Latest / Intimacy After Infidelity | Cut Contact, Rebuild Trust, Shed Shame, Avoid Divorce, Forgiveness for Adultery / 121 | Ask Me Anything: The Raw, Real Truths About Healing After Infidelity I’ve Never Said Out Loud

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121 | Ask Me Anything: The Raw, Real Truths About Healing After Infidelity I’ve Never Said Out Loud · Intimacy After Infidelity | Cut Contact, Rebuild Trust, Shed Shame, Avoid Divorce, Forgiveness for Adultery

Hello, friend.
0:02
I'm so glad you're here.
Today is all about questions, because what if someone just asked you the real questions? You know, not like, "How are you doing?" when they don't really want to know, and not the surface version of your story.
But I mean the questions that get underneath, the ones about your identity, your darkest nights, your biggest fears, your doubts, your body, your God.
So today, I want to turn the tables a little bit and answer some of those questions for you about myself.
These are questions that I wished someone had asked me when I was early on in my affair recovery.
The ones that would have made me feel a little less alone, a little more seen, a little less ashamed, and a little more convinced that healing was actually possible for a woman like me.
So pull up a chair, grab your cup of coffee or tea, wherever you're at.
This one gets personal today.
Okay, friend, before we go anywhere, I have to stop and be here for just a second.
Cue the confetti because this podcast recently hit 50,000 downloads.
50,000.
Friends, I started this show because I couldn't find a single podcast that talked about this, about healing after infidelity as the woman who had had the affair from a place of faith, without shame, and with practical tools for your whole being.
So I started this podcast because I needed it, and it didn't exist then.
And now 50,000 downloads later, phew, I, I don't take that lightly.
Every single listen represents a real woman in a real moment reaching for something better, and that is not lost on me.
So from the bottom of my heart, friend, this is a genuine thank you for being here.
Whether this is your very first episode and you're just tuning in, or whether you have binged them all, and you know every episode thank you for being here.
And I wanna do something really special to celebrate with you.
I would love to give away two free coaching sessions, one hour one-on-one with me, no strings attached, no pressure.
Literally just me sitting with you and coaching you on your very next step.
Let's encourage you, give you hope, pray together, and help you feel like you know how to take the next right step for you.
And so how I'm gonna ask you to do this is to leave a review on Apple Podcasts for, for this podcast, an honest review with your thoughts.
How has this helped you? How has this met you in a moment that you needed it the most? So leave a review, screenshot it, and DM me a screenshot on Instagram or Facebook, send me an email, whatever's easiest for you.
But that is it.
Leave a review, get entered to win a free coaching call, and I will reach out to you personally on Monday if you have won.
Your review helps more women to find this show, women who are in their darkest moments right now, and women who don't know that this community exists yet.
So dear friend, you're not just entering a giveaway, but you are potentially changing someone else's life as well.
So thank you.
Thank you for being here.
Praise the Lord that His message is going out, and I'm so excited for the next 50,000.
Okay, so let's get into today's episode.
I wanna tell you something about where I was when I needed Rooted in Joy.
I remember sitting at my kitchen table with the Bible open in front of me, and I remember saying out loud to God, almost like a dare, "Okay, God, I feel like a completely different person now."
I had confessed the affair to my husband.
I had just finished my master's degree.
did not have a job at that moment.
So many things had been stripped away.
I was a completely different person.
And so, "God, who am I now? And would you show me? I believe it's in the Bible, but would you show me, who am I?" The degree was gone.
The affair was over.
There was no job consuming my time.
It was like everything that I had used to define myself was suddenly gone, and I was sitting there in the quiet, genuinely not knowing who I was at that moment, and it was really lonely.
And the loneliest part was that I had no one to process that with who understood.
I was showing up to coaching groups that weren't affair specific, and I was trying my best to apply those lessons kinda sideways into my story, and they were helping.
Those coaches were amazing.
They kept me at the feet of Jesus.
Those were some valuable lessons that I learned in that season.
So I really was showing up intentionally, putting forth my best effort.
But it's still true that I was- Showing up in rooms where no one else had walked where I had walked.
No one else had a shared experience with me.
And friend, that's the gap that Rooted in Joy was built to fill.
I built this six-month healing journey in partnership with God for women like you and me who are rebuilding after infidelity.
This is a room full of women who get it, who have walked in your shoes.
Women who won't flinch at your story, and who are still walking the same path as you towards freedom, towards peace, and towards joy.
So may be you're sitting at your own kitchen table right now, and you're wondering who you are.
Friend, would you send me a DM on Instagram, on Facebook, through email? Contact me, and let's just see if coaching or the community would be the next right step for you.
So today, as promised, I'm not gonna be teaching a framework today.
It's gonna feel a little bit different.
I'm not walking you through three steps on how to do something.
I just wanna answer some questions.
The questions that I wished someone had sat down across from me and asked me during my recovery.
The questions that would have made me feel seen and known and a little bit less alone on the journey.
And so I want you, friend, to feel like you are the one asking them.
Like we're sitting across from each other at a coffee shop, and you finally have permission to ask me all of the things that you've been wondering.
So here's a couple questions.
Number one, Christina, how did you rebuild your identity after the affair? I remember this exact moment when that question became real for me.
I mentioned this a minute ago when I was sitting at my kitchen table, and I asked God, "Who am I now?" Because, like I said, I had nothing else in front of me.
So here's what I learned after asking that question.
Here's what I learned about identity and rebuilding it.
Unfortunately, it's not a lightning bolt moment.
But instead, what I found was it was the daily practice of choosing to believe what's true about yourself.
Choosing to believe it before you feel it.
That's why I want you to understand I was sitting there with my Bible open because I knew that capital T truth Was going to come from what God said in his revealed word.
Friend, the hardest lies that I had to battle were the ones that felt most logical.
You are what you did.
You will always be the woman who had an affair.
You know, good things like abundance are for other women.
You deserve punishment.
Whew, and those lies were persuasive because they had evidence.
I couldn't argue them away just with willpower.
And so what began to shift those lies was scripture.
Not in a cliche or, like, check it off the list kind of way, but sitting inside a passage, even a familiar one like Psalm 23, and just letting it speak over me.
I also let myself journal super honestly, raw and honest, even when the tears hit the page as the words did.
And slowly, one day at a time, I was adding grains of rice to this balancing scale.
And what I was doing was acting in accordance with who I knew I was.
So every time I had an action that matched, "This is who I really am.
I'm doing it.
I'm showing up as her.
This is who God says I am, and I believe that this is who I am," I would metaphorically move a grain of rice from one side of the scale to the other.
And I believed it, until eventually the feelings came as well.
So friend, if you are questioning, "Who am I?" Identity doesn't come back all at once, but it comes back with one kept promise, one honest prayer, and one courageous step at a time.
Those make the difference.
Okay.
Question number two, "Christina, that sounds great, but what spiritual practices actually helped? You know, not just the obvious ones like read your Bible and pray."
Okay.
Yes, I hear you.
Those do matter, really.
I mean, I just talked about reading the Bible and praying and journaling.
But there was more intentionality that helped to move the needle for me in those hidden, quiet days of healing.
So first, I stopped rushing through scripture.
I had been a checklist Bible reader for many years.
You know, read the Bible passage, check the box, move on, feel good about it.
But in this season, I stopped doing that, and I started sitting inside of passages for longer periods of times.
Sometimes it was the same couple verses for a whole week.
And I just sat, and I asked God what He wanted to say to me today through those specific words.
I mentioned Psalm twenty-three, and also Psalm forty became really personal.
Psalm forty, a part of it says, "He lifted me out of the pit, out of the mud and mire.
He set my feet on solid ground."
I read that and I thought, "Huh, that's not just a metaphor anymore.
That's literally my life.
He pulled me out."
And similarly, Psalm one hundred sixteen, that says, "The cords of death entangled me.
I was overcome by distress and sorrow.
Then I called on the name of the Lord."
That verse felt like it was written in my own handwriting.
The cords of death were around me, but I called on the name of the Lord, and He delivered me.
He saved me.
And so, yes, read your Bible, but can you slow it down a little bit? Can you be a little bit more intentional? Can you begin to see yourself in those pages of scripture? And again, Psalms, the whole book of Psalms was really, really, really good for me in that season when I was really hurting.
Besides scripture, I mentioned this, I journaled honestly, not like I had done in the past, like devotionally.
You know, I'd write down the verse and write my thought about it.
It, it wasn't pretty anymore.
I remember times I would write in my journal, "God, I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, but..."
And I practiced intentionally and respectfully speaking things out that I didn't know I was allowed to say.
Things like, "God, I don't know what to do about my marriage," or, "God, I kind of miss this guy today."
And you know, things that I was so ashamed to say publicly, but I practiced being that honest with God.
I chose to believe that God was bigger than my emotions, and He was more powerful than the thoughts I was having.
And so because I believed that, I could bring God my honesty, and He could sit with me in it.
It was so safe.
So I was getting these thoughts and these feelings out of my head, out of my body, onto the page of paper where I was journaling, and then I started to understand what was happening inside of me.
Okay, the other thing that really moved the needle for me, a couple things that go together, were counseling and coaching, and then also visualizations.
So with counseling, I had a bad habit of waiting for my counselor to ask me the right question at the right time, and if she didn't ask that question, I wasn't gonna volunteer the information.
But during this season, I said, "Christina, there are some things that you need to honestly bring up in counseling.
Whether or not she asks the question, you need to choose to bring it up because that is what the Spirit's impressing on your heart."
And so I started to bring up the real stuff and the really hard stuff, and I decided to use that hour very intentionally for what I needed.
And so what came out of some of those sessions were visualizations.
I let myself imagine sitting with Jesus at the beach, and I let myself imagine meeting different parts of me that were really hurting.
But as I met those parts, I could sit with them with love.
And so suddenly, I tapped into this creative side of me I never knew that I had, and my imagination became a place of healing rather than a place of shame.
And this is something I now do with the women that I coach because your imagination surrendered to Holy Spirit is a powerful healing tool.
So if you're curious about what that looks like, send me a message.
I'm happy to send you one that I've recorded just so you can get a taste of what that might feel like for you.
Okay, question three: What did safe community look like? So, okay, Christina, you're doing all this individual work at home, you know, one-on-one with your counselor, but Christina, you talk a lot about community.
So how did you find it, and what did it look like? Good question.
This one is so important because I think women expect safe community to just appear when they decide that they need it.
And in my experience, finding this safe community required something from me first.
Like I said, I was in coaching groups.
They weren't affair specific.
Nobody in those rooms shared my story, but I showed up anyway, and I applied every lesson to my healing as best I could.
But what these groups required of me was that I let myself be seen.
You know, not that I came to these rooms with every detail of my life story, but I let myself be seen, and that was enough.
Then as I was showing up in these rooms, then God started bringing other people to me.
First, it was a marriage program that I was attending at a local church.
In that room, I met a woman who had been where I had been.
She had walked out of the same kind of shame and into freedom.
And at first, I could not believe that she was standing in front of me leading this marriage program at the church.
For me, she became one of the first people that embodied hope.
She showed me that a future of joy and healing was actually possible.
And then I met a friend whose husband had been unfaithful to her.
Different sides of the same wound.
And when I told her my story, she was actually inspired and not repelled like I thought she would be.
She was inspired because she saw what God had done in me and what was possible also for her marriage.
So there are many more stories I could share, but every single one of those connections required me to show up first and be willing to be seen to some extent, and then God brought the right people, but I had to be faithful to do my part as well.
And so that's what I wanna tell women today.
You don't have to announce your story to the world.
I'm not saying that you have to get a podcast mic and start a coaching business.
But you do have to at least let one person in, whether that's me, someone in our community here, someone at your local church, one person, because shame cannot survive when your story is shared out loud in a safe space.
Shame cannot survive.
And so, friend, I implore you to find one person that you can share honestly with.
Okay.
Question number four.
Christina, all this is great.
I'm in community.
I'm sharing my story.
Things seem to be going well, but what in the world is up with this temptation to relapse? Does it actually get better ever? I know that I have not talked much about this publicly, and I wanna be honest with you about why, and I wanna practice being honest with you about the truth.
I haven't talked a lot about temptation and relapse because honestly, I want to give you hope.
I want you to know that the intensity of the affair does decrease.
The pull to go back to this guy does get smaller with time.
If no contact is your goal, I do promise that each day of no contact is, again, like a grain of rice that's being moved on this scale.
You are healing.
You are rebuilding trust.
And I know what it's like for the longing and the desire to decrease.
But then I realized, because I'm giving you so much hope and I'm not talking about this very much, I don't want you to think that I'm some untouchable version of a healed woman who's never had another thought or desire or temptation.
Because the truth is, every day is its own opportunity for me to walk in integrity and choose joy where I'm at.
Not because I'm white-knuckling it, but because I have built a life and an identity and a relationship with God that I genuinely don't want to trade.
My desire has changed by God's grace, and my why for living in integrity, my why is a louder than that pull to go back to where I was.
So I wanna be real with you.
Healing is not the absence of temptation.
Healing is the presence of something stronger.
There are still moments, there are still days, and on those days, I come back to who I am.
I come back to those grains of rice that I have been stacking every single day.
I come back to my friends, my accountability partners.
I use the, the tools that I have learned and that I coach with These tools that help me to be with myself.
I'm not gonna shame that feeling.
I am not going to criticize or condemn a passing thought.
But I remind myself of every good thing that I've chosen, every promise that I have kept, every morning that I have woken up and chosen differently.
And when I remind myself of what I am choosing and where I've come from and where I'm going, then God gives me the strength to choose again today.
And friend, that's freedom.
Freedom is not never being tempted.
Freedom is choosing clearly and confidently who you want to be, even when the other options still exist.
So friend, from my heart to yours, I promise it gets better.
I promise that one day you'll realize that your scale has tipped, has tipped towards healing and towards self-confidence and trust.
And you'll see the temptation or the pull, but it barely registers as anything that would rock you.
Okay, and question number five.
What does freedom actually look like now? I just mentioned this idea of freedom.
And, you know, I used to think that healing and freedom was like a finish line.
Like, one day I'm gonna get there.
I'm gonna cross into it and everything would be different.
And I would just know that I had arrived.
Well, friend, it's not actually like that.
As I've been on this healing journey for the last several years, freedom crept in rather quietly.
And here's how I knew that.
Because it looked like laughing again, really laughing without guilt.
And freedom looked like dreaming with God about my future instead of just surviving the present.
Freedom looked like sitting in my identity as a mom and a coach and a friend and feeling like those things actually belonged to me.
I was worthy of holding these spaces with joy and happiness.
And, you know, freedom looked a lot like Proverbs thirty-one, twenty-five becoming true in my body, not just a picture in my bedroom, where it says she is clothed with strength and dignity, and she laughs without fear of the future.
Friend, at the very beginning, I was not laughing.
I absolutely did not have a picture of my future.
But as I healed my thoughts, my body, my emotions, my soul, I started loving myself for the first time.
I started feeling safe with myself.
I started trusting myself, and then I could start dreaming again.
I often talk about that prayer, "God, would you just give me my dignity back?" And you know what? One day I looked up and I said, "Yeah, I'm living out of my dignity again."
So freedom is not a destination that you arrive at, but it's the woman that you become one day, one choice at a time.
And friend, I want that for you, and I genuinely believe that it's possible for you.
Not a version of my story that's copied onto yours, but it's your story.
You have been redeemed, you have been reclaimed, and you are now fully alive.
The question is not whether or not it's possible.
The question is, how do you actually get there? How can you do the identity work, the body work, the soul care in a way that actually transforms your life? And that's where I come in.
So friend, if something in this episode has landed for you, if one of these questions sparked something, or if one of my answers gave you hope or just, you know, touched something that was tender, I would love to hear from you.
And don't forget, like I mentioned, if you haven't yet left a review on Apple Podcasts, now is the time.
Leave a review, grab a screenshot, send it to me, and you will be entered to win a free coaching call with me.
Your review helps other women, maybe in her worst moment right now, and it helps her find this show.
Friend, that matters so much.
I love you.
Keep going.
You are not alone.
Father, would you give my sister courage for today and a joy that runs deeper than her circumstances? God, would you bless every brave step that she takes and remind her that you have been writing her story all along, and it is a beautiful one.
In Jesus' name, amen.