9/444 Healing from Infidelity: Broken
2011.09.14
There are two important categories to process in dealing with affairs. One is the affair itself. The other is the overall story of the marriage and what the affair was communicating to the spouse about that story.
For us there were lots of desert times in our marriage from the beginning. My first lover was golf. I gambled on football and basketball when I was in college and in the early years of our marriage. I drank too much too often later realizing I was indeed an alcoholic. I avoided tension and conflict. I cheated on Ann before we were married and was emotionally attached (pseudo lover) to another woman at the same time she had her affair.
For Ann she realized in hindsight that she was emotionally unavailable to me since she didn't even know what she was feeling herself most of the time. She stayed super busy to stay out in front of her heart. She was a controller to avoid being vulnerable. She had a sexual lover.
By far our driest desert occured after the revelation of the affair.
It was chaos. The emotions whipped up and down like the line of an expert fly fisherman. We both experienced depression. I felt like I was caught in a tug of war between God and Satan. I wanted to turn my back totally on God (because I felt like he betrayed me too) and I also knew he was the best thing going for me. We loved one another, hated one another. We laughed and cried. Deep sorrow pounded on us like crunching tackles from Brian Erlacher and Ray Lewis. We were being broken in the worst and best sense of all that means.
We needed restoration and so much more.