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Mikayla Matthews never grew up talking about her trauma. But that’s all changing now.
The 24-year-old, a star of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” discloses she was sexually abused as a child on Season 2 of the breakout reality series (streaming May 15 on Hulu). She peels back the layers of her abuse over the course of several devastating scenes in the season’s third episode: The abuse occurred over four or five years; she told her mother about the abuse in 2015 and wasn’t believed; this in turn caused her to be hesitant of telling anyone anything or expressing any emotion – a cycle she wants to stop.
“I don’t want my kids to grow up with the same trauma that I was shown growing up,” she says over a recent phone call. “I want them to have the skills to express their emotions and to be emotionally mature.”
‘It’s been absolute hell’
“Mormon Wives” features a group of Utah influencers known as “#MomTok,” whose friendship and relationship ups and downs made for binge-watching gold when it premiered in 2024. Part of what made it work? The jumps from light to heavy topics – something for everyone, and a reflection of reality.
“We might be having a serious conversation, and we just can’t help but be silly, because it’s what helps us feel comfortable,” Matthews says. “We really trauma bond on the show.”
This season, viewers watch Matthews open up about her trauma in a conversation with her sisters as well as a therapist. They’re powerful scenes that showcase just how vulnerable she’s willing to be. Her on-camera chat with her sisters was the first time they’d ever discussed the abuse.
She’s publicly talked about her health before, but hasn’t connected the dots much until now. Matthews – a mother of three children, and expecting a fourth with husband Jace Terry – was a bit of a background player in Season 1 while dealing with a chronic, mysterious skin issues.
“It’s been absolute hell,” she says. “It’s been like a roller coaster and a wild goose chase.” A litany of tests later – blood tests, stool tests, gut tests, you name it – failed to produce any answers to her illness.
“I got to a point where I just wanted to give up, because I was going to so many dermatologists, she adds. “I was going to my dermatologist office just crying, just begging them to give me any answers to help me, and I wasn’t getting that. So it was really frustrating.”
Once she started addressing her mental health and dealing with her past trauma, though, she’s experienced the most progress – “taking it into my own hands and trusting my own intuitions and in my body.” Research has shown a connection between stress and skin disease.
She credits “Mormon Wives” with encouraging her to share her feelings. Doing so has both inflamed and quelled her skin problems.
“When I am overly stressed, or when I go to therapy, and I’m talking about things that are really traumatic and hard, I will flare,” she says, noticing her “skin gets worse when I’m talking about these things, and then it’ll get better after, almost like a release.”
‘I just think about my kids’
Healing from her trauma has allowed her to process her emotions more effectively and not just shut down. While she can talk to her husband, siblings and the rest of #MomTok about it, “I think it’s OK for me to be that safe place for myself and feel comfortable just feeling those emotions.”
The hardest part for her occurs during therapy, when she tries digging into her childhood self while she was being abused, now that she has children of her own. “I just think about my kids and what if it was happening to them,” she says.
This has led to better communication with her husband, though. He steps in when she’s feeling overstimulated or she’s having trouble regulating her emotions in front of their kids.
“Just having the conversations before and after and during, just while everything’s happening, has been the most helpful thing for us,” she says. “It’s hard. It’s hard to look at yourself and realize you’re doing things that are not great and things you don’t want to do, and it’s hard to take a look in the mirror and fix them. But I think just giving each other grace and having those conversations as it’s happening has been the most important, helpful thing.”
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