Cornellus & Candiece
For Candiece, the discovery was like "falling off a cliff and never hitting the ground." For Cornellus, it was the culmination of a lifelong void—an attempt to fill a childhood wound with anything that would be a drop of water to the drought he battled within. Like so many couples, they found themselves in the wreckage of an affair, drowning in secrecy, shame, and the exhausting effort of pretending everything was okay while growing further apart.
Their breakthrough began when they stopped trying to fix the unfixable on their own. By connecting with mentors, diving into therapy and entering the EMS-Online course, they found a community that understood their pain and offered a structured path to navigate it. Cornellus was able to "cut the strings" of past trauma, allowing him to finally become the leader and husband he always wanted to be. For Candiece, the weekly vulnerability and expert-led activities revealed a side of her husband she had never truly known. Today, they aren't just recovered—they are transformed. They have moved beyond the fragile fairytale and into a masterpiece built from broken pieces.
Struggle
Cornellus: All my life, I wanted to be married. I was raised by my grandparents and I saw two couples who had been together since they were teens. When I would look at them, I would think to myself, “That’s what I want; I want to be a husband.” Candiece and I both shared the same college advisor and I walked into my advisor’s office one day and I saw Candiece instead. We talked for about three and a half hours; it was a magical day and that’s where the journey began.
Candiece: The first year of marriage there was this feeling of living in a fairy tale because it felt like he was being a husband, but not being a real person. I began to realize that there were some things I felt like I didn't really know about him.
Cornellus: I didn’t know that there were things about me that weren’t whole enough. As a child, my parents dropped me off with my grandparents and didn't pick me back up. There was this huge void of not being wanted that I thought Candiece was supposed to fill. She was going to come in and make me happy, right? After the first year of seemingly bliss, I discovered that I had insufficiencies. I would never meet the standard of excellence that she or my children deserve. Not being sufficient led me to a place where I needed that “hit”—that dopamine boost—just to get by. Pornography led me down this very dark path where I ended up in an affair with someone I worked with. Eventually, it all came out.
Candiece: I had not prepared for what to do if something like that happened and I didn't have anybody to talk to about it. So I didn't do anything; I just cried all day. It was like falling off a cliff and never hitting the ground. By this time, I had my second child so I decided against divorce. But then I also thought I must have done something wrong that I needed to fix. I would go through days of attempting to figure out what I needed to do better, what I needed to change, if I needed to be better at sex, etc. I was doing a checklist, comparing myself to other women, comparing myself to this other woman. I was so angry that I wasn't enough.
Course of Action
Candiece: I was trying to push past my shame and anger. Some days it worked; most days it didn't. And he was trying to push past his shame and his sense of inadequacy. We kept pretending like everything was okay—nobody knew anything—but we were growing separate. We continued growing apart until the day we met mentors who ended up being the first people we told.
Cornellus: Shortly after, I met a guy who just became like a father to me and corrected me along the way while championing me in the process. It was him who led me to trauma therapy.
Candiece: It was our trauma therapist that told us about Affair Recovery and we signed up for EMS-Online. It was the best resource we had come across because it felt like it had everything we needed in one program. It was the first time that we had a community of people that knew everything. The week-to-week work of nailing things down, going deeper, etc—it was like that program knew every part of what needed to be healed, everything that needed to be said, and everything that needed to be uncovered. There was one particular week where the task was for my husband to do an activity that proved he “got it”—that he understood what I was feeling. And wow. Doing those activities every week brought out vulnerability and transparency in him that I had never seen. And within those weeks of that course, I started getting to know a person that I had been with for years but didn't truly know. It was at that moment that I thought, “Oh, I actually know you now, and I really do like you, and I want to stay married.”
Lessons Learned
Cornellus: As I began to really sit with the Lord and process my life, I was able to see things for what they were. I asked for repentance, forgave the people and the places where I had been hurt, addressed how I caused hurt to my wife and eventually forgave myself along the way. I feel like the trauma—the darkness behind it—was pulling strings in my life up until that point and our therapy just started cutting the strings off. I began to realize: “Oh, I can do this. I'm not under the control of my pain or a wound. I can actually be a good leader; I can be a great husband; I can be a great father.” All the things that were telling me otherwise were no longer pulling the strings. I started to look at myself and wonder why I was waiting for other people to do something that I'm supposed to be doing for myself. It's not my wife's job to make me happy. It wasn't my parents' job to make me happy. God has given me that purpose—to enjoy Him and live out a life of purpose and satisfaction in His pleasure. I'm willing to do whatever it takes to be in this covenant union with Candiece. We've walked together through the valley of the shadow of death, and we've made it out on the other side.
Encouragement
Candiece: Right now, I feel like we're living in that world where you can have broken pieces that make you see a person and know a person in a way that nobody else in the world knows them. I see Cornellus as somebody that fought to present to our marriage, to present to me, and to present to the Lord all the best. And as for all the bad, he didn't settle for letting it stick around; it had to be dealt with. I didn't know that our story could be better than I hoped it could be. I didn't know there was a world outside of the fairy tale I had in my mind.
Cornellus: I'm not thrilled with how we got here as it relates to my part in all of it. But I am thrilled that the Lord, who is the Master Redeemer, is able to take all these broken pieces that we brought to Him and create such a masterpiece that neither one of us thought could ever exist.
Comments
Beautiful redemptive story…
Beautiful redemptive story. I am praying to the Lord that mine and my wife's can be rhe same.
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