Java with Juli: #539 The Impact Of Shame And How To Overcome It
Full Transcript
How do I start to heal after my spouse’s affair?
Boy, if you’re asking that question, you are in deep pain and you might feel very isolated in that pain ’cause there’s maybe not a lot of people you can share with. But let me just say that a betrayal
and affair is a breach in the covenant of your marriage. God takes it seriously and so do you. It’s not something that you can just quickly forgive and say, Hey, let’s go back to the way things were. It requires you to work through just a breach of intimacy. You can’t rebuild until you address the fact that something significant has been broken or fractured. And so I’d really encourage you to find a counselor who understands infidelity, that understands rebuilding trust. Not every pastoral counselor knows how to do that. Sometimes they may try to move you too quickly, um, through the stages of forgiveness and rebuilding intimacy. You need support. And God doesn’t just care about your marriage. He cares about your heart. He cares about you growing through this and healing through this, and being able to express your sadness and your anger and your doubts. And you need a trusted counselor who can help you assess whether or not your relationship is able to and ready to start building intimacy again. Boy, there are a lot of couples who rebuild after an affair, but it’s not an easy thing. As a matter of fact, experts in this field would say that it takes between two and five years to fully recover from it betrayal. And the couples that truly do that work of recovery would say that their intimacy, their oneness, their trust, is actually stronger than it was before the betrayal happened because they’ve had to address deep issues that maybe were happening underneath the surface, but they didn’t know how to talk about. And so, don’t rush this process. Get the support you need, get the wisdom you need. And above all, just ask God for his comfort and his wisdom through this very difficult time.
