From Marriage to Addiction to Divorce… Now They Help Others’ Marriages

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we returned to Our American Stories. Up next, you’re going to hear from Ron and Eva Hunter. This couple went through great hardship and even a divorce. Today, they use their experiences to help others heal in their marriages. Here Ron and Eva, sharing their own story of brokenness and how they restored a marriage that most would have deemed hopeless.

00:00:40
Speaker 2: I grew up in Macon, Mississippi, which is a small town, which is all of Mississippi, and I lived out in the country.

00:00:49
Speaker 3: We farmed around.

00:00:50
Speaker 2: Four thousand acres, and I had two older brothers that were four and five years older, and it was kind of like boy heaven growing up in that environment, hunting, fishing, cows and dogs and horses and tractors.

00:01:05
Speaker 3: There was not a better place to grow up.

00:01:13
Speaker 2: My mom and dad then divorced when I was eight years old, and that was the first great tragedy or trauma in my life, and everything changed. I was kind of turned over to my two older brothers who were four and five years older. And I always say that I was raised by wolves, the wolfpack. My two older brothers and their buddies that were all four and five years older than me, and so we kind of figured life out. We had very little parental supervision or direction, and we grew up not in good ways. Eva and I met. We knew each other; everybody knows each other in small towns. Actually started dating when we were fifteen, and that began our journey together.

00:02:09
Speaker 4: I too am from a small town in Mississippi, the same hometown as Ron.

00:02:14
Speaker 5: However, I lived in the city, the.

00:02:17
Speaker 3: Big city, the big city.

00:02:19
Speaker 4: I’m the firstborn of three children. My parents were very young when they had me. They were just nineteen years old and then quickly had another child, and so they were just really, I think, probably in survival mode, trying to make ends meet. However, I mean, they were very involved in my life, especially my mother. I had a lot of accountability and a lot of rules.

00:02:45
Speaker 3: However, I had.

00:02:46
Speaker 4: A lot of freedom too. I mean, I knew every crack in the sidewalk. I rode my bike all over town. Like I said, I had a lot of rules. I grew up in church. I accepted Jesus when I was eight years old, but that was just a one-time experience.

00:03:01
Speaker 3: Not a lot of growth after.

00:03:03
Speaker 4: That for me. And my home, just a lot of intensity. My dad was an alcoholic. Being a firstborn, I took on the hero role in the family system. So, an overachiever, overly responsible. I made the family look good because I achieved.

00:03:27
Speaker 2: So Eva grew up with a lot of rules, and I grew up with no rules. And when we met, you know, she could come to my house and get a beer out of the refrigerator, and like that was just normal for me growing up. And for her, that was like really, really out there. And so I think that was the attraction for her: that she could get a beer out of the freedom. So that’s why she liked me. That is not true. That is not true. I was really shocked by that, quite honestly.

00:03:57
Speaker 3: It was a red.

00:03:58
Speaker 4: Flag, but I did not quite.

00:04:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, there were lots of red flags. We were both very broken, growing up in kind of the dysfunction. I always say, I grew up in the Easter Christian denomination. We went to church at Easter, maybe, if nobody was hungover. And growing up in small-town Mississippi, not going to church was kind of, you know, that was different. And like none of my friends’ parents were divorced, and so even that, you know, was something that, like, it just felt different. What I developed was just that kind of a chameleon personality to be able to adapt and fit in in whatever environment I was in. And then when Eva and I met, I started going to church with her. I always say: fifteen-year-old boys don’t love Jesus. They go to church because there’s a girl there. And so I did start going, and then we started dating, and we graduated and went to college. That’s summer before going into our freshman year, kind of the second great tragedy in my life, and certainly tragedy in our life, happened.

00:05:10
Speaker 4: Yes, and it was definitely the second tragedy for me. Although I did not realize the first tragedy was growing up in an addictive family system. I did not understand that it really didn’t think it.

00:05:21
Speaker 3: Had affected me.

00:05:22
Speaker 4: And I got pregnant in between my senior year in high school and my freshman year in college, and we really thought, “Well, let’s just get married, you know, small-town Mississippi.”

00:05:34
Speaker 5: We’ll just begin life together.

00:05:37
Speaker 4: Now. However, our parents got involved.

00:05:42
Speaker 2: I mean, I’d already had several buddies that that had happened, and you just get married and, you know, build a house on the farm, and I’ll just farm and we’ll start doing life together. When my mom divorced, she remarried very quick. Probably the ink was not drawn the divorce papers. Later in life, my brothers and I came up with our affectionate name for him. We couldn’t call him “stepfather” because he didn’t have a father bone in his body.

00:06:13
Speaker 3: So after this movie came out, we.

00:06:16
Speaker 2: Started calling him “Stepfokker,” and so that became our affectionate name. And then they had my little sister, and so that became kind of my mother’s new little nuclear family. And I was kind of like, “Where’s Waldo?” And he had a yacht. In the summer, they would go over to the Bahamas and live on the boat, which I got to experience that in my teenage years, which that was a one benefit of growing up with him, but it didn’t outweigh the bad. And so they were in the Bahamas, and I talked to my mother and I told her that Eva was pregnant, and she basically told me that she needs to get an abortion, and y’all don’t need to get married at seventeen.

00:07:02
Speaker 3: That’s the level of support you get.

00:07:04
Speaker 2: I certainly did not know what to do, and so I called Eva and told her, and she told her mother what my mother had said. And then that decision was made pretty.

00:07:17
Speaker 3: Quickly, very quickly.

00:07:18
Speaker 4: Yes, that happened when we were very young, and we both buried it.

00:07:25
Speaker 5: Between Ron and I, we never talked about it again.

00:07:29
Speaker 4: Now, if there was a conflict between us, it got very intense, very fast. I think that trauma would just come out of me with a lot of intensity over the next seven to ten years in our relationship.

00:07:48
Speaker 2: At twenty years old, we were at Mississippi State in college. And I always say, it’s real when a twenty-year-old frat boy comes to Jesus, and he quits drinking, cussing, and smoking. Because that’s all I knew to do was to stop those things. And then…

00:08:03
Speaker 3: Start going to church, and we did.

00:08:06
Speaker 2: Eva actually was with me when I accepted Christ, and it became very real.

00:08:12
Speaker 3: We were just so desperate.

00:08:14
Speaker 5: I mean, we were two very hurting young people.

00:08:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, going to church… Well, certainly we knew we needed something more than what we had, but there was, you know, we got very little in terms of, you know, how do you actually do a relationship, how do you actually navigate emotions and all those things.

00:08:32
Speaker 4: Yeah, we were both really emotionally dysregulated, totally. And we both… So, there was a lot of chaos.

00:08:40
Speaker 2: We’re dealing with attachment issues, and again, we didn’t know any of this at the time. We’re just trying to do life, and so we wound up getting married going into our senior year in college because, you know, marriage will fix all this, and we just thought that’s what we need to do.

00:09:02
Speaker 1: And you’re listening to Ron and Eva Hunter share their story of brokenness and thinking marriage would somehow fix their problems. And by the way, that happens every day, and it doesn’t fix the problems. My goodness! Trauma on both sides, brokenness on both sides. Eva, an alcoholic parent, and well, the trauma that Ron faced with an early divorce and then being raised by, as he put it, a pack of wolves. Boys shouldn’t raise boys. It doesn’t end well. When we come back, more of the story of Ron and Eva Hunter here on Our American Stories. And we’re back with Our American Stories and with Ron and Eva Hunter. When we last left off, they were still a bit lost in their relationship that they decided to get married anyway because they thought, well, they thought that would fix things. Let’s return to Ron and Eva.

00:10:30
Speaker 4: What I saw in men growing up were men who were emotionally disengaged. They didn’t really connect with their female children.

00:10:40
Speaker 2: And certainly what I saw modeled was just a lot of detachment.

00:10:46
Speaker 3: We didn’t know how to emotionally connect. So we got married and then moved away.

00:10:52
Speaker 2: Lived in the Mobile, Fair Hope, Alabama area for five years, and then I got transferred to Nashville. We were there for about a year and then ultimately wound up in Atlanta. And so we’re in Atlanta, and both of our sons had been…

00:11:07
Speaker 4: At this point, we had two small children, two sons.

00:11:10
Speaker 2: And we were having a discussion. I didn’t think we were arguing, but Eva asked me, “You know, you seem down. Why are you so down?” And I looked at her, and the words came out of my mouth.

00:11:24
Speaker 3: I said, “I have a problem with pornography.”

00:11:28
Speaker 2: And I literally remember turning around, going, “Who said that?” Because there was no way I was ever going to tell her that. For me, the pornography thing started. And obviously, this was way before the Internet, but my mother’s attitude was, “Boys’ll be boys,” and we had pornography on the bedside table, and it hooked me. There were hours spent just absorbing that stuff into my brain. And when I came to Christ, it was one of those things that, like, I sincerely wanted to not do that anymore. And, you know, everybody thinks you get married and that’s going to fix it, and it really doesn’t work that way. And so with marriage came stress and intensity and anxiety, and so my full-blown sexual addiction began to escalate. When Eva and I moved into these bigger cities, I was going to strip joints and massage powers and prostitutes. And each one of the moves, it was a geographic cure, because I was like, “If I can just get away from these places, you know, that’ll fix it.” Well, each city was bigger and there were more opportunities, and the geographic cures lasted about a week and a half in each one of those moves. And then we’re in Atlanta, and she asked me the question, “Why are you so down?”

00:12:57
Speaker 3: And the words came out of my mouth.

00:12:59
Speaker 2: And that it was really God because it had to get out into the light. And so that was the beginning of everything changing for us. But it was two years of hell on Earth. Yes, it was.

00:13:15
Speaker 4: It was devastating to me to know that he had this secret, because of what he presented, who he presented to be to the outside world, to me. We were in leadership at our church, you know. And at that time, in nineteen ninety, the Seven-Eleven convenience stores had taken out pornography off their shelves all across the United States, and that was a huge thing. And he talked about that and let everybody know, you know, what a great thing that was, at the same time never saying, “This is an issue for me.” It was just so shocking to me. So I went into my own green cycle. The first stage is shocked and numbness, and then a lot of anger. Of under anger, was hurt, fear, frustration, and injustice.

00:14:11
Speaker 5: But I couldn’t tap into those deeper feelings.

00:14:13
Speaker 4: I’d never in my whole life really let myself feel those really vulnerable feelings ever. And I lived in that angry stage of grief for longer than I could really sustain, and I got hopeless. When I became hopeless, I thought a separation would be good for us or for me. I went to a lawyer in the state of Georgia, which is the same here in Mississippi.

00:14:42
Speaker 5: There is not a legal separation.

00:14:44
Speaker 4: I wanted to be protected financially because I was a stay-at-home mom. And so she said, “You know, the only way you’re gonna protect yourself financially is to divorce, and you can be divorced in…”

00:14:55
Speaker 3: Thirty days, be protected financially.

00:14:58
Speaker 4: If y’all are able to reconcile, you can always remarry. And so that sounded like a good solution to me at the time. Once we did divorce, I was completely done, and at that point, really realizing, “I’m on my own and I have two small children,” and ended up getting a full-time job and beginning to work on myself. The first thing I did was go to a group, Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACOA) group, and that was eye-opening for me. It was one of the layers began to peel off that. Oh, wow. What I had grown up had affected me, and these were all the ways when they handed me the laundry list of what happens to a child.

00:15:47
Speaker 5: In my mind at the time, I thought, “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

00:15:51
Speaker 2: We would go to counseling. During the two years prior to the divorce, Eva was not really… I was engaged in that process pretty quickly after I admitted to the pornography and then began to reveal more to Eva. I very quickly got engaged with a Christian counselor in Atlanta because I wanted to be better. I wanted to deal with this. I’d been wanting to deal with it. I just didn’t know how, and so I got engaged with a Christian counselor. I got involved in a support group ministry. I was in a therapy group with my counselor because I wanted to do my work and I wanted to be better. And we would go to counseling, and the counselor, you know, we knew, I…

00:16:35
Speaker 3: Was the problem.

00:16:36
Speaker 2: I was easy. And then he would kind of shine that light over on Eva and he would ask about, “Well, what about growing up with an alcoholic father?” And her standard reply was, “I’m fine. We’re here because of him. You need to fix him.” And then, okay, he’d come back to me. And then he’d shine the light over there and, “You know, what about the abortion?” And she’s like, “I’m over that.”

00:17:00
Speaker 3: “I’m fine. We’re here because of him fixing.”

00:17:04
Speaker 4: So at that point, I did not want any more couples counseling.

00:17:10
Speaker 3: After the divorce, I was ready.

00:17:12
Speaker 4: To get the help I needed for myself, so I did a lot of individual counseling along with ACA. I for the first time saw my own brokenness. I really didn’t think I had anything. I had a lot that I had brought into the marriage. Over the next year, I became open to reconciliation with Ron because I could see it looked different. I brokenness looked different, but there was a lot of similarities in it too. And even when we were apart, I saw that he stayed in recovery. I saw that he stayed in his own therapy. That gave me hope that he was always going to work on himself.

00:17:54
Speaker 2: I was engaged in my process because words at that point are meaningless.

00:17:59
Speaker 4: I got up for a long time with, “I’ll never be able to trust him again.” Well, as I did my own work, I realized I had been set up in my family of origin not to trust. So we began more of a restoration process.

00:18:15
Speaker 2: We were divorced, separated in divorce, for a little over a year. And then we did decide to remarry. We committed to doing our work in that process.

00:18:28
Speaker 5: We were involved in recovery groups.

00:18:31
Speaker 3: Yeah, and in our process.

00:18:32
Speaker 2: It wasn’t like we got remarried and everything was rosy.

00:18:37
Speaker 3: We had a lot of work to do.

00:18:39
Speaker 2: We were both involved in support groups, and we always have been and we always will be. And so we continue to do our work because your marriage is not easy, and you have to be intentional.

00:18:54
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Ron and Eva Hunter share, well, quite nakedly, quite boldly, the problems they each brought into the marriage. It was easy for Eva to blame her husband Ron, but in the end, she realized she came with a lot of brokenness into this marriage too, and they ultimately get divorced, reconcile, and find love and hope again in each other. When we come back, more of this remarkable love story, Ron and Eva Hunter’s story, you’re on Our American Stories. And we’re back with Our American Stories, and with Ron and Eva Hunter’s story, let’s pick up where they last left off.

00:19:50
Speaker 2: Eva did not cause my sexual addiction, my acting out so often. You know, guys will justify that in a lot of different ways, and that’s just totally bogus. You know, I got on the marriage train with all this packed in my luggage. You know, it’s in that zipper compartment down in there. Get it all packed, neat, and hidden. We both got on the marriage train with our stuff. So she did not cause it, and she could not change it. You know, what I developed was a very illegitimate coping behavior that went back to early childhood. And so the illegitimate coping behavior is learned early on. And so that became my way of escape, my way of numbing, my way of medicating the anxiety and the stress.

00:20:36
Speaker 3: That I was feeling.

00:20:37
Speaker 2: And even when we say “sex addiction,” Eva and I both say we don’t really like the term. And the term that we really prefer is just “sexual brokenness,” because this thing takes a lot of diffe