Listen to the first full episode “I Had an Affair” from our podcast here. Read the post first as the content is slightly different.

Andrew

I Had An Affair.  This is something I never thought I would type, or say out loud. But it just so happens to be true.  It has been over a decade since the affair and only about a year ago did I finally have the courage to tell my wife about it.  Perhaps you’re thinking, “Why in the world are you telling me this?”  Well, I don’t want you or someone you love to make the same mistake as me.  I also want you to know that there is hope in the story.  We do not have to be defined by our mistakes, but we can learn and grow from them.  Yes, we need to own them and yes, there are consequences for our actions.  One of the biggest consequences for me was actually in keeping the secret for 12 years.  For over a decade I felt like a fraud in everything I did.  It was imposter syndrome multiplied by 1000, because I was the embodiment of a living imposter.  I had made a promise to someone I love dearly, and I had broken my promise.  So much of my world was shaped from the view of myself as a liar and a cheat.  

Katie

Vulnerability, my chosen word for 2019.  Ha, I think the universe, God, a higher power, or whatever you choose to believe in, was laughing in my face.  I had no idea what that word meant, nor how it would call me out to the waters and raid the depths of my soul.  11:00 PM in a tiny bathroom that belonged to someone else.  Our children were asleep right outside the door.  Other family with us in the house.  There was nowhere to run, to hide, I couldn’t wail, or scream.  I knew we had to face the dawn of the next day and life had to carry on as “normally” as it possibly could, at least for those moments.  So, in light of all of this, I chose to respond with compassion, or maybe compassion chose me?  It wouldn’t have been my typical response.  I think seething anger and wrath feel more appropriate, but honestly I think I was in a state of shock for a good few weeks after the knowledge of this news dropped.  As I began to unravel, to fall apart, the questions and grief came.  Anger, denial, sadness, bargaining, and eventual healing came, but the road was not easy.  I had to face some hard truths, some beautiful parts of my past, and some grueling, not so lovely parts of our story and myself.      

Andrew

You will tell yourself anything to justify something when you’ve made a horrible mistake and you don’t want to own it or deal with the potential consequences of your actions.  You will tell yourself that this person could never handle the news.  They are not strong enough you will say. But, who are you to decide how strong they are and if they can handle it?  Who are you to betray someone and not even notify them of the betrayal?  The truth is, secrets do a lot more damage than revealing the truth and facing the music.  When we reveal the truth, the lie no longer has any hold in our lives.  We don’t have to obey any of its commands of guilt or shame.  We do have to deal with the consequences of our actions and do the hard work necessary to try to repair the damage, but we do not have to be bound by a paradigm of lies, hiding, and hardening ourselves to who we were truly meant to be.

An Excerpt From Katie’s Journal

January 5, 2019 (the day after the bomb dropped)

How do you love someone and move forward after betrayal?  How can you stay present and engaged when you are questioning every ounce of your existence in a relationship you thought you knew?  Nothing makes sense anymore.  This pain won’t kill me, but dammit, it hurts like hell.  The truth will help us find freedom, but how do I trust from here?  How do I believe there are no other secrets?  How do I stay true to myself?  How do I not hold resentment?  I forgive, but I hurt.  I have hope, but I’m paralyzed today.  What do I need?  How do I stay resilient?  How do I keep an open heart, but hold boundaries for myself to heal?  How do WE heal?  I feel numb, despondent, vacant.  Like the world is moving around me and I am stuck.  Void of any path forward.  A prisoner to my own mind.  Left to tread this water alone and forgotten.  Will I be enough?  Is our marriage built on a lie?  Will I ever be enough?  Do I love myself enough to survive this?  I can’t rely on anyone else’s love to get me through.  I wish I could say God would help me, but I’m not even sure what that means right now.  I don’t want to add any burden to how badly Andrew has already been feeling these past 12 years, but I don’t know what that looks like.  I don’t know what he deserves to feel.  I don’t know how much he has changed or truly wants to work on his own shit.  Do I just accept him where he is anyway?  Do I demand more?  Do I find contentment in the not knowing? How do I extend grace, but also give myself space.  How do I allow myself to remain genuine and true and to feel all the feels?  

Andrew

Many of Katie’s questions were answered over the course of the year 2019.  We started therapy to work on our communication and because we had no idea what this meant for our marriage.  The road was not an easy one and there were a lot of tears, arguments, and a lot of growth that happened.  I had to respect Katie’s process in working through this, and she had her own journey towards wholeness that she had to work on.

So what should you do with your secret? Maybe your secret has nothing to do with an affair. Perhaps your secret is that you are bulimic, anorexic, gay, transgender, you’ve lost your religion, you want a divorce, or any other thing that you are holding onto that you don’t want anyone to know.  You need to eventually work up the courage to tell someone. Tell someone who you feel safe with. You will find that it will embolden you to tell other people, and eventually it no longer will have a hold over you.

Here is our YouTube Growth Challenge on Keeping Secrets

So, Where Are We Now? . . . 

Katie

A few months ago, I literally thanked Andrew for telling me about this deep, dark secret.  Not that I thanked him for what he had done, but for the gift of truth and the ability to awaken my own awareness.  It hurt and it’s been messy, but I would prefer the pain and rebirth over pretending like “we’re ok.”  I felt it for years, the disconnect, the feeling that something just wasn’t right.  I even asked him several times over the years if we were ok, if he still loved me, if he would open himself up to what was going on deeper in his heart and share it with me.  I knew there was something blocking us from having the full and intimate experience I craved and I knew we were capable of.  This experience has challenged every fiber of my being.  It’s the acknowledgement that our marriage is not what I thought, that we are not who I thought, that our beliefs are not what I thought.  The beauty of this though, is that we get to choose who we want to be and how we rebuild.  This persona I created of us having the “perfect marriage” had to be shattered so we could really build the marriage that we want to have.  And we are still in process.  We always will be.  We have realized through this that we will never “arrive.” We must keep striving to be true to who we are and push ourselves beyond, to who we want to be for ourselves first, and then for each other.  

A Path to Healing:

We have had to navigate the hard questions, the feelings of pain, sorrow, and grief, the uncertainty of the unknown, all while keep up day jobs, parenting responsibilities, and the normalcy that life calls us to.  Andrew and I both have had to do equally hard work on ourselves personally in order to fill our marriage with the kind of intentions we want it to have.  Here are some helpful strategies to consider if you are going on through your own personal journey with infidelity or any other challenging life situation where it is calling you into the unknown.

Journaling has been therapeutic and helpful on days when I just couldn’t find air to breathe.  It helped me dump my brain so I could make room for new growth.  Now those entries have served as reminders of my growth and ways to celebrate this hard work.  It’s also helped me take back myself and give credit to my own wisdom.  To see illustrated, the process of what learning to trust myself looks like.   

Therapy has been hugely instrumental in learning better ways to communicate, to dive in to our hard work, and to gain support for what we needed emotionally.  I have participated in my own personal therapy for the past two years, which I would argue opened the door to me being in a space emotionally and mentally that I could reckon with this hard news and really choose vulnerability instead of my past tendencies to shut down and avoid.  We have also had extensive couples therapy over the past year, that without, I am pretty damn sure we couldn’t have made it this far on our own.  The truth is we all have our own shit we are dealing with.  We might as well get it out in the open and try to make something out of it.

Personal growth and self-care have also been key to our own personal work that has been required to truly transform our marriage.  Giving each other grace and space to feel, to have time to be without obligation, and to encourage each other’s personal growth and interests have only served us to be better lovers.  Learning my own boundaries and how to say what I need more clearly has been born out of this hard work.  I am now a recovering people pleaser.  Realizing I can’t be responsible for other people’s feelings has been a huge epiphany.              

Final Thoughts

When you can stand strong in your own boundaries and find peace in yourself, you can then give more freely and openly to others.  You’re essentially unbreakable.  I’m learning the value of the fall apart and the beauty of putting myself back together over and over again.   I have realized my own blindspots in how to really show love and build partnership with Andrew.

I was stuck in a victim mentality, and though I appeared giving and self-sacrificial, I was constantly resentful and disappointed that Andrew never did enough for me.  The blame and shame cycle was strong and it was hard to break.  It’s still a struggle some days.  It starts with an awareness around the stories I make up.  Changing my story from scarcity and lack to abundance and gratitude has completely rewritten my daily life.  You can never be enough for someone else until you learn to be enough for yourself.  I am enough.  You are enough.  

If you want to check out the full Vidcast version of the Podcast, check it out here.