I view my life as just existing rather than living.
At one point, it was so bad that I didn't get out of bed.
My past trauma is holding me captive,
and preventing me from being able
to live the life that I deserve.
As you can see, it's pretty cluttered.
I admit that my house is messy and overrun with clutter.
I tried to get it fixed.
When I moved in three years ago, the house was disgusting.
I was completely caught off guard,
because we didn't have anywhere else to go.
It just got overwhelming, and we kinda just gave up on it.
'Cause there's boxes and stuff everywhere, I order online.
If I can order it online, I'm gonna order it online.
And I was so convinced I was gonna be
moving out of my house, I kept the boxes, so my living room
and where you're supposed to have a dining room,
my mother is freaking out because there's boxes everywhere.
My house does not have electricity.
There's no electrical to it,
so we have to run extension cords, and power strip.
And the ceiling doesn't work.
The electrician told me that the house is a death trap,
so I felt very trapped.
My bedroom walls have outlets that work,
but we super overload them
because I have things I have to plug into my room,
because most of the house doesn't have power,
and then we run extension cords out of my bedroom,
down the hallway, into my son's room
so that he can have power.
You see we have holes in our ceiling
where electrical wires are exposed.
We have an almost working bathroom,
but there's no hot water.
It's misery.
It makes me feel so bad about my house and my situation.
I absolutely crave the chance
to really give my son a better life.
Crystal.
Yes?
You've watched "Dr. Phil" before, right?
Yes.
And there's a line in the open that plays every day
that says, today's gonna be a changing day in your life.
Yes.
Have you caught that, it's in there?
Today's gonna be a changing day in your life.
Okay.
It's gonna be a changing day in your son's life.
(audience applauding)
Okay?
Now, you're probably expecting that
with looking at this house,
and everything that's been shown,
that this is gonna go pretty bad for you.
Yes.
That would be your thought.
Yes. (crying)
I mean, anybody would think that anybody
would look at a mother going in this kind of a situation,
and think you're gonna get pretty bad marks
as a mother. Thank you, yes.
Right?
Yes, sir. (crying)
I'm kind of of the opinion that that house
looks on the outside exactly the way you feel on the inside.
(Crystal crying)
I think if we could unscrew the top of your head
and look down inside, that it looks exactly like that.
(crying) I've been saying it for years,
decades, that I've been trying.
Now, how do I know that?
'Cause your Dr. Phil.
Well, there is that.
(Frank laughing)
But you know, nobody would consciously choose this.
No.
Nobody would consciously choose to live that way.
Nobody would say, this is how I wanna live,
this is how I want my child to live.
I mean, nobody would do that on purpose, right?
So that means something is going on.
There's some intervening variable that's going on here.
And by the way, I don't think it's isolated.
I think I know what's going on, and I think it's you,
and I think it's you, and I think it's you,
and I think people live something long enough
that it becomes kind of their new normal.
You've been this disheveled for a long time.
When did it start?
I would say it probably started initially
when I was eight years old,
and I was molested by a group of boys,
and an adult man that I should have been able to trust.