Tucker and Michelle's Recovery Story

Video Transcription

Michelle: “I’m Michelle”

Tucker: “and I’m Tucker.”

Michelle: “The easiest way to describe us are a young couple, a young family trying to make the most of our little life I guess…[going on] adventures, the outdoors, that’s pretty much us.”

Tucker: “We met [through] a mutual friend a couple weeks into our freshman year of high school and my friend had a class with [Michelle] and I was having lunch with him one time and we are walking down the hall and he stopped to grab a cookie from her, and as soon as she walked away, I was just like who was that?! And I had my sights set on her from pretty much that time forward.”

Michelle: “We were 17. It was the real deal. Our young hearts thought, we were in love at seventeen.”

Tucker: “No, we started dating at 15.”

Michelle: “Well, that’s getting difficult though.”

Interviewer: “So did you get married pretty young too?”

Michelle: “Yes, we got married our senior year. We got pregnant and so we got married halfway into the semester of our senior year and had our first baby boy a couple months after we graduated. It’s busy at home and it's hard to be a parent. It's trying and it's rewarding, it's heart-wrenching, but it’s fun with or without [Tucker].”

Tucker: “I get to be away...I mean I have to be away [from home] with school and work. I like coming home and having the kids there. They're all excited and run and jump into my arms and that’s the best. It’s nice to get away sometimes when Michelle has to go and do something for any amount of time. I always wonder how does she do this every day. I love my kids, but it's tough.”

Michelle: “What surprised me about love is that it didn't stop once you got married and it was perfect. The real colors kind of shined and you had to work around with what you had, in a good way, and sometimes in a bad way. I learned that it’s real, but you have to work for it. It’s that deep bond, your best friend, it’s real. You don’t want to be with anyone else, but it takes work.”

Tucker: “Finding out that love isn’t really like it’s portrayed in movies and TV. It does take work, It takes a lot of work. From both of you, it’s a two-way street. Things have happened along the way, and I’m sure they will happen in the future, that test that. When you overcome those little battles, you get stronger together. I think that as long as we’re in a place that we can overcome those battles together, in twenty years, we’ll be closer than we are now. I think that right now, it's hard to imagine that because I think that we’re so close right now.

When we got married, I think that we thought we were in love. Looking back on that now, it just seems silly because we’ve come so far. I think pornography plays a big role in that because it completley distorts the view that you have of love. I know, in my experience, that the things that are portrayed in pornography are completley unrealistic. It’s hard to see that and recognize that and be able to recognize that. Especially when I was in a very dark place, to go from [pornography] and then go to real life, you cant just flip a switch, it’s not that easy. I think that is the most problimatic thing about pornography and how it plays it’s role. It very temporarily makes you feel good, or complete, or like there is love there. Then you step into real life and it’s not [there]. Then you have to work hard again and it’s not realistic.”

Michelle: “I feel that it’s degrading our whole womanhood and it’s disrespectful to our womanhood. It’s said that all these men, everywhere around the world, whether they believe in God or if they think it’s right or not, their brain is getting chipped away little by little from these images. They’re getting poisoned. [because of this] Their future relationships are not going to be whole and it’s sad.”

Tucker: “I think of it as a wedge that inserts itself a little bit at a time and then it drives deeper and deeper into the relationship. The more involved [in pornography] I was, the deeper that wedge got between us, between real life, and fantasy. In pronography, it can be all about me. I feel like it’s focused on me. I don’t have to work very hard for it. Real love is a two way street. It involves both of us working hard. I can’t expect her to come at me with love and for me to be able to get by that way. I have to work hard to reciprocate that.”

Michelle: “Real love is caring and real love is in tune with each other and respectful, compared to its counterfeit. Lust is selfish and that is just a downward spiral, to be absorbed in yourself.”

Tucker: “It got to a really low point for me when Michelle found out about it. I had kept it a secret for a long time and I felt like I was pretty good in hiding it. One day that came crashing down. She had known, I think, for a while and I had denied it. I got to such a low point in my life. You hear that darkness and light cant occupie the same space. My life was so dark. I had two kids at that time and I asked myself what was I doing?

I was just depressed all the time because I was so guilty, but never really guilty enough to stop. The guilty feeling would go away. When she confronted me, finally, I had reached the point where I came completely clean to her and that was a very sobering experience for me. I can't even imagine what is was like for her.”

Michelle: “It was actually a lot of relief when he came clean about everything because I knew it all along. I knew all the lies couldn’t be true. It didn't make sense. I’m not stupid. So I felt a lot of relief, I felt peace. Then I got angry. In my mind I thought, ‘How could I love this person that wasn't being true, that wasn’t being honest with me, and who is he now? What is my life now? What do I do now?’”

Tucker: “The hardest thing about it was, even after I came clean, I couldn’t just stop ‘cold turkey’. Just because I told her doesn’t mean that it, at all, went away. It’s been something that I struggled with for a long time. To overcome most temptations, I had to really let go of my of myself and I had to rely on other people. That was a really hard thing for me to do because I think I have all the answers and I think that I'm always right. I started going to counseling with somebody at home where the [the therapist] asked me a series of questions. When we were done, he said, ‘You’re borderline narcissistic.’ Then, I said ‘That’s probably why I’m struggling so much at overcoming this.’ It was also very revealing, I learned a lot about myself. I knew that I had to let go and I that I didn’t have all the power.”

Michelle: “I think healing to me has been taking time for myself and making myself whole again. In turn I can be a happy person to be married to and I can fully experience this love again and our life together and be in present time. That’s the key. You have to heal to do that. I think we’ve been that way for a good while now. It makes me excited for maybe another baby and the future. The future’s exciting when it has a positive outlook. When I am not thinking ‘Oh, what if something happens?’ instead I’m planning for things now.”

Tucker: “To me, healing was probably different than what she experienced. We’re were both victims in different ways. Healing for me has been coming to know myself and coming to understand myself and my thought processes. That was something I needed professional help for. That wasn’t something that I could do by myself. I’m grateful to have had something to help me overcome the experiences that I've gone through that made me a victim. Although I don't think these demons that I have will ever be gone completely, to have a tool set that I can use to fight them and to know that I have that, going forward, gives me a lot of confidence. I know that we can keep working together and working on ourselves. The future is bright. I feel like our love is strong but incomplete. There will always be work to do and we continue to grow closer together.”

Michelle: “Our love is a fighter. It’s one love together and it fights. It’s going to make it.”