thought of the week
"Whether you think you can or whether you think you can't, you're right!" Henry Ford
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catriona’s story
"Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods." C S Lewis
I can still clearly recall the day back in late August 2008, when my husband, Brett told me he had had an affair. He calmly told me he had something he needed to tell me and then dropped the bomb that tore my world apart – the amazing thing was I had not a clue it was coming. I was living in a bliss bubble of a great marriage, 3 beautiful children and a sunny and happy life full of friends and community here in Brisbane. How could I have been so wrong?
And that is it, with very few words from your partner, your life falls apart. The deep shock lasted a long time. I didn’t eat, sleep or do much at all beyond when my girlfriends (my angels) got me out of the house. My mother-in-law came up from Melbourne and looked after the kids for a couple of weeks and beyond just existing, Brett and I tried to work out if we could put it all back together. The affair story was like so many others I have heard. It was with a woman from work, whom I had come to know after she moved to Brisbane, and started when he was working interstate a lot in the town where she had lived. The woman had a toddler - I had not given it another thought. It turned out the child was Brett's. The complexity of the situation was overwhelming. I felt like I was climbing a mountain of loose dirt - I knew I had to get to the top but every step just crumbled beneath my feet.
Initial attempts at professional help were soul destroying – a psychologist thought that perhaps Brett might be a sex addict and I was a lost housewife – we didn’t go back. Instead I trawled the internet looking for resources and read any books that I could find. Some helpful, some not so and some down right wrong (like the one that suggested that if I had been thinking about getting a boob-job the revelation of my husband’s affair might be a good time to do it to make me feel better about myself).
Time moved on, the shock subsided and life kept happening but we were not alright. Brett had retreated in fear of my pain - he just wanted me to get over it - and I could not let it go. After a particularly low point where I became so despondent I had thought about ending my own life, I saw a counsellor myself and she was great in helping me feel better about me but it was the relationship that needed help and for that I had no clear path. Until I stumbled upon the Beyond Affairs Network and Anne and Brian Bercht of Passionate Life Seminars who just happened to be coming to Australia to run their Healing From Affairs Seminar. In one weekend we went from hopeless and near divorce to having knowledge and support to repair our relationship - something that the books just couldn't provide. We had an amazing counsellor who coached us over the rough times and slowly we rebuilt our relationship from the gound up.
The affair that hit my marriage was a turning point in my life. In a way it shook up all of my personal beliefs and the way in which I rediscovered myself and stayed with my core beliefs during the turmoil has helped me define and strengthen them in a way that I don’t think I had ever articulated prior. As well as providing the opportunity for me to grow it also provided the opportunity to rebuild my relationship into the one I had always wanted - it is not perfect - but now, rather than accepting the flaws as they present, I have new skills, to address and change them.
I share my story because I believe that it is the silence that still surrounds the issue of affairs in relationships that enables them to flourish in our society today. This silence means that those vulnerable to an affair remain unaware of their vulnerability and allows their partners to remain in the bliss bubble of believing that it would never happen to them. I am working on prevention as well as cure. And I want the person who reads this, perhaps wondering whether I can help them with their relationship, to know that I am an infinitely better counsellor for my experience of having been through a relationship crisis than I was before. I have compassion and empathy that only comes from having taken the journey and I look forward to helping you on your own journey.
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