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124 | 5 Lies I Told Myself to Stay in the Affair (and truths that set me free) · Intimacy After Infidelity | Cut Contact, Rebuild Trust, Shed Shame, Avoid Divorce, Forgiveness for Adultery

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Friend, what if the biggest obstacle to your freedom was not actually him? What if it was the story that you were telling yourself about why you couldn't leave him? Here's what I know from living it out and from coaching a lot of women through it.
The affair does not survive on feelings.
It survives on lies, carefully constructed, completely convincing, totally logical-sounding lies that your brain served up on repeat so you could keep going and still sleep at night.
Okay, so today I'm naming five of these lies, and I'm gonna tell you the truth that broke each one, because that is where freedom actually starts Hey friend, before we go there, I want to tell you about a room that I walked into in 2022.
This was a business retreat.
It was not affair specific.
It was not a therapy group.
It was a room of women who gathered for something else entirely, network marketing business.
And I walked in carrying what I had been carrying alone for years, the whole truth of my story tucked so far down I had almost convinced myself that it wasn't there anymore.
But I could feel it bubbling up.
I was going to say something at this retreat, I knew it.
And sure enough, something happened in that room that I was not prepared for.
Safe women asked real questions, and for the first time, the very first time, I spoke my truth out loud.
The whole truth, that I had been struggling in an affair.
It was not a cleaned up, sanitized version.
It was not just the edited highlights.
It was the real story.
And guess what? These women did not recoil.
They didn't gasp.
They didn't drop their gaze.
They didn't look at me any differently.
They held me in the love of Jesus.
And I realized in that moment, this is what I had been starving for.
Not solutions, not a program, but a room, a safe room where the truth could come out and not implode my life.
And friend, that is the space that I'm creating.
And specifically, I'm doing the best that I absolutely can in our free Facebook community.
A safe space where you can come as you are, carry what you're carrying, and find women who get it.
Women who are happy to sit with you, empathize with you, pray with you, encourage you.
You will find women who won't flinch at your story because they have their own version of it.
Friend, the link to join is in the show notes.
Come join us and find your safe room too Okay, so I wanna start with something today that might feel a little uncomfortable, and I'm gonna ask you to stay with me through it.
Okay, hear me out.
The affair did not just happen to you.
At some point, you chose to stay in it.
And in order to do that, in order to keep going back, to keep the secret, to keep the double life going, your brain had to build a case of evidence and a really convincing case, one that you could return to every time your conscience came knocking.
These are the lies that I told myself and some lies that I have coached other women through, and I would guess these are the lies that you have thought as well.
I am not sharing these to shame you, but I am sharing them because naming the lie is the first crack in its power, and you cannot be free from something that you have not been willing to look at clearly.
So let's start by taking a look.
Number one, the lie: I have control.
I can stop when I really need to.
I'm managing this a-okay This was one of my most persistent lies, and on the surface, I felt responsible, mature.
I'm not out of control.
I know what I'm doing.
I could definitely stop this if I needed to, but I just don't need to yet.
Here's the problem.
I couldn't actually do that, not when I needed to, not when I wanted to, and not when I prayed about it, and not when I promised myself about it, and not when I made the decision at nine AM and broke my promise by ten PM.
Here's the truth that broke through this one for me.
Sin is never something you can control or manage.
That's not how it works.
That is not how sin is, is made to work.
The moment you are convinced that you have control over something that is actively pulling you under, that right there is the lie doing its job.
Romans seven nineteen, Paul says it really plainly for us.
Paul says, "For I don't do the good that I want to do, but the evil I don't wanna do, this is the thing I keep doing."
The most spiritually mature man in the New Testament said, "I cannot stop myself," and I thought that I was managing it okay.
The lie of control kept me stuck in this far longer than I care to admit because as long as I believed I was in charge, I didn't need to ask for help.
I didn't need to tell anyone.
I didn't need God to intervene because I had it handled.
Friend, I did not have it handled, and if you're the woman who's been telling yourself, "I'll stop when I really need to," I wanna ask you, when is that moment going to come? Because the need has been real for a while, if you're being honest, and yet you're still here.
The truth is this.
You don't need more willpower.
You need a way out.
You need a way of escape and deliverance that doesn't depend on you.
Number two, I am not hurting anyone because my husband gets his needs met in other ways, and so what I'm doing, it's not hurting anybody.
This one did a lot of work for me because on the surface, I could almost make it math.
My husband was fine.
He didn't know.
Nobody knew.
So where was the harm? Here's what I couldn't see at the time.
I'm gonna be really blunt with you here.
I was hurting myself, not in just like an abstract, spiritual, future consequence kind of way, in a real, present, cellular kind of way.
Every day I lived the double life, I was fracturing my own integrity.
I was training my nervous system to live in this hypervigilance and secrecy.
I was slowly, invisibly dismantling the woman that I wanted to be, or at least the person I said I wanted to be, and I couldn't even see what was happening because I was so busy managing the lie.
Remember lie number one? I'm really good at managing.
And so I couldn't even see that the harm was happening to me, let alone the people around me.
And the harm wasn't only relational, it was internal.
The woman on the other side of this, the woman that you are becoming in a few months, in a few years, she feels every single bit of this, even when you thought you were protecting everybody around you.
I also wanna say something about this piece of, like, his needs are getting met in other ways, because this is a rationalization that, that sounds noble.
I'm sacrificing.
I'm managing things.
He's okay.
Friend, your husband is not okay, and if I s-- Can, can I say this with all love? You are also not okay.
The compartmentalization required to believe otherwise is its own kind of wound.
The more that you are continuing to separate different compartments in your life, that is also wounding and hurting yourself.
First Corinthians six eighteen says to flee sexual immorality, and then it says, "All other sins that a person commits are outside of the body, but whoever sins sexually sins against their own body."
So friend, if you're still stuck in this, you are hurting someone, and that someone is you, and friend, you deserve better than that.
Okay, lie number three that I believed: I know that God ultimately forgives, so I'll deal with this later Now, this one does have a grain of truth in it, which is exactly why it's so dangerous.
1 John 1:9, "If we confess our sins, He's faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."
Thank the Lord.
There's no time word in that verse.
And so I told myself, "Well, what's the difference if I confess my sin today or if I confess my sin next week or next month?" Yes, God forgives completely, radically, graciously.
I believe that with everything in me, and I have built my entire coaching practice on the reality of that grace.
And Paul anticipated this exact lie.
Go back a couple...
Or go back a couple books back to Romans.
Romans chapter 6, Paul writes, "Shall we go on sinning so that grace may abound? By no means!" And there's an exclamation point there.
The theological term for this is antinomianism.
You can look that up in the dictionary.
It's using grace as a license to continue to sin, and Paul shuts it down immediately.
Not because grace isn't real, but because a genuine encounter with grace doesn't leave you wanting to stay in the thing that required the grace.
We have got to get back to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and what Jesus did on the cross for our sin.
Here's what I know now that I didn't know then.
Dealing with it later is a way of never dealing with it, because tomorrow becomes next week, becomes next month, becomes next year, and then it becomes, "I'll take it to my grave."
The secret has a way of becoming load-bearing.
You start to believe that the whole structure of your life would collapse if that secret ever got out.
And friend, trust me when I say the longer you wait, the heavier it gets.
I thought that I was buying myself some time, but in reality I was buying myself more pain.
The truth is, the longer you use grace as a reason to delay, the further away freedom will always feel.
God's grace is not a payment plan.
God's grace is an invitation to come home now, today.
All right, lie number four.
I'm going to end it soon, and I'm going to take the secret to my grave.
No one ever has to know.
And I held this secret for a very long time.
No one will ever know.
Sounds like a plan.
Sounds like protection.
And I said that in many different ways.
I'm protecting my marriage.
I'm protecting my family.
I'm protecting my husband.
I'm protecting my reputation.
I'm protecting my entire life.
But here's the thing about God that I find both terrifying and wonderful.
God has quite the sense of humor because I walked into a room in 2022 with the full intention of taking this secret to my grave.
I had carried it for years, and I was committed to my plan, and then I opened my mouth in a very safe space, not because I had prepared a speech and planned this, and let me also say, not because anyone pushed me or pulled it out of me.
But when you are finally in a room that is truly safe, when the women around you are genuinely trustworthy and the presence of God is real, and the weight of the secret has become far heavier than the fear of being known, something shifts inside of you.
And once my story came out that weekend, I have never shied away from telling it again.
Not once.
This podcast exists because I could not stop telling it.
I said, "God, this is your story.
God, you have a message that needs to get out to the world.
I'm happy to be that mouthpiece," even with this podcast mic.
James 5:16 actually says, "Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed."
Notice it doesn't say, "Confess and be forgiven."
Remember, that was the 1 John 1:9.
But this verse says, "Confess and be healed."
Healing is in the telling.
Freedom is on the other side of the secret.
And no one, not you, not me, not any woman listening, was designed to carry the weight of a secret that slowly swallows you whole No one will ever know is not a plan for gaining your freedom.
It's a plan for a very small and exhausting and miserable life Lie number five.
If I end this affair, he's gonna fall apart.
He might hurt himself, and I cannot bear to be the one to do that to him.
Friend, this one is super tender, so I'm gonna be really careful how I say this.
Because for me, this lie did not come from a bad place.
I, I really do think that it came from a, a real place.
Uh, this guy that I was entangled with had some pretty bad habits, and so I genuinely was afraid for his life if I broke his heart to that extent.
My fear for his wellbeing was real.
I cared about him as another human being, even if it was misplaced.
Yes, the affair was wrong, all those things, but I still cared about him as a human being and his life, and so I don't wanna dismiss that for you.
You have a great heart.
You care about him as a person.
But I also need you to understand this.
It's really important.
You are not responsible for his emotional regulation.
You are not responsible for his next choice.
You are not his higher power, and you cannot be the reason you stay in something that God's calling you out of.
A- and you cannot use this excuse of, "Well, what is he gonna do?" When God is clearly calling you out of this affair.
And this lie, ugh, does something particularly cruel.
It disguises this feeling of obligation as love.
It makes staying feel noble.
"Well, I, I'm protecting him.
I love him.
I care about his wellbeing.
I can't abandon him."
But what it's actually doing is keeping you trapped by a fear that was designed to keep you where you are.
May I remind you, our greatest enemy in this world, his nickname is the Father of Lies.
So that's why I am speaking out today about this lie that was designed to keep you stuck, this lie that was designed to keep you in sin and not in alignment with God's will for your life.
So here's the truth I had to sit with.
Number one, I verbally said out my window one day, "I'm making peace with the fact that I won't know the end of his story."
I care about him greatly, but I will not know the end of his story, and I'm gonna make peace with that Number two truth that I sat with, I can't control what he does next.
I can control what I do next.
And staying in relationship with him in order to manage his potential response, that was not true love.
It was fear.
Fear is a terrible reason to stay in something that's costing you your integrity, your peace, and your healing.
The praise report, by the way, he was okay, and as far as I know, he was fine.
He is fine.
The, the catastrophe, the worst case scenario I imagined, it didn't come to pass, and it rarely does.
So friend, even if you have a story similar to this, maybe it does have a, a sad or bad ending, friend, it is not your fault.
His choices belong to him, and your choices belong to you.
Okay, I also have a bonus lie here.
And when I was preparing this episode, it was this thought of, "Okay, I know this affair is wrong, but," blah, blah, blah, fill in the blank.
And I almost didn't include this because it's not a lie that you tell yourself once.
It's actually this like sentence structure.
It's a pattern that gets repeated.
Whew, and it's a, it's a tough one because when you say, "I know this is wrong, but," it's actually the moment that your conscience is speaking, and it's immediately followed by your, your logical thinking brain overriding it.
Because your brain's job is to keep you safe and comfortable and to give you more of what you want.
And so if your brain has associated this guy with safety, and he's what I want, he's what's familiar and, and safe for me, then of course your brain is gonna keep feeding you that, but your conscience started that sentence with, "I know this is wrong."
So when you say, "I know this is wrong, but he really understands me.
I know this is wrong, but my marriage is already broken.
I know this is wrong, but I've never felt this alive before," everything before the but is true.
Everything after the but is a lie that cancels out that first part.
So here's the truth.
There is no but The moment you say, "I know this is wrong," that is Holy Spirit.
That is your conscience, the part of you that knows what's true.
And when you add that little word but, you are choosing to override the part of you that's trying to bring you back home to your Father.
So what would happen if the next time you heard yourself say, "I know this is wrong," what if you stopped? What if you put a period at the end of that sentence? I know this is wrong, full stop.
That sentence is a complete sentence, by the way.
Even if it feels unfinished or unqualified or undefended, that is the beginning of your freedom Okay, as we close, I want you to recognize these lies are not an invitation to pile shame on yourself.
Friend, I love you so deeply.
The reason I did this episode is so that you have an invitation towards compassion.
You weren't telling yourself these lies because you wanted to be sinful and you wanted to experiment with evil.
You were telling yourself these lies because you're human.
And if I had to guess, you are hurting really deeply and you're trying to survive something that you might not know how to get out of.
These lies all made sense to me at the time, but they still weren't true.
And the truth, even when it's hard, is the only thing that will actually set you free.
So here's what I want you to do today.
If you're up for a little invitation, I would love for you to write down on paper one lie that you have told yourself.
You don't have to share it with anyone.
You don't have to do anything with it right now.
The invitation is just to name it, to put it on paper, let it exist outside of you.
Let me tell you, the lie has less power when it's written down outside of your body compared to when it's living rent-free in your head.
That's where freedom starts is just by naming what's been going on in your mind.
And friend, if you would like a safe space to keep going, a community of women who are naming their lies and walking towards truth, that is what our Facebook community is all about.
And that community is free and waiting for you to join us.
The link is in the show notes.
Come find your people.
Can I pray for you? God, would you give my sister the courage to look at her lies clearly? God, open her mind to see them and the courage to name them.
And Father, give her compassion to see herself with kindness as this comes up.
God, would you bring joy to the places where shame used to live? And would you bless every brave step that she takes towards the truth that will set her free? In Jesus' name, amen.