

Bob Lepine: If you go to FamilyLife.com, there’s a link there that takes you to the Celebrate Recovery website. They’ve done a pretty good job of spelling out how you can get a Celebrate Recovery ministry going in your community or in your church.  Again, go to FamilyLifeToday.com and click on the link you find there for Celebrate Recovery.

Let me also mention, you might want to take some friends with you this weekend and see the new movie Home Run that is opening in theaters this weekend because Celebrate Recovery is featured prominently as a part of the movie. It’s a story about a baseball player who has a substance abuse problem. The team sends him to rehab and he winds up going to a Celebrate Recovery program and hearing the Gospel and responding to the Gospel.

It’s really a well-done movie. It’s going to be out in theaters this weekend and, in fact, we’ve got a link on our website at FamilyLifeToday.com where you can watch the trailer for the movie Home Run that opens this Friday night in movie theaters.

So, if you want information about Celebrate Recovery, you want information about the movie Home Run, or if you need additional help, we’ve got copies of Ed Welch’s book, which is called Addictions: A Banquet in the Grave. You can order a copy of that book from us at FamilyLifeToday.com. Again, the website is FamilyLifeToday.com or call toll-free 1-800-FLTODAY for any help we can give you. 1-800-358-6329; that's 1-800-“F” as in family, “L” as in life, and then the word “TODAY.” 

Speaking of Ed Welch, we’ve had him as a guest on FamilyLife Today a number of times. I think the last time he was here we had a conversation about the whole issue of addictions and how you get to the root of the issue; how you get to the idolatry that really is at the core of all addictive behavior. We have an audio CD available of that conversation with Ed Welch. We’re making it available this month to those of you who can help support the ministry of FamilyLife Today with a donation.

When you go to FamilyLifeToday.com and click the button that says, “I CARE,” you can make an online donation and request a copy of that CD. Or call 1-800-FLTODAY, make a donation over the phone, and just ask for the CD on addictions. We’re happy to get it to you.

Let me just say how much we appreciate your financial support. Even if you don’t need the CD on addictions personally, you may want to get a copy to pass on to somebody you know who could benefit from listening to it. We just appreciate your partnership with us. We couldn’t do what we do without you, so thanks for going toFamilyLifeToday.com and making an online donation or calling us toll-free at 1-800-FLTODAY.

Now tomorrow we’re going to continue our conversation with Bob and Karrie Wood. We’re going to talk about how really the idol in Karrie’s life turned out to be an idol of control, and how God brought that to the surface in her life. I hope you can join us back tomorrow.

I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, and our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine. We will see you back tomorrow for another edition of FamilyLife Today

FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas. 

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