Pray for no rain


January 2017. I had spent the greater part of a month consumed by fears that I was being betrayed once again, and then catching myself talking myself off the ledge. Was this paranoia justified? Was it a sign of being unhealed? Was it my intuition, and I was right?

As I said in my last post, I had to know. It seemed the only way to get a definitive answer, and so I purchased a digital voice-activated voice recorder, and started making plans for how I would plant it, sight unseen, to collect the evidence I needed. Gretchen had placed hers under the seat. What was the underside of the seat like? I didn’t know. Was it fabric like the seats? Was it metal, like the frame? Was it something else entirely? I prepared as best I could, and decided on double sided velcro in the event its the former, and double sided tape in the event of the latter. I brought it home, read the manual (yup, I am one of those people), and set about making a decision to put the device in place the next morning.

Morning came quickly, and my stomach was all aflutter in nervous butterflies. I was worried about what I might learn, yes, but these butterflies were different. These were more about the nervousness I felt in violating my husband’s privacy, and I for a split second I identified with spouses who go behind their spouse’s backs, and I realized I could never be a cheater. How do they live in this place perpetually? How do they walk into a room, smile at their spouse, all the while knowing they have a dirty secret? It was enough to stop my appetite, and I felt unwell. I honestly don’t know how they do it. It takes a certain constitution, maybe, and I don’t have it.

The car had been parked outside for weeks in the middle of winter. It was dry and cold outside, well below freezing. As soon as I heard the shower in the master bathroom turn on, I knew my timer had been set. He didn’t take long showers, but I knew I had maybe 7-10 minutes max. I darted out the door, not bothering even to wear a coat. I grabbed the keys, taking note of their position so that I could return them, just so, and unlocked the doors. Once inside. I set about feeling the underside of the seat. Metal. OK, that meant double sided tape was the best option. My fingers fumbled as I quickly tried to tear open the package, and apply the tape to the long flat back side of the recorder. I had practiced the night before how to turn it on, how to set up a file, and how to begin a recording within that file. With the battery in place, I pressed the power button firmly with numbing fingers, and the red light illuminated. Because I had chosen a voice-activated model. I knew that it would not begin recording until a voice was heard. After all, this would be sitting in his car for a full day before capturing the sounds of his evening commute, and I didn’t want to drain the battery, nor did I want to have to fast forward through empty air being recorded in a parked vehicle for hours unattended. I pressed the double sided tape firmly against a flat part of the seat’s underside. It wouldn’t stick. I hadn’t factored in the cold, and that tape doesn’t adhere well to cold metal. I needed another plan. I quickly searched the car for other options. In the visor? No, one sunny drive into the sunset would leave it crashing down into his lap. In the glove compartment? No, I wouldn’t hear much with it trapped inside a box on the passenger side. Backseat under the floor mats? A quick test and listen revealed it was too muffled and the actual movement of the device under the mat may cause unwanted noise as it rubbed against the microphone. I’m running out of time. Is he out of the shower? Has he called my name and I haven’t answered? Might he be looking for me? Is he standing in the window watching? Will I get caught red-handed? My heartbeat pounded in my ears, and knocked in my chest. With nowhere left to place the recorder, my eyes spotted a black umbrella lying plainly in the passenger seat. How long had it been there? It was January after all, the rainy season had ended months ago. I thought maybe its like those times you leave something somewhere long enough, and it soon becomes a part of the landscape, and the oddity of it being in such a strange location becomes commonplace, unquestioned, even normal. Maybe the umbrella had been there for months, maybe it would remain there for months more. I didn’t have time to think, and so I quickly tore the velcro closure tab that held it closed, and carefully slid the voice recorder up high under the fabric, and nestled it into the metallic bones of the umbrella. I then pulled the fabric tight to keep it hugged in position, closed the velcro tab, and placed the umbrella back on the seat. Desperate to get back inside and resume the normalcy of a typical school-day morning, I glanced quickly to make sure the red light wasn’t visible through the umbrella’s fabric, and exited the car, locking it from the remote as I ran back inside, heart racing, mouth dry as a bone, replacing the keys as I had found them.

Once inside, I resumed my activities of packing lunches into backpacks, feeding children and dogs, signing permission slips, and loading up the car for the morning drive to school. “Time to go guys!” I yelled up the stairs. I left the driveway with the kids safely belted into their seats, and was reminded of the voice recorder also tightly nestled into its own seat. I watched in the rearview mirror as his car in the driveway grew smaller and smaller as we drove away. And I prayed for no rain.

Sneaking Suspicions


One of the biggest gifts that came from my husband’s first affair was my friendship with three women. Had it not been for the recovery program I attended in December of 2012, and later started coaching for in 2013, I never would have met these three soul sisters. The closest friendships, I find, are both born and sustained by vulnerability. Sharing a traumatic experience, living through a nightmare together, going through war together – it bonds you.

Anyone who has been through the throes of infidelity and betrayal has felt like no one else around you understands the pain you’re in. They don’t understand how earth shattering it is to learn that the person you have loved and devoted yourself to has lied, has deceived you, has created a side-existence without you, and has chosen someone else over you. The feeling of being unchosen, picked over, replaced, deceived and discarded is hard to describe. With these three women, I didn’t have to. They got it. They lived it. We were walking the same path, some of us just a little ahead or a little behind one another, but walking it nonetheless. Words didn’t need to be spoken to explain the grief, the sadness, or the dissociation that washes over you unexpectedly in the days and weeks and months after discovery. They knew it well. Apologies and explanations were never needed to explain the sudden hypervigilance that overwhelms your nervous system, and causes you to approach everyone and everything with caution and suspicion. They understood the desperate need to keep oneself safe, to scan their surroundings for the things that don’t belong, or patterns that don’t align. They were walking through the same minefield, being careful and cautious with every step, suspicious of everything and everyone in their path. Betrayal like this changes you. It changes how you show up. It changes your nervous system. It changes how you interpret your world. It shatters you from the inside out.

So after working together on the coaching team for affair recovery, we became fast friends, we knew we had a bond unlike any other. We have clung tight to those friendships ever since. We are the fab four, the betrayed wives club, the quad. It is nice to be seen. It is even nicer to know you’ve already. been seen at your ugliest, and loved in spite of it.

By November 2016, 8 months into our stand-off, red flags started to emerge. Disparaging comments about me to my children were made right in front of me. My attempts at discipline were undermined, and any punishments I levied were lifted under the guise that I was “crazy”, and “you know how mom can be”. He was dismissive, and mean, and wasn’t even making efforts to hide it anymore.

By December, betrayed girlfriend 1(let’s call her Chelsea) suggested I check his phone bill. “Why?” I asked. Knowing how disconnected he and I had become, she feared what all of us who have walked betrayal fear: that our disconnection may have afforded him an opportunity to create connection elsewhere. I checked the bill. I scanned for repeat numbers, took note of dates and times, and looked for repeating patterns, and things that didn’t belong. Calls to me, his weekly call to his mother, calls to the hospital switchboard, calls to his one friend, and then calls to several unrecognizable numbers. I focused on the unrecognizable ones, and noted the one that appeared most often. It actually appeared quite regularly, and fell into a discernable pattern. Calls to this number tended to happen on his drive to work, during the morning commute, and on the car ride home in the evenings. They didn’t happen every morning, sometimes the morning car call was made to his office phone number. I imagined he was calling to get his schedule for the day, speak with the office manager about the details of the

Occasionally, that same number was dialed on Saturday mornings, always. between the hours of 10-11:30am, the time during which I had my kids enrolled in classes, classes I took them to on my own. Whose number was this? Who was he calling before and after work, but never during work hours? The fact that the calls also happened on weekends disqualified the call as being work-related, and the exact timing always falling on Saturday mornings in that same time window when I was occupied was a bit of a red flag. But like many red flags, before we let them fly free, we justify them, and rationalize them, and convince ourselves that we aren’t seeing what we think we are seeing. Maybe those calls were being made during the kids’ lessons because he didn’t want to cut into our family time later on. Maybe he was just being efficient with his time, and using the time we were out to conduct personal or professional business, and this was done in respect of our family. He was calling someone in his “free time” but who? He used to call me on his way to work, and on his way home. Who was he calling? Betrayed girlfriend 2 (let’s call her Kathy) suggested she would call. the number and find out. “How are you going to get her name from a call you are making TO HER?” I asked. “Shouldn’t you know the name of the person you are calling, or have some reason to call? What is your backstory going to be?”. “Leave it to me”, she said, and I waited breathless for the next 30 minutes to find out what she would learn.

“The number belongs to Rachel”, she said. Rachel is the office manager at my husband’s work. She runs the operations day to day. She sits at the right hand, if you will. Rachel has always seemed a bit of a try-hard. Desperate to. make an impression, she always seemed a little uncomfortable around me. I had only met her a handful of times, but there was a casual distance between us that was palpable. If my husband needed something admin-related for work, any ideas I would come up with would be automatically shut down or overturned by her, and she would work to come up with something better, bigger, flashier. I honestly didn’t think much of it, and just chalked it up to insecurity and overcompensation on her part. She asked for raise after raise, threatening to leave, and was always granted what she asked. When she started to out-earn the nurses in the office, I grew concerned that my husband was being manipulated. She has no formal training in office management. She was a secretary, ironically hired on by mistress #1, and she had made herself so useful, so dependable, that he had come to rely on her. She had become invaluable, and that came with a price tag, apparently for us both.

“You need to know what they are talking about?”, betrayed friend 3 (let’s call her Gretchen) advised. “It’s his office secretary”, I said, “he talks to her before and after work, likely as part of the prep for and the debrief after the day”, I defended. “So why is he calling her on the weekends, specifically when you aren’t around?”, she pressed. She had me there. I had no good reason or plausible excuse for that. She was a lower 30’s, newly single woman, recently separated from her husband, and maybe the calls to her on the weekends were because she was free, or eager to work, or was part of her try-hard approach to being invaluable? It made sense that none of their calls happened during work, she was in the next room.

Gretchen had been betrayed years before by her husband, a wannabe golf pro. He toured around in amateur PGA tournaments, and traveled a lot with that hobby, a hobby she did not share. “You could do what I did with Keith”, she said, “and bug his car”. We had long ago shared the means by which we had each found our husbands in the affairs that led to our friendship. For Gretchen, it was a voice recorder hidden under the front seat of Keith’s car that would ultimately reveal his lies and deceit. “You will never experience anything as emotionally painful as hearing the sound of their flirty conversations delivered directly into your ears, so only do this if you feel you have no other choice, or that you can’t move forward without knowing for sure”, she advised. I thought long and hard. Is the pain of not knowing worse than the pain of knowing? Am I a bad person for violating my husband’s privacy? Is it justified? I already knew from affair #1 that once you know something, you can never un-know it. I already knew the wisdom behind “only asks questions for answers you are prepared to receive”. I had already walked through fire once, how bad could it be? I am either wrong, and no harm, no foul, or I am right, and this is going to hurt. I’ve been hurt before, it won’t be new, it will be familiar. I’ve trained for this. By now, I am an elite atheete in the arena of betrayal, right? So I took a drive to Staples, and I bought myself a voice recorder, some double sided tape, and some double sided velcro.

I had to know.

Weighted Words


The words that we use have power. They carry weight. They carry the potential to heal, to reinforce, to deny, to withhold, and to harm. They can also send you on a trajectory you never thought possible.

TOXIC:

“Very harmful or unpleasant in a pervasive or insidious way”
– Oxford Dictionary

The day he called me “toxic” is seared into memory. It is one of the punctuating moments in our marriage, and one that took us down a path that I am certain neither of us saw coming.

I was driving home from an outing. It was Winter 2016. The kids, then aged 15, 11 and 9 were home with my husband, and I took a call from him in the car as I drove home. We discussed how we would spend the afternoon. There was a new release in the theatre at the time, and I seem to recall it being a superhero themed, action movie. I had grown excited to take the kids to see it, and so our discussion turned to this possibility. I also mentioned that we needed groceries so a trip to the store would have to factor into our plans. I can’t recall the conversation in detail, it was 6 years ago, but I do recall that it was his position that I should get the groceries while they were in the theatre. I didn’t take kindly to the suggestion that I should be the one to get the groceries, be left out of the movie, and he get the relaxing outing. It felt unfair. It felt like it aligned with sexist stereotypes, and I said so.

Knowing us, there was probably some discussion around who deserved a relaxing afternoon more. We always competed that way. It wasn’t a good marriage dynamic.

Who should get up with the baby?

Well…..

Who is more tired?
Whose job is more demanding?
Who carried and birthed the baby?
Who has more responsibility?

We were always trying to justify our needs to one another through comparing strife and struggle. Note to self: don’t do that next time. If there is a next time.

We argued the full duration of my drive. I can’t recall now why there wasn’t an option for us to do both tasks together, but something prevented that option from being recognized, and so we fought. He had the busy career as a physician, heading up an ER, and having launched his own clinic years earlier (yes, the clinic where inappropriately engaged with a nurse/employee, the woman who would later bear his child, and whose crash-landing into our lives formed the basis for this blog.). He was the one who needed quality time with the kids, and to relax on his day off. I had the flexible job, and the ability to participate with the kids and their activities and school functions. He didn’t want to do the menial work of running a grocery errand and leave me to play and relax with the kids. He worked hard all week. I worked flexibly part time around the kids. He deserved to go. I should support him in spending quality time with the boys on his few days off of work. I was the one preparing the meals so I was better positioned to know what would be needed from the store. Blah, blah, blah…you get it. I hung up on him. I did that from time to time when we would fight on the phone. It wasn’t the healthiest way to cope with an argument, but when things get overwhelming, and I am hitting a brick wall, going unheard, spinning on the same carousel with no sign that it will ever slow down to let me off, I jump. I hang up. I stop the spin.

I returned home to him standing in our master bedroom, upset that I had hung up on him. Hanging up is a major offence in his world, an expression of blatant disrespect. I can still hear the echoes of him yelling after one of our children “Don’t you walk away from me when I am talking to you”. Disrespect. It is the first ingredient in the stew that eventually is served up as rage.

“You are a toxic person“, he told me. Toxic wasn’t something I had said or something I had done, toxic was clearly something I was. It was a label assigned to me in the same dry, authoritative way he might offer a diagnosis to a patient. “You have Cancer”. “You. have 6 months to live”. “You have Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia”. “You are a toxic person”. “Today is Monday”. Just facts.

Spoken with conviction, there wasn’t a question. The words just hung there. If a word could have a dirty smell, it was the putrid odour of something left behind long after the offending source has left the room. It hung in the air like a stench, it filled my nose, it influenced the scent of everything I would take in afterwards, acting as a constant punctuating memory. I was triggered. It was the most hurtful thing he could have ever chosen to say to me, and here is why:

I didn’t have a functional or healthy family growing up. My time in couples’ therapy actually revealed for me that my mother was, in fact, likely a covert narcissist. That realization and the fallout of what happened in the months and years following that realization could form a whole other blog. so sufficed to say his words triggered a childhood trauma, tore open a wound and laid bare my biggest insecurities about myself. I had spent my childhood desperately seeking my mothers approval, trying to get her to notice me, or be proud of me. If I dared speak my feelings, I was labeled “too much”, or “overly dramatic”, or “overly sensitive”. Issues in my relationship to my mother were my fault, usually distilled down to a deep character flaw of mine, or an insufficiency on my part. When I would have the occasional girl-drama at school and would tell my mother about it, my tearful statements of “Jennifer and Christina aren’t talking to me, and are getting all the girls to gang up on me” would be met with “Well, what did you do? You must have done something“. It was never a possibility that I was mistreated, only that I was treated as deserved. I grew up with the message that I am hard to be in relationship with, that there is something flawed in me that makes me hard to love. When my husband called me toxic, he reaffirmed for me all that I had been told all of my life. I am the problem. I am the reason no one can be in relationship with me. I am broken, flawed. So when my father called my then-fiance to ask him out for a walk and a cigar, only to warn him that I am highly manipulative, and that he ought to think very carefully about marrying me, I was hurt, but not surprised. He had driven over 2 hours for a spontaneous visit with him, and hadn’t even come up to see me, He just took my fiance on a walk, disparaged my character, and then rode off into the night. I never confronted my dad about it. Conflict resolution wasn’t modelled in my family. I didn’t know how to begin to address it. By this time. I had been well trained to expect my feelings to be invalidated, and to be told, once again, that I was overly sensitive. It seemed a fruitless pursuit. In the days, weeks and years that followed my dad’s spontaneous drop-by, I did wonder if he had come on the demands of my mother. He was often used as her henchman, so it seemed plausible. But, as I reflect on it today, it is equally plausible that my dad never uttered any of what I was told. You see, my fiance had been paying attention for 3 years, learning about my family dynamics, and the relational challenges I had with them both. He knew that if they hurt me, I would just recede from them, and not dare address it. So he told me that my own father warned him that I am manipulative knowing how much that would hurt. The cut was made, the wound exposed, but who held the blade?
My parents have both passed away since I started this blog in 2011, so I guess I’ll never know.

As I stood in front of my husband in our master bedroom, and told him that his calling me “toxic” was the most hurtful thing he could have said to me, he offered no apology. He made zero attempts to mend the hurt he knew he had caused. We would spend the next 9 months avoiding one another in the house, living as roommates. You read that right, 9 months. Acutely sensitive to the rejection that might come if I open the conversation, I waited for him to come to me. He didn’t. And every day that he didn’t come to me to apologize for the hurt he caused, he reinforced for me that I was being rejected, and that I would be met with further rejection if I took the first step. So I stepped back. I couldn’t take the risk. Friends told me to initiate the conversation. I couldn’t. I had never been shown a healthy or safe way to do that. I was paralyzed by an immense fear of rejection. He was, I suspect, paralyzed by his own deep sense of shame. Having spent the previous 6 years identifying as a cheater, facing his own shame every day, I think he had maxed out on how much more shame he could face. Somewhere in those 9 months, he drew a line. No longer would he question his hurtful choices. No longer would he take responsibility or apologize. He was, as he would later put it, the 2.0 version of the husband I once had. Gone was the man who would accept the blame for the choices he made. Gone was the man prepared to take a one-down position in the wake of his hurtful actions. So when I caught him cheating a second time, the fault laid with me.

Standing in the arena


Remember me? Some days, I barely do, and that’s ok.
My last post was 20 months ago. I said then that I had a lot to share. I still do.

It has taken me a long time to sit down, and start writing here again. I had hoped that my last post would be the catalyst that would resurrect me back to blogging, that it would be the small infusion that I would need to keep me putting my thoughts down, and sharing my story. It didn’t happen. Life happened.

Life got busy, and life got real. Life got messy, life swallowed me whole, spat me out, swallowed me again, rinse and repeat. In case I get swallowed again, let me preface this by saying that I want to be here, I want to be writing and sharing, and I want to make this a priority again because I value the clarity and the healing that comes from writing. For those loyal readers from ‘back in the day’, it is possible that you’ve moved on, that this content no longer interests you, or it is possible that you’re still there, willing to take a moment to enter my world, sit a while, and offer your valuable comments and that together we can continue to inspire and support one another. Perhaps also, this new start will bring the blog and its content to other readers, those newly finding themselves in murky waters, treading furiously, trying desperately not to be overtaken by waves crashing all around them. For you, I see your storm, I know it well, and I want to be a life raft for you, a source of support and understanding, a virtual bestie, if you will. I see you. I feel you. I was you. I still am 😉

I am hoping that one day, the content of this blog can form the basis of a book. I’ve always toyed with the idea of writing one, but my self doubt creeps in (hello, old friend!), and I flood into a state of overwhelm, and I close the lid once more. With the right support, advise and steering, perhaps I can find the best way to get started on that. If I can successfully do that, I will consider this entire chapter to have had purpose, but let’s face it – even without the book, it has had purpose: I have grown immensely over the last decade since disclosure of my husband’s affair. I have learned so much about myself, my own shortcomings, my family of origin issues that played out in my choice of partner, my willingness to stay and tolerate a situation that was toxic for me, and so much more. I have navigated separation, collaborative divorce, abusive litigation, post separation abuse, coercive control, financial abuse, threats, harassment, and stalking. I have navigated the waters of single parenting, with two of my three children opting for no relationship with their father, and the unfortunate accusations of “parental alienation” that has showered upon me. I have navigated finding therapy for my children, holding space for their emotions and keeping them above water, while treading water with my own weight-vest on. I am on the precipice of securing my own mortgage for the first time, retraining for my career that was stunted by my marriage and childrearing, and hopefully in the months ahead, moving into my first home – my own home, and starting again.

In case no one has ever told you, divorce sucks. It will break you in ways you didn’t know were possible, but the process will also build you back differently than you were before, if you let it. This new chapter of the blog will document my 6 year journey through divorce. I think, for clarity’s sake, I will start at the beginning, and move chronologically through it, eventually catching up to present day.

It is my hope that these upcoming posts will be found by those who needed to see them, at just the right time. I hope that my experiences, shared openly and with the utmost of vulnerability will provide support and understanding for those currently experiencing the same events, reminding them that they are not alone. I hope that the stories I share provide insight for those who are contemplating the end of a marriage, and wondering if they can stick it out, or those desperately fighting to hold onto their marriage (both are completely ok!). I hope that these posts act as a reminder to all of just how much we can handle, how strong, capable, resourceful, resilient and fucking incredible we all are, and how we owe it to ourselves to wake up every morning reminded of just this.

Whether you are experiencing the pain and trauma of intimate partner betrayal, contemplating whether you should stay or go, paralyzed about your decision to leave, scared for your kids, scared for your future, facing the litigation arena, facing post separation abuse or coercive control by a former partner, navigating abuse and unwelcome influence from an ex’s new partner, feeling lost, confused and alone, and feeling like no one is standing in the arena with you, I am. I am standing right beside you. I hand you my well-worn armour, with all of its dents, scratches, its missing pieces, and its worn patina. It has withstood the war you are in, its dents and scratches recounting the story of what it has seen, what it has endured, and the protection it has provided. I don’t need the armour anymore because I have become the armour. I can take it off, and pass it along to you, to hold you tightly inside, shield you in the places you are most vulnerable, and shoulder the hits you’ll invariably take along the way. But you won’t take them alone, I promise. We are all in the arena together, old and new, young and old. I see you, and I’ve got you. You don’t stand alone in the arena.

I leave you with one of my favourite quotes from a speech delivered by Theodore Roosevelt, called “Citizenship in a Republic”, a passage more specifically referred to as “The Man in the Arena”:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly”

Let’s do this.






Phoenix Rising


Photo by Thought Catalog on Pexels.com

It has been a while. It has been a LONG while. A lot of life has happened since I last updated the blog, and I look forward to diving back in, providing updates, and reconnecting. I know that this blog was a source of inspiration and resonance for so many, and honestly was so healing for me, while writing it, to know that it was helping others.

I haven’t updated this blog for a few reasons:

Number one, I was finding that posting, once I had reached a certain point in my own healing, was acting as more of a reminder of past pain, and I wasn’t personally needing to write for my own healing anymore, nor did I want to live in the past. I didn’t make a conscious decision to stop writing, I just gradually posted less and less and then stopped without even really noticing that I had. I looked forward, and my own journey took another turn, and then another, and then another.

Number two, I felt embarrassed. As my long-time readers know, this blog was focused on my repairing and restoring of my marriage, and I was actively doing all that I could to understand affairs, understand the mind of the unfaithful, and of the OW, doing self-care, and doing therapeutic work. I was actively involved in coaching other betrayed women through a well-reputed program launched by a mentor and friend. I was proud of the work my husband was doing to show me he wanted to be better. He had been doing all of the right things, saying all of the right things, engaging with me in what felt like all the right ways. So, when I found him cheating again, in February 2017, I didn’t feel that I could face you. I was embarrassed for ever standing by hum. I wasn’t ready for the admonishment, the judgment, the “I-told-you-so’s”. I had spent years defending him to all of the nay-sayers who would come and post comments like “once a cheater, always a cheater”, and “your issue should lie with your husband who made marriage vows to you, and not the other woman who made you no promises” (I still disagree with that line of thinking, but that is a tangent I don’t wish to chase at the moment). I didn’t want to admit that they had been right, and that I had been wrong. I was wrong.

It is now March 2021, a full decade after I started this blog, and I am in the midst of a 4 year divorce with no end in sight. We separated in March 2017 (what is it about March?), and it has been the longest and most painful divorce process imaginable. I still don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel. I am tired, I am broke, but I am not broken.

I don’t want to be embarrassed that he cheated again. I don’t want to be embarrassed that I chose to see the best in someone who let me down, again. I don’t want to be embarrassed that I chose to believe in hope, possibility of change, and the existence of true remorse. Maybe the fact that I did makes me naive. But I won’t apologize for fighting for my marriage, or for fighting for my husband, and trying to see him in the best light possible, when he least deserved it. I won’t apologize for wanting to see him as the man I married. I don’t offer any apologies.

I was wrong. I was idealistic. I was betrayed a second time, after offering my forgiveness to a man who never deserved it, and who clearly didn’t value it.

And so this blog takes a new turn, starts a new chapter, and has a new focus. I have no plans to rename the blog, even though I am no longer rescuing my marriage. I am now rescuing myself, and my children, but I don’t want to dishonour what brought me here, nor what I was fighting for. I won’t apologize for being naive, I just was. I won’t apologize for being idealistic, I just was. I won’t apologize for trying to see the best, and believing he could be different. He couldn’t. I don’t own that.

I was betrayed a second time by a man who never deserved my forgiveness. I am now fighting to reclaim my footing, and wrap up a long divorce, 4 years in the ring, with no end in sight.

Thank you for reading, and for your support. More to come.

Understanding your loyal spouse


Arguably the most comprehensive article I’ve come across.  Spot on in many ways and a wonderful article to be able to give to the unfaithful spouse who may be failing to understand what you need and why, or failing to provide it in a compassionate and loving way.

http://www.affaircare.com/articles/understanding-your-loyal-spouse/

 

 

Complementary teleseminar tonight!


From Anne Bercht, director of Passionate Life a Seminars, and the Beyond Affairs Network;

**********

JOIN US LIVE TONIGHT FOR A NEW TELESEMINAR ON RISING STRONG …
… even when you are still in the middle of your story, even when your marriage isn’t saved, even when it looks like you are headed one way, and then your journey takes a turn against your will in a way you never wanted to go. How do you rise above when what you don’t want becomes inevitable?
YOU DON’T WANT TO MISS THIS ONE!
I’ll be interviewing Passionate Life Coach and BAN’s Assistant Director, Tammie, and she’ll be sharing some of her personal journey. She has so much great wisdom to share with you!
To join: (There is no cost to join)
Date: Monday, April 18

Time: 6 pm pacific/ 7 pm mountain/ 8 pm central/ 9 pm eastern

Call-in number: 218-844-1930

Access Code: 688685#
Please be sure and read the tele-seminar etiquette guidelines, by clicking on the link below:
http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=5L2vP&m=Js95kWadmMZWqX&b=kTJa0ogVNuuTBEJHel2qfw
We look forward to having you join us tonight as we help you GROW to your next level!
Anne & Brian Bercht, and the Passionate Life Team
2016 SEMINAR SCHEDULE: WAYS WE CAN HELP YOU HEAL!
Healing From Affair Intensives for Couples

June 25 – 27, 2016 (Sat-Mon)– Seattle, WA

September 10 – 12, 2016(Sat-Mon) – Newark, NJ

November 11 – 13, 2016 – Charleston, SC
Take Your Life Back Retreats (for betrayed women)

April 22 – 24, 2016 – Dallas, TX (day 1 starts at 9 a.m.)

July 9 – 11, 2016 – Newark,NJ (day 1 starts at 9 a.m.)

October 21 – 23, 2016 – Phoenix, AZ (day 1 starts at 9 a.m.)
Man of Honor Retreat (for all men)

May 13 – 15, 2016 – Florissant, CO
Step 2: Love & Passion (for couples who have completed Healing From Affairs)

July 22 – 24, 2016 – Semiahmoo, WA
Passionate Life Seminars, USA Office: 8842 Goldeneye Lane, Blaine, WA 98230 Phone: 360-306-3367 Website: http://www.beyondaffairs.com
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