Survivors Blog: 

Jeremy

After the discovery of my wife’s infidelity, I felt shackled by the negative emotion that I carried. And the more I thought about it, the more intense it seemed to get. I’m not naturally one to explode emotionally, but I did one day when my failed attempts to forgive were too much to bear. Let me tell you how a puppy, a therapist, and a really good book helped me find my way to the freedom and peace forgiveness can bring. A Puppy, A Therapist & A Really Good Book A few months into our recovery, we made the horrible decision to get a puppy. Adding a helpless creature who needed us for everything was not a wise choice, but we did it because we thought it would be fun to have something we could do shoulder-to-shoulder in the midst of all the tension. One day, as I was really struggling with forgiveness, we hit a particularly painful bump in our recovery work…

My life changed forever almost eight years ago when I decided to jump out of a perfectly good airplane. Now, before you think I'm about to tell you some crazy cool skydiving story, it's not about that. It's about what happened when I arrived back home. It was D-Day and I didn't know it. My wife disclosed to me that she had been unfaithful. I was sitting on our white IKEA couch when my world flipped upside down. We had dated for six years and were just a couple of years into our marriage. I believed we were deeply enjoying life together. I didn't even have a category for the words my wife spoke that day. What made it worse was that the betrayal was with a friend of mine, adding layers of hurt and complexity to the already painful situation. As I began to process, instances from the past month that seemed slightly abnormal started to…