Survivors Blog: 

Dana

No one likes an ambush, least of all me. At the beginning of the day I like to know what is going to happen so I can plan accordingly. Three years ago I walked into the mother of all ambushes. Not only did I discover my husband’s betrayals, but I was also immediately assaulted with lies. They were almost a constant daily and nightly attack. It was like I was constantly bombarded with thoughts that I was not enough. I began to feel like I never truly was loved or celebrated, and I was never the true love of my husband’s life. I felt I had been dumb for falling for the trick that my husband had played on me. Having already been cut deep to my very core, these lies fell straight into my heart like salt in a fresh wound. To say they hurt would be a gross understatement. They were devastating. I remember wondering if I would ever be the happy girl I once was. Thankfully, I was not left to fight this battle alone. Very kind people who had walked this path before me picked me up out of the pit of despair that I had fallen into and spoke truth to me. “You did not cause this. Your husband loves you. He didn’t act loving, but he does love you. You had no way of knowing this was going on. It is not your fault you didn’t know about this before now.” Many people in my situation have had to confront these horrific and gut wrenching lies too. Part of my greatest relief was realizing I was in fact not alone in my hurt and pain. Hearing the truth from friends was only the first step in the battle over my mind and heart. I had to learn to discern lies from truth. I learned that while the voice of Truth may tell me things that are hard to hear at times, He never says them in a way that brings shame. Shame has become a big indicator to me that I am listening to lies. (Remember though, shame and guilt are not synonymous.) Very often I had so much going through my mind at one time that it was difficult for me to really know what exactly I was hearing, so I began the practice of purposefully taking time to listen to my heart so that I could discover what I was hearing and feeling. One of the biggest weapons I found was writing specific words of Truth on note cards that combated the lies which were being thrown at me. Generally the lies that I heard were repeated over and over for a period of time. When I got to where I was able to recognize the lie as a lie, then throw Truth back at it, that lie would stop. Another lie would soon replace it, so I would then find another word of truth to combat it and carry it around with me on a new card. No matter where I went those cards were in my pocket. I never left home without them. I am convinced that those words alone are what saved my sanity and what gave me the victory in my ‘battlefield of the mind.’

During the last several years I have heard quite a bit about the ‘battlefield of the mind.’ Generally the speaker or writer is talking about the battle to keep our minds pure and clean. Being married to a man who lives in the trenches of this battle, I can appreciate the importance as well as the difficulties involved. The world we live in is fighting against us from every side. Whether we are standing in line at the grocery store, watching TV, or on the computer, both our spouses and ourselves are surrounded by temptation. So at least in some small way, I get it. It is a daily battle. But it occurs to me that the battle for purity is not the only one being fought. Those of us who have been betrayed by our spouse have a battle to fight as well. The enemy does not fight fair. He is quick to pounce on us the second we are wounded because he knows that this is when we are most vulnerable. As we head into recovery, we hear lies such as, “He never really loved you,” or “If you had only done (fill in the blank) this never would have happened.” The constant message of never measuring up surrounds us and only gets louder as we struggle to find hope. When I am watching TV and a Victoria Secret commercial comes on, I am told that is how real women look and act. When I am at work I may notice some coworkers flirting it up, and I am told this is how fun women behave. Along with these lies comes the implication that fun, sexy women are never hurt by their spouses and certainly never cheated on. If we allow ourselves to listen to these lies they will begin to sound like truth, and our battle will be lost. The only way to win in this battle is to learn to discern the truth from the lies, and then to fill our minds with truth. In part two, I will share some of the ways I learned to do this.

I believe I was in middle school when I first began noticing “SAFE PLACE” signs around town. I remember asking Mom what they were about. She explained that they were posted on buildings where a person could go if they were in trouble and in need of a safe place to find help. About fifteen years later, after I discovered my husband Wayne’s betrayals, I found myself in need of a safe place. Not a physical one with a black and yellow sign out front, but an emotional one where I could be real without fear of judgment or unsolicited advice. The first few months after discovery, I felt anything but safe with Wayne. Looking back, it is very obvious to me what a blessing it was to be surrounded by about a half a dozen women who poured love on me during that time of such brokenness. One thing that made them such a sweet and invaluable part of my healing was that they loved both Wayne and me. When they prayed over me, they would pray for his healing and restoration as well. It was because they believed in both of us that I felt safe enough to share my heart with them. Whether I was in a moment filled with hope, or in one brimming over with despair, I could go to them and find safety. There were days when I shared the overflow of hope that I felt being poured over me, and days when I was free to just sit with them and cry over the overwhelming pain and sadness that I felt. And on the days when I felt both of those emotions and about fifteen variations in-between them, they just rolled through the ups and downs with me. It truly was quite the rollercoaster of a time for me. I can’t imagine how I would have gotten through it without their love, support, and prayers. I am so grateful for each one of them, and for the safe place that they provided for me during a time that I so desperately needed it.

“Broken” almost seems too small a word to use when describing how I felt when I discovered my husband’s infidelities. Like being in a five-car pile-up on a major highway and later telling a friend that my severely wounded body was simply bruised. It felt like I had been hit by an emotional Mac-truck and was internally hemorrhaging. And understandably so. With the click of a mouse and the stroke of a few keys I had come face to face with a reality that even my worst nightmares never managed to conjure up. In the same way that a person’s body can go into shock when they are severely wounded, sparing them from an intense amount of pain, I too went into emotional shock. Parts of what I saw on that screen my mind rejected as not possible. The room literally went black and began to spin around me. I had to hang onto the desk and the walls so I could make it across the room to close the door, shutting it against anyone who might wander in and catch me in my shame. You see, it wasn’t “just” a betrayal as one who has never experienced such a wound might think. It was the sudden death of my childhood dream to be my husband’s one-and-only. The dream of being looked at by him the way I had watched my Dad look at my Mom when I was a little girl. The dream of being wanted and desired and pursued. The enemy was quick to step in during my moments of greatest pain with lies such as, “You are not desirable. You are not loved. It has all been a big charade. Your heart was never really pursued.” And because those lies felt true to my wounded heart I believed them. Had I been left to my own devices this could have easily been the end of my story. The emotional wounds I received from my husband’s actions, combined with the lies my heart heard so soon after discovery could have bled my poor little heart dry till it became a bitter and hard shadow of the life it once held. But thankfully, that is not the end of my story. Unseen forces battled hard against the enemy of my heart. Many people stepped into our lives and provided the emotional and spiritual life support our hemorrhaging hearts so desperately needed. A dear friend gave me the phone number for Rick Reynolds and the Affair Recovery team. My husband and I eventually did one of the EMS weekend intensives that they provide. It was there that we found hope and began the healing process. The process was not an easy one. In a lot of ways it was the hardest thing I have ever done. But it has also been the most rewarding. Well worth every single challenge and every single tear.

It’s funny the things one thinks about when in a moment of intense pain or personal crisis. A friend once told me about the events surrounding her father’s death. He had lived with her family for several years and was an important part of their daily lives. Her young daughter had a special relationship with him and often ran into his room early in the morning so he would be awake in time to take her to school. One morning when she ran into his room she was unable to wake him. So it was through the hysterical screams and sobs of her daughter that she learned of her father’s passing. While attempting to calm her daughter she looked out the window and saw a friend passing by on her morning walk. I remember her telling me, “I don’t know what came over me. In that moment of intense loss all I could think of was that I had borrowed a can of beans from her and that I needed to give her another can in return.” So she grabbed the can and chased her friend down the street with it. I cannot help but think about this story as I remember the events surrounding the discovery of my husband’s infidelities. In a lot of ways the early stages of my grief following discovery felt like I was mourning a death. But more about that in part two. Today I want to focus on my initial reaction. As I sat in my office at work staring at the computer screen full of evidence of my husband’s betrayals, my mind went back to the night he had graduated from college. All of the guests from his graduation party had left except for me. We had decided to go for a swim, and as I was walking across a wet spot next to the pool he protectively guided me past it, explaining as he did so that he did not want me to fall. He then looked deep into my eyes and promised “I will never let you fall.” His words to me that night held great significance for me through our dating and married years, and became ones which I had reminded him of many times. I will never know why, out of all the broken promises that I was staring at on that computer screen, that was the one that my mind grabbed onto like a steel trap. Looking back, I have to wonder why the bigger promises like “keeping only to me” or “till death do us part” weren’t playing through my head that night. Perhaps it was due to the emotional connection I had made with that promise. Or maybe the broken wedding vow promises were too big for my heart to let them sink in. Whatever the reason, as I mentally heard him say “I will never let you fall,” his words suddenly felt like a cruel lie. “No.” I said aloud to an empty room, “You didn’t let me fall. You pushed me over the edge.” That broken promise became the ‘bean can’ that I carried around with me for a while. The question of why he had let me fall is one that I continued to ask until I was satisfied that I understood it as well as I could. Not that I liked the answers. In fact, most of them were incredibly hard to hear. But, in the end, understanding how we had gotten to that point did help to bring healing. Which is what this blog will be about. How two very broken people in a very broken relationship can come back together and form a healthy and whole life together.

I recently went to a new salon to get my hair highlighted and cut. What I had envisioned as a cute, strawberry blonde highlight and cut turned out looking like blood streaks. Another trip back to the stylist proved to be even more disastrous. I walked out after the second try with brown, blonde, red, and pink stripes, all of which were so over-processed that the outer shaft of my hair was sloughing off in my hand as I drove away. By the time I got home I looked like a mangy calico cat. Needless to say there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth at my house that night. The first thing I did when I got home was get on the phone with several friends for some much needed sympathy. A few days after my hair disaster, I was scheduled to work. I had about 12 nurses ask me at different times throughout the day what had happened to my hair. At the beginning of the day I still felt the sting of having my hair ruined. But by the end of my shift I discovered that I had grown a little bored of the story, and that I no longer felt upset over it. I still didn’t like the way it looked, but I no longer felt the need to cry over it. Certainly a bad haircut in no way compares to the amount of pain that I felt when I discovered my husband’s betrayals. But going through this reminded me of the grieving process that I went through during that time on at least one level. When I first discovered my husband had been living a secret life, I talked about it - a lot. To pretty much anyone who would listen. It was almost like a weird compulsion. Not because I wanted to bad-mouth him, but because I was hurting so deeply that it was all I thought about. It was all-consuming in my thoughts, so it naturally poured out whenever I opened my mouth. But as time went by, I discovered that the story hurt a little bit less when I told it, until finally the day came when I no longer felt the need to spill my guts every time someone asked “How are you today?” After being hurt so deeply and thinking that I would never feel right again, I remember feeling hope mixed with surprise and relief when I first discovered the pain was subsiding. It took a while to get there, but it was well worth the work.

Several years ago my family went to the Gulf of Mexico for a weekend at the beach. As soon as we arrived we began to hear rumors of a hurricane heading in our direction. It was still a few days away, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but when we got in the water we could feel the storm brewing. What was normally a relatively laid back ocean with an occasional lazy wave here and there had turned into an angry foam. Its waves stood up twice as high as normal before they crashed back down into the water below. Then without hesitation they would raise right back up again in preparation for their next thunderous break. As a general rule, I am a pretty laid back, easy going kind of girl. You may get an occasional wave out of me, but even then they tend to be pretty harmless. Almost three years ago that was not the case. As I began sensing the storm that was building up momentum and heading toward me (the discovery of my husband’s infidelity), I became more and more upset. Had anyone been watching me, they would have seen a “bright, sun-shiny day” simply because that was the only way I knew how to act. I had lived a relatively happy and easy life up until that point, so all these stormy negative emotions felt foreign and somehow wrong. So I tried to ignore them, hoping they would go away. This may seem strange to you. It certainly seems strange to me now when I look back on it. The only way I can explain my odd reaction to negative emotion is that I had long believed the lie that positive emotion is “good” and negative emotion is “bad.” Being the ‘good’ girl that I am I had developed an unnatural ability to stuff down negative emotion. This proved to be a debilitating habit for me when the storm finally hit. It turns out stuffing down negative emotion doesn’t do anything but create a bigger problem later. While drowning in the pain of the secrets I had just uncovered, all the unhealed wounds that had been stuffed down and ignored for so long popped back up to the surface. What I had needed for the coming storm was a heart fully healed and fully alive. If I could go back in time I would tell myself to feel. There are times when it is perfectly necessary and appropriate to feel negative emotion. Thankfully, I went to a very good counselor (Rick Reynolds at Affair Recovery) who was able to help me navigate my way through the choppy waves that were stirred up by the fresh pain of betrayal. While it would have been easier to grieve and heal the wounds as soon as they happened, all was not lost. We tackled each wave of painful memories as they came and eventually found healing for all of them. Perhaps that is part of the beauty that can be seen after a big storm. We have a lot of hard work cleaning up the mess, but in the end we are made clean and new. With hearts fully restored and fully alive.