Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Monday, March 8, our host if the President of FamilyLife, Dennis Rainey, and I’m Bob Lepine. We offer help today for the many women who are finding themselves on the same path that Meg Wilson found herself on years ago.
And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us.
I was thinking back to last fall when all of the news was reporting on the Swine Flu and the vaccinations that were coming out and the fact that people needed to be on the alert because of the spread of the Swine Flu. I was thinking, I am not sure how many people have to get sick with something before we say we have an epidemic going on. But the issue we are going to be talking about today is maybe the hidden spiritual epidemicmaybe it's a pandemic as opposed to an epidemic. It is under the waterline in marriages and relationships all around the country, and it's got to be addressed.
Dennis: And interestingly, Bob, what we are about to talk about is typically thought of as being a male problem. But that is changing. We might just say that at the outset, just by way of a disclaimer, if there are young listeners we are going to be talking about a matter today that perhaps it would be wise for you as a parent to remove little ears from listening. We're going to be talking about the subject of sexual addiction. With us to do that is the author of a new book, Hope After Betrayal, Meg Wilson. Meg, welcome to FamilyLife Today.
Meg: Thank you, Dennis.
Dennis: Meg is a writer. She has been married for 27 years, has two adult children and lives in suburban Portland, Oregon. We appreciate you making the journey down here to Arkansas. It is in the United States, Meg. You were probably wondering if you were going to a foreign country leaving the Northwest.
Meg: Yes, there were moments.
Dennis: I appreciate you coming down. This really is as story of not just one storm cloud rolling into your marriage but two major hurricanes that really hit you within a short period of time all more than a decade ago in your marriage, right?
Meg: Yes. Correct.
Dennis: Tell us what happened.
Meg: Well, I would describe them more of earthquakes because there were fault lines that were in my marriage that we both brought to the marriage. So they were unseen, but there were things underneath that caused the storms, as you said, to come about. And, let me just kind of paint a picture. We had been married 17 years, had two beautiful daughters, and we lived in the American Dreammiddle class home, the car, no white picket fence.
Dennis: You went to church.
Meg: We went to church.
Dennis: You would have been known as upstanding, upright couple in the community. Everything was going okay.
Meg: Yes. My husband was actually moderator at church and a successful salesman. From the outside everything worked really good and I worked really hard to keep it looking very good. Then we received a call from good friends of ours who had moved out of the state. The husband called and told us that he was stepping down as a deacon of his own church because of Internet pornography and it was the first I had ever heard of it. I was shocked. I knew this man, and I knew he was a wonderful husband, and a wonderful father, and it just blew me away.
Dennis: Why did he call you?
Meg: Because we’re good friends. You know, that's a good question. I should go back and ask him if he had seen signs in my husband. I just thought of that as you asked that question. But for my husband, it was time for him to realize that he also had that issue and he needed to come clean, and that it really was a problem.
Bob: So did that phone call that you got that night from a friend, did that trigger something that took place in your own marriage that day, a week later, what was it?
Meg: It was about a month later. He came back from a business trip and I'm assuming he had been on some site or something while he was away and he came home and he confessed to me that when he traveled that this was an issue and it was devastating. For me it came out of the blue because of all those things that we said. Every part of his other part of his life was squeaky clean. I mean, our accountant would say, “Your husband is as honest as the day is long,” so it was very shocking. Some women have an indication and they kind of know, but for me it really was out of the blue.
Dennis: He just came home from a trip and had evidently been on a porn site and felt the need to come clean. How did he share that with you? Did he say, “After the kids are in bed we need to go back here and have a conversation? What happened?”
Meg: Yes. We were alone. It was in the evening when he sat me down. You know the Holy Spirit is powerful and the weight of conviction, I'm sure, had been on him all the way home. He's coming home to his wife who prays for him and loves him. Here your two girls look up to you and meet you at the door. That's pretty weighty.
And I think having a friend who had the courage to confess was the impetus for him be able to come to me at that point, and so unfortunately he did what so many do. He did a guarded confession. He told me 90% of the information. I believe he sincerely wanted to be clean at that point. But unfortunately if you leave even a small amount of information it's a foothold for the enemy. I can say that with every fiber of my being because I have seen it.
Bob: I want to take you back to that moment of confession. Do you remember how you felt and did you respond well to what your husband told you?
Meg: That's a really good question. The definition of “well” has changed over the years. I responded gracefully in the moment. Looking back I was a very good co-dependent wife and so I was thankful that my husband had come clean and put a lot of weight on that. I praised God for that. I praised God that it was only pornography at the time because I thought that was the case, and I did what I did in my life with difficult situations. I put a high gloss spiritual finish on it, and I moved forward.
Dennis: So you weren’t really honest about it?
Meg: No. I struggled when he travelled. I would have to wrestle with fears. Suffice it to say that he did go outside the marriage. That was an important fact to understand, because it was why I could in the beginning (after the second confession) say to myself, "Ummm. Well, I have biblical grounds to divorce him,” and we can talk more about that later.
Bob: When he made his 90% confession, was the part he left out that he had been with other women.
Meg: Yes. Actually, ironically at that point, there had not been physical touch. But because he left that out, the enemy waited a couple of years and then pulled them down hard and fast and he crossed that line.
Dennis: You know, we're really taking two events that occurred in your marriage and kind of going back and forth between them. But as you write about them in your book, the first event occurred out of the clear blue. You said earlier you would have counseled yourself to have asked more questions and put up boundaries. What kind of questions would you have counseled yourself to have asked him at that point ... the first time?
Meg: I guess I would have tried to get more at the root. The acting out, the sexual aspect is really a small portion. Ironically sexual addiction is not about sex, it is about medicating pain. And so it's important for people whether you are struggling or being betrayed. Either way, to understand this is a deeper issue. If you don't get at the root causes of what that pain is and where that originated then it's like pulling the top off of a weed.
So there're some deeper issues in terms of how were you feeling when that happened? What are you going to put in place to ensure that you get the healing that you need for those deeper issues and then for me being able to identify healthy verses unhealthy behavior?
There were unhealthy behaviors in our family, but I was not aware of it. So now, eight years later, after much counseling, many resources, we grabbed onto everythingspiritual care team, every book we could find. After all of that information and after walking with 100 plus other women, I recognize, "Wow! There are real patterns that you can look for.” And now that I have a husband who is growing spiritually, who has a personal relationship with God and doesn't just go through the motions, it looks very different.
Dennis: You know, as I listen to your story and as I hear you in a way kind of being hard on yourself that you didn't ask those difficult questions. I'm going to give you a little more grace in those situations. I'm going to say, you know for a woman who has had this atomic bomb go off in her marriage where she realizes there has been this secret life occur, more than likely it's gonna take a third party coming in to ask those questions and to allow the wife to absorb and to listen and maybe ask some questions of her own. But I think it's expecting a little too much of a wife to know what those questions ought to be and to start drilling down asking questions of a man when as a woman you may not understand what the problem is for a guy.
Meg: Right. And actually that's the impetus for writing the bookto hopefully be that third voice and to be able to identify what true healing really looks like so you won't spend as much time in that place. Nothing is wasted; God has been throughout the process. So if I am beating myself up, I don't feel that way at all.
Dennis: Well, you are on the other side looking back and you now know what you wish you would have asked at that point. But to the wife who may be about to face this, we're really talking about an earthquake that's going to turn her world upside down. Emotionally she may not be able to recover for several weeks.
Meg: Can I talk to that woman for a minute? I would like to talk to that woman who has either recently found out or is about to find out. I would like to tell her some of the things I needed to hear.
Number One: It's not her fault. It's not about anything that's lacking in her whatsoever. And that is a really big lie that the enemy uses and second it is a huge opportunity. Not that it's not painful. Not that it's not grueling. Not that it won't take everything you have and more, because it will take obviously the help of Christ, and His grace, the Holy Spirit. But it's an opportunity to really look into the face of God, the face of suffering, and find out who Christ really is and all those promises that we write about and we put in our head. We get to live them out and find out that they are true for them specifically.
Bob: So in the days following your husband's first confession, I'm presuming that you said "I love you. I forgive you. I'm hurt but will get through this, and life went on."
Meg: Pretty much.
Bob: Were you doing anything to provide regular checkups, accountability? Were you asking him questions on a regular basis to see what had happened was more than just confession and was actually repentance.
Meg: I did ask some questions, but it's really important for the wife not to be the detective, so it was more important to see him getting resources, reading books, making sure that he had an accountability partner and that couldn't be me. It's much too painful for the wife to have to be the accountability partner.
Bob: Was he reading books? Did he have an accountability partner?
Meg: Yes, he was. We were in Phoenix. And we moved to Washington and he went to a for-men-only group that our church had and he was seeing a counselor and he was lying in both places.
Bob: Really?
Meg: Unbeknownst to all of us.
Bob: So when and how did the second bomb go off?
Meg: Fast forward. We've moved on, literally. So we are in a new place, and my girls were in high school at this point and there was a message on the answering machine. My husband said, “I'm coming home early.”
He had been away for a week on a business trip, home on the weekend, and he was supposed to be gone the following week. So now it's Tuesday and he says, "I'm coming home early. I need you to be home alone. And I have to talk to you." And [he said] something about his boss being supportive, so I knew that he had not lost his job and I knew it was bad. I knew it was serious.
Dennis: Did you know it was about this area?
Meg: I don't know what I knew. I just remember the sick feeling just waiting. Waiting ... waiting for whatever it was. I probably knew it was about this, but I couldn't even imagine what was coming so he walked in the house and I remember he had a rolled up journal in his hand and he sat me down. I just remember him pulling out his journal and saying I have got to tell you something that's really hard and I don't know if we will be married when we are done.
And he went through when it started at age ten. He did kind of a timeline and the places. Some of it I knew, and the places where he had lied, and then he had just recently fallen when he was gone the week prior.
I just remember sitting in the chair with my knees shaking. Kind of an out of body, watching myself, thinking I can't feel anything. I am just sitting here looking at my legs shake. It had been two hours and I don't know if I said a word and my daughter was coming home. My husband, in a panic, said, “What do you want me to do? Do you want me to leave?”
Meg: I said, "No, I don't want you to leave. I don't want you to do anything until I hear from God. That's all I know at this point is that I have to hear from God.” And so over the course of the next two days everything was wiped off our calendar except I had a meeting with a friend who is a little older to be a mentor and we met and she went with me to the hospital to be tested for STDs, and she listened and never once condemned my husband and that was the first piece for me that was like "Wow! She can hear this and she cannot condemn my husband.”
So God sent just the right person at the right time and we continued to cry and talk for three days and then it was the third day when he was sharing the last bit of information that for him was the most shameful. For me it felt like just another thing. For him it was that one thing that probably he didn't think he could tell anyone and he shared that and I remember looking at him and I remember he was weeping and he was on the ground and I looked at him and I saw a little boy in that moment. I had been crying out for those three days to God, Why? Why? I have been a faithful wife. I gave up my career to raise my kids (like God didn't know these things).
And so I was just crying out the Why question and in that moment, looking at my husband, I saw 30 years of pain. I heard God as clearly as you can hear Him in your mind say, If you don't extend my grace to him now, he may never know it. I knew why I was there. All I could do was put my arm on his shoulder and something broke spiritually.
If there were chains they would have been on the ground for both of us. I really believe that was the beginning when healing could start. Not the beginning of happy, happy, but just the beginning when true healing could start because everything was out on the table.
Dennis: What you are describing I think is a picture of what a Christian marriage is at its core. I'm not trying to be glib or trite as I say that. It really is two broken people. You may be broken in different areasome seen and some unseen. But the passage of Scripture that came to my mind is not an optimal passage of Scripture. 1 Peter Chapter Four verse eight says, "Above all keep loving one another, earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins."
Barbara and I have been married 37 years and we have not had a situation like you've described. But I promise you, we've had moments when there had to be a love expressed by one of us toward the other that was a love that covers and forgives a multitude of sins and grants mercy and grace. And to that wife right now, or for that matter to that husband, because this really can go either way.
Meg: Yes.
Dennis: The betrayal can go not just by men of women, but there can be women who are betraying their husbands as well. This is where Christian marriage is totally different than any other kind of marriage. With Jesus Christ as the builder of your home, the builder of your marriage, there can be forgiveness extended. It may not be instant. It may not be right now, but it can occur and that really is what you talk about in your book Hope After Betrayal. It really does bring about I think a process that ultimately does result in hope.
Bob: And you know we didn't talk about this at the outset, but I think our listeners understand your husband knows you are here. He knows you wrote the book. You aren't saying anything that he has not given his blessing and his permission. In some ways he is your partner in this ministry in the openness about what's gone on in your life.
And in the process I think there are a lot of people who are going to benefit from hearing your story and hearing how you have walked this path and what God has taught you along the way. In fact your husband wrote the last chapter in the book, and you’ve said that's your favorite chapter.
We've got copies of the book in our FamilyLife resource center. It's called Hope After Betrayal. You can go online at FamlyLifeToday.com for more information about how to get a copy of Meg's book. Again, it's called Hope After Betrayal. On our website, we've also suggested a number of other resources that are available to deal with this issue. I'll just let you go there and look those over.
If this is something that has emerged in your marriage relationship, go to FamilyLifeToday.com for more information about resources that are available to help you work your way through it. Or call toll free 1-800-FL-TODAY, 1-800-358-6329. That’s 1-800, F as in "family," L as in "life," and then the word "today." When you get in touch with us we can answer any questions you have about the resources we have. We can make arrangement to get the ones you need sent to you.
You know it is always an encouragement for our team when we hear from listeners who write to us or drop us an e-mail and let us know how God’s using the program in your life. The fact is it's especially fun to hear from new listeners.
Those of you who may, for a couple of weeks or months now, have been tuning in FamilyLife Today. Maybe a friend mentioned it to you or you were just scanning the dial one day and you found the program. And now you are listening somewhat regularly. We would love to hear from you. Love to hear you comments on the program. Any thoughts that you have about what you've heard and would love to hear how you found FamilyLife Today.
In fact, this week we have a thank-you gift we want to send to any listener who contacts us and requests it. It's a couple of laminated cards that we've put together, one for you and one to pass along to your spouse or to a friend called the Five Essentials for a Thriving Marriage.
Dennis and Barbara Rainey have listed what they see as the key ingredients to keeping a marriage on track. Keeping it headed in the right direction. These five essentials are good to review and reflect on from time to time, so you may want to get your card and put it in your Bible.
Give your spouse the other one and again just from time to time look it over and say, "How are we doing in these areas?" The cards are free. All you have to do is call 1-800-FL-TODAY to request it. Again the toll free number 1800 FL-TODAY. Especially if you are a new listener, we'd love to hear from you. We'd love to send these cards out to you and let you know about some of the other things that we have at FamilyLife that are designed to help strengthen your marriage relationship and to help you in your family.
The toll free number, one more time, is 1-800, F as in "family," L as in "life," and then the word "today." Just ask for the Five Essentials for a Thriving Marriage card and we'll get them in the mail to you.
And with that we've got to going to wrap things up for today. Hope you can join us again tomorrow. Meg Wilson will be with us again and we will continue to explore her story about how her marriage was able to recover after her husband confessed to a repeated pattern of sexual sin. I hope you can tune in for that tomorrow.
Want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, and our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I am Bob Lepine and we will see you back next time for another edition of FamilyLife Today.
FamilyLife Today is a production of Familylife of Little Rock, Arkansas.
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