Set Free by Jesus: Marie’s Powerful Testimony of Freedom in Christ
- Marie Schaaf
- Mar 22
- 11 min read
Father God, I just pray that You use my testimony as a proclamation of Your goodness and glory! That as you say in Your word “Revelation 12:11: “And they overcame him (satan) by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony;“
⚠️ Sensitive Content ⚠️
This testimony contains discussions of self-harm, suicide, sexual content, and other content that may be triggering or traumatizing to some readers.
I want to start off by saying this testimony is purely to bring glory to God. In no means do I want to shame anyone or speak badly of anyone. Next, I want to say that my parents are amazing people. I want to honor them and thank them for doing their very best to lay out a firm foundation in Jesus for me and my siblings. Throughout my testimony, I am simply recounting events that shaped my mindset and the struggles I faced. God set me free, and He can do the same for others. One of my goals in sharing this story of salvation, healing, and deliverance is to help people who struggle with a lot of the same things I did. And like early on in my testimony, they may feel there is no freedom for them. I am here to share with them what God has done for me, He can also do for you. All you have to do is surrender your life to Him, believe in the work of the cross, call out to Jesus, and He can save you and set you free.
From a young age, I started to struggle with loneliness. I don’t think I could pinpoint the exact time, but it definitely started when I was young. I remember that I was the biggest of my siblings, just a little chunkier, and I recall them always teasing me about being the heaviest. I don’t remember my siblings ever being really mean about it. I just know it hurt my feelings and led me to not like my weight. I also struggled with knowing who I was, my identity was something that I searched for in wanting to understand why I felt outcast, lonely, and didn’t like myself. There was part of me that wished I could become someone else. Around the age of 7 or 8. I remember we had just got out of church with my parents and I wasn’t being obedient. I don’t recall what I was doing; I just remember one of my parents saying that if I kept not listening, they would shave my head, and I could look like a little boy. For some reason, I really wanted that. I even told my brother and sister that it would be so cool if I could be a little boy and all of our friends would think I was a boy. I think there was part of me that was excited about the possibility. If I became something else then maybe I would fit in better.
We moved to Missouri around 2012, and when we did, the feeling of isolation and loneliness only grew, and on top of that, the feelings of not knowing my identity intensified. It was hard for me to really connect to people. I felt better isolating myself from even my family and started to get into a place of depression and self-hatred. My parents tried to help me by putting me in martial arts and other activities to get me to be more social and increase my self-esteem. Which did help; I felt better and even started to make a couple of friends.
However, another obstacle popped up. After we moved, I discovered pornography. I remember one day, I was watching an anime series in the basement with one of my siblings, and it showed a girl naked and a guy doing sexually suggestive things to her. It was something I had never seen before, and seeing it sparked a desire in me to see more. I started to look up pornographic images, and that led me to pornographic videos. So, around the age of 13, I really started to struggle with pornography addiction. I felt so disgusted with myself, and due to my Catholic beliefs, the self-condemnation and self-hatred only grew. My parents really tried to help me overcome the pornography addiction and get out of it. Unfortunately, in my mind, I thought they were only disappointed in me. However, now I can see they truly just wanted to help me overcome the addiction and loved and valued me.
One of the results of the addiction to pornography was body dysmorphia. I felt that the way these girls looked in these videos was perfection. and in my view of myself, I didn’t look anything like that. Because of this belief, I felt I needed to lose weight and look super skinny because I saw that all the girls that were in these videos were tiny. I started skipping meals and sometimes would go days without eating. I felt gross if I ate anything and was so disappointed for giving in to the temptation of food. I would constantly overwork myself by exercising excessively. Going to swim team and martial arts and other spots, just trying to be as active as possible. My mind was constantly being bombarded with thoughts that I wasn’t good enough, wasn’t skinny enough, wasn’t pretty enough, and that everyone probably thought I was disgusting. I was so frustrated and overwhelmed by being unable to break the habit of pornography and with all that built-up hatred and frustration against myself. I started to self-harm. I felt that I needed relief from all this self-condemnation, and It was something that I had read in a book. I remember the woman in the book even said that after she hurt herself, she felt better afterward. So, in my confused and already twisted mind, I decided to give it a try. There was this voice inside of me telling me. “oh, you’ll feel better if you see blood; if you hurt yourself to a point where you bleed, you’ll feel better.” so I started to cut myself on my side with a razor. At first, it was little cuts, so no one would be able to see them. I felt so much regret afterward, but there was this thing inside of me that felt satisfied that I made myself bleed. Looking back now, I know it was demonic. At the time, I didn’t understand the feelings of wanting to self-harm and why I had those thoughts.
I went on hurting myself in other places, and eventually, I just settled on cutting my wrist. I would do it when I was frustrated, exhausted, or depressed. I would take a pen because the demonic voice inside of me would say, “Oh, the knife doesn’t hurt enough.” I would use a pen, and over and over again, I would dig the pen into my arm, creating a line until it bled. All of this didn’t make me feel better; it never comforted me or helped relieve my stress and anxiety. In fact, it made my anxiety and depression worse. Eventually, I decided that I needed help. So, around the age of 17, I decided to see a therapist. I was diagnosed with severe depression and anxiety. She tried to help me and talk me through my emotions and how to stop self-harming. but I couldn’t break the habits I had developed no matter what the therapist gave me to try. So slowly, I stopped going because I knew she couldn’t help me.
Throughout all of this, I was constantly praying and asking God why I felt like this, why I was so disgusted with myself, and why I felt so broken and unworthy of love. I didn’t want to keep living with all these thoughts of self-loathing. However, I didn’t know what to do because, in my mind, I was doing everything I needed to through Catholicism. I was going to church and then to confession. I was being a good Catholic and doing my best that I knew how through religion. But I couldn’t seem to get out of these habits of pornography, cutting, self-loathing, starving myself. It didn’t feel like it was ever going to stop. I kept having such hateful thoughts about myself even to the point of suicidal thoughts and wanting to just be done with everything, to just give up, because if I were dead, then I wouldn’t have all of these thoughts and these inner voices.
I was lost, not understanding why and what to do. Slowly God started revealing the demonic influences around me. It started at this retreat in Colorado, where they talked about demonic influence, demons, possession, and different items that can have curses or generational curses that can be attached to your family. they talked about speaking in tongues and getting healed by the finger of God. There was so much that I learned then that I just dismissed about the power of God and what He could do, and what he wanted to do in my life. Even after all the revelations and signs that I witnessed at this Colorado retreat I still went back to life almost exactly the same as before. Trying to change things, yet slowly, I forgot about the things God had shown me.
A couple of months later, some friends of mine and some of my siblings started a Catholic youth group. Our focus in this group was to help teens grow in their relationship with Jesus. We started praying together, going to church together, and even setting up a couple of events, sharing testimonies of struggles and how we felt God helping us overcome those struggles. During one of our meetings, we were praying over one another and asking the Father if He would baptize us in the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues. I struggled so much and felt like my mouth was being held shut. Lauren Battis, one of my good friends at the time laid her hands on me and started praying. I felt a release over my mouth, and I felt God begin to speak through me in tongues. At the time there was still so much doubt and concern if it was from God and if tongues were real, and there was part of me that felt like I was just faking and lying. Now I know that was the enemy trying to steal the gift away from me. Unfortunately, I didn’t understand relationship with Jesus to fully understand praying in tongues, and eventually, I stopped doing it out of fear that it was wrong.
In 2020 I met my future husband. We became really good friends, and I found myself putting a lot of trust in him. We moved in together and were living in sin and fornication. At this point, I had stopped going to the Catholic Church and really wasn’t practicing Catholicism anymore. I slowly stopped praying and asking God for help with anything. After a couple of months of dating, my future husband and I moved in with some of his family all the way in Louisiana where we eventually got pregnant with our daughter. Around this time my future husband really started seeking after God and reading his Bible and pursuing a relationship with God.
I remember one day, he came up to me and said he was pursuing God first before anything else and that he didn’t want to leave me behind. He said his relationship with God was more important than anything else and that he didn’t want to be the only one pursuing God.
And although that may sound harsh or weird to some, that was exactly something I needed to hear at the time. because I wasn’t pursuing God in any capacity. I really needed to seek after Him again, not from a point of religion, but in a true, meaningful relationship.
So, for the first time in a long time, I prayed and asked God to truly open my heart to the truth. Instead of just asking Him to fix things and using the channels I thought I was supposed to go through, I started asking God to reveal the truth to me by reading my Bible and having Bible studies with my future husband. At that point, he and I had viewed ourselves as married because we went before God and made a covenant before Him, but around this time of truly seeking God and reading our Bible, we asked Jesus to just reveal what He believes a valid marriage is and what we must do to truly be married in His eyes. We felt that the Lord led us to get married legally and in front of witnesses. We set an appointment and were married within a week. We also felt Him leading us to be baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, so we put a tarp in the bed of my husband’s truck, filled it with water, and prayed over one another, then baptized each other. We then decided to get rid of any idols or anything we felt offended God or distracting us from Him.
Around 2022 we started learning about deliverance. My husband started watching videos from Isaiah Saldivar, and we also began hearing about deliverance from his dad and stepmom, as well as the transformation and deliverance they had experienced themselves. It was amazing the things God was doing, although I didn’t believe that I had any demonic influence inside of me.
In January 2023, my husband’s grandma got very, very sick, and many in the family believed that she would not make it much longer. However, because of everything my husband and I had been learning about deliverance and hearing my father-in-law's testimonies about the miracle signs and wonders God could perform, we knew He could perform a miraculous healing for his grandma. When my father-in-law and his wife came down to Louisiana to pray for my husband’s grandma, I remember asking them if they could pray over me just to pray deliverance in case there was anything there. I did not even fully believe that I could have a demon, but in my mind, I was thinking, “It can’t hurt to just get a little prayer, Even if nothing happens.” not long after they started praying, I felt a rush come over me, and I started crying. The power of God covered me and I just felt a brokenness and hurt leave me. Afterwards, there was a peace that settled on me. Although I knew there was something more there. I could feel that inner voice that would tell me to self-harm. In my mind, saying it wasn’t real, nothing was going to change, that I was still going to struggle with everything. Later on that day, we were in the upper loft of my husband’s grandparent's house. I was sitting down so that my husband could do deliverance over me. When he started calling out and letting the Spirit of God lead him, I could feel the bones in my face start to shift. A heavy presence came over me and started to speak out of me. It was yelling, “No, I don’t want to leave.” My husband started to command that spirit of destruction off of me, off of my life, and to be broken in Jesus Name. And just like it says in the Book of Acts “For unclean spirits, crying with a loud voice, came out of many who were oppressed, and many who were paralyzed and lame were healed.”
Acts 8:7 NKJV
When that demonic spirit left, we prayed for the Holy Spirit to fill me, and every empty space that the demonic spirit had occupied. I felt the joy and the peace of the Lord come over me. Those years of dealing with depression and anxiety, those suicidal thoughts, and self-harm, even that horrible pornography. God had delivered me of all of it. Even though I was saved and a born-again believer, I still needed freedom from so much. Whether you are a believer or not, you can still be oppressed by demons. He set me free from all of my addiction. I didn’t struggle with it any longer! I never went back to my old lifestyle of sin.
After my deliverance, my husband, myself, and his aunt began doing deliverance on each other, declaring our testimony to those around us and proclaiming the changes that God had made in our lives and what He had done for us.
He is the same God yesterday, today, and tomorrow. He’s never changing. He still delivers those in bondage. He still heals the sick, and He continues to work miracles and signs and wonders today. Those who believe in Him will do what He did. “And He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will follow those who believe: In My name they will cast out demons; they will speak with new tongues, they will take up serpents; and if they drink anything deadly, it will by no means hurt them; they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.”
Mark 16:15-18 NKJV
God saved me! He took my brokenness and my uncertainty in who I was. He showed me my worth and my identity in Jesus! He set me free from depression, anxiety, self-harm, pornography and suicidal thoughts. And He can do the same for all those who struggle with anything! All Glory to Jesus!