Parent Compass Radio

Victor Marx: This is my bride of 30 years, Eileen Marx. I actually met her just as I was getting out of the Marine Corps.

Eileen Marx: This is my husband of 30 years, Victor Marx. I actually met him at church, invited to church. As an unbeliever, I met my fresh out of the Marine husband.

We've been married 30 years and we have five children, ages 29 down to 13. I think we both wanted big families, but after three under the age of four, I said no more. After 10 years, we said we want more.

After a man has a procedure that stops that, the chances of that happening are very small, but God granted that request. We have two more. We have three in our 20s and two teenagers.

Victor Marx: Three adult children, all married. We have one grandbaby and one on the way. Then we have two teenagers in our house. It's been really interesting. As we tell our older kids, we practiced on y'all, these two we're going to do better.

Eileen Marx: God gave us another chance.

Victor Marx: A do-over. When we found out we were pregnant after we were married four months, I was both so elated because we wanted to have kids right away and then I was terrified. I remember laying on the bed going, "God, I don't know how to be a dad because I never had one that was worth two nickels to rub together. God, I'm terrified."

What I remember about that moment is the Holy Spirit will speak to us sometimes through his word or to us. I remember just sensing this deal of peace and God saying, "I'm the best father there is. I'll teach you how to be one."

He has taught me all the way through the years in areas that I lack severely. I think part of what I was fearful of is that I would repeat angry, abusive, violent, or dads that walked out. God has granted me the grace and the proof that he can do and redeem in any man's life what the enemy meant for the worst. He can do a new work. We have a new legacy in our family.

For me, my background as a child is my mother got pregnant, but they didn't make it in marriage, and I was born after they were divorced. I was a constant reminder to my mom of him. The night she got pregnant, he shoved rosary beads down her throat and put a pistol to her head.

When she was running around pregnant, he said, "That ain't mine." My mother came from a very bad background. My dad spent time in a boy's home growing up. Their marriage or relationship was doomed. I think she was married at 15. She would end up marrying six times because sometimes women get in this deal of if they've been abused, they're going to marry an abuser with the hopes of fixing him, trying to fix their background. It never works.

I grew up with a sense of rejection of a real dad who would become a drug dealer and a pimp and later be involved in the occult. It was painful as a kid not having a dad there. I would say the worst of the abuse happened between the ages of three and seven because of the situation of my mother marrying another man who saw her as a very broken person with four children and her last child by a man who didn't want the kid.

My mother had, and I say this in the most respectful way because she's still living, a very challenged childhood. Because of circumstances of my birth, I thank her for having me. She could have aborted me and it would have probably been okay by a lot of people's standards because of the situation she was in.

Because of the background, going to 14 schools, 17 houses, and the instability, often when kids aren't watched and given a protective environment, bad things happen. Bad things happened to me that would affect me to the point of I was abused physically and sexually.

Professionals called it torture when you're being electrocuted as a kid or dumped in a tub of water until you pass out. It would require 123 visits over nine months. I was on Depakote, Depakene, Prozac, Zoloft, Lithium, Buspar. When a psychiatrist says you'll never fully function, that's not a lot of hope.

Again, I think God wants to show off through people's lives of what he can redeem and what he can do regardless of your background. I was left for dead as a kid in a commercial cooler. It's all documented in our film, "The Victor Marx Story," which I never addressed or wanted to until I was probably in my 40s.

It gives people hope and I was able to revisit places and people where bad things happened and God has redeemed that part of my life. As a result, he's given me a passion to help those who suffer some of the worst things in life.

Part of my worldview is understanding there's good and evil. Without evil, I wouldn't be here literally if I didn't have an understanding that there was an evil entity, demonic in origin, that is out to destroy mankind. That's what makes sense of so much of the craziness I went through and even our work helping children and women affected by ISIS these last few years. Nine times in Iraq in the last four years.

If there's evil, then there's got to be good and there's got to be a God who's more powerful, who's able to and has given us holy scriptures that tell us the truth and can overcome every lie any person has ever believed about their childhood or life. That's the battle and we've found the keys to victory.

When you have consistent things happen to you as a child, and I've only shared 10% in a book and a film because I never want to give the enemy too much glory of his evil deeds, but there's enough for people to understand that no matter what you've gone through, no matter how horrific, I was made to shoot a man when I was seven years old and watch him get buried. There's a level of acceptance, but there'll never be a full understanding of why people did what they did except that it's evil.

There is a truth in knowing that God can redeem it. In different stages of my life, I started drugs in the sixth grade. I couldn't connect with people, I certainly couldn't connect to women because I was abused by both men and females.

Here's a great example of when we knew something was really wrong and I had to start dealing with it. I fell in love with her instantly. There was a kindness and a strength, a ruggedness of soul, but a genuineness of sweetness in her that I just thought, "Oh my gosh," especially because of everything we've been through.

I remember when we got engaged after about a year and a half of knowing each other, we sent out our wedding invitations. She came to visit me at my apartment one afternoon and we started talking and I wasn't responsive. She goes, "Are you okay, Victor?" I said, "Yeah." She goes, "Are you feeling nervous because the wedding invitations went out, are you getting cold feet?" I said, "It's not cold feet. I don't feel anything." She says, "What do you mean?" I said, "I can't feel anything. I feel numb. I don't have hate, fear, love. I don't feel anything."

My mind had clicked into a gear of survival that I did not understand why I would do that. Later I found out because of some things my mother said to me one night as she was drinking, she grabbed me and slammed me against the wall. She said, "Boy, don't ever trust a woman. They'll only use you and then leave you." I saw that pattern in my mom, so I grew up never holding a relationship more than three months. There was a 90-day cutoff. For us, between the time we got serious, proposed, and really falling in love, it was a three-month deal.

My mind clicked, it switched into survival mode. This is one of those times in life you can't deny that God shows up. She looks at me because obviously I didn't trust women. She said, "I know something's not right because this behavior's not normal. There's nothing that would determine you acting like this." She just said, "I'm not your mom."

We end up calling a psychiatrist, it was an emergency call, and he helped me understand why I was acting like this. She looked at me and in tears she said, "We'll cancel the wedding. We can do that." She said, "But I'm not your mom. I will never leave you. If we're 85 years old and that's when you feel comfortable, we'll get married then. I love you and I will never leave you."

She said it through tears and it made my eyes leak just like they are now. These are man tears, by the way. These are not sissy tears. These things do push-ups and repel off my chin and road crawl away. I believed her. That was the first time I trusted a woman and we got married.

One of the things that really helped us that you just don't hear in this culture, there's no counter-messaging about sex, is we decided to wait. We had both had relationships, we had both been in the world. None of it satisfied.

When we met each other, when we got serious, we were friends and brothers and sisters in Christ. We decided we're going to wait until we're married to have sex. I think that was such a critical thing that would help us in very difficult times that would come in our marriage, knowing that we could submit to God and honor each other.

The greatest compliment she gave me so many years ago, she says, "I've never dated a gentleman." I said, "Well, you got one now."

Eileen Marx: I came into our marriage not knowing fully his childhood, and I'm glad I didn't because it would have scared me. I was a brand-new Christian, brand-new in the faith. I wasn't raised in the church. I wasn't raised with any understanding of who Jesus was. When I became a Christian, I really believed in Jesus. I believed who he was and I believed that he was my savior and I believed that he was going to help us.

I needed that because when his, he calls it his safe, started cracking and he wasn't able to contain his emotions. He describes it as a beach ball popping up and all these emotions are surfacing. We didn't know what to do, but I did know this: that divorce was never going to be an option. I came from a divorced family, too. My parents divorced when I was 10 and that exposes children to a lot of stuff. I just know that if God was not real to me and he was real to Victor, there is no way that we would be here today 30 years later.

It's been a journey. That scripture that says all things work for good for those who love God and are called, God has worked all these things out not just for healing for Victor, but so many people that he's been able to minister to both of us because truly, even though I didn't experience the trauma and abuse, there's secondhand trauma that spouses go through, children go through, when one person in the family is going through trauma. He was hemorrhaging and the focus was on the hemorrhaging, but myself and our children were also small bleeding because of what was happening.

God has been able to heal us and give us a platform. We did not know the terminology of PTSD then. It was just, he's behaving, he has these flashbacks, he's having this really odd behavior giving him anxiety and he's tormented. Our children at this time were little. They were four, two, and a baby.

Victor Marx: I ended up going to the VA for psychiatric care. The Veterans Administration as a former Marine, I went to them for help to try to figure out what's going on with my mind. They diagnosed me with Bipolar 2, Ultra-Rapid Cycler, and put me on a lot of meds. There wasn't any help or hope beyond that. I was just spinning, suicidal, homicidal. On the medications I was suicidal and probably more homicidal because of my background and this pent-up anger toward injustice that I couldn't, "Why did this happen to me?"

In the era of post-traumatic stress disorder, it's something that people can get better from and people can get help from. We know people that have completely been healed, struggle no more. Depends on the severity, the length, or whatnot, but I'll tell you the main thing is people must take control of their thoughts. People with severe PTSD have intrusive thoughts.

Me, I suffered from trauma-based Tourette's where a thought would hit my mind and I would say something or physically have a physical movement that I couldn't stop. I didn't have time to take it captive. It was an instantaneous reaction instead of responding to a thought.

On our film "Triggered," we show the different modalities that will help a person with intrusive thoughts, with hyper-vigilance, with suicidal thoughts, with addictive behaviors because these are all natural responses to something they encountered very unnatural.

I remember calling a friend of mine, a colleague, he's on board and we were in Iraq together. He was in CAG or Delta, a thousand missions. I remember calling him one day when I was having a hard time. I had just got out of Iraq and the very tough missions and I said, "Do you remember the day you didn't feel like you were part of society anymore?"

He said, "I remember the exact day, yes I did." I said, "Okay, that's my day because I don't fit anymore. I've seen too much. I've seen too much evil, I've seen too much killing, I've held too many people dying, and I can't make sense out of it." He said this, "Do you feel like you're in a tornado right now spinning?" I said, "Yes, my mind does." He goes, "Are you on a bull?" I go, "Yeah."

It was the best advice I could get from another fellow brother, a warrior that I respected who said, "Victor, you can't stop the temporary craziness. Ride it out. Latch onto it and just go with it because it will stop. It's like surfing. You get hit by a big wave, you cannot fight the force of the wave. You can only pray and relax and then you'll pop up."

When these moments of intensity come, you cry out to God just like Peter was sinking in the water. He had faith, he was doing great, but boy once he started sinking, "Lord, save me!" The Lord grabbed him. The Lord will always save us out of our most intense moments. But people just take captive the thoughts. There are scriptures that give us a roadmap to victory and have success in the middle of this mental turmoil. One is 2nd Timothy 1:7 that says, "God's not given me a spirit of fear, but power, love, and a sound mind." The other one is we're to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.

Currently, there's 22 veterans, military active veterans, taking their lives daily and that's due to PTSD. It's because I don't think they understand what's happening to them. We know that destroys not just the person but the family members. The number one thing is to be able to express what you're dealing with, to share with other people that you're struggling. There are great resources if people are willing to be honest with themselves, understand that your behavior tells on you, and be willing to reach out.

On our website, victormarx.com with an X, we actually produced two films. They're short films and we have workbooks to go with them. One is for military, first responders, those who suffer from PTSD, and then for civilians because the net outcome of suicide or broken relations or addictions are all the same. We explain in very simple terms and give real solutions on how do you feel better, first what it is, and then different modalities and approaches to feeling better and getting better. I'm living proof of that.

Even though most of my trauma was as a child, I remember a helicopter went down when I was in the Marine Corps and I had just got off of it. I should have died. You live with that guilt. Nine times in Iraq in the last four years, losing people, someone especially that I really cared for in a combatant situation, being shot at, being mortared because of ISIS trying to help people, and you see the devastation of children who are shot running towards you just trying to get away from ISIS. Kids being shot in the back by the most wicked people in what I call manifestations of evil.

Guess what? It does mess with you. There are a lot of very courageous people and I would just say don't look at suicide. It's a permanent solution to a temporary problem. You may not feel good right now, but there are resources and we invite them to come. We'll send them a free copy of our book and they can watch the film online. There are other resources that can help people in their need right now to stop, as my wife says, the hemorrhaging when you start to spiral out of control.

What I'm thankful for is that we have a God that made us to heal. He is a great redeemer. He's a savior, but he redeems and he understands the frailty of man. If he didn't, he wouldn't have cried at Lazarus's death knowing that he was going to raise him from the dead. He still understands that we're humans and our capacity emotionally is limited and we're affected by death, dying, destruction, and trauma.

Part of our whole approach to healing is mind, body, and spirit. God is able to heal the wounds, the deepest wounds of a man or woman's spirit, our soul that's been ravished by trauma. If he couldn't, I wouldn't be here. There's no way I could be here.

I do thank God for my military training, being in Iraq nine times doing the ISIS fighting the last four years for the work that we do. When you need help and when you're spinning, oftentimes the first step is just to understand you're not alone and you're not crazy. I would tell her in my moments of angst, "I'm not crazy, I'm not crazy." She'd always say, "I know you're not crazy. You're not doing well right now, but you're not crazy."

The reality is if you can stay together and understand, don't take everything personal, I would say very mean things to her. A few minutes later I would go, "You know this isn't even about you." She'd go, "I know. It hurts, but I know." She would pray for me because there is a common enemy and it's not each other. It's the person of Satan and demonic forces that hates marriage, hates humanity, and does all he can to destroy that. Drugs and alcohol just complicate things, as does infidelity.

I would just say in a sex-soaked culture that's non-moral, just in the US, I would tell men and women do not let social media, the internet, porn, all that stuff get into your lives. It will destroy you. It makes everything harder. It doesn't make it easier. We had boundaries and I think men and there's an uptick on women too looking at pornography. That should not be an option. It is destructive.

I've called pornography the ISIS of America. If men don't start seeing it as a formidable foe, it's going to destroy them. You'll lose intimacy and I just spoke to 5,000 men last weekend and made this statement. I said I think we've given as Christians, I'm talking from a Christian perspective, we've given pornography far too much time. We've made it an idol.

The reality is it's a Goliath and God calls men to be Davids, to leave the crowd of men who are stuck and in fear and in bondage and run to it with a sling and cut its head off. If men acted like that more, porn would lose its power over their lives.

Eileen Marx: We have a ministry that started 16 years ago originally to help and reach our nation's incarcerated youth across the nation. At that time, there were over 2,200 lockup facilities. What we found a common thread for so many of these children and youth was trauma. High-risk behavior because they're acting out. It made perfect sense to us.

Today, because of the trauma that we have experienced and walked through, we are now in the Middle East because we were invited by the Kurdistan government back in 2015 when ISIS went through the villages. They were taking Yazidis and other people that did not believe the way they did, and many hundreds if not thousands of young women were taken.

These women who were now freed, but now because of the horrific things that ISIS did to them, they're free out of their capture, many are taking their lives because they're remembering what was done to them. They actually contacted us and said, "Would you please help us? We know you deal with trauma." Since 2015, we've been in the Iraqi region helping the young women and now the children who've suffered from ISIS.

Victor Marx: Large-scale, we've helped 32,000 kids in this period of time, plus women and families. We've actually been able to get persecuted Christians out of ISIS territory, away from the threat out of the country, and develop trauma tools that help children sleep at night because there's music in their own culture and then prayers. Scriptural prayers that bring them peace. We bring hope and healing to children, women, even families who've suffered trauma.

She's one of the few dogs that actually face ISIS fighters nose to nose and then children were playing with her in our home in Iraq. We've actually built an orphanage and we've had safe houses, so she's a great team member.