Did you know that Jesus is ready to deliver us from our traumas? To give us healing and the opportunity to feel alive again? It is important not to allow the enemy to make you feel that your trauma is your fault because it’s not, and only God can truly give you healing.

show notes:

In this episode, Teia Martinez, the president of Teia Martinez Ministries, shares her testimony. She opens up about traumas from abuse and disordered eating that brought with them fear, shame, and control.

Listen in to learn how fear triggers us to obsessively control and be ashamed of what is not even our fault.

“Shame doesn’t work alone; if you’re dealing with shame, you’re most likely dealing with fear, and you’re dealing with control.” ~Teia Martinez

Top Takeaways:

• How the enemy makes you believe that your trauma is your fault, and it becomes your stronghold that you struggle with.
• How God addresses our identity issues after we get healthy emotionally leading to physical health.
• Allow yourself to let Jesus deliver you from the shame and fear of your trauma.

What you will learn:

• [3:35] Teia narrates her testimony of how she found her inner healing from her traumas by allowing God to heal her.
• [12:05] Teia’s experience with diet trauma and how it affected her physically and emotionally.
• [17:18] How sometimes eating disorders are connected with abuse, and how to begin to invite God to heal you.
• [22:30] How God’s healing allows victims to be themselves without shame, fear, and control.
• [25:42] Don’t allow shame to stop you from seeking inner healing with the help of Jesus.

“I want to run the race until the very last day that the Lord says, ‘all right, good and faithful servant. I’m ready for you to come home.’ And I want to be able to run that race healthy and strong and vibrant.” ~Teia Martinez

Relevant Links:

• Teia Martinez Website: https://www.teiamartinezministries.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/teiamartinezministries/
• Robyn Wright Website: https://faithfullylivingfit.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/faithfullylivingfit/

Detailed Transcript:

Hey, beloved. Welcome back to episode number nine. I can’t even believe it! We’re just about over a month into the new podcast and we have almost 250 downloads. You guys are amazing! I can’t believe it. I’m just so excited. I’m honored. And honestly, the best thing you can do is go to iTunes and leave a written review. That’s how people are going to know what you’re getting out of this podcast and how they’re going to know why they’re going to even want to check it out. And it lets people know that we’re doing really well. So I would appreciate that if you’re liking an episode, go ahead and take a screenshot and share it on social media. Feel free to tag me. I would love to hear your feedback.

Okay. So for today’s episode, we have a two-for-one. I have not only a behind the scenes and sneak peek, but I also have two incredible women doing an interview together.

And so this is a behind the scenes from the 8-week program that I talked about in episode number three, with special guest Robin Wright. She’s a good friend of mine. She’s a fitness, nutrition and lifestyle coach who helps women find their identity in Christ and create intimacy with him. She helps create that connection of deep wellness. And so after listening to that episode, you’ll hear about the trauma in her childhood. And so Teia Martinez is a special guest that Robin invited into our group and she kind of connects the dots of trauma with reactions and how inner healing and deliverance relates to body image and relationships, and how going back to the lie that we believed and addressing that trauma helps us heal once and for all. Teia Martinez is a special lady. She is the founder of Healing Hearts Ministries International, as well as Teia Martinez Ministries.

This is such an incredible interview. I had to split it up into two parts because it’s a little bit longer. And so we’re going to have part one and part two. In part one today, we’re going to hear Teia talk about inner healing, deliverance, kind of what it is and how it can affect our relationship with food, identity and body image. And then in part two, Teia is actually gonna walk us through an inner healing exercise. You’re going to get to hear Teia’s story in part one, but I do want to share that she has said yes to God’s calling upon her life and is passionate about seeing individuals and families set free. She does a lot of work with children and she firmly believes every person should be empowered to fulfill their destiny and purpose. And her desire is to seek God’s people of all ages healed, equipped, and activated. You’re going to love her. I promise let’s dig in!

Speaker 1 (03:34):

So first I think it would be helpful, kind of give us a brief definition of what is inner healing and why is that something that we would seek out apart from our salvation and our study of the word of God.

Speaker 2:

Hello everyone. Nice to see you guys or meet you guys. That’s a good question. So basically I like to give a little bit of my testimony because that’s, for all of us, we have a story behind certain experiences, if you will, that we’ve had with the Lord or places that the Holy Spirit has touched our lives. And for me, I got saved at 19. Wasn’t saved in church. Didn’t go to church my whole life, didn’t own a Bible. Didn’t have any religious background. And I actually got pregnant at 14, married at 15, had three kids by the age of 22. So in the midst of having children, being young, having to reap the consequences of my actions, I just didn’t want to live anymore. It was too hard. I was in an abusive relationship at the time. My husband was very abusive. I found God that way. I was like, I need something. And we all have our testimony of how that looked. But when I got saved, I was a mess. I was broken and I had a lot of baggage. And you know, it’s all put at the cross. Which, what does that really mean? How do you put something at the cross? I guess you just pray and say, “I’m giving it to the Lord,” but I still had habits. I had reactions. I had insecurity and rejection. I had all of these things that came out of pain in my life that I wanted to get rid of so badly because they were causing issues in my life. Being a saved Christian, going to church every Sunday, reading my Bible every day, I still was struggling with stuff that I did not want to struggle with.

(05:27):

The Lord began to align me with certain people. And I was aligned with a couple that started an inner healing deliverance ministry that began to teach me and take me through ministry. And I began to just be able to walk, freed out freedom in these areas that have been making a mess in my life, in my marriage. I wanted to be a better mom. And you know, being a mom is hard, but being a mom at 15, I was the the baby of the family. I was rebellious. I didn’t listen to anybody. I didn’t really have a lot of moms skills anyways. God began to heal those things and began to teach me how to have relationships, teach me how to be a better parent or how to love differently or how to not be rejected in relationships, or have fear in my relationships.

And the only way that was able to stick was for me to get healing where the trauma happened in my life, but see that wasn’t something that people broke down on a Sunday sitting in church, you know. It wasn’t something that was taught at the pulpit by my pastor. Not saying that’s a bad thing. It just is not something that you always teach up there. And as God began to heal the traumas, the rejection left. The fear of man left, the fear of death. I used to have fear of my kids dying. All of these things that haunted me began to just dissolve. They left. And I began to find myself and look at myself differently through Christ, more than I ever could before. Scripture was a big part of that. Reading was a big part of that. And having relationship with God, you can’t do that without that.

(07:09):

But the inner healing is basically where you go to the trauma in your life and you allow the Lord to heal that place of trauma. So if I was abused at five years old, say by my uncle, that’s a trauma. And in that trauma, really what happens is the enemy begins to speak a lie out of that trauma. So you’ve been sinned against at five years old, the enemy comes in and says, “Oh, it was your fault. You liked it.” Say you were raped at 15, “that’s your fault because of the way you were dressed or you had too many beers” or whatever it is. So a lie is built with that trauma and it becomes a stronghold eventually. And that stronghold means that it’s something that is in your life that you can’t get out of. It’s something that keeps coming up that keeps operating in your life.

It keeps popping up in your relationships. You react out of it, you struggle with it and you can’t seem to get rid of it. And that would be a stronghold. So that is kind of the breakdown of what those two mean. The problem with deliverance ministry is we’ve watched too much Hollywood. You know, when I say deliverance you think of someone’s head spinning and green soup coming out of their mouth. That’s really not what it is. It’s really not that at all. And so that has been kind of scrutinized to where the church has really brushed that out of the way. And it has been abused. And so people have pushed that to the side and said that it wasn’t biblical, or it’s not healthy or it’s cultish or whatever. What we’ve seen from that is the body of Christ being wounded and not being able to be healed, not functioning properly, and we’re hurting. And that’s not what Jesus died for us to live like. So that’s kind of a breakdown of that. Does that make sense for everybody?

Speaker 1 (09:08):

That’s so good Teia. So good. And I love… I’m over here just scribbling notes obviously. And like I said, I’ve already sat under her for some time, but this is just so good because we look at the state of our world right now and if the way that we’ve done it so far was good enough, I don’t know that we would really be where we are in a lot of respects. And I know me with good intentions, I love the Lord with all my heart, mind, soul and strength. I read his word, I pray, but there were some areas like you mentioned there’s a stronghold, right? It’s something that we can’t seem to get free of. It just keeps popping up. It’s a common thing. And so sometimes we just say, “Oh, I’m just a sinner saved by grace.” Like, “this is just the thorn in my flesh,” right? “This is what God’s going to be using to humble me my whole life.” And I can’t help, but feel like that’s watering down the power of the Lord’s blood and the indwelling spirit.

So I love that you’re bringing to light. These traumas need to be healed and the strongholds need to be broken. And in this specific group where we’re leaning into the strongholds that oftentimes trigger us to turn to food to comfort, to satisfy, to numb, to distract. It’s really leaning into this concept of idolatry, but understanding where the root of that comes from, right. You know, you guys have all been in the challenge for two weeks now. Some of you’ve been coaching with me for a while. And why I’m bringing Teia in is because of the way that I approach coaching as the heart and the mind, because everything flows out of that, right?

(10:55):

Our behaviors are products of belief and we with good intentions are doing some heart and mind work, but there may just be some blind spots in some traumas that are actually linked to why you maybe struggle with binge eating, why you may struggle with emotional eating, why you may struggle with identity, things about your body image and stuff like that. So, Teia, you’ve been doing this for a long time so chances are, you may have your own story in this area, but you’ve also probably worked with some women or had some training around some of the things that you see commonly tied with somebody who struggles with maybe disordered eating. And I want to stop here for a second because I’m not saying eating disorder, but disordered eating, you know, and they’re different, right. And can flow into the same vein. I just kind of want to hear what your experience and your knowledge is. Some of these things that we see maybe with a stronghold around binge eating, anorexia, obsessive control, compulsive, eating closet, eating, that kind of thing.

Speaker 2 (12:06):

Okay. Well, I want to kind of start out with just talking about the general feeling that we have of needing to change something that we don’t like about ourselves for one. Okay. So this is a little different. People come in usually not wanting to come in and say, “well, I’m coming to see you because I want to lose weight.” A lot of times people are coming in because they have anger issues. Their marriage is falling apart, or they’re blocked in their relationship with God. They don’t feel like they’ve been able to move forward. Sometimes people’s businesses are stuck and they feel like it’s something that they’re doing. But it’s interesting Robyn, because I have seen where women have gotten healing and out of their healing, the Lord does address weight. When we get healing, he addresses our identity issues that we have and out of that they began to get healthier physically, because they’re healthier here.

I was thinking about this because like I said, this isn’t really a general, this is cool, but this isn’t really a topic that I really talk about when I teach on inner healing and deliverance at a conference or at a school. But I’ve been doing this with you for the last week. I didn’t get to do the challenge for the two weeks with you guys. I’m just going to get a little personal here. I was like, wow, this is harder than I thought it would be. I’m like every one of you, maybe I’m a little worse. I don’t know, but I’ve gone through every diet. I’ve been dieting for 10 years I feel like on and off. And so I was really pumped and wanting to see what I could get out of this. And the Lord has with me, has me do an inner healing on myself and doing some prayers and kind of allowing, cause this for me is my life, I live like this. I don’t just teach about it.

These are tools that I use to get freedom on a daily basis in my life. And so I’m asking the Lord, you know, “what is the lie that I’m believing about food? What is the lie that I’m believing about dieting?” Like I said, with every trauma, there’s a lie that connects. And let me tell you, ladies, I don’t know about you, but this past couple days I’ve realized that I have some trauma with just dieting, man. I was like doing some journaling and I’m like p-oed at like some of these stupid diets I did where I was eating like 500 calories a day, you know? And I’m taking hormone drops. Y’all remember that diet. Yeah, there you go. And you’re like, you know, starving yourself and taking pregnant women’s probably pee or something hormones in your body. I mean, I screw my body up. And then a year ago I went to a doctor who gave me testosterone, who gave me so much that I ended up with my testosterone up in the five hundreds. I had a man’s hormone palate. It made me sick and I gained 30 pounds. I got the shots, there were little beads, not shots that they put in my bottom every six weeks. Like, they made an incision and put it into my butt cheek. I was so sick. I lost my hair, my voice was messed up, it made me have acid reflux really bad, but it was so that I could start losing weight. That’s why I did it because I was fighting dropping weight. And so I’m just kinda trucking through this week and going through these memories of just in general dieting and how that’s affected my life and how I felt about it.

And I was really mad. I was angry at all of the gimmicks and the moneymakers and all of the things that have really messed up my body. I was mad at myself and I was mad at the companies. I’m just being honest with you. So it’s that type of stuff that I have an emotional trauma there. I wanted to get that healed and put in my past so that I could start from a foundation with you clean, so I was ready to go. There wasn’t any junk from old diets and old habits of thinking with food and whatnot. Does that make sense?

Speaker 1 (16:20):

Yeah, 100%. And I love that too. Yeah. Cause that’s really, you know, this identity reformation exercise that we’ve brought in, that I’m having everybody work on in these first two weeks is to do exactly what you’re talking about. Okay. “What are the lies that I have believed about myself and about food and diets and even change,” right? Like, I love that you started this up saying like this, this feeling that we need to change something about ourselves. And I think it’s so often what we see is the world telling us like, “Hey, don’t eat this food, do eat that food. Don’t move your body this way, move your body that way.” And we deal with all the fruit, but to really step into that lasting transformative change in a positive way, right – in a free way, it doesn’t always mean externally, but we have to start with the heart and the mind to bring about the true freedom.

Speaker 2 (17:16):

Right. That’s really what a stronghold is, is there’s a trauma that has happened over and over and over with a lie that we began to believe and live out. And then it begins to have access in our lives. And so as far as with food or you were talking about disorders before, you know, we see a lot of eating disorders that are really connected to abuse, to be honest with you. Say you’re starving yourself. Well, I’m just going to be personal with you guys because I guess kind of who I am anyway, but I like to teach out of if I’m just human and I’m on the same road as y’all, and this is what I do for a living, but I also use this in my life, you know, because it works and it has changed me and my husband. We’re just very passionate about what we do because of that.

The disorders, eating disorders usually connect back to abuse most of the time. So when I shared that I was starving myself, I realized it was one of the days this week — I had my mentor just passed away this month, so I’m in a place where I started the program, which is interesting, where I’m grieving. I’m hurting. I noticed that in that process, I was emotionally eating. And when I emotionally ate, I got mad at myself. And so I just told myself I wasn’t going to eat anymore. I would just do protein shakes because it’s like “bad Teia.” So now I’m gonna do protein shakes for three days so I can drop the five pounds I probably gained kind of rollercoaster. And I had watched one of your videos this morning, actually talking a little bit about your relationship with food. It was right on with what the Holy spirit was teaching me.

(19:00):

And so I had just this week figured out, “wow, isn’t this interesting that when I want to punish myself, because of something I don’t like, I punished myself by not letting myself eat.” Which is means that food has become a punishment. So when you say dieting to me, I’m like, “Oh man, I don’t want to do that. Like I’ve had a hard enough month. I don’t want to have to punish myself.” That’s where it would go through my brain. The Lord began to really talk to me about that and took me back to some memories of me doing some diets and some comments that people had made about my body and allowed me to walk in forgiveness. I’m going to take you guys through some of this because the best way to learn inner healing is to just allow the Lord to take you there and heal and experience it.

But he took me to the memories and I walked through forgiveness and I asked him to come in and to show me the lies that I believed in those places where I was hurt, where I gained weight, and I had been made fun of. He began to speak the truth to me. And then he began to heal my heart in those specific memories of getting on the scale and weighing more. When I just hardly ate for three weeks and did the intermittent fasting and all of this stuff, he began to speak truth to me. And I could feel within my soul, I could feel that torment feeling that I have when I have to diet or I have to change my eating and I’m punishing myself. I could feel that began to leave. So that filter that I have in my soul of when I think about dieting or when I think about changing my eating, that filter God began to clean that. And so when I would think about eating something healthy, I didn’t have the same thoughts and battle and fight feeling that I had before today, which I thought was really interesting. That’s how God heals!

Speaker 1 (20:58):

So, so good. It’s hard for people I think to bridge that gap with this topic, as far as “hey, there’s actual traumas within your soul that have been triggered by this journey.” I know each one of you personally. I’m sitting here remembering the things that you’ve told me and saying, “Oh wow, have you ever associated those things with traumas that have actually like wounded your soul that need inner healing and that now your filter, when I say XYZ, you hear through that filter rather than maybe what I’m trying to say, or even what the truth might be,” right? Where that filter gets distorted and because of your experience and in that relationship, when I hear you talking, I’m thinking about that shame cycle, right? So oftentimes we go into this journey because of hatred about the way that we look at our bodies, hatred towards food, right? We start to point the finger at all these different things that are the enemy when really the enemy is the wounds and the diet culture, or the spirit of this age that is accusing and coming at us with the standard that God never set for us. Right? You mentioned like this punishment of, in that flow into that shame cycle. And I see that a lot. And so tell me a little bit, and shame is very closely related to abuse. Is that correct, Teia?

Speaker 2 (22:24):

Yes it is. So usually with shame, you’re going to see fear and control all working together. Shame doesn’t work alone. If you are dealing with shame, you’re most likely dealing with fear and you’re dealing with control because there’s a pattern or a cycle with them where they run together. I gave you some examples of my own life, but God is showing me as far as eating disorders and shame that kind of hopping back to your other question. A good example of that is having someone that comes in that is overweight and you find out later that she was abused and out of that abuse in order to protect herself, she began to overeat and not take care of herself so that nobody would ever look at her or touch her again. We have women that come in that have a disorder to that extreme.

(23:17):

So you heal the abuse that happened to her. You allow the Lord to heal that and that protection that she needed with food and needed with her body from men goes away because she knows Jesus as her protector, after that. And she doesn’t have to overeat or make herself look unattractive so that people will leave her alone anymore because she knows Jesus will protect her. And she’s gotten enough healing that she begins to get healthy again. So that’s a good example of allowing shame and control and fear to operate and an eating disorder. You’ll see girls that are afraid to be fat. That’s exactly what they say. When they come in and fill out their paperwork. Usually we call that self hate. When you make yourself throw up, a lot of times, you’ll see women that will, they’ll have cutting issues say in middle school. And then now they’re having themselves overeat and then puking in high school, but they’re not cutting anymore. You’ll see this self-hate that has operated throughout their life in different ways, but it’s the same spirit. Does that make sense?

Speaker 1 (24:29):

Yeah, definitely. You know, being somebody who’s gotten delivered from an eating disorder and seeing it generationally in my family, so my mom was sexually abused and then she was bullied and she was an alcoholic. She used to tell me, “if I could just lose weight, I could stop drinking.” You know, “if I would just lose weight, I wouldn’t be an alcoholic anymore.” And then me, when I’m, you know, into an eating disorder, I’m saying, “I would rather be dead than fat.” I mean, those were my true words. That’s like the reality of how I felt. And so such a distorted lie from the enemy. So yeah, that’s amazing to me, the fear and the control. How many of you guys just raise your hands, you know, on your journey to trying to lose weight or transform your body or your health, even this fear of sickness, right? How many of you guys have flowed back and forth between fear triggering you to want to obsessively control? I mean, I know I have. So are you guys seeing how these things are like interconnected?

Speaker 2 (25:35):

I just want to, I probably should have started out saying this, but don’t allow shame just as we’re talking about shame, don’t allow shame. A lot of times people won’t enter in to learn about deliverance and inner healing because of shame. They’re like, “Oh, that’s for like drug addicts.” That, “I’m fine. I’m not that bad. I’m not…” you know ? And they don’t realize that the reality is, and this is why I get so personal because this topic is for everybody, all it is is Jesus healing us. And every one of us has things that we’d like him to heal. If we could do it ourselves, we would’ve already done it. It may even make you feel like, “you know, gosh, I don’t know, this is kind of a weird topic or this is overwhelming for me. This is too much.” Because the reality is, as scripture talks about us going glory to glory, to glory with the Lord in us, dying to ourselves.

(26:28):

Well, we don’t really know how to do that other than allowing the Lord to come in and show us what he’d like to heal and change and allowing him to do that . We’re better for it. And that’s all this is. Don’t let the words scare. You don’t let the word inner healing scare you because honestly, guys, this is, these are tools that will change your life. I see children on a daily basis and teenagers and we’ve seen kids set free of things. I wish I would have been set free at seven years old of instead of 23. But this is something that we have access to because of the cross. Every one of you has a calling. Yes, we’re talking about weight. Yes, we’re talking about getting healthy. We’re talking about changing our identity so that we can live in a healthy place. I want to run the race. I want to run the race until the very last day that the Lord says, “all right, good and faithful servant. I’m ready for you to come home.”

And I want to be able to run that race healthy and strong and vibrant. And so I think that this particular topic, I wish that we saw it more in church and we saw it more in Bible studies or groups like this that took our spirituality and eating and everything because we do this every day and took it together like this because every one of you has an anointing and a calling on your life. Every one of you. You’re a powerful woman of God and everything you do has a purpose. I know that the more that I get healing and the more that I began to feel better about myself and see myself the way Christ sees me, regardless of what the scale says, but feeling better and having energy and being alive, feeling alive because a lot of the foods that I have eaten most of my life don’t make me feel like I’m living. They make me feel like I’m dragging a dead body along and that’s not running the race. This is something that if you can embrace and allow the Lord to go to a deep place like Robyn is, and your thoughts, and maybe traumas that have happened to you when you were younger, this would change your life.