Use existing terms when creating content for testing

I have several vocabularies where the terms carry meaning elsewhere in the system. When I create a scenario where a user has a term in a field, this term seems to be created instead of reusing the existing term. Is there a way to specify to use the existing term and not create a new one?

EDIT: correction, terms aren't created, but terms show up as objects in my code and not as arrays as when I run my code manually in the browser. Weird.