Why Trust Rebuilding Feels Impossible

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Husband Material Podcast, where we help Christian men outgrow porn. Why? So you can change your brain, heal your heart, and save your relationship. My name is Drew Boa, and I'm here to show you how. Let's go. Over the years, I have received so many questions and messages from husbands who are trying so hard to rebuild trust with their wives, and it's just not working. Men have said things like, My wife is not open to doing any of her work. I feel like she's controlling everything I do. My inner child doesn't feel safe with her. That's why I decided to invite James and Sam to this show. They are the hosts of the Ask the Unfaithful podcast. And in this episode, I brought some of your toughest, most difficult dilemmas to them. James Aneer is a licensed clinician who has extensive experience in treating complex trauma, mental health disorders, addictions, betrayal trauma, and he's certified in the Early Recovery Couple's Empathy Model, also known as ERCM. James is passionate about helping clients restory their childhood wounds using inner child work and parts work, helping them create their own internal loving parent. Sam is a leading voice in infidelity recovery, bringing nearly two decades of insight, expertise, and genuine compassion to individuals and couples navigating the aftermath of an affair. Formerly with Affair Recovery, he is now the host of Sam's Healing Podcast. James and Sam both use the language of the unfaithful to talk about a husband who has sexually betrayed his wife. This is not meant to be an identity statement, but a way to help the conversation move forward. The views expressed by guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Husband Material ministries. Featuring a guest is not an endorsement of their beliefs, methods, products, services, or any other content they have created. We believe in discernment. So as with any resource, listen thoughtfully, test everything against your own convictions, take what's helpful, and leave the rest behind. Enjoy the episode. Welcome

James And Sam’s Recovery Stories

SPEAKER_01 2:03

to Husband Material. Today we are with James and Sam, the co-hosts of the Ask the Unfaithful podcast, a safe place for both the unfaithful and betrayed partners to find hope, healing, and insight into the actions and behaviors of the unfaithful. Welcome, guys. It's great to be here, Drew. Thanks for having us.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

Thank you so much, Drew. It is uh fantastic to be here.

SPEAKER_01 2:26

You're welcome. Why are you so passionate about helping the unfaithful relate to the betrayed?

SPEAKER_00 2:32

There's a couple of reasons. Sharon and I started this journey in 2010. August 26th will be our discovery anniversary. And August 28th was my first day in SLAA. Back then, the only help was sort of an old school way of calling the betrayed partners co-addicts, which was not helpful at all because it ignored their trauma. So she and I went through an awful lot trying to find our own way through this, including at any at one time six different therapists doing different things for us or helping us with six different things. And I was very fortunate that I had an amazing, amazing sponsor who Sharon and I both credit with saving our marriage. With that, I went and got my CSAT, my certified sex fiction therapist, because I was, I am a sex addict, scored 17 out of 20, so a student, unfortunately. And that was at the time still that co-addict model. It is not anymore. And then about three years into that certification, so four years five years into recovery, I had the fortune of taking my APSATS certification, which is the Association for Partners of Sex Addicts Therapists. In that, I met Barb Stephens, who was one of the teachers who wrote Your Sexually Addicted Spouse with Marsha Means. And she actually took me to the principal's office basically and re-educated me completely about why the co-addict perspective was entirely wrong. We were so blessed by Barb because that that absolutely flipped everything on its head for me. Now that's not to say that my CSAP training was is not useful. It's incredibly useful. There's so much benefit in it. And Barb really turned things around. So between Scott, my sponsor, and Barb Stephens, and then all the really hard work that Sharon and I did, here we are, and we just didn't want anybody else to have to go through what we had to go through to find our way. So we wanted to bring what we had learned into a much more condensed and useful presentation for people.

SPEAKER_02 4:56

Yeah, my story's a little bit less attractive for me over 23 or so years ago, after I'd just blown up my life with having an affair that I was a public figure. It came out, and I went from, as they say, a hero to a zero in one night. And I remember I was in a cornfield in Austin, Texas. I was trying to make a living. Everything was spiraling. And I remember sitting in my car in a cornfield, and I remember saying, God, I am so alone and I'm so hopeless. Everybody that I've known for 15 years has left me. If there's any way that I can help somebody else not feel this alone, I'm all in. If I can somehow find words to the pain that I don't even have right now for other people in the future, God help me do that. And that was over 20 years ago when certain people from certain parts of the country, when you ask them how they're doing, and they say, better than I deserve, you won't find someone who is doing better than they deserve than me. And so that was 20-some years ago. I get to help men and women deal with infidelity, addiction, what have you, just like James. And it is literally one of the greatest joys of my life because I'm doing better than I deserve. That's the dang truth.

SPEAKER_01 6:25

Thank you both for taking all of your pain and turning it into purpose and turning it into the kind of help that just didn't exist before.

SPEAKER_02 6:34

It's absolutely right. In many ways, right, there's so much shame associated with it, whether you're unfaithful or you're betrayed, whether you're an addict or you just deal with compulsive behavior or you just don't know why you do what you do. Now it's so much easier. You can buy books online, you can go to so many different podcasts like this and videos. 20 plus years ago, James and I were like, can someone help us? And so meeting people like you, Drew, and in our podcasts, we're really trying to give people tools to not have to have it be as hard for them as it was for us.

Early Recovery Mistakes That Stall Healing

SPEAKER_01 7:08

What are some of the biggest mistakes that you made when you were starting to try to heal?

SPEAKER_02 7:14

I'm gonna go first because I am the chief mistake maker. Number one is I thought I could just suck it up. I thought my willpower alone was enough. If I can just suck it up, everything's gonna be fine. And I learned that the hard way, that this was a time in my life that I needed to humble myself and realize this decision that I made to have an affair was me at my best. That my best thinking had brought me to that point. And it's probably time for some new thinking. It's probably time that I humble myself and say, you know what, I don't know what I'm doing. And we men, we know this. It's one of the oldest jokes of men, right? We don't like to ask for directions. I had to humble myself and say to my mentor and my therapist, I don't know what I'm doing. So I need you to chart a course. Another mistake that I made was thinking that I could phone it in and just kind of do enough to keep my wife happy when in reality I had come to the point where while I had accomplished some wonderful things in life, this was going to be the hardest thing that I needed to do. And if I wasn't willing to put everything into it, it just wasn't gonna work. And then my final mistake was thinking that God was done with me. I remember sitting in my therapist's office and he was like, What do you think, you know, God wants to do with you? And I was like, Stay alive. And he said, Okay, that's not enough. I said, I don't have any dreams. I just want to be a husband, I just want to be a dad. And he said, You know, that's great, but what else? And I said, I'm pretty sure God's done using me. I just really want to take care of my family. And so my biggest mistake was to think that God was gonna wash his hands of me.

SPEAKER_00 9:06

I made so many seemingly small mistakes. And thank goodness that Scott was there to catch me and literally catch me doing them, but also catch me falling, right? And I mean, things that you would never imagine. So I wore, I bought a at the time I was in much better shape than I am now. Of course, that's a long time ago, and I'm old now. I bought some new t-shirts. I used to be a bodybuilder, and you tell a bodybuilder, you give a bodybuilder a shirt, if it's too large, he'll thank you, and if it's too small, he'll wear it. So I wore really small t-shirts, right? And Scott was like, What are you doing? And I'm like, What do you mean? And he said, he said, Well, you're wearing a tight t-shirt to an SLAA meeting, right? And you're you don't know how many people that's triggering. And I'm like, You're kidding me, right? Because I had no self-esteem. He said, You can't do that. So what I want you to do is, and he said, I've noticed these things, and he listed a few things. What I want you to do is ask my permission every time you want to do something different. He said, if you go out to get a new haircut, he's a funny guy. Um, you know, I want you to ask me first. Now that was surely surrender. So that was a major thing for me to be able to take somebody's guidance like that, as though he was giving me orders. I had to do that, or I wouldn't be where I am today. And in about eight months, he said, okay, no more permission. Now we're going to perspective. Right. So that was really important for me to be able to give over to somebody who knew so much better.

SPEAKER_01 10:46

I hear both of you saying that we absolutely need to humble ourselves and admit that we need help, that we don't have the answers. And now you are in a position of offering that help. I would love to hear your perspectives on some of the common experiences men in our community are having, specifically the married men who are working on rebuilding trust with their wives.

Why Your Wife Can’t “Move On”

SPEAKER_01 11:16

One of the ones that I hear all the time is some version of this. A guy will say, I'm doing so much work. I'm going to groups, I'm reading books, I'm listening to podcasts, I'm going to retreats. My wife is not doing any of these things, and it seems like she's not doing her work.

SPEAKER_02 11:38

I think oftentimes we have to understand we caused this and we made these choices that have wounded them. A popular therapist would say trauma is stored in the body and in the brain. Trauma of this, whether it's pornography or an affair, addiction, what have you, it creates an altered state of being in our wives or our husbands if we're unfaithful females. They are living in hypervigilance, destabilization. They don't even know who they are, let alone they don't know who you are in light of the recent disclosure. So it takes time. What I'll tell a lot of guys in this dynamic is you can't control what they do, but you sure can control what you do. And you got to give them time. This is not going to be a couple of months. This is not going to be a bump in the road, brother. This is a whole new reset. You have created an altered state of being in your wife by your actions. To expect them to treat you as though this didn't happen is really denial. You are in denial of how much you've harmed them. So take your eyes off of them and put your eyes on number one, the Lord, and then number two, yourself and do your work. Because if you're doing your work, you have a confidence to go, well, I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing, and I can't put a burden on them. I've already put a burden on them by my choices that is possibly going to last a lifetime. So how about I take a step back and worry about me and focus on me and make sure that I have the right people involved? James and I say this all the time. When you find the right people, you find the right process. And when you find the right process, you can create a pathway to healing. But if you're just white knuckling it and if you're just DIYing it, I'm sorry, it is not going to go well. Now, the great thing about James and I is James will put a clinical spin on this. It's brilliant. I just love to be the eye candy and just kind of rattle off euphemisms and things that I've learned from being a complete screw up that God seems to still love. So, James, why don't you put a really good clinical spin on what I've just said because that's your specialty.

SPEAKER_00 13:51

You know, what we're looking at here is betrayal trauma, right? And trauma affects the brain in myriad ways. One thing that a lot of people don't know is that the amygdala, which is, well, the right side of it is the survival, fight, flight, freeze. The left side is actually encoding fear memories, which then get sent to what's called the hippocampus, which is like the filing system. Those can actually, with deep trauma like this, which is studied to be on the same level as combat soldiers and first responders, so something really important to remember, it will actually change the shape of the amygdala and change the shape of the hippocampus. That is permanent. They are very plastic, so they can work find workarounds with a lot with enough healing. The thing with feeling with this is that unfaithfuls can feel really alone in this, and partly because it's going to take some time, as as Sam said, for partners to feel that level of safety to share very much in terms of recovery with their unfaithfuls. So what we have to do in part is to get a support system. For me, I was fortunate. I went to 12-step, I had a support system built in. Not everybody's an addict, not everybody's a compulsive. If you're compulsive, you can also go to 12-step. Frankly, I think you can go to 12-step no matter what the problematic sexual and intimacy issue is. So that feeling of aloneness can be there, but we can handle that with engaging with other people in recovery. As far as partners, they're going to initially feel all of these, all of the things that Sam talked about and this injustice, right? And that can translate into why do I have to do any work? I didn't do anything. And unfortunately, as unfaithfuls, as much as we would love to actually help them heal that, fix that, right? We can't do that. We can't create safety, but we can do things that are not unsafe, right? We can also become reliable, predictable, trustworthy. In time, because it takes a lot of time for a partner to see that and frankly have a felt sense of it, really feel it. That does create an invitation for our wives to join us in the recovery journey. But remember, that takes a lot of work and can take a lot of time. So I think one of the big things is what we look at as unwillingness. We have to change our mindset there. It's that unwillingness is actually terror. It's exhaustion, it's hopelessness, it's self-protection. You know, our partners are trying to figure out whether the relationship is emotionally safe enough to invest in again. Right. Also, her healing at that point is going to be very fragile. It's going to be very, thus very sacred. And we haven't shown that we can hold that sacred or a crucible yet. I think the yet is huge. So our recovery can't be contingent on our partner's participation in relational cover recovery or even her own if she's not there yet.

SPEAKER_01 17:00

A lot of guys have told me they feel controlled or smothered by what Sam described as hypervigilance.

When Hypervigilance Feels Like Control

SPEAKER_01 17:12

What do you recommend in terms of reframing that or trying to work with it?

SPEAKER_02 17:20

Yeah. And that's a great question. I think it works well for me to go first, and then my brilliant counterpart dresses it up better for me. And so one thing that's important that I think can really help a lot of men in this dynamic is to remember they don't want to be this way. The betrayed doesn't want to put you under surveillance. They don't want to have, now the experts would say every betrayed spouse deals with somewhere between 50 and as many as 250 reminders a day. That's a day. They don't want to be in a state of hypervigilance. They don't want to be in a state of fight, flight, or shut down. They don't want to watch a movie or a comedian and have an infidelity scene come in in a split second and have their nervous system go into absolute chaos. They don't want to be like this. But we have made decisions that have put them in this altered state of being. So when we can reframe it and go, you know, they don't want to be like this, but this is what trauma does. My dad was in Vietnam. He came home from Vietnam. And for the rest of his life, certain things would trigger him. And I made the mistake of waking him up one day in a very aggressive way. And let me just tell you, he went into a trauma response that scared the life out of me. It is just as the as James said, it's so similar with the betrayed. They are experiencing the fact that their brain has been rewired. And so with the right help for them, that can change. That can be adjusted. But if we keep wanting them to be who they were before the infidelity, we set ourselves up for failure. They are not that person anymore. They are in an altered state of being, which requires us to tap into kindness and tenderness and patience with the process. They don't want to be like this. They have become this way because of our choices. That doesn't mean we're going to be a doormat the the rest of the relationship. It means we have to learn how to tap into compassion and empathy and patience with the process.

SPEAKER_00 19:40

It can feel like our spouses are trying to control us. So the feeling is a feeling, right? What we have to do is add some perspective to it. Really, is that the amount of increased transparency and accountability that we have to have to help our partners heal, to help them feel safe, can feel to us incredibly restrictive. From a betrayal trauma perspective, what looks to us like control is actually most often an attempt to create safety. And this is the primary initial need for a betrayed is to feel safe. Everything they've known has been broken. Everything. Their trust in themselves, their trust in us, of course, their trust in the world has crumbled. And so that safety is really building a new foundation. But you know, when we betrayed our wives, all at once she knew that she didn't have any power in the relationship up until then because we were keeping secrets. We were creating a one-up, one-down power relationship. So all of her choices were taken away because she didn't have all the information. And she was making choices based on her trust in us or her trust in you, right? And believing that we were on the level with her as she was with you. So since she hasn't had any control, her attempts at controlling the outcomes or controlling the situation or what might feel like controlling you is to try to make those outcomes predictable. Just in an attempt to ensure there's no doubt in terms of what she's dealing with and that attempt to regain her choice or her choices and her ability to choose. So it's not actually controlling. So if you think of a pendulum, here we are over on one side of the pendulum. Ideally, the relationship's going to be in the middle, right? That's that's balance. Initially, we're going to have to go over to her side of the pendulum, right? In terms of giving more than what she might need if the relationship were stable. Sam was dead on. Our partners didn't wake up wanting to monitor our phones, to track us, to ask questions, to look at our emails. Or know where we are. They, you know, hypervigilance is a trauma response. It's not who they are. And people who feel safe really don't act in ways that make us feel like they're controlling. People are terrified, try to create that predictability.

SPEAKER_01 22:17

Yeah. I'm going

Addiction As A Trauma Response

SPEAKER_01 22:18

to ask a very spicy question, and I don't even know if we'll end up using it on this show. Isn't it also true that oftentimes the addiction itself is a trauma response?

SPEAKER_02 22:31

Aaron Powell When we are trying to tolerate intolerability, we're going to look for a way to soothe, or we call it using, whether it's pornography, whether it's massage parlors, infant uh affair partners, multiple, what have you. We're looking for a way to tolerate it. So in many ways, yes, it can be a trauma response because maybe we were introduced to pornography. Maybe, and this is a large part of my caseload, maybe we're a childhood sexual abuse survivor. I was taken advantage of at 11 years old. And it affected me in ways that I had no idea until I finally had somebody I trusted enough to unpack it. And when I was able to unpack it, I began to understand why I did the things that I did.

SPEAKER_00 23:16

So addiction always comes from some level of trauma. Now, the way Sam described his is that is one big T trauma, right? The thing is, if we're under the age of 12, our brains cannot discern between big T and little T. What I like to look at though is you can't if you can't identify anything that was big, okay. So what happened? Well, this is what we call compound or complex trauma. Complex meaning different things, compound meaning the same things piled up. So with that, we all have trauma drivers. And then Sam also alluded to things that kind of open us up. So I discovered porn at six, and it was not light, it was pretty graphic, right? So what that did was it's basically you take a six-year-old and you lay out a few lines of cocaine and say, sniff this, and that's what it does to a child's brain, because our brains are not ready for that. So why doesn't everybody who has seen porn early develop into this? Well, first of all, I was a very anxious kid. I suddenly felt, ah, all that dopamine release made me feel happy. It made me feel like literally happy. I know that not everybody who looks at porn now feels happy, and especially in addiction. Addiction isn't fun. People think sex addiction, oh wow, that sounds like fun. There's nothing fun about it. You're a slave. You're enslaved to it. Not everybody continues down that path. They may be given different ways to soothe their anxiety or their sadness or whatever they might be feeling. They might not, might have been a generally happy child and not gone down that route. Ultimately, it was the only route that I found, right? That made me feel okay. And so that built from there. And others will start looking at it, and then, you know, it not that often, but then it becomes more and more and more. So it creates a habit loop. Every addiction has a habit loop, not every habit loop is an addiction. So, you know, but it is about the soothing. So we have to find healthy ways to do that.

SPEAKER_02 25:30

And I would just throw one quick little caveat. For many of us, we're self-harming. Because there has been some extreme fragmentation in our childhood. We're acting out, and to the untrained eye, and to many betrayeds, they kind of think we're out here just gallivanting around having an awesome time, but in reality, we're self-harming because we have a brokenness about us that says, you know, I'm such a piece of crap anyway, I might as well go do piece of crap things.

SPEAKER_01 26:00

Right. It's often self-soothing and self-sabotage at the same time. Right. Thank you so much for unpacking how trauma is often really on both sides of a marriage in this situation, and with both people feeling

Your Inner Child Is Your Job

SPEAKER_01 26:22

those extreme trauma reactions. One thing I hear from the men in our community is my inner child doesn't feel safe with her. The inner child at the core of my addiction doesn't feel safe with my wife.

SPEAKER_02 26:39

Well, I think in in many ways, that from my perspective could be true, but it's my job to take care of my inner child. It is not my partner's job to reparent my inner child. It's my job to reparent my inner child. That is on me. As long as I put that in somebody else's hands, I make myself somewhat codependent. And I'm not trying to make that a label, but when I put the care of myself or my inner child in the hands of somebody else, now I've again put myself in the victim position, and it's always somebody else's fault. Somebody else is harming me. I had to realize for me, it was time for me, and I don't mean this in a derogatory way, but it was time for me to be an adult and to be a man and take ownership and responsibility for my own mental and emotional and spiritual health. I kept blaming other people, including my wife, instead of coming to the point where I had to say, I did this, I'm responsible for this, I need to fix it with the Lord and with the people that He's given me. I can't keep offloading my responsibility onto somebody else. Now, to protect my inner child, I had to understand that I was not a worthless waste of space. And I did have the right to have boundaries when my spouse would get upset, rage, or what have you. It was my job to be able to say, hold on, I think you're flooding or I think you're triggered, maybe we need a timeout. Or, hey, it doesn't help me when you call me names and you shame me. But if you want to tell me how you're feeling, I want to hear about that. If you want to tell me what's going on inside of you, I'm I'm all in. But raging at me or shaming me is not helping us or helping me. So let's find a way for me to hear about your feelings. And that's where third-party helps come help comes in, being able to find a process to do that. But I would tell you my inner child is my responsibility. James, I'm sure you have a whole lot more on that because we talk about that so often.

SPEAKER_00 28:48

We do. And this actually relates very strongly to that previous question about trauma, right? Our trauma is always in the room. And our trauma can be thought of as our inner our wounded inner child, our wounded inner teenager, and then coming up as a critical parent, that negative voice in our heads, and then we have to learn how to be the loving parent or reparenting, right? So what we have to be really careful of doing is not making our inner child the center of the room while our partner is actively experiencing her betrayal trauma. What we have to do though is in those moments, we have to put our partner's betrayal trauma first over our family of origin trauma because it is what is so present. That again, so one way we can do that is to say to our inner child, hey, I hear you. So I I dialoguing with inner child and inner teenager and critical parent is so important, right? Because that's how we connect. I hear you. And we I promise we will talk about that. And what I like to say is if you can help me here and divert your this painful energy, but divert it into positive energy, like listening, being able to stay present with my wife right now, then we can talk about this later and have a have a dialogue about it. That's obviously sounds really weird.

SPEAKER_01 30:17

No, I love it. We do it all the time at husband material.

SPEAKER_02 30:21

Well, it's interesting, right? The concept of the inner child is becoming more prolific, if you will, amongst recovery work. I didn't even know I had an inner child. That's a new concept for many people. And many people will go through conference after conference, intensive after intensive. They will work with all kinds of therapists, but until they come to the point where they understand something called regression, they don't really understand what's happening. Regression is when emotionally I leave my current adult place and I become like a child who feels passive, who feels choiceless, who feels out of control. When we lose the dignity of choice, we don't know what we're doing. When we feel choiceless, we're regressed. We are not in our adult self. You think about when a child is overwhelmed, what do they do? They shut down, they feel choiceless, they feel hopeless. So many men don't understand regression. And until they understand regression, they wonder why they keep getting angry, keep getting defensive, keep lashing out, keep shutting down. And then the betrayed female in this case is like, he doesn't love me, he doesn't want this, he's a narcissist, he's out of control. No, sometimes that might be true, but more often than that, they don't understand that they're regressing. So the betrayed female is talking to the inner child who's raging, or the inner teenager who's raging and out of control because the unfaithful doesn't know how to access their adult or stay in their adult. And until they learn that concept, so many people feel hopeless and they are just on the hamster wheel. And until that moment comes, and and just yesterday I had a moment explaining with a client about regression, and I had to talk with him about enmeshment. And this 65-year-old man, who is a strong, confident, successful, burly man, fell apart weeping because finally he began to understand what was happening. That is not to give myself props. I didn't come up with regression. I had to learn it both practically and then in my training. But this man was like, nobody's ever said that to me. This makes all the sense in the world. And he had this breakthrough moment that I'm hoping will be life-changing. When you find the right people, you find

Regression And The Timeout Skill

SPEAKER_02 32:42

the right process. He has done four intensives. He's been trying to process through recovery for four years, Drew. These are things that are absolutely vital for us to understand because when we can understand it, then breakthrough can come. I hope that makes sense because it's a it's a pivotal piece to recovery for unfaithful men.

SPEAKER_01 33:06

It's not the mature, healthy adult me who's being triggered. It's a much younger, more emotional, vulnerable me. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 33:17

You know, when we go into or regress into a child state, and it can be any age, it has to do with what trauma occurred and what's being triggered, but that's also going to trigger our partners. And so they can also go down their trig their trauma spiral and end up in their inner child. And then you have really two children on the playground arguing, right? So one of the ways to do that is when you recognize that you're regressing, is to say, I need to take a timeout, I need to put myself in timeout, right? And as John Lee, the author, says, go grow myself back up, and I will be back in 20 minutes. Be back in 19 minutes and 30 seconds so that you're not, you cannot be late because every time that you do this, then you're coming back, you're ready to listen, your partner's going to see that, and eventually that's they're gonna start feeling a bit safer because they can trust that you're gonna be back. There's that reliability piece, right? Initially, though, like we've found 10 to 13 times, they're gonna be really mad and maybe not want to talk. That's okay. You're doing what you need to do. But it's also to say, don't just do it because you can't tolerate anymore. Work on your on your level of tolerance, too. It's just when you completely get to a place where you're not hearing anything. And you have to say, I need to take this break because this is the most important thing to me, is to hear what hear you, to be to heal this relationship.

SPEAKER_01 34:47

In order to live out of that adult self, how can we be assertive without being selfish?

Assertive Boundaries Without Selfishness

SPEAKER_00 34:58

Assertiveness is hard because if we're in a place of shame, we will just try to just be the yes man, right? Okay, I'll do I'll do whatever, I'll do everything. The problem with that is we're not attending to ourselves, our inner selves, then we're going to create resentment. And that's when that inner teenager is going to puff up and come out and react strongly in ways that we do not want to act, because then we've spiraled down and we've lost control. And what is that inner teenager trying to do? I'm uncomfortable, I'm beyond uncomfortable, this is wrong, and push away. But also, interestingly, what we have found is that that inner teenager works to defend the inner child who's so wounded and can't defend himself. So, in a sense, the inner teenager is being assertive, but in an angry, divisive way. What if we can say thank you, inner teenager, for being there to defend, you know, little James, as it were, right? And can you use this energy to be assertive about what needs to happen? Because that's what is going to be more productive. And if that assertiveness surrounds the number one priority, which is healing the relationship. Within that, it's putting our partner first, right? Because anything other than first is last, not second, and swinging that pendulum over, then it's so much more acceptable to that inner teenager because we're not somehow devaluing ourselves. We're creating more value in ourselves because we're in union with the with our wives, with the goal of the relationship.

SPEAKER_02 36:58

And I learned this from Rick Reynolds, who was my first therapist and mentor, and then I worked for him for 15 years. And really, when you're doing this kind of work, there's three recoveries. There's the unfaithful's recovery, there's the betrayed's recovery, and then there's the recovery of the marriage. You're trying to do work on all three simultaneously. And at the end of the day, that's very hard to do, but it's very possible to do when you have the right people in process. Assertiveness is fantastic when the posture of our heart is an assertiveness that says, I can protect myself while I'm empathetic. I can have boundaries while I am kind. I can have compassion on myself while I participate in recovery. So many men fall prey to something, and I don't mean to step on toes, but this mentality can be very toxic, which is if mama's not happy, nobody's happy. Well, what does that teach me? That teaches me self-abandonment and self-neglect because I'm just trying to keep the woman happy. So where's my autonomy? Where is my confidence and my security? Typically, when we have a mentality of if mama's not happy, nobody's happy, we learn that from the mother wound. And in childhood, we are robbed of the ability to be our own individual. So we've been going through life, James and I call it sleepwalking or in survival mode, because we're just trying to keep the marriage going. And so we feel like we have to become needless and wantless in order to keep mama happy. And then we're trauma reenacting, we turn our wives into our moms. And so now we're on what we call the crazy cycle. And whenever we're on the crazy cycle, we're not being true to ourselves, we're actually not being true to the Lord because I don't really read anywhere in the Bible where the Bible says we're supposed to hate ourselves, deny ourselves, yes. But at the same token, if we are making ourselves a slave to just keep the marriage going, that's our problem. And we have to unpack what James said earlier, which is our family of origin work. Because in the middle of this, the true game-changing moment, and James taught me this, and we say it all the time in our podcast. When I have a mentality that says, How do I fix this? How do I fix this? How do I make the pain go away? How can I make this pain stop? That is a problematic approach. The game changes when I say, Who do I want to become? Who am I becoming? What kind of man do I want to be? And then I get help from sources that are secure, that are healthy, that are expert, that are serving the Lord, that their own recovery is in a good place. I say it this way, and I this is a controversial statement. Never see somebody who isn't seeing someone themselves. Okay. I have a supervisor, I have my own therapist, I have another therapist that trains me in different trauma modalities and makes sure that I'm not in burnout and that I'm not doing weird kooky stuff. And I'm learning. I've put myself in a posture to learn from them, right? I have more accountability than I've ever had in my life. God has seen fit to know how stupid I can be. So he has been gracious to provide people in my life. James is one of my closest friends. I love him, but I listen to him. And there's oftentimes I will sit with him and say, hey, I need you to get your take on this. Where am I missing it? Am I missing it? I have to invite other people in my life who are smarter, who are wiser, who I can trust to help me see my blind spots. And if I had done that 25 years ago, more than likely I wouldn't have made the mistakes that I've made. Make yourself a student of recovery. When you're a student, nobody makes you study, makes you prepare for tests, makes you read your books, makes you go to class, you make yourself a student. I guarantee you, for those of you that are watching and listening, if you make yourself a student of recovery, a student of addiction, a student of betrayal trauma, you will experience personal transformation. But nobody

Become A Student Of Recovery

SPEAKER_02 41:18

can do it for you. You have to decide to do it.

SPEAKER_01 41:22

Amen. And if you all want to continue learning from James and Sam, go down to the link in the show notes. And you can check out the Ask the Unfaithful podcast as well as to get in touch with them. Guys, thank you so much for this wealth of wisdom. What is your favorite thing about healing?

SPEAKER_02 41:41

The favorite thing for me about healing is I'll use yesterday as an example. This gentleman has invited me into his life to pursue

What Healing Makes Possible

SPEAKER_02 41:52

transformation. When I get to sit with men and women who are trying to find some form of a light to follow, I am not the light. I am a representative, I am an ambassador of the light that God gave me. And there's a meme that I saw not too long ago, and it said something to the effect of, I love the people that have come out of darkness with a flame in their hand, willing to lead me into the light. And so there's such a humility. Every day before my sessions, I spend a pretty good amount of time praying, saying, Lord, I'm not the answer, but I know who the answer is. So help me to be who these people need me to be, because I know what I needed 20-some odd years ago. And God saw fit. If He can, if, if He can be as gracious as He can to the biggest screw up that I know, I'm pretty confident that He's going to show Himself to you as well. So that's when I pivot to James and say, James, you have a passion for what you do. One of my greatest joys is walking with you. What's kind of your secret sauce, if you will?

SPEAKER_00 43:03

Well, I am one of those, and I am so grateful to have you in my life. And the word inspire, because I feel like what we do is inspired, comes from the Latin inspiritus, which means to the spirit comes in. So whatever brilliance I have is certainly not mine to take credit for. My very, very favorite thing about healing is being able to delight in my relationship with Sharon. It's so beautiful, and I never thought I could love the way I can love now and receive love the way that I can receive love now.

SPEAKER_01 43:42

Amen. That's what this is ultimately about. And that's why I always end each episode saying the same words. Always remember you are God's beloved son, and you, he is well pleased.