iterating through object

You use a for..in loop for this. Be sure to check if the object owns the properties or all inherited properties are shown as well. An example is like this:

var obj = {a: 1, b: 2};
for (var key in obj) {
  if (obj.hasOwnProperty(key)) {
    var val = obj[key];
    console.log(val);
  }
}

Or if you need recursion to walk through all the properties:

var obj = {a: 1, b: 2, c: {a: 1, b: 2}};
function walk(obj) {
  for (var key in obj) {
    if (obj.hasOwnProperty(key)) {
      var val = obj[key];
      console.log(val);
      walk(val);
    }
  }
}
walk(obj);

My problem was actually a problem of bad planning with the JSON object rather than an actual logic issue. What I ended up doing was organize the object as follows, per a suggestion from user2736012.

{
"dialog":
{
    "trunks":[
    {
        "trunk_id" : "1",
        "message": "This is just a JSON Test"
    },
    {
        "trunk_id" : "2",
        "message": "This is a test of a bit longer text. Hopefully this will at the very least create 3 lines and trigger us to go on to another box. So we can test multi-box functionality, too."
    }
    ]
}
}

At that point, I was able to do a fairly simple for loop based on the total number of objects.

var totalMessages = Object.keys(messages.dialog.trunks).length;

    for ( var i = 0; i < totalMessages; i++)
    {
        console.log("ID: " + messages.dialog.trunks[i].trunk_id + " Message " + messages.dialog.trunks[i].message);
    }

My method for getting totalMessages is not supported in all browsers, though. For my project, it actually doesn't matter, but beware of that if you choose to use something similar to this.

Here is my recursive approach:

function visit(object) {
    if (isIterable(object)) {
        forEachIn(object, function (accessor, child) {
            visit(child);
        });
    }
    else {
        var value = object;
        console.log(value);
    }
}

function forEachIn(iterable, functionRef) {
    for (var accessor in iterable) {
        functionRef(accessor, iterable[accessor]);
    }
}

function isIterable(element) {
    return isArray(element) || isObject(element);
}

function isArray(element) {
    return element.constructor == Array;
}

function isObject(element) {
    return element.constructor == Object;
}