Betrayal

From Betrayal to Healing

October 1, 2012

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10 minutes read

Life has challenges – what an understatement! There are challenges financially, in marriage, dating, parenting, and other relationships. You can have your hopes and dreams dashed and struggle with the resulting negative emotions. Life will have its ups and downs, but the way you deal with life situations will improve when you apply healthy thinking, life, and relationship skills. You can overcome any challenge that you face.

I am going to share the story of a couple, I will call them Bob and Betty, who felt overwhelmed with the struggle that they faced in their marriage. They needed to acquire the tools through Christian couples counseling, that were necessary to maneuver through the experience. The following tools are four simple steps used to help identify and turn your thinking and emotions toward solutions. Betty and Bob used this and other tools to resolve their challenges.

Reach Out – Reach out to God and others to gain knowledge, to apply it with wisdom, and receive support. When choosing someone to talk to, make sure they are part of the solution, not someone who will rile you up to anger, or confuse you further. Choose someone that is nonjudgmental, emotionally healthy, can validate you, and help you to see all your options to be proactive in a negative situation. If the situation has roots in addiction or even the subtle, or not so subtle forms of abuse, seek a trained counselor with experience in these issues to help.

Identify – Identify the truth in your situation; call it what it is and name the challenges. Don’t deny, minimize, or rationalize your pain or struggle. Kicking dirt over something doesn’t make it go away; it only buries it so it cannot be dealt with appropriately.

Be Proactive – Don’t think like a victim who is without choices. Maybe your choices are not ideal, but you still have choices to maneuver out of your situation. Choose the best of what choices are available to you. Don’t react; rather make proactive decisions to move forward. Victims react, but overcomers are proactive.

Control Your Thoughts and Emotions – Recognize, capture, and reword the thoughts in your mind, or that come out of your mouth that are negative and promote an expectation of failure or a repeat of bad experiences. Turn your thinking to similar stories where you or others overcame struggles and persevered to the other side of the experience. Don’t allow yourself to focus on the negative, but encourage yourself with testimonies and remember the challenges that you have already overcome in your life.

As a Life Renewal counselor there are many of life’s challenges that I have heard thousands of times. I have seen the pain and wounds of the people involved, but that is not where it has to end. The old adage “we can get bitter, or we can get better” is very true. I personally choose better, and most of my clients do as well. There are some circumstances that not only break the bonds of marriage and relationships, but cut you to the depth of your soul.

Many of you reading this have experienced the pain of infidelity, the betrayal of someone breaking their promise and cheating on you. I feel the pain of both the men and women that struggle with these issues. Addiction and the more subtle forms of verbal and emotional abuse are fundamentally at the core of many marriage problems. I define addiction as an unhealthy relationship with a substance or event. Sexual addiction issues like affairs, pornography, serial cheating, social media relationships, and much more are at epidemic levels.

Remember the steps above as you read – The Story of Betty and Bob.

Bob had many affairs and got caught a number of times. One of these times Betty finally reached her limit and was ready to end the marriage. She came to counseling as a last resort before she gave up hope. She needed to know how to deal with the situation and needed support. At the very least she wanted to be healed and be certain that she would never allow herself to be treated this way again, and if at all possible she wanted her marriage to be healed and her husband to become faithful. She knew she could no longer kick dirt over what she had known all along was the elephant in the living room of their marriage.

Bob and Betty committed to doing the work in counseling individually, before they began to work on marriage relationship skills. As a counselor I don’t believe you can build a house on a cracked foundation. You can’t put a band aid on an infected wound without first treating the infection. You must identify the problem to resolve it; the infection was sexual addiction. I knew that the marriage could be saved if both Betty and Bob were willing to apply themselves both individually and as a couple.

Bob did the work to transform the root system in his thinking that promoted his coping skills and unhealthy approach to sex. He identified the foundation of how he developed patterns of addiction and identified the triggers. Bob learned how addictive thinking and these patterns of behavior promoted an inability to bond in a relationship and hindered healthy relationship skills. He was broken, willing, and moved very quickly into solid recovery from the thinking, core beliefs, and behaviors he had been operating in.

Betty processed her grief and pain that she felt and I taught her the dynamics of addiction and how to respond. Betty needed to be empowered with a picture of what healthy looked like in a relationship so that she could identify if Bob ever went back to these patterns again. We worked on not enabling his behaviors and denying, minimizing, and rationalizing the red flags that she had always seen. Instead she learned how to choose boundaries and give appropriate consequences that would hold Bob accountable and responsible for his choices.

Bob and Betty each received tangible tools and skills to apply to their thinking, emotions, and relationship. They both became proactive in the situation versus reactive to all the heightened emotions. They each turned their own thinking and expectations from failures of the past, to a view that included a testimony of overcoming. They learned that the past does not have to define tomorrow.

When Betty and Bob developed healthy thinking, life, and relationship skills, the marriage was viewed differently by both of them. Children are as healthy as the family, the family is as healthy as the couple, and the couple is as healthy as each individual. Bob and Betty did the work and it has been 10 years since that time. They are prospering in their relationship, as parents, and in their business financially.

They restored the honesty, trust, and safety that promoted intimacy to be rekindled. They developed healthy coping and conflict resolution skills, and began to communicate in a positive way. They learned to discern when their own behavior in the relationship was healthy or falling short. Now they have a marriage with a foundation that they can build upon and keep strong. Bob has become a good and faithful husband and Betty is restored and happy. They are a model to those around them and share their story to help others have a testimony of success to hold on to through tribulation.