Fully Known, Fully Loved: How Ripping the Doors Off My Secrets Saved Me

I am a Christian. It wasn’t until my husband discovered my infidelity that I started to truly understand what that means.

“Christian” was a persona I would take on Sunday mornings and around certain people then shove back in the "Christian" closet in my soul the rest of the time. At one time, depending on who you were and what I thought you expected of me, you would have thought I was the most amazing Christian woman. Generous, kind, pious, thoughtful. I had morals of gold. I was still human, but willing to admit my failures and bring them to God. The kicker is, around you, I would have thought the same thing. When living out of my “Christian” closet, that is who I was.

When my husband discovered that I had been unfaithful, the ticking time bomb in one of my closets, marked “Do Not Enter”, went off and blew debris of the hidden me all over my inner hallway.

As I panicked and tried to sweep the rubble into a dark corner, I noticed the cracks and missing doors of my other closets. I didn’t know where things belonged, or where they came from. I didn’t know which closet was me. Who was I?

That question was answered for me in a song.

I was—and always will be—a Child of God.

I knew I had to empty out my closets. I fought God hard on this one, but He won. Two months after my husband's discovery, I ripped the door off more “Do Not Enter” closets. As I unpacked them, I started to share bits and pieces of their contents with him. I was afraid to share it all. What would happen then? With every new box, he realized more and more that I wasn’t the only one who didn’t know who I was.

He had no idea who he had married.

After some time, and prayer, he decided that he would stay to see who that person might be. So we began a long journey of figuring that out.

The more closets I opened and pulled into the hallway, the better, and more confused, I felt. I was ashamed of all the stage make-up, costumes, and masks I was surrounded by. What was I supposed to do with all of it? What would be left when all the closets were empty and demolished?

I needed help. I prayed, I went to counseling, then my husband found a video on YouTube. We watched video after video, talking, unpacking, devouring videos and the glimmer of hope we felt contained within them. We signed up for classes. I had one, he had one, and we had one together. I finally had an answer. Those groups were like a troop of the most amazing angels, coming in and helping me clean and sort through the rubble. The content helped me decide what got tossed and what could stay. All the work and the support also helped me find one last closet. The groups couldn’t help me with this one though. The content couldn’t either. What they were able to do was point me to a therapist who could.

We found infidelity specific therapists. I saw someone, my husband saw someone, and we saw someone together. We didn’t have the money for any of it, but God provided in a way I had never given Him the chance to before. This last closet was opened slowly, lock by lock, until, finally, we were able to open the door and find…me. Me at 6 holding a box with my eyes closed and back turned hoping no one saw me. Me at 8 holding tight to a box that I was trying so hard to pretend was supposed to be there. Me at 13 hiding in a corner as far away from my box as I could get, crying and wishing I was anyone else. Me at 16 standing in front of a mirror holding too many boxes with tears streaming down my face. All the pieces of me that I had locked in that room.

This was why I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t want to know. I had spent my whole life adding parts of myself to that closet and adding locks to the door. After all my groups, all my work, all my lessons, I knew it was time to let them out. I had to. Not only did my husband need it, and my relationship need it, but I needed it. It took me a week. I pulled each girl out, one by one, and together, in that hallway, with God holding us, we unpacked the boxes together and I wrote down what was inside. After all of the girls were out and all their boxes lying empty, we turned toward what had been in the other closets and took inventory of all that was there as well. Then came the hardest part.

On my journey, I had been taught, “you can’t be fully loved, unless you are fully known”. God had helped me know myself, and start to love myself as He loves me. Now it was my husband's turn. I gave him the pages of inventory from my closets. Then, I sat quietly, arm-in-arm, with every piece of me that I had forced into hiding, as we let the most important person in our life see us for the first time.

We hugged as he cried. We stood together in peace in the face of his understandable anger.

Then, we took a polygraph so he would be able to believe us when we told him there was no more.

We all sat silently in the parking lot after passing—me and every one of those girls I’d hidden away—and waited for his reaction. This was it. He leaned in, hugged me, and asked me where we were going for our date day. As we drove to our destination, each one of me smiled and entered my heart all together in the light of acceptance. I finally knew who I was, and so did he, and he embraced me.

I am a Child of God. Crafted lovingly by the Creator of the Universe and, like all priceless works of art, I am flawed; but as any art collector will tell you, the flaws, the unique aspects, the bumps and imperfections, are exactly what makes it valuable and wanted.