Sid: Hello Sid Roth here.
Welcome to my world where it is naturally supernatural.
I am so excited about my guest, Paul Hegstrom.
Paul, you are an absolute answer to prayer because
what you have tapped into is an answer to your prayer
also, I know this, it’s hard to believe that I am going to
take you back to a husband that is abusive in every
arena to his wife, why were you that way?
Paul: I didn’t know and that is what made me angry,
I married when I had just turned 19, my wife was 16,
and on the second day of the wedding, or the marriage,
I went off on her physically and abused her and we lived
that way for sixteen and a half years in the first marriage.
Sid: Was this new to you, this type of behavior toward
a woman or had you even been that way before?
Paul: I had been that way in dating, I had abused her
physically, and terribly emotionally as a teenager
and I didn’t know what was wrong with me, I always
felt I’m flawed, I’m defective, I’m dirty, I’m damaged,
I’m different, but I could never trace back where
that feeling came from.
Sid: What about God, where did He fit
in there at that point?
Paul: I couldn’t find a place for Him because it seemed
that, that God, it was to a point that having a Father that
was totally silent, God didn’t answer prayer, He didn’t
seem to have power, I was raised in a parsonage and it
worked for everybody else but it didn’t work for me, and
the reason it didn’t worked for me is Satan had gotten to
me through sexual abuse in childhood outside the family
and I had tried to talk to my mother about rape that I had at
eight and one half years of age, and I said, “Mom, I need
to talk about sex,” and I got my mouth washed out with
soap and I still today don’t like the taste of Ivory.
And so I got the message that this was something
that we as Christians don’t talk about.
And so later, probably three weeks, or three months, I
don’t have a timeline but I said if David down the street
had been messed with by an older man was it going to be
okay, and my mother was washing dishes and she started
flinging dish soap around and says David can never
play with you again, David is dirty, damaged,
different, he is defective, he is flawed, he will
never be right, he needs to be kept in the kitchen
with his mother when he is at family reunions.
Sid: But you were actually talking about yourself.
Paul: About me.
Sid: So you knew I’ve got to bury this part of my life.
Paul: Oh yes, absolutely, and so I was told that I would
never be right and I saw that as mental retardation,
and we don’t talk about sex, has David tried something
about you, no it’s not about David, I just asked a question,
oh it has to be about David because you know
too much about what you are asking about.
Sid: So Paul, how abusive was your marriage,
how abusive?
Paul: Oh it was so abusive that I can remember one night,
and then I was sexually abusive, emotionally abusive,
physically, spiritually abusive, every type of abuse
there was, I was the master of all of them.
But it would be, Judy would say something,
and something was going on in my life and she didn’t
even know about, and I would hit her in the head
with a closed fist, I would slap her.
Sid: Well why would she put up with it so long?
Paul: Because I trained her to be a victim, I created a
helplessness, that’s what we find in the domestic violence
field that a man like myself will pick a woman, and then
he will start degrading her and telling her things like you
know, you are lucky to have me as bad as I am because
nobody would really want you, you are fat and ugly, you
are stupid, and all those things that she wasn’t, she was
brilliant as a young person, she was smarter than me and
so I couldn’t stand that so I had to put her under me
through abuse, verbal abuse and sexual abuse, and I
remember one night we were arguing over sexuality and I
hit her so hard that she screamed and the kids started
banging on the door and said mom are you still alive,
are you still alive, and I had hit her so
hard she could hardly breathe.
Sid: Didn’t this bother you, didn’t you say enough
is enough; I’m not going to do this anymore?
Paul: Yeah I said it a thousand times Sid, you will never
know how many times I said I will never do this again,
I would promise her, honey I’m sorry and start the
process of escalation again an hour later, I hated
what I was, I despised what I…
Sid: Okay, finally she had enough, you got divorced,
you have a new relationship, did this work out okay?
Paul: No, every girl that I ever dated I was abusive to,
and so I get in to a live-in relationship and I would
batter her so badly that I am facing 15 to 22 in the
state penitentiary for attempted murder.
Sid: Fifteen to twenty-two years, you are
going downhill fast.
Paul: Yeah, real quick, real quick, real quick.
Sid: So what happened?
Paul: I, because of my sexual abuse in childhood, I made
up my mind that I would die before I would go to prison,
so I had two choices, either kill myself or accept Christ
and lay myself on the mercy and grace of the Lord Jesus.
And so I can remember the night, that it was February 12th,
back in the early 80′s and I threw myself out of bed and I
says God if you can do something with me do something
because I will not go to prison, if some man tries to do
something to me in prison I will die because I will ruin
them, they are never going to, nobody is ever going to do
to me what was done to me in childhood with male to male
sexual abuse, and so I gave my sexuality to the Lord that
night, I also gave Him my fiances, because there is no sex
in prison I was interested in, no finances to be made in
prison, and God delivered me from death and delivered
me from prison, and there is more to that story.
Sid: You did not go to prison?
Paul: I did not go, I did not go, God delivered me from it,
you talk about supernatural, there is no way, my attorney
said you are the dumbest man I have ever met in my life
because you are in the state of Minnesota and you pulled
this in the first state that has developed automatic arrests,
nights in jail, the whole load, I mean the Duluth model for
men who batter was founded in Minnesota, Duluth,
Minnesota, and so they pioneered all of that.
Sid: Okay, but I don’t get this, his ex-wife he begins to
date after this experience with Jesus, and also something
very, very supernatural happened, God began to show him
revolutionary ideas about the brain.
Why did you wife even want to date you again?
Paul: Well she didn’t, she came to me
Sid: Your former wife.
Paul: My former wife, and see we were separated and
divorced for seven years while all this other stuff was
going on and when I came to Christ and I mean it was a
died out to Jesus type of situation, God I’m at your mercy,
but she started to see change in me and when I really had
that experience with Christ, the message I heard from the
Spirit was, and this is what’s supernatural, really
supernatural, was if you will become teachable
Father would give you a program that would
restore our family and then He wants you to
take it to a nation, take it to a world…
Sid: I am so excited about this program, don’t go away,
you are going to find out about it in a moment.