The Power of Belief in the Face of Adversity

What if the person you trusted most in the world turned out to be someone completely different? How would you cope? This episode takes you on a deeply personal journey of resilience and self-discovery. From the shocking revelation of my husband's attempt at human trafficking to the traumatic aftermath that strained our relationship to the breaking point, this story is as harrowing as it is moving. Listen in as I navigate through this emotional minefield, juggling child-rearing, a high conflict divorce, and custody battles, while grappling with the painful realization that my husband was not who I thought he was.

As the struggle intensified, running became my solace, my lifesaver. It was a time for self-care, a tool to manage the mounting stress. But, even as I took care of myself, the weight of my children's safety bore heavily on me. Heart-wrenchingly, signs of sexual grooming in my middle son emerged, and despite my frantic efforts to protect him, Child Protective Services dismissed the case. Feeling helpless and cornered, I turned to an unconventional source for guidance - a psychic. 

This episode also discusses my spiritual awakening during the global pandemic and my deep dive into the Seth books. These books opened my mind to the power of beliefs in shaping reality, and I started perceiving the universe differently, understanding its interconnectivity. Struggling within and beyond, I grasped onto the power of self-belief, learning to harness it to shape my own reality. This incredible journey of self-discovery, resilience, and rebuilding from the ashes promises to inspire you to tap into your own power. Tune in for a heartfelt exploration of the power of belief, and the strength to rise from the ashes.

To learn more: https://TheSexTraffickersWife.com

Transcript

Amanda: 0:35

In this episode, we're going to get to know each other a little bit. If you don't already know who I am, I am a author. I launched my very first book, the Sex Trafficker's Wife A Story of Truth, faith and Trust in Self. That became a bestseller, and I went on to speak about it on many different platforms and became a public speaker. I've continued to be a spiritual channel as my awakening started after I began the process of writing this book, and I'm also an advocate for trauma-informed practices, because I don't believe that the majority of people out there recognize how traumatized the majority of humans out there are and have any idea how to interact with them in a way that respects the place that they are in their own trauma and understands what to do, not to deepen it, as well as what to do to actually help them and their nervous systems recover from the things that they've experienced. And as I have been interviewed all of those times and shared my story more broadly, it became wildly apparent that it was time for me to build my own platform, and so this is me doing just that Now. If you haven't read my book and you want to, it is available anywhere on Amazon, but this episode. I want to talk a little bit about what I have been through and where I am today, as we kind of get ready to go on this journey together, and to share more and more about what this has meant for me and what I have learned.

Amanda: 2:03

And so, way back in 2016, I was a full-time stay-at-home mom. I had three young kids. They were one, four and five. I hadn't worked in five years. My focus was my family, my kids. That's all that mattered. I was what I believed to be happily married. We weren't as close as I would like, but we had young children. And he had a very demanding job. He traveled often for work. He had direct reports in another state, but he made good money and he financially supported us and I knew that this was a season. And then one day, my husband doesn't come home. He doesn't come home from work and it's later than he normally is. He's often late, but this was unusual.

Amanda: 2:44

And eventually I found him in jail, arrested for attempt in human trafficking with a $250,000 bond. Every time I say those words, I can feel the audience go what? And even to this day. Sometimes it just takes my breath away. I about dropped the phone. What Huh? I didn't even know what that charge meant at the time and I was googling trying to understand it.

Amanda: 3:09

Also terrified, but I didn't believe that this could be real. You see, I am somebody who is fiercely loyal fiercely loyal to those who matter to me, and I believe that I know who they are, and so this didn't make any sense. Somehow he's caught up in something horrible, but that's. But I have to help him. I have to get him out of there. That's what's going through my mind. Not that he could potentially be guilty, and because I'm stubborn and hard headed and I'm also amazing at a crisis, I just set out to fix this. I got on the phone with lawyers and bail bondsmen and I just what do I need to do? And I continued down that path to get him out of jail. Even after the bond hearing, they actually said they were going to increase his charge to completed human trafficking instead of attempted human trafficking, implying that he did worse.

Amanda: 4:02

I still didn't believe it. I still was determined to get him out of jail, and when most people hear those parts of my story, they just go what Are you crazy? I would have left him in there, but I don't think people realize what it's like to be married to somebody for six years, to be with them with 10, and to have multiple children, young children, with somebody. This isn't just a oh see you later sort of thing. Your lives are intertwined. You have a strong belief that you know who you're married to. At least I did. And so when I bonded him out of jail and yes, that means I paid the $250,000, I was ready to hear his side of the story. Give me any explanation, please. And he did. He told me that he had been seeing adult escorts our entire marriage.

Amanda: 4:50

Now this was a shock to me also, but this wasn't what he was accused of. He was accused of trying to have sex with children and trying to pay for sex with children, and I was like, wait, what? Huh? How long has that been going on? Oh, you know, since forever. Super flippant, what. And then he starts panicking and saying he should run because they won't listen to him and they think he did something horrible. And that's not him and I don't want to believe this is him either. And so what he basically his side of the story was that he was soliciting adults and when they offered children, he didn't think it was real. But he had to figure it out so he could report it, because that's what good people do, right, they report these type of people doing bad things. And but he couldn't report it if it wasn't real, because then he would be in trouble for what he was doing. And so it left him kind of between a rock and a hard place.

Amanda: 5:46

And you know, obviously in hindsight I know differently, but back then I would have believed just about anything if it even sort of made sense, because I did not want to admit that the person I was married to could be so horrible. And so I proceeded to believe him, I proceeded to support him through his criminal proceedings and you know, this meant that I was solely responsible for our three children for a period of time because, out on bond, he wasn't allowed near them. Eventually we received supervised visitation, which was welcome, because they were very upset about where their daddy was and why they couldn't see him. And you know, every all of a sudden he was showing up in the marriage and in the family, like I always wanted. He was no longer working and the only thing he could focus on was us, and so we did as much supervised visitation as possible. We were on the phone nearly 24 seven. He was in my ear at all times.

Amanda: 6:47

Eventually it got to the point where I couldn't have a thought without him being there, and from a psychological standpoint I didn't really understand what that was doing to me. But it was definitely further deepening a trauma bond that had started as soon as he was arrested and only gotten worse because the only person who could understand what I was going through was my husband. The only person who understand what it felt like to be shunned and shamed by the rest of the community was this was public information, this was in the newspapers was my husband, and so, as I isolated myself from anybody else that I felt judgment from, he was the only one that I didn't feel judgment from, and so he was the one who felt safe. And so something happens when we're deep in this trauma bonds with with one another and we just we create this, this bubble. This bubble, it's us against the world. Nobody else understands us, and that's truly how it felt. It was us against the legal system, us against all the naysayers. We were going to prove everybody wrong that we can recover from infidelity because, again, I only believe he's been sleeping with escorts, not not children we can recover from this. Our family is going to be stronger. This is going to be. You know, this is going to be the turning point for us. This, this is the belief that we have and, if anything, our relationship is actually stronger at this point in time, which is kind of confusing and, honestly, was probably the most shameful piece for me to unravel for myself, because it even after he was arrested.

Amanda: 8:22

We got closer at first and eventually he was offered a plea deal. And this also is worth a bit of a discussion here, because here we are in privileged white America. A middle-class white male is offered a plea deal with no jail time. There wasn't even a discussion or fight about it. He was instantly offered a plea deal for four years of probation. That's it Now. Of course, at the time we were pretty happy about that, because it meant we didn't have to be without anymore and he could come home. And so, as hard as that was, part of me still did want him to fight the charge, but he couldn't turn down that. There are a lot of people in jail for a lot less, but a man trying to have sex with children is offered four years of probation Can let that sink in a little bit, but regardless, he took the plea deal and at the same time in the state of Colorado, where we were, there was just a Supreme Court precedent set that basically said that all sex offenders did not automatically lose their constitutional right to parent, that they had a constitutional right to familial association, which meant that, as long as I agreed, he would be allowed to move back home and have unsupervised access to our children the moment that he pled guilty to this charge. Now, his guilty plea was to attempted solicitation of a minor. Usually it's a slightly lesser charge to get them to plead guilty for it and basically on January of 2017, once he did that, he gained back his parenting rights.

Amanda: 10:05

He moved back home and we thought we were beginning to rebuild our life. Now, if that isn't a big enough deal as it is, it doesn't end there. Unfortunately, that's just the first piece. That's just the oh my goodness, something has happened. Piece, because we tried to go back to normal.

Amanda: 10:24

At first, he found another job and tried to start working again, but he couldn't focus. His mental health was way worse at this point because he had been confronted with a whole lot and I realized that it had been now six years since I had been employed and that employment gap is only getting bigger, and if I was ever gonna need to go back to work, now was the time to start, and I knew that I was not gonna make what he made at his job, but I eventually would learn more and would be promoted or grow in the ranks in some way, and so I needed to start now and I started to look for work and, much to my surprise, in April of 2017, I was offered a job and I went back to work, and this meant that I was no longer the full-time stay at home parent and, because my husband wasn't working, he became the stay at home parent, although as a sex defender on probation, he had a multitude of restrictions. He had a curfew, he wasn't allowed in your schools or anywhere really. Children were allowed, and so I still had to do a lot of the dropping off and picking up, but he could keep the little one at home and if everybody was home, he could be with the children. So we figured out we're gonna just make it work, and we did that for a good period of time and at first it seemed like it was working, he started to learn how to meal plan and clean the house and put the baby down for naps and all of the things that had been my world.

Amanda: 11:52

And I started to learn that I was more than a wife and a mom and there was more to me and I got to use my brain for something else and I was enjoying my life. I was enjoying being more, but I had a huge fog over me because I didn't want anybody else to know who I was, who my husband was, what I had just been through, and so I was hiding. Still, I had a huge just mask. I wouldn't even say my husband's name at work because I was scared that maybe they would remember what they read in the paper a year ago and put two and two together. But I proceeded that way for just under a year because I didn't know how to do different. I didn't know how to face the truth of what was happened. I didn't know how to uncouple myself from my husband's crime Because the truth was, even though I really wanted to believe him, there was a part of me that held so much shame and I made his crime my burden and I hid from the world because of it.

Amanda: 12:57

But eventually that stopped working and I started to process the fact that my husband had admitted to sleeping with escorts and I started to realize that I don't think I could stay with somebody who was doing that. I started to feel like there were ghosts in the room with me at all times. Every time he would look at me and try to be intimate with me, I would start to feel like, oh, that's how you looked at them, that's what you did with them, that's what you wanted from them, and it would really eat at me. I couldn't anymore and I would come home from work and he would wanna talk about my day, he would wanna connect with me, and I couldn't even look at him and I started drinking. I started drinking about a half a bottle of wine before I could even talk to him anymore and eventually, after a few months of this, I was like this is not okay, this is not the answer If I can't even look at my husband, unless I'm pretty tipsy.

Amanda: 13:53

We got a problem, but I didn't know what to do about it because I had just fought like hell to keep my family together. I had just fought like hell to keep my kids to have a father in their lives. So how was I supposed to do anything about this? I didn't wanna see it, I didn't wanna look at it and to distract myself, I decided I was gonna start dating, because I was interested in a coworker who seemed to be interested in me as well. And so if I could just go start dating, maybe that would help and I wouldn't have to be intimate with my husband, but we could keep our family together, which I know it sounds crazy and twisted, and I recognize, obviously, that I was not in my full right mind at this moment, because when I told my husband that I was interested in dating somebody else, he tried to stop me. He tried to convince me to work on our marriage, but once he saw that I wasn't gonna change my mind, he just said okay, we'll be weird, normal, I'll move downstairs and we'll stay in the same house and we'll keep things normal. For the boys, always for the boys. That was my weakness. If it was for them, I would have done just about anything, and he knew that, and so I agreed. I got what I wanted right and I did. I dated, I had fun, I learned how to have joy again, I learned how to smile and go on adventures with somebody else. It was freeing. It was honestly very healing for me to be with somebody who wasn't cheating on me with multiple escorts. I felt important to somebody and I have so much gratitude for that time.

Amanda: 15:35

But at the same time, in order to be away from my husband, I had to be away from my children, which started to change our relationship. I had been the stay at home parent that home birthed and breastfed and co-slapped with my kids. I was very connected to them and all of a sudden, I was not and what I was starting to see was my husband, who was now becoming closer to them, was starting to feed them stories, starting to talk about how I was leaving them. And I was doing this. This was my fault. My now three year old my little one at the time says oh, are you gonna go off and have another baby and leave us? Three year olds don't get that idea on their own. And I just I didn't like what was happening. I was having a very hard time with it and I also didn't know what to do about it.

Amanda: 16:28

But eventually fate took another turn and I got offered a promotion at work, and because my now boyfriend was a coworker and the same department as me. I was now gonna be his boss. So that was a no, no. I had to do something about it. I had to break up with him and I had to figure out what the heck I was gonna do with my marriage and my family. And so I did. I broke up with him and my husband thought we were gonna get back together. No, no, no, no. I am not happy with you. I do not like what's been going on here.

Amanda: 17:03

And the moment he realized I wasn't going to get back together, he decided to file for divorce, which was another shocker, because we had just gotten out of the legal system. Now you want more lawyers and judges involved. I was pissed Because the next thing he did was try to remove me from the home and claim that he was the primary parent. He was trying to pull this legal maneuver on me to kick me out of our house. It was maddening. I don't think I'd ever been that mad at him, even through everything as I was. Is he trying to remove me as the primary parent and remove me from the home? I pretty much saw red.

Amanda: 17:42

I was so upset and I started to realize there was more to this man than I realized, more to this man than I had actually ever seen, that he was not just manipulative in an asshole, but there was darkness there and he was going to start to fight dirty. Now he didn't succeed at kicking me out of the house Because we had also just purchased him a home which happened to be right next door, when we thought we were going to be weird, normal and we had talked about this is his house, that he was going to start to move into, but he decided he didn't want to. Well, the judge thought that was ridiculous and eventually told him he needed to move. But when we went to the temporary order hearing and tried to basically say that he should not have overnights with the children based on his crimes, I was told that with the support I had had of him before and the fact that probation and his sex offender therapist supported his parenting time, there was nothing they could do. Now this is another shocker for people, but the fact is sex offenders have unsupervised access to at least their children and sometimes others, and that's fully legal. That doesn't matter. You know, I had been living with them before, but now he was going to be in his house without me there with my children. I was not happy about that either, but it seemed there was nothing I could do about it, and I certainly didn't have any evidence to prove that he was unfit and unsafe, other than his past history, which I still didn't really believe was true, other than adult escorts. And so I was really. I was pulling at myself. I didn't know which way was up or down at this point, and so all I could do was listen to my lawyers, take their advice and follow what they recommended. And so we settled temporary orders, hearing, which ended up going back and forth between households four times a week, which was a lot, but the kids were young and we were living next door, so I was. I guess we're going to try this Now.

Amanda: 19:44

Their behavior worsened. Their behavior got worse and worse towards me. The alienation attempts continued. They would tell me how come you won't forgive daddy, how come we can't live together anymore, and everything was fed as my fault. And I would try to explain. That's not how this works. And they didn't. They couldn't hear me because he was telling them differently, and it got to the point where they were even getting physically violent with me to come to my house. They didn't want to be there because daddy was playing video games and feeding them treats and mommy was holding boundaries, which wasn't as fun, and I was doing my damnedest to hold it together.

Amanda: 20:21

I was still doing well at work, but from a mental health standpoint, I was starting to exhibit PTSD symptoms. I was starting to have panic attacks and I was really trying to do anything I possibly could to take care of myself. You know, this is something that I don't know that I spent as much time talking about on other platforms, but learning how to take care of myself in the midst of really stressful events is a skill that kind of happened unintentionally at first for me, but it has carried me through and is something I continue to use to this day when things get challenging. You know, right after he was arrested, I was gifted a treadmill and I wasn't a runner before, but I had been at that point about 50 pounds overweight after having three children and being a stay at home mom. I didn't know how to go exercise or take care of myself.

Amanda: 21:13

I had kids, but my sister-in-law at the time gifted me a treadmill and I started running, or run walking truthfully every day, just some amount of time to get out of my head and it became like really the only thing that I could do for myself. But it was so helpful in moving those emotions. If I got upset, I could run it out. If I started to cry, I could run it out. If I was angry, I could run it out. If I just need to get out of my head, I could run, and I did so every single day. It got to the point where I was running three miles a day consistently and it was like a religion for me and I actually started to lose weight very, very quickly once they started to do that because I was moving so much in my body and I continued to run three miles every day all the way up until the pandemic and to this day. If I'm going through a hard time, I recognize my body needs movement. I have to move this stuff, and it's a reminder that comes up regularly, and so that was one thing I was doing to really ground myself.

Amanda: 22:19

I also took the time away from my kids to try to have fun. It was hard. Anybody who's gone through a divorce will tell you that the first few months sometimes longer, when you all of a sudden don't have children after you've had them 24, seven. It's a mind-melting experience because you're grateful for the space. That's all you wanted for a long time. And yet the house is empty and quiet and it feels wrong, and there were many nights where I would break down and I was not okay, and so I needed to find things for me to do in that time. I started taking salsa dance classes, I started hanging out with friends, I started to just try to have fun in the time that I could, because I had to learn how to take care of me.

Amanda: 23:05

In the beginning of all of this, I had this belief that if my kids were okay, then I would be okay. They came first, and because of my own trauma with my father, because he left when I was nine I believed that my kids would only be okay if they had their father in their life, and so it was my job to make sure that he stayed in their life no matter what, because that's how I would be okay once I made them okay. But the truth is, I was backwards. I was entirely backwards. I had to learn how to be okay first. I had to learn how to take care of me first, because kids actually regulate from mom most of the time, and even as they grow up and they're no longer attached to mom 24 seven they still take their cues from their primary caregivers. And if I was going to make sure they were okay, I actually had to put me first, and so all of these things that were happening were teaching me that all of the time away that was forced was teaching me how to take care of myself first, and so I was doing the best that I could at the time, and I was also employing the best lawyers I could find and the best specialist I could find, and we were able to settle our finances in a mediation.

Amanda: 24:23

But child custody was not something that was going to be settled easily, and after a lot of back and forth, I eventually decided that we needed to get a parental rights evaluator involved in the case. Every state has a different version of this, but in Colorado that's what it's called. It's a third party assigned to the case. They interview everybody they're usually mental health professional and sometimes full psychological evaluations are done, and then a recommendation to the court is made based upon the statutes. And so we hired a parental rights evaluator to do just that and we both had psychological evaluations done. All of the interviews, all of the pieces, every piece of data that I had now gone through, I was able to give to somebody. I was documenting every transition, I was documenting every conversation with the children. So I was able to give that to somebody to help make that recommendation to the court.

Amanda: 25:16

And that process brought some hope but also a lot of unknown, because now you're putting the ball in somebody else's court. But I was hopeful that she was going to look at things clearly and we had our very worst transition ever right before her report was due, and so I felt like she was able to see all of the alienating behavior very clearly and I also didn't know what is psychological evaluation was going to say. But I was hopeful that this would all make sense to somebody. Somebody with more experience or understanding or education than I could help me through this. And eventually her report came out and basically said that the ultimate recommendation was a 50-50 arrangement, with some exceptions for his probation restrictions and despite all of the evidence and everything that had been happening, ultimately it was the statutes that made that recommendation, because in Colorado and in most states in the US 50-50 is the default, unless somebody is grossly unfit, and even then it is very, very hard to prove. And so it wasn't what I wanted, but at least it was clear that that's what was going to need to happen, based on the law as it was written. And so we eventually tried to make a settlement and said, okay, we'll try, we will try, we'll see what happens.

Amanda: 26:38

And the settlement went unanswered for over a month, because the one provision she gave me was that, in a decision-making standpoint, I would have primary decision over mental health decisions, education and extracurricular activities, because I was the one who was going to have to be facilitating this. As a sex offender, he was never going to be the one going to schools or activities and he didn't like any version of not 50-50. That was not okay for him, and so he basically just ignored it. Now, in that month that he ignored the settlement, the bottom drops out for me once again, and this is actually where I hit rock bottom. Some people think, well, you know, it must have been before, but no, no, this is where I hit rock bottom, because I started to see my middle son, who was six, seven at the time. His behavior started to change His behavior, started to get sexual towards me, started trying to climb into my lap and kiss on me, and then one day, as I'm driving him to school, he stops and says sometimes I suck on daddy's fingers as he's getting out of the car and I don't even know what to say what. And I can feel all of you reacting the same way.

Amanda: 27:51

I did Shit right and I am in the middle of a very high conflict divorce case. You can't make accusations again at this point. And yet, all of a sudden, everything is flooding me. This man who was arrested in a sting operation trying to have sex with children is sexually grooming my child. How fucking dare he? And what the hell am I going to do about it, knowing that he's going to still have to? The kids are going back and forth four times a week. He's still got custody of them.

Amanda: 28:25

I call my lawyers. They tell me I can't do anything right now, but I need to talk to the kids therapist. I call them. They say you know, ask them to show you what it means. And so I did, and it was as bad as I feared. And then she tells me that I should call Child Protective Services because she would have to as a mandatory reporter in that instance. So I do.

Amanda: 28:48

I call Child Protective Services on my husband for what my son says. And A couple days later they call me. They want to interview my child. But they come to my house and my kid's scared to death of this man. He's hiding under the kitchen table, refusing to talk to him. And the guy just point blanks at him and says, hey, that game you play with your dad, your mom told me about it. You still do it. And he says no, no, no, we don't do that anymore. And then they drop the case. That's it, nothing. And I'm just like wait what? You guys don't? You guys don't think this is a big deal? Nope, nope. And his probation officer polygraphed him and said no, he's fine, all good. I'm shocked.

Amanda: 29:28

I'm watching my kid's behavior start to change. He starts peeing himself in in summer camp he's. He's put taking a doll and a chopstick and and banging on the doll's crotch. He's. His behavior is changing. He's telling everybody that he's hearing voices in his head and they're they're being mean to him. He's not okay, I'm not okay and I am appalled at the system.

Amanda: 29:53

There appears to be nothing I can do here. I have the lawyers, I have the evaluators, I've called child protective services. Nobody will do anything. This is my rock bottom. I am terrified. Everything in my mom instincts want me to just take my kids and cross the border and never look back. But the truth is that I would be charged with kidnapping. If I had done something like that, even trying to protect my children from a predator, I would be charged with kidnapping. That's the truth of our system today.

Amanda: 30:23

And so, as I was processing all of this, as I was working in my own PTSD, as I was trying to figure out how in the ever loving am I going to get out of this, while also, at the same time, trying really, really hard not to beat myself up for not knowing what I didn't know back then, because if I had left his butt in jail, we wouldn't be in this situation, and that was really loud. I did this, I caused this, but there was also a part of me that knew that if I caused it, I could change it. I didn't know how yet, but there had to be a way, and I was asking for help. I was talking to my therapist and as I was, as I was leaving her office, one day she says to me have you ever thought about seeing a psychic? Huh, but now I had been a very spiritually agnostic person my whole life. My mom was very spiritual growing up. I went to a Episcopalian high school but I had rejected all forms of spirituality, religion, anything. I didn't have a complete atheist view of the universe, but I really wasn't sure what my beliefs are. Only that I didn't know and I didn't align to anything.

Amanda: 31:34

And so my reaction to her was like you mean, like a fortune teller, what Are they even real? I was not quite sure why my you know regular mental health therapist was suggesting such thing. And she says, no, no, I know a good one, I know a good psychic. Well, you know, I'll try anything. At this point I probably would have paid anybody to tell me and try to help me anything. So I said, fine, I'll go see her.

Amanda: 32:01

And I go see the psychic and she starts talking to me about her gifts and that she sees angels like their people. And she says clear as day, and that they created this, this session, for me so that I could hear what they had to say. And they're just jumping up and down to help me. Okay, okay, tell me what they got to say and they start talking about a past life that I had with my husband and he even has the same name in this life, which just about floored me. And in this life his drug of choice was alcohol and he was physically violent and manipulative. Things were kind of, you know, okay, yes, until we had kids, and then I stepped in to protect the kids and things got worse.

Amanda: 32:41

And then she starts telling me all of the reasons I stayed and how I believe the kids needed their father, and how I didn't know how to support myself back then and how I had to stay. And the way she's talking to me about these things, it just it's completely the same as the energy of how I felt the last four years that I had to stay, that I didn't. I didn't think I could be a full time single mom of three kids. I didn't think I could financially support us. I didn't think I could do this. And when she's telling me this, I'm just okay, okay, I'm listening. I'm listening because there's no way that she would know all of these details, that what's happening today.

Amanda: 33:20

And then she tells me in that life he beats me to death and he throws me down the stairs and she says I'm watching as this happens and as she's telling me this, my thought is, well, what happens to the kids? And then she says, and you're dying thought is, who's going to take care of the kids? And I just okay. And she says your sister takes them in that life and they're okay, but you're still afraid of him. And my body was absolutely validating that. I was having this huge fear response.

Amanda: 33:52

As she was telling me the story rise in me and I was realizing that I was so afraid of him. He was never physically abusive, he never laid a hand on me, but he was emotionally and mentally manipulative. And that energy remind me, it reminded my body of what happened. And so I was terrified at the man, even though he hadn't really done anything. And she's telling me you need to get a handle on that fear now, because that's not then. It's not then, it's now. And you need to, you need to change, you need to choose. And I said what do you mean? I have chosen. I have all the lawyers, all the people I've hired, everybody. I've chosen. She says no, no, you haven't. And I take a good look at myself at this point, because she's basically saying I haven't actually chosen to be done with him.

Amanda: 34:43

There's still a part of me that doesn't want to believe any of this is real, that wants to have there's some other explanation for what my kid said or what happened. There's something else going on. This can't possibly be real. Still, even though it's right in front of me, there's a, there's a small part of me that's hoping, hoping that I'm wrong, that there's another, there's another explanation or that he can get help and that maybe we can have a positive co parenting relationship. Or there's even still a part of me that still loves him and still wants to see him healed. There's still believes that, being with him, I can support him in a way that he can be healed in whole and we can be a family again.

Amanda: 35:22

That was a really, really hard thing to admit to myself, but the truth is it was there. There was a small piece of it that's there and I don't. I don't think I'm alone in this. Even when we're with a mentally, emotionally and physically, even sexually abusive people, there's a part of us that's so deeply tied to them, were so bonded to them that we we would give up almost anything to help them, including our ourselves. And I was seeing that I was. There was some part of me still still holding on to this, even though my actions were we're saying otherwise.

Amanda: 35:58

There was, there was a piece of me that wanted my family to stay together, and so I saw it, acknowledged it, and I said okay, I see that and I need to choose now, right in this moment. Now I need to choose to be done with that, completely done, done. And I stood up and I said I'm done. She said okay, now I can help you. Oh, okay, what do I do? Because at this point I'm bought in like this lady. She's, she's, she's accurate. I'm telling what to do. Help me out here. She said to me there's more that you can do, there's more people who want to help me and all you have to do is ask. Everybody knows somebody and you just need to keep going and keep trying. There are people out there who want to help you. And I and she confirmed that he was so far gone that he is just digging his hole even deeper and that, at least from her perspective, this lifetime was not one that he was going to recover from, that he didn't have any interest in healing because it would be too painful to face his own trauma and I said okay, and I left that that office.

Amanda: 37:07

A changed person. A changed person who had a new amount of hope. The moment we switch from hopeless to hope is is a powerful shift in our systems because all of a sudden, we are empowered to change. We know the balls are in our courts and we're the ones who have to have to do it. It was clear to me that I was the one who was going to have to change things and I know how. I didn't know where, I know who I was going to talk to, but I wasn't going to fail because I wasn't going to stop trying. We had, I had six weeks at this point till our court hearing, through our final orders hearing, and I'd say that meant I had six weeks to get enough evidence to prove in court that my kids were unsafe with their father.

Amanda: 37:53

I went back to, went back to work and I started talking to everybody. I found a connection to ice, who put me in touch with Homeland Security, who put me in touch with the arresting officer that put the cuffs back on my husband in 2016. They put me in touch again with a local police officer who ran the sting operation in conjunction. They both vowed to help me any way they could. They opened the CPS report again. They've actually forensically interviewed my son. He never did disclose more. Too much time had passed. But they continued in their efforts to help.

Amanda: 38:26

I got in touch with the local district attorney who agreed to unseal the case file, the criminal case file. I had never seen the truth of what actually happened. You know, most people think that the family at least has all of the evidence. No, no, no, the police officers keep that in case it does go to trial. And so I had never seen all of the details, only what my husband had said. And so all of a sudden, once that case file was released to me, I saw all of it. I saw the text transcribed back and forth between him and the undercover agent. I got it Because there was stuff in that report that I don't know that anybody would have caught on to, but I sure did. I had had three kids with the man. I knew some of his preferences and I knew that not only was this real to him, but this was not the first time that he had done this. And that was another bit of momentum, another bit of anger, another bit of fire in me. To fight, I had to keep going. I started recording conversations with my children. I gathered evidence after evidence, data after data and at the end, when it was time to go to court, I had a three-inch binder full of data.

Amanda: 39:34

We had the evaluator do another evaluation, another update. She had more, more diagnoses for him and she was no longer recommending 50-50 at this point because the alienation attempts only worsened and instead she was recommending he get only every other weekend and a day and I would have full decision-making Because, again, of the statutes in Colorado. She was still hesitant to recommend supervised visitation, but her reasons were actually protective of me and my relationship with the children. Her focus was to make sure that there would be no way that he could continue to alienate them, because if he would only have supervised visitation, that's all he would do for that entire time. But my lawyers thought that this was still a really good report and we were still going to be able to use this in court to prove that they were unsafe.

Amanda: 40:22

And so, on February 28th of 2020, we had our final court and during that trial, everything got to come out. The evaluator was interviewed, probation was interviewed, I was interviewed, my husband was interviewed and everything came out. All of the things that couldn't come in the report came through me. We were able to prove the incompetence of probation and his therapist. They both did not hold him to terms and conditions of probation, even their own, even their own statutes and we were able to prove our case. And a few days later the final orders came out and the judge gave him one last chance. And people are even appalled at this, the fact that he got one more chance, but the truth is they have to live within the statutes, and the one last chance was for him to get a job, to get more therapy, to get more evaluations, and, if he did, a large list of things that he could have the every other afternoon or the every other weekend in a day, and if he didn't, he would only get supervised visitation, and in the meantime he was only to have two afternoons a week, and so she basically removed all overnight immediately.

Amanda: 41:32

What nobody expected after that was, two weeks later, the pandemic hit, and so not only did he not ever file the certificate of compliance to say he done everything, but everything changed in the world. Nobody expected the world to shut down in March of 2020. My job went remote, the kids went remote, everything changed and the six weeks he had to comply with, everything came and went, and the afternoon visitation stopped, and if he wanted to see the kids, it would have to be supervised visitation. But I knew that his mental health was not only Deteriorating, but it was. It was way far gone at this point and time. More time went by and we didn't hear from him. He never filed anything further. He never set up supervised visitation, and the final deadline for him to do so came and went as well. And so now supervised visitation was the permanent parenting plan, and he had still never set it up. That was three years ago and we have not heard from him in three years. April of 2020 was the last contact we'd had. He's not paid a dime of child support. He hasn't contacted us by phone, email, anything, and, boy, I am so flippin grateful.

Amanda: 42:46

All of a sudden, the fight was over. That's it no more. This was a new place for me. I'd been on fighter flight for so long, but what I got to see was that that manifestation that I started just a few months ago succeeded. I held true to my truth and I created an impossible outcome. Nobody gets full custody in Colorado. That doesn't happen, but I did, and I did in a way that I didn't expect. I didn't, I couldn't have foreseen that coming, and it opened up my eyes to this understanding of the power that I held. If I could do this, I could do anything, but the question was what did I want? I didn't even know anymore.

Amanda: 43:36

You know the pandemic change things for, especially single parents, and I eventually left my job and I focused on spiritual growth and development and join the spoke groups. I joined workshops, I joined classes to learn about healing in the body and nervous systems and how we need to heal on all levels and layers. You know I I looked back at those, those readings that that spoke to the angels and I said, well, if she can talk to him, how come I can't? I'm going to learn how. I just decided that I, I can too, and if I can, you can too, and I just needed to figure it out. And so I started devoting everything I had to learning all of that and I started to make friends in other parts of the world and I started to really open up my understanding and my perspective of the universe and I started to see how everything is so intertwined and interconnected and I had I not really trusted myself to make that change that I there was no way I could come out the other side, but every time things didn't go according to plan.

Amanda: 44:40

I just took a deep breath and I said this there's something else that needs to happen, there's some other piece of data that we need. This is happening for me. I don't know why yet, but it is, and I truly believed that. And then I got proven right and this is something that I've come to understand today that our beliefs really do create our reality. You know the I've been reading the Seth books. If you haven't read them, the nature of personal reality by Jane Roberts it's really noted as perhaps the beginning of the metaphysical movement and the New Age spiritual movements back in the 70s and 80s. But this concept that our internal beliefs create our reality is proven to me time and time again, because that's what has to shift first. Even before we shift, even before we really have evidence, we have to believe. We have to believe in our self, we have to believe in our truth, we have to believe in our power to do anything, and the more we do, the more we're shown the evidence of that. And that's what I want to talk about on this podcast.

Amanda: 45:44

I want to continue to talk about all of the ways that's true, all of the ways that, as things happen in my life, the things that I've learned, things that just come to me from seemingly nowhere, because the more I spent time on believing in the truth, the more I spent time on believing that I could do it to, the more turned on for me. I all of a sudden started receiving information in my body. I would, I would be talking to somebody and I would know where the pains were in their bodies, because I could physically feel it in my own. I would have information just come to me, seemingly just a knowing this is, this is the truth. And I would say something and how did you know that? I don't know, I just heard it. I would start to see things in my mind's eye that didn't make any sense and all of it just started to turn on really, really quickly.

Amanda: 46:29

And I know that in a lot of ways, some of those parts are harder for people to wrap their heads around, because it seems like woo, woo, crazy talk, and that's okay, because I also know that had I not listened to myself, no matter who told me whether you believe in angels or not I wouldn't be where I am today. So whether you believe in spirits or angels, it doesn't matter, because what my goal is isn't to get you to believe in some outside force, but to get you to believe in yourself and your abilities Whether that means your psychic abilities or not, that's up to you to decide but your ability to create your reality, your ability to choose what you want to experience in this life, with, with or without evidence, because ultimately, it is always up to us. First, we have to believe. We have to believe in our self, we have to trust our self and we have to believe in our own individual truth, and that that matters. That's it for today, folks.

Amanda: 47:29

I am so excited to continue to share more with you on this podcast. I hope you enjoyed this first episode. Subscribe for weekly updates. Lots of love.