Transcription

 Welcome back to this course on Rebuilding Trust. As we jump into stabilization and safety, our primary goal is going to be to stop the bleeding. If there's been betrayal, if things feel fresh, if things feel raw, the goal is to get help and to stop making things worse. So the,

 to kind of preface all of this, Dan Allender said.

"Safety is not the absence of danger, but the presence of trustworthiness." And so you ha, maybe you haven't been trustworthy up until this point. This is the point at which it's absolutely time to kick that trustworthiness in so that you can be begin rebuilding trust. Because the thing is, when you're honest about the scope of your struggle, you can work together toward finding solutions.

If you're hiding the depth of your struggle, then one, it's all gonna come out again anyway, and you're gonna be right back where you started now, except she's likely gonna have less patience with you because you've been here before. But ultimately it's just, it is so much better to just be honest. Now, there's a difference between, uh, going into the details and going into the scope.

Which we'll get into later in this course. But my encouragement now would be to work together to find out what, uh, she in particular, but you both need in order to feel safe, to feel like your relationship is as stable as frankly can be, and to, for yourself as the one who has, is the offender right now, for you to do whatever it takes for her to feel safe.

So, for example. Uh, early into or right after my wife found out about, uh, a lot of the depth of my struggle, I went for at least a month with legitimately no phone, which as someone who's really bad with directions. Yeah, there was actually one time funny story. My office was about 15 minutes away from our house.

About an hour later after work, I show up. Long story short, I accidentally got on an on-ramp, got lost on the way back home. It was a whole kind of funny thing, but my point is, at this phase, pretty much nothing is off limits as far as what you need to be willing to do for her to feel safe if she thinks it's best to go to counseling, no, I would actually put that in your camp of you taking initiative to do what's best for the marriage.

But if there are boundaries that she thinks are in play, even if there are boundaries around things that have never been an issue before. Let's say for example, you have a news app, never been an issue for you, you've never, uh, done double takes, you've never, you get the point if still feels a sense of that could lead you to sin one.

She's right in that as you cut off access to, uh, more explicit content, what ends up typically happening is you begin getting tempted by lesser and lesser extreme content or just frankly, whatever is available. I know that was absolutely the case for myself, and so the point is. Cut anything and everything that she needs to feel safe and that you need in order to be sober.

Now, if you've been acting out within the last, say, 90 days, you're still within. Where people refer to it as the detox period where people can tend to act based on impulse or like compulsive behavior, where, for example, you're not even thinking before you act out. You just do it because that's what you do, and it feels like you have very little control.

And so by creating these very rigid, strong, plentiful boundaries, it will play a tremendous role in. The rebuilding process, both for yourself as well as for your wife. The point here is her safety. Your safety as a couple is of utmost importance, and it is so easy for us to put certain things off limits.

For example, I worked in the corporate world. I had a company laptop and. I was very convinced that if I were to put a tool like Covenant Eyes on my laptop, that inevitably it would find out and it would lead to a really awkward conversation that, as you can imagine, the thought of that sounded terrifying.

It was a secular company that happened multiple times. And guess what? Our marriage is still intact. And I share that with you as an example because. So often we can feel like such and such would be the worst thing in the world, but would you rather lose your spouse? Because that is what could well be at stake.

Anything in this phase, anything that we say we can't do this because of that, that communicates to your spouse. I value this more than you and our relationship. It is not a good look. It's not a good feel. It doesn't lend itself to feeling safe or stable. And so in this phase, my encouragement would be do pretty much whatever it takes to help stabilize the situation and then, uh, and to promote safety.

And then from there you can build. Uh, and some boundaries can come down. So a couple of exercise I want to encourage you with. Okay, over 72 hours come up with any and all boundaries that would be helpful for accessing fill in the blank, whether that's accessing certain locations, accessing certain websites, accessing certain technology, accessing certain people.

Everyone's situations are different and so I'm leaving it broad there intentionally. Additionally, defining boundaries around contact. If, for example, part of, uh, your acting out is with people in your community, then some of the boundaries that may need to exist are okay. No communicating with other women without your wife being present, for example, on a text or an email, uh, chain.

Uh, defining boundaries around triggers. Again, if you aren't familiar with the term trigger, I encourage you to go back to the rebuilding Tru or to the re breaking free course. It's completely free, uh, and it will help you understand the nature of triggers, but creating boundaries around triggers so that you don't get to a place where you feel like you're compulsively acting out and defining what kind of crisis support each of you guys need.

In some cases it can be helpful to process with family members. In some case that can be very detrimental. So feel out your scenario. But my point is set us be willing to set aside everything for the course of a couple of days in order to stabilize things and to get on the same page with what needs to be done for stabilization and safety to be enacted.

I would also encourage you 'cause it can feel so incredibly overwhelming, emotional, exhausting to do all of this, have at least one daily kind of grounding practice, if you will. Um, whether that looks like breathing, walking, I would very much recommend journaling, prayer, just something to help kind of clear the air.

Um, and then each of you map out a couple of people that are safe for you guys to share with going forward. And if you don't have that, I would encourage you to reach out to a professional counselor as one to reach out to people in your church or if you. Uh, go online. You can find other churches that have ministries geared toward sexual addiction and betrayal, and other churches could be a resource.

My point is, you cannot should not try to fight this alone and endure this alone. It's important to have a few people that you can process through with on a very regular basis.

A couple of discussion prompts as you're trying to, uh, enact these exercises, asking each other, what does safety look like today? Again, every situation is going to be different, and oftentimes the unspokens about safety can be what get us in the most trouble. So, uh, ask for a definition of what does it mean to feel safe right now, given everything going on.

Additionally, what behaviors spoken or unspoken? Break trust. This is one of those fascinating things where oftentimes in guy's mind, the only thing that would break trust is acting out. So if I'm not doing that, I'm good, but in her mind, oftentimes other tri other behaviors can trigger, uh, breaking of trust, for example.

If she's expressing her heart to you and you cut her off, that can come across as breaking trust if you are, uh, not showing up for her, if you're not emotionally there for her. All things that will get into throughout this course, it can have the same kind of effect, is breaking trust. Okay. What about, for example, you're on the phone with a support agent for, for example, whether it's your wifi goes out or whatever, and yeah, you assure them that you rebooted the router even though you didn't, and she notices or you tell a little white lie to a member of a wait staff at a restaurant about all of those things are going to be scrutinized, and it's important for you to realize that.

Rebuilding trust is not just about, uh, allowing your wife to live in reality Now, allowing all people that you come into contact with to live in reality is going to be on the table. What boundaries can I put in place to help my wife feel safe even, and especially at my own expense? We've already talked through this, so I won't go too much more into it, but my friends, as we get going, I want to encourage you.

There is a path toward rebuilding trust. There is always hope in the steps that we're going to take moving forward. The goal is to rebuild your relationship stronger than ever before, deeper than ever before, and more joy filled than ever before. So where are we going from here? We just covered safety and stability.

Next, we're going to get into transparency, honesty, and accountability. Then from there, we're going to build emotional attunement. You'll notice each of these build on each other. For example, you have to have safety in order to have honest conversation. And then you have to have honesty and transparency and accountability for her to be open to connecting with you on an emotional level. So each of these build, each of these are vitally important. So the next one is emotional attunement. After that is going to be growing and curiosity and understanding.

Next is emotional intimacy. Finally sexual intimacy. I very much look forward to diving into each of these with you. Again, you cannot skip steps. It's going to be vitally important. So look forward to seeing you on the next one as we get into truth telling, transparency and accountability.