FamilyLife Blended®

Joanna Rabsmith: I definitely disappoint a lot of couples, especially the betrayer, when they come in and they think, "Okay, we'll finally be healed when we never have to talk about it again. I'll finally know I've been forgiven when she's not bringing it up anymore." I go, "No, no, no. You've finally healed when you can name it, when you can bring it up without it triggering you, without it bringing up insecurities and pain." It's actually when you can embrace and share your story from a place of power. That's when healing has happened. That's when forgiveness has happened.

Ron L. Deal: Welcome to the FamilyLife Blended podcast. I'm Ron Deal. we help blended families and those who love them pursue the relationships that matter most. Why do we do that, you ask? Because sometimes we don't pursue what matters most, and we find ourselves cleaning up a mess, trying to redeem what has been fractured. We're going to do a little bit of that today on this episode of FamilyLife Blended, so stay with me.

Nan and I would love to connect with you when we're out on the road this fall. You can find our full speaking schedule at familylifeblended.com. Just click "Find an Event." That's familylifeblended.com. It'll be in the show notes as well. We're going to be presenting our Mindful Marriage conference in New Hampshire, Sacramento, Little Rock, Nashville, and at the WinShape retreat facility near Atlanta, Georgia, which, by the way, is an amazing weekend to go to that retreat facility. You get away from everything. You've got lots of time to yourself. There's also time to sit and have meals with us and the other participants. It is a great, great event. That's WinShape. You can look that up.

By the way, you can also find at this searchable map that we have online blended family small groups, parenting classes, and workshops, and marriage small groups throughout the country at churches like yours. Yes, your church can host something and put it on the map for free. So just go look at that searchable map. Again, the show notes will get you connected to that. We'd love to see you in person.

I want to say a big thank you to those of you who support FamilyLife with your financial treasure, your prayers, and whenever you share this podcast with somebody else, you're supporting us and them because you're helping us get connected and helping us minister and serve them. We really appreciate that.

If you didn't know, maybe you just stumbled on this podcast or maybe a friend just shared it with you and you don't know who FamilyLife Blended is, we're a division of a ministry called FamilyLife. FamilyLife Blended is the largest blended family equipping ministry in the country, and we just love to encourage your family. We've got books, audio resources, web articles, multiple video series, stuff on YouTube and social media, and live events. We'd love to help. Browse it all at familylifeblended.com. Find something that works for you. A lot of it's free.

One of the things we've talked about before on this podcast is the residual pain that we carry from previous fractured relationships, in our family of origin perhaps, or maybe in a previous marriage. Today we're specifically diving into recovery after sexual betrayal, whether it be a previous marriage or the present one that you're in now.

My guests are Matthew and Joanna Rabsmith. They coach and counsel individuals and couples. They've co-authored a book together, *Building True Intimacy: Creating Connection that Stands the Test of Time*. That sounds like a good title to me. It's a good book. They co-lead the Rabsmith team where their mission is to help couples navigate the aftermath of sexual addiction and betrayal. This is what they do. They live near Memphis, Tennessee, with their three children. Matthew and Joanna, thank you for being with me today.

Joanna Rabsmith: Thanks so much for having us. We're excited to be here.

Matthew Rabsmith: Very excited.

Ron L. Deal: I think it's fair to say—correct me if I'm wrong—but I think it's fair to say you guys got into this line of specialty in mental health in part because of your own personal journey. Is that right?

Matthew Rabsmith: It is. This was not the plan, not the path. It was not on the list of options. Career counseling did not suggest this. But God has an interesting way of using the work he does in your own life to become a work in the life of others. We were actually the recipients of that ourselves. Our story became possible because of others' willingness to tell their story and to be a witness to what's possible, and so we've just really enjoyed being able to continue that on.

Ron L. Deal: Your credentials are clear, but I do want our audience to know a little bit about your personal story, if you don't mind. Could you just give us the couple-minute version, the highlights of your personal story?

Matthew Rabsmith: Absolutely. Joanna and I met, and we were not instantly attracted to each other. We actually had a little hard time getting along at first.

Joanna Rabsmith: Didn't like each other very much in the beginning.

Matthew Rabsmith: But we worked through that, and like all good rom-coms, we eventually were like, "Hey, you're pretty cool, and I think there's something really special here." It was actually my second marriage, so I had been married before and had gotten divorced. I did not have any kids, but I had been through divorce. This was Joanna's first real relationship. So we were in very different places in life, but we really felt like God was calling us together, and so we jumped right in.

Joanna Rabsmith: It was a very whirlwind initial part of our relationship. We dated for about two months before we got engaged, and then we were engaged for about two months before we got married. Then eight months after that, we moved across the country to go to grad school together out in California.

Matthew Rabsmith: And the dream was that God was going to use us to do some type of ministry. We had a heart for marriages. We felt like marriages were something that was really special and sacred, but it had a kind of negative connotation in a lot of cultures, even in the church, and so we weren't really sure what that would look like.

Joanna Rabsmith: We had a heart even for our own marriage. We knew that we wanted the same kind of marriage. We wanted to be very connected to each other. We wanted a healthy, secure relationship, but we also realized that that's a lot harder to do than either one of us realized, and we really didn't have the tools.

So pretty early on in our relationship, we noticed getting into pretty destructive cycles with each other. There's a part of our relationship, about 90%, that was wonderful and great and amazing, and then 10% that was really ugly and really nasty, and we didn't know what to do about it.

Matthew Rabsmith: We got exposed to restoration therapy, which you know of, and it is an amazing resource, and that radically changed how we would show up day-to-day. But we still found ourselves over the years, even as we were learning so much about relationships, we still found this glass ceiling on our connection.

Over time, it became clearer and clearer to me, though not to Joanna, that this was really due to me hiding an addiction to pornography and a history of sexual addiction that I had really kept compartmentalized from my life. Three years into our marriage, Joanna was in a class for her master's program at Fuller, and a pastor came and he gave his testimony. He told the story of struggling with sexual addiction, breaking the fidelity of his marriage, watching everything come crumbling down, but then God really restoring him piece by piece, both in his marriage and in his ministry.

Joanna Rabsmith: As he was sharing, I just knew. My gut knew this is it. This is why we are getting stuck. It answered all the questions that I had, and so I went home that day and I confronted Matthew and I asked him, "Is this going on in our relationship? Is this why we are getting so stuck?"

Matthew Rabsmith: I had for years, whenever that question had come up, always lied, deferred, "I don't struggle with that anymore. That was something in my younger years. I'm better now." About a couple of months before this had happened, I had really gotten to a place where I just saw how much it was destroying my life and destroying our marriage.

I remember praying to God, "God, if you will give me a path forward, if you will show me a way out of this, I'll take it because I can't do it anymore." So when she came and started telling the story, I could feel something in my heart was like, "Okay, this is it. This is what you wanted." So instead of lying like I had done for so long, I just looked at her and said, "Yes, this is true."

What was amazing was she said, "Okay, I'm not giving up on you. I'm not giving up on us, but you're going to have to change. You're going to have to do something about this." She gave me the list of all the resources that that pastor gave that day, and we dove right into recovery. Years later, as we had really rebuilt so much of our relationship, we realized that that was really what God wanted to do with us: to help other couples really kind of follow in the footsteps of that pastor, share our story, but also share the way out.

One of the things we learned was that there's not a lot of clear direction on what to do when this happens to your life. There's a lot of what you can do individually, but very little for what a couple can do to truly restore, to have something that God is really blessed and is thriving.

Joanna Rabsmith: We really used our story as well as the professional trainings and working with other couples who are walking through this to create a path out of this. Instead of it having to take years upon years upon years of rebuilding trust, we really wanted to give something practical and helpful and hopeful for couples to know that there actually is healing after this. This isn't the end of your relationship. This isn't the end of being able to trust someone. That's what really drove us to create the intimacy pyramid, to write the book, and start helping couples.

Ron L. Deal: Thank you so much for sharing that. There are so many pieces to what you said I'm sure we can flesh out more as we go along. But that 90/10, Nan and I can so relate to that. That's in a nutshell our testimony in *The Mindful Marriage* book that we wrote. 90% of relationship was great, but 10% wasn't. That 10% nags and it hangs on. If you don't resolve it, it just grows and it becomes this thing that gets in the way.

It didn't have to be sexual betrayal; it's just anything that gets in the way. There's always something that is an invitation for us as people, as couples, to push through whatever that hard thing is. So I commend you for finding your way and not giving up and now being in a position to be able to help other people.

We're definitely going to talk about when betrayal, like in your story, is happening in the marriage. So anybody who's listening or watching right now, hang on. If that's your current situation, hang on; we're going to get to that. But I also want us to just sort of pause and look back. A lot of blended family couples, one or both have been married before, right? Often there was a betrayal of some sort that brought about the end of that relationship.

In particular, sexual betrayal I think is unique and different. You guys know more about that than I do. Let's just start there by thinking back for people who have had something in that previous relationship that brought about the end of it. That puts a residue on your heart. It creates pain that lingers even when you walk into a new subsequent relationship. I'm just curious, what have you noticed? Are there some common themes that pop up for the people you work with?

Joanna Rabsmith: It's good to first understand that when you experience betrayal in a relationship, it's actually a trauma. We call it betrayal trauma. You have had a traumatic experience in an intimate relationship. You can imagine when you go to enter into a new intimate relationship, the trauma of that past relationship is going to be very real in your body.

Trauma lives in your body, and if you imagine sexual trauma is going to be very connected to any attempt at intimacy, both physical and emotional. Even though it's a brand new person who may be completely honest and trustworthy and safe, your body may not always feel that. As you go to be close, to be more intimate, it's going to remember what has happened previously and respond in that way if you have not healed from that trauma. Any trauma in life is important to create space to work through and heal from. Intimate relational trauma is really important if you want an intimate, connected relationship in the future.

Ron L. Deal: I know a lot of people will say, "I don't have any reason not to trust her or him. Why am I feeling this? There must be..." What I hear you saying is, "Hey, cut yourself a break." The body, soul, mind remembers, and the closer you get to somebody, the more vulnerable you are, and you've been there before and it didn't end well. Of course, something inside of you is setting off alarms.

Matthew Rabsmith: Absolutely. This can be really important for the other person to know because there will be this yo-yo effect of maybe someone who is coming close, but as they get that closeness, they start to pull away. Especially if you don't understand your own processes, you may not realize, "Hey, I'm getting drawn into this process."

Where I have an opportunity to experience closeness with our partner, because what's really interesting is that when you are hurt in relationships, you're also healed in relationships. New family systems and new couples have an opportunity to reconcile the story for someone. Even if their original relationship ended because of betrayal, it doesn't mean that they're going to be limited from a relationship of great closeness.

In many ways, the closeness will come through the grieving of that history. We'll talk about this with couples it goes through specifically, but even if it wasn't the story of your relationship, it can be the story of us. One of the things that Joanna and I have realized is that a lot of our closeness has come through grieving what happened to each other that we had nothing to do with—things that came years before, things that weren't a part of necessarily our story together, but they still impact our story. She understands that the bullying and some of the things that I experienced as a young child were contributing to the ways in which I learned to cope and to escape and run and hide. Joanna and I have had the opportunity to grieve those things together, which creates a sense of closeness.

One thing I do want to say that also tends to happen is that if maybe you are on the side of the betraying spouse, maybe you were the spouse who committed betrayal, one of the mistakes that often people make is they assume that infidelity and betrayal is a relational issue. "Well, I didn't love this person, or we had a toxic marriage, and so now that they're out of the picture, I won't have that problem anymore."

That was definitely a lie I told myself, which was, "I love Joanna. We have a great relationship. I like who we are together. That old me is gone." I think that that's one of the lies that the enemy uses to reinforce the problems that we carry with us. It can be really tempting to want to leave that in the past and not even talk about it. There's a lot of people who have infidelity in their past and they won't share it. They won't talk about it.

That was certainly Joanna and my story. I didn't want her to know my past. I didn't want her to know my sexual history. I didn't want her to know my relational history because I was afraid she wouldn't choose me. But by doing so, I was just repeating the same patterns from my past, which was, "I'm only going to let you see a little bit of me," which means I actually never get to feel chosen. I never feel safe. I never feel known because I'm always wondering when that shoe is going to drop.

Even if you feel like, "I'm in a different marriage now. There's no reason for me to worry about those old behaviors," behaviors have a way of wanting to come back and show back up in our life. It's good to remember that, and it's good for couples to learn how to talk about our past—how do we talk about our histories so that it brings us together?

Ron L. Deal: That is so very good. What you're saying is you may be in a different marriage, but you're not in a different "me." You've still brought yourself. This is something we've all learned from restoration therapy. We talk about this in *The Mindful Marriage* as well. What a light bulb for me, having been in marriage and family therapy for 10-15 years before I stopped and said, "Wait, all this stuff is about me that preceded Nan. Somehow this is not her blame, and the stuff she's wrestling with and how she copes, that's about what preceded me." I think we often put so much pressure on the marriage or the partner or both to heal me, fix me, resolve me, help me not have to—and of course that's a big setup because it's still going to come out of you.

Let me back up a step. If somebody was looking for—sometimes around here we call these the ghosts of marriage past—the things that linger with us that haunt as we enter new relationships, what are some good signs that I've got a ghost, that I'm being haunted? Or what's the flip side? What maybe am I looking for if I feel like my spouse has a ghost? They were hurt, burned, and now they're fearful in our relationship. Any thoughts about how people would recognize it?

Joanna Rabsmith: I think the reality is we all have them. Everybody does. To what extent they are showing up in this relationship or in this moment determines usually on your level of awareness.

When we talk with couples, I talked about that intimacy pyramid. That's building healthy intimacy for every couple, no matter what's gone on. That first layer is honesty, and a part of honesty, the first step of honesty, is awareness. If you are not aware of your story and your spouse's story, then it's going to be impacting you in ways you don't want it to.

Building up awareness, understanding your story—where you've been, how it's impacted you, the types of feelings that come up when that story is showing up in a moment—you're able then from a place of awareness to separate out, "Wait, is this because of my past, this experience I had in the past, or is this about this present moment?" That's where so many people get confused.

Knowing your story, knowing the impact, and then that mutual knowing of my partner's story, how it impacted them, allows me to be more compassionate in that moment and go, "You know what? I would imagine he might be feeling 'not enough' right now because of what just happened, but I also know that's one of his core pains from what he's experienced in a previous relationship. So maybe some of that is showing up. That's why his reaction is so big in this moment." I can then have more empathy and compassion as I understand that, and if we've done that work together, we can slow down the moment and have that realistic conversation of what's showing up together in this moment. Is it about the present or is it about the past?

Matthew Rabsmith: Practically, I think people can look for energy. When there's more energy in a situation than it seems to call for. When I can tell when I'm more bothered by something, and when I really start to get it logically, I'm like, "Why did that really get me? What has this too-ripe mango got on me that's got me so frustrated?"

I was cooking last night and the mango was too soft, and I was frustrated at the mango, and I thought, "This can't be about the mango. It really can't." But the mango had me worked up, and that's when I usually realize, "Ah, this is something else." That would happen a lot between Joanna and me. We would have disagreements and I would find myself—it felt like I went to a place of, "I don't know if this woman's even right for me. I don't know if our relationship was right."

I had all of these major relational questions and big energies around us, and I would think, "Wait, I love this woman. I think she's amazing. How can my head go there so quickly?" That's usually when I'm bringing something in. That's when I know it's not just about this moment. It doesn't mean that Joanna can't aggravate me. She's actually very good at aggravating me. But to the extent that I am considering dropping something that has been so valuable, that's when I know that wasn't an aggravation. There's something I'm not seeing.

Ron L. Deal: Matthew, this is so good. This is a scaling thing, right? If the mango situation is a 2 on a 10 scale, why am I reacting like it's a 9? That ought to be an indication. This is that mindfulness piece where we have to notice something's going on with me that seems beyond the circumstances that are immediately here.

That right there is the pause. For a lot of us, we walk through life and we're so—we spend a lot of time being so focused on everybody else's speck in the eye that I really have a hard time noticing I have this massive log. When Nan and I do our marriage conference, sometimes we'll take a pole from a mop or something and disconnect it from the mop, and I'll grab it and put it up to my eyeball and start walking around stage having a conversation. It's ludicrous, but it makes the point how we spend a lot of time ignoring what's going on with ourselves, so focused on everybody else that we don't know I'm overreacting to the mango situation. How do we—what does it take to slow down, to pause? How do we get there?

Joanna Rabsmith: Don't wait until you go, "I'm overreacting," because most of us are pretty good at justifying our reactions and like, "No, this is completely appropriate! I should feel this level of indignation about the mango." We're all very good at that. We would usually say any hint of any dysregulation and you need to slow down. You need to pause. You need to check in with yourself. Because if there's any dysregulation at all, if I'm not taking care of it, I'm expecting the people around me to take care of it. If he's in the room, it's him. If my kids are in the room, it's them. I have to slow down and I have to deal with my own dysregulation when it comes if I'm going to be safe for myself and if I'm going to be safe for the relationships around me.

Matthew Rabsmith: It is habitual. One of the things that we learned was when we first learned the pain and peace cycle, it made logical sense to us and we were like, "Hey, this is great!" We tried and we failed miserably. I actually remember calling Sharon Hargrave and telling her, "Your system is broken. You need to quit. It doesn't work." She was so sweet, and in her Southern accent was like, "Now bless your heart." She's like, "Will you come and work with one of our therapists for eight weeks and just practice it? If you just practice it and really have it become a habit."

What we found was over those eight weeks, by practicing it, by building it into our rhythms of our daily life, that made pausing normal because right now, it's not normal for me to pause. It's normal for me to be annoyed, to shove it down, to think it won't bother me and to move on, to get annoyed. Now I've got two of those sitting down there, and then three, and then four, and it's probably just going to take our middle child doing something he's not supposed to, breaking something, that all of a sudden my reaction's out of line. It's those habits that help me to go, "No, I can feel it." It doesn't take me too long to go, "The mango is my friend. It's not my enemy. I'm okay. I'm in charge. I know I'm capable of making this meal and it's going to be great, and we're going to have a family moment."

Joanna Rabsmith: We love the phrase, "You don't rise to the occasion; you revert to your training." If you're waiting for the moment when you're clearly dysregulated and, "Now I'll use my tools and I'll slow down and regulate," but you haven't been practicing it, it's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. You have to make it some type of daily habit, ritual, that you are slowing down and practicing on that mindfulness.

Ron L. Deal: For somebody who's listening or watching and you don't know what the pain or the peace cycle is, we'll refer you to *The Mindful Marriage* and to their book as well. But let me just in brief give everybody—we're connecting dots with the pain cycle. What am I feeling about me that has to do with not feeling loved or not feeling safe, and how does that then come out of me? How do I cope with those feelings? What do I do? So the "why" behind getting frustrated with the mango—Matthew, do you mind telling us what's the why behind that frustration?

Matthew Rabsmith: When the mango is too ripe, I feel defective. I feel incapable for some reason because I all of a sudden start to intuit that this meal won't be as good as it could possibly be and that's a reflection on my character. I know that probably sounds crazy, and as I say it now, I think, "Wow." But in the moment, my brain's there. That's exactly what's happening. So I get frustrated, I get annoyed. I tend to stuff. I tend to kind of want to ignore it and pretend like everything's okay.

Joanna Rabsmith: We can just play out what a couple pain cycle would have looked like if I had noticed, if I had been there and I noticed him getting annoyed, anxious, frustrated. That triggers—usually one person's coping behavior triggers the other person's pain. So I immediately would start to feel unsafe is what I typically feel, alone, and I love to control and fix. I probably would have been like, "Okay, what's the big deal? It's a mango. You need to chill out a little bit. I can get you another mango. You want me to order on Instacart a mango? I can do that."

Matthew Rabsmith: That makes it feel so good in my heart, except everything communicates, "Hey dummy, why are you making such a big deal over this?" There I am. "Mr. Inadequate, you really are inadequate." She's practically handing me the sign. And I get the sign and tear it up.

Joanna Rabsmith: He gets angry, which makes me feel even more unsafe, and then we never eat mangos again.

Ron L. Deal: To our viewer and listener, you can relate to something in this—not specifics to mango or inadequacy or control necessarily, but there are predictable set of ways that we react when we feel unloved or unsafe. This identity thing of "I'm not good enough"—boy, I can relate to that one, Matthew. That's me. Whatever your triggers are—and everybody has their own individual story—that's what we help you do is unpack that, understand that, so that when that happens, you can do the pause. You can do the "Wait a minute. What? Okay, I know what this is. What now am I going to do instead of acting like a jerk and making things worse?" That is fundamental to then the peace cycle, which is about turning the corner and putting on a "better you" in a tough moment so you bring a better possibility to the next moment.

Back to somebody listening, thinking about a previous betrayal. Maybe they were the betrayer or they were betrayed, and there's stuff that lingers. You recognize it when in a new relationship that requires love and trust, then those moments arise where you're going, "Oh, I'm supposed to be honest," back to what you were saying about honesty. But I find myself not wanting to be honest. That would be, by the way, a signal that there's a little—there's some pain going on.

Joanna Rabsmith: Absolutely.

Ron L. Deal: So I'm finding my way around honesty, or I'm going to give a little, but I'm not going to give everything. Those are those moments where you need to catch it and say, "What's going on with me?" If I don't learn how to manage this lingering pain, I think it's just going to continue to haunt your current marriage.

Matthew Rabsmith: It reinforces the story you're so scared of. The more I hid, the more it reinforced how unacceptable I felt and the story that I told myself that if anyone ever finds out, I'll lose everything. I'll lose my job. I'll lose my family. Everything. I'll lose any connections I have. So it just reinforces itself.

It always starts small. It always starts with those things. One of the challenges that we had in our own journey for me was recognizing that I wasn't just lying about pornography and some of the big things. I was lying and hiding and managing information about everything. I was really trying to craft a story for Joanna that said, "Hey, I want you to only see this version of me, and if you just see that version of me, you will find it acceptable."

So a lot of my work early on was having to learn how to be radically honest about everything and then maintaining that honesty because knowing that my pain cycle, that pain that I have, will always want to send me back to that place of kind of hiding and managing the way people see me, my appearances. That's been a lifelong challenge and one that even that we continue to work on because without that honesty, there's no real safety in our relationship. There's no relational safety because there's always going to be the question of what's real and not real.

That was that glass ceiling that we were finding. There was a lot good about us, but we were finding, because not everything's on the table, we can't actually work through everything. We don't know the bogeyman that's in the room. It's amazing once you start naming and turning the lights on, you're like, "Well, it's not as scary as I thought it was." It doesn't mean it's nothing, but it's amazing what a different feeling it takes on.

Ron L. Deal: Matthew, I don't—how do I know if I'm honest that my spouse will receive it, hear it? How do I know they won't leave? How do I know they won't say, "Oh, well that's the truth? Then forget you." How do I know?

Matthew Rabsmith: You don't. But you won't have what you want any other way. That's the challenge: that if you want connection, it only comes through honesty and transparency.

Ron L. Deal: I've often said the future is far more risky than the past. The past is now predictable. You know what you're going to get if you keep on doing the same stuff, and that feels a whole lot more safe than taking risks with unknown potential consequences. But closeness and intimacy and breakthrough only come if you take the risk. So you don't know, and at some level you've got to push through in order to discover. If nothing else, I guess you're trusting in God at that moment. "I don't know how to trust my spouse, but I do trust God."

Joanna Rabsmith: If my safety is not in my spouse—that's kind of what we're saying—you are responsible for your own sense of identity, your own sense of safety. My safety isn't dependent on this relationship or my spouse. That's what gives you the courage to step into honesty because God is my foundation. God is my sense of safety. I have internal security. If I haven't done that work, maybe it is a struggle to be honest and take that risk if my safety is in the other person being here. If I'm so scared of abandonment that I have to control the situation to make sure I'm not abandoned, but I also never experience that deep connection, that deep intimacy.

Ron L. Deal: I want us to keep pressing in. We'll talk about a betrayal in a current marriage. But before we do, it occurs to me somebody's listening or watching and they're putting the pieces together of why the previous marriage failed. How can that serve them? I mean, sometimes just sort of getting another layer of understanding brings some benefit. What would you suggest?

Joanna Rabsmith: I think there's so much you can do with why it didn't work. What didn't work? That's what we do with all of our clients the first time they sit down, that first session. "Okay, what have you been doing that hasn't worked? Let's identify it. Let's understand why it doesn't work." Again, that's part of mapping that pain cycle, is building that awareness because with awareness then comes empowerment. Then you get to choose to do something different. If you don't have that awareness, it is likely you will keep choosing those old patterns. So it is so powerful to name, to identify those past patterns that didn't work, that hurt, that caused destruction, detachment, and going, "Okay, that's what I want to do differently. Now I know what I'm working on." There's still work to do to get to that place where you can do it differently, but I do think that that's so helpful. That's helpful for anyone entering into a new relationship. We all have histories or stories of, "Hey, this didn't work. This wasn't healthy." Then we get to choose together what works for us. What does healthy for us look like? It can be a very collaborative process as well.

Matthew Rabsmith: I've found it helpful. Once I'm outside of one relationship and I'm really taking a look at the greater whole, I can see my own pattern a little easier. It's a little more obvious. It's really easy when I'm in one relationship in one moment to go, "It's probably them. I bet it's them." But when all of a sudden I start to go, "Oh, I do this with everyone. I've always done this. I do this no matter what," that's when it's harder to hide. It's harder to put the blame on others. That's actually something that recovery communities have learned: that one of the very first steps in a recovery process from addiction is you get everything out. You get all the secrets out and you put it all together and you walk through what your life has been doing what doesn't work over and over and over until you can be really, really clear. "This can't serve me," even to the point where you're like, "This is killing me. It's robbing me of all of my life." That's usually what it takes. You've got to get pretty frustrated, pretty annoyed, pretty at your wits' end to be motivated to change some of the patterns. I think that our culture has built this practice of, "It's not that bad. It'll be okay. Everybody does it. You're doing your best. Just keep trying," versus real honesty. It's cleansing. Confession has a way of helping us go, "No, God, I need your help. I can't do this on my own, and I'm going to keep doing it unless you intercede and show me a different way. If you will walk that way for me, I will follow. Let me see."

Ron L. Deal: "It's not that bad. It'll be okay," is just another way of empowering our pride to be in denial about ourselves and instead think we have power over the thing that really has power over us. Really what you're saying is confession and humility lay the groundwork for you to now be transformed for things to begin to change. But without that heart conviction, you'll just sort of keep rising up thinking you can beat it.

Matthew Rabsmith: Yeah. A lot of our behaviors that don't serve us, they came from places where we were the victim, where we were hurt, where we didn't have power. So we get that when I'm working with mostly men who have practiced infidelity, they may have struggles with sexual addiction. I get that this started for them usually so early on in their life as a way of trying to medicate what they were feeling and escaping often really tough realities. It's just that it has stopped serving them for a long time. In fact, it never really served them; they just didn't understand it. So there's a lot of grace and compassion that can go into this where we're not just calling ourselves out, but we're also practicing some understanding of like, "Hey, I get why I do this, but I also just need to name it's not working. It doesn't get me what I want." That's a hard balance because there's a temptation to kind of want to go just on the grace side or just on the confession side. That's where the shame kind of picks up and the performance. It's really balancing those that really helps us to move forward.

Ron L. Deal: You guys get phone calls, and obviously the person making the call asking for help is motivated. Sometimes that's the person who has been hurt. At the end of the day, what they're asking is, "I want to repair, but how do I know my spouse who did this terrible thing is repentant?" That's one question. The other is you get a call from the person who did the offending. They were the betrayer, and they're motivated to repair, but they're going, "I don't know if he or she is going to give me a chance at fixing this thing." Let's just talk around that for a minute. When you're struggling to know whether it's worth fighting for this relationship, what do you need to ponder? What do you need to sort through a little bit, whether you're offended or the offender?

Joanna Rabsmith: It's so interesting because you would think, especially for the betrayed spouse, that they'd really struggle with that. But it is amazing to me how many betrayed spouses call and they want the relationship. They want to fight for it. They want to push through the deep, incredibly deep pain of being betrayed to make the relationship work. For a lot of them, what they saw was a really healthy relationship. They liked the person on the other side of them. They liked what they were building together. Some of them kind of thought we had the dream marriage. So a lot of times there's so much relationship there that is worth fighting for. But it's so painful because they know that, but at the same time it all seems tainted. It all seems like a lie. So they're struggling to even know what is real and what is not.

One of the first steps, that step of honesty, part of it is helping them enter reality. So for a lot of them, it's helpful to almost put that question about the relationship on hold until they're able to enter reality, until they know the truth of what has happened in the relationship. We do that through a process, a very structured process called a therapeutic full disclosure, which kind of levels the playing field for the couple. It gets everything out in the open so they're both standing on reality.

You would think after going through a full disclosure, most partners would run out of the relationship as fast as they can. We have yet to have a partner do that. Every single partner goes kind of relieved a little bit that I finally know the truth, and as much as that is painful and hard, if you're willing to be safe, if you're willing to do the work to heal and repair so I know you will never show up this way again, I want to fight for us. The courage, the strength, the resilience is just incredible.

Matthew Rabsmith: We do get that kind of scared question of "What if? What if the other person...?" Two things we always try to remind people: one, the work you do for your marriage, if you do it the right way, will serve you the rest of your life. Because marriages are made up of two people who are working to be their best selves to care for the relationship. When that happens, even if I do the work and I'm the only one who does the work, and our relationship begins to distance because they're not—they won't do the work, or they just can't, or something that is holding them back—I'm getting healthier. Our relationship is even changing because I'm getting healthier. So it always serves you to do the work.

It is also really helpful to make sure you have guidance from people who understand the process. One of the hardest parts of this is recognizing what's normal and what's not normal. It is very normal for partners who've been betrayed to become hyper-controlling, angry. They will swing—big emotional swings. So I'll have husbands call me and say, "My wife is like one person one day and one the next," and I have to tell them, "That's actually a typical trauma response. That is the body's reaction to trying to figure out if it's in danger anymore, and we can help structure the ways that you guys interact and help you understand, 'Hey, is this part of the healing process, or is this a sign of something else?'" Having that support, because so many of these couples try to go through it alone. They try to kind of figure it out on their own. They maybe listen to their friend or somebody who doesn't understand this process and says, "You should leave them," or "You should stay," and they don't actually know what's going on. I think that's another way that couples can really do this well: is making sure you have someone who's either been through it or really understands the process so they can walk with you.

Ron L. Deal: If pornography was the thing—is there something different about that? It's so readily available. It's so easy to get access to. That whole piece of—and I know it depends how long, deep, and wide has that practice of going to pornography, how long has that been? I know there's a whole history there. But is there just, I guess, from informing our audience, if that's part of the equation, is there something unique about that people need to pay attention to?

Matthew Rabsmith: I think they need to know it doesn't change the experience relationally on the other side. A lot of people always assume that if it's not a physical affair, if I do not have physical interactions with another person, then it's not the same or it's less. Our experience, that's not the actual case relationally, because it's about the leaving of the relationship. Instead of honoring the vows and maintaining integrity, it's breaking integrity, and it's also the betrayal, it's the hiding. So we've seen lots of cases where there's been emotional affairs, fantasy, pornography, where we call the flesh line, right? People haven't actually had a physical affair. Those relationships experience the same kind of rupture. Partners experience the same kind of trauma because it's really about two different worlds and that other person not knowing the world that they were living in.

One of the things that was the hardest for Joanna is that we would have arguments, we would have pain cycles, and she would think it would just be about kind of us. But it was a lot about my shame because what would happen is I would act out early in the day, and then I would carry a lot of shame and I would want to pull away from her. She'd come home from work and she'd say, "Hey, what are you doing?" and she would want to connect and I would pull away and I'd get angry. We'd do our pain cycle, but Joanna had no idea that this was really about something much bigger, and that was really unfair for her. That really created a power imbalance in our relationship. I had all this power because of the information I had that she didn't. So even though it was pornography or just one thing, it's still those ruptures that occur relationally.

Joanna Rabsmith: I think the other thing around pornography to just be mindful of in our culture is that there's a high likelihood that there's a screen addiction there as well because most people access pornography on screens. It's probably a place that's then hard to boundary because most people have to engage some level of screens in their day. So being able to stop a pornography addiction requires extreme boundaries, the willingness to inconvenience yourself to the point because if I'm still connected to things that create that dopamine rush, I'm never getting clean and sober. So eventually, even if I maintain some level of sobriety for a period, at some point I will probably go back to pornography if I haven't been able to really cut off that screen addiction, not just the porn addiction. So that's something just, like I said, to be really aware of.

Ron L. Deal: You guys mentioned support system, what's going on around people, and yes, people hear all kinds of stuff: "Leave him, never talk to him again." "Give him another chance." "Go back to her, she's whatever." Sometimes that is part of the problem for people is they don't know what to do. They're getting all kinds of advice, and this kind of sexual betrayal in particular polarizes your community: your friends, your family members. You went to church together and half your Bible class says, "Forget it," and the other half says, "Fight for it." It is so, so difficult. Of course, Christian culture often emphasizes forgiveness. In my experience, that puts an inordinate amount of pressure on the offended partner when there's still responsibility to be taken by the offender. What are your thoughts about that? That seems delicate space and it's hard to navigate.

Joanna Rabsmith: Absolutely. Whatever I work with partners, I help them understand that their story is going to trigger other people's pain cycle. When they are sharing, people oftentimes are responding with advice but more a response out of their own pain and discomfort of whatever their story is. If they've ever had a betrayal of any kind in their life, somebody who didn't show up for them—exactly. They will use their faith and they will use scripture to try to control the situation out of their pain, as well-intentioned as they may be.

Helping my clients understand that lets them put a little bit more in perspective what they're hearing from everyone around them, why they're hearing what they're hearing, and such different messages. Helping them learn—one of the things we help our clients learn is healthy relationship in all the relationships. Is this a relationship that's honest, that's safe? Do you trust this other person? Okay. Why or why not? Can you tell they're speaking out of their pain? Then maybe we take that recommendation with a grain of salt.

Starting there, I think forgiveness is a big one that can come out of people's pain cycles. "Well, you need to forgive them." Okay, I literally just found out yesterday that I was betrayed, and we're already talking about forgiveness and I don't know how many people they slept with. We are jumping so far forward. That's, like I said, kind of step one.

But then understanding a healthy process of forgiveness is so vital and partly so you can know when people are trying to force unhealthy processes of forgiveness on you and then going, "Okay, what does healthy forgiveness actually look like for us?" We really like the triad model of forgiveness that talks about compassion, justice, and power and understanding what does that look like fleshed out in our relationship. This isn't a burden placed on the betrayed spouse to offer this forgiveness. It's a process that's worked out in the midst of relationship. We'll oftentimes talk about nuancing forgiveness and reconciliation. Often when couples are talking about forgiveness, they're really talking about relational reconciliation, and that is going to take a lot of time. That is going to take major changes on the side of the betraying spouse to get to that place.

Matthew Rabsmith: I like to say forgiveness forced is rarely forgiveness found. It's tempting because that was how I felt in our relationship. I wanted Joanna to tell me that we're okay. I wanted her to tell me that I was a good man. I put a lot of pressure on her, and that meant she couldn't talk about the pain that she was in. She couldn't talk about what my actions had meant to her because I would get defensive and I would say, "Look at me now. Look how much better I'm doing."

The more and more I tried to be trusted, the more and more I felt myself not being trusted. The more and more I focused on being trustworthy, that's when I experienced trust. We talk a lot about if you're repairing a relationship, your work should be around being trustworthy. Your goal shouldn't be to be trusted. That's the decision that she's making. The relationship is telling us that, and when you force that, you're forcing yourself farther from it. Truly, our relationship did not fully heal until I was willing to own and accept the impact of my actions. That's what's probably the hardest and what I thought I'd never be able to do. I thought that our relationship would only work if it stayed in the past, if this was a thing that happened to us that we never talked about anymore, that was buried deep, deep, far away, and that actually kept us struggling for many years.

Joanna Rabsmith: I definitely disappoint a lot of couples, especially the betrayer, when they come in and they think, "Okay, we'll finally be healed when we never have to talk about it again. I'll finally know I've been forgiven when she's not bringing it up anymore." I go, "No, no, no. You've finally healed when you can name it, when you can bring it up without it triggering you, without it bringing up insecurities and pain." It's actually when you can embrace and share your story from a place of power. That's when healing has happened. That's when forgiveness has happened.

Ron L. Deal: I love that. That perspective is so very important. I would add even sort of theologically, you know that the next layer of healing is when God uses your story to help other people, which is what you guys are doing now. That's redemption. Not just that you got through it, but that now the narrative is not the narrative of betrayal, but the narrative of grace, forgiveness, redemption, and that's the story you get to tell because that's the story that points ultimately to God.

It occurs to me prayer has got to be such a huge part of this whole thing because you don't know: Am I moving toward forgiveness? Okay, I've forgiven a little; now how do I forgive a lot? But is the other person confessing? Are they truly repentant? Are they being trustworthy? How would I know if they're being trustworthy? Every one of those questions is legit and doesn't have an easy black-and-white answer. So prayer and working with somebody who's guiding and offering perspective to the process has got to be such an important part of the journey.

Matthew Rabsmith: Absolutely.

Joanna Rabsmith: It's huge. We actually had a moment of prayer that was powerful for us. No one enters this journey going, "Can't wait until we can share our story with everyone." We were no exception. The first time we shared publicly, it was to a very intimate group of friends and mentors that we had not shared with yet. It was kind of like, "We probably need to tell them, but we won't tell anyone else ever again." "Okay, we'll just get it all over with once." So we had them all come, we shared our testimony, and then they prayed over us afterwards.

Matthew Rabsmith: A shared friend, Terry Hargrave, was one of the ones who prayed. He prayed this prayer: "God, I pray that this story is not told a hundred times. I pray that it is told a thousand upon a thousand times." I remember being so angry and going, "Terry, God listens to these prayers! Don't do that!" And now our story has been told thousands of thousands of thousands of times.

Joanna Rabsmith: Fearful what you pray for.

Matthew Rabsmith: Every time we tell it, I feel more free. I feel more alive. I feel more in love. I feel more of what God has wanted me to feel all my whole life. That is the good news. I think that it is scary. It is absolutely terrifying to take some of those first steps, but it is the liberation that God promises, that freedom from the captive that you get in the journey that makes it all worth it.

Ron L. Deal: One of the things you guys point out in your book, *Building True Intimacy*, is that you made the observation that a lot of couples in recovery after a betrayal end up doing things that sort of put them in parallel with one another—that they're both moving forward, but they're not connecting. They're not meeting. They're not coming together. Describe that. Why does that happen, and what is it that you want them to avoid there?

Joanna Rabsmith: It was a little bit of what we experienced because that's kind of how it was set up. There was resources for a betrayed spouse—"Okay, understand what you've been through, process through the pain," work through your side of the experience, which is radically different than his side of the experience.

Matthew Rabsmith: Then on the other side, I had my groups, my guys, who were addicts, who were betrayers. They were working on themselves and repairing. So very much, they got me and it was wonderful because I could go and I could share and they would nod. Then Joanna and I would try to talk, and we wouldn't get each other. I'd talk about my childhood and how it wasn't my fault, and I'd do all these things, and she'd go, "Whoa, whoa, whoa! What about me? Hello!" So we would revert back to our silos. We'd be like, "Okay, my silo is safe."

But we knew that if we wanted an "us" again, an "us" had to mean we had to meet at our story and we had to meet at the parts of our reality. So we had to have those moments, and one of those moments for us was learning to check in every day. We started a process of daily checking in with each other, of naming where we were emotionally, where I was in my own recovery so that Joanna knew and she didn't have to ask, she wasn't burdened to wonder. She knew where I was that day. But just where we were in our life, and that simple 20-minute daily check-in just radically moved us piece by piece, day by day, of this rhythm of not just having these kind of siloed journeys but shared journeys. It was that check-in that allowed us to have those stronger moments, those deeper moments, those grief moments where we cried and we wept over what happened between us and what could have been that we lost, but now God was bringing back. It is a process that's not natural. In terms of the world would just keep you safe in your silo, and God is saying, "No, I want the relationship to be something that you share together, even in the pain of it," because that is also where you'll share the joy, it's where you'll share the hope.

Ron L. Deal: So much involved in that little moment of trying to find each other in the midst of both sides filled with pain and discomfort and difficulty, and it requires so much. Back to honesty, vulnerability, and willingness to take the risk and to be aware of what's going on within yourself. What are the little micro-trust moments that you take a tiny step toward? I'm wondering what that's like on both sides, both the person who's trying to be trusted again as well as the person who is open to trust but yet scared to death of stepping into that space. How do you do that and not panic?

Joanna Rabsmith: It was like definitely looking, watching, being present and connected so I could see the changes that were happening, that were taking place, that communicated "Matthew is becoming a new person, a trustworthy person." One stands out to me. It was the first time I really felt like he initiated a boundary without me kind of going, "Hey, I don't feel super safe about this, or this situation, or the way this is..." He proactively thought about, "Wait, maybe this wouldn't be the safest environment. Maybe we need to make these adjustments, or I need to do this differently to create more safety for us."

Those moments are huge. Where I don't feel like I have to lead or even watch out—like, is he going to see it? Is he going to see the danger? As those things started to shift just—and it can sound like a tiny shift. Even like a lot of couples we work with, the wife may name these things and the husband's super agreeable and like, "Oh yeah, I see that too. Okay, I can make these adjustments." But as long as he's not leading, she's not going to feel safe. She's still having to create her own safety by leading his recovery in some way.

So it was looking and noticing those small changes were so helpful and then talking about them, naming it. We talked about the check-in. One of the pieces is honor: honor your spouse, something you noticed that day. So that would be something maybe I'd bring up and I'd name: "Hey, I really appreciated today when you initiated this conversation, this boundary. That let me know that you're really taking our healing seriously and it matters to you." Bringing it into the relationship in that way.

Matthew Rabsmith: I think the journey for me was a lot of rebuilding trust in myself. I think that I had really gotten to a place where my shame had gotten so all-consuming and that I really wondered what I was capable of. God was so gracious to give me a path to freedom that not only brought me out of the dark but also let me see what I truly am capable of.

So when I'm cutting that mango and I'm feeling like I can't do it, I have this arsenal of experiences that God has shown me. He's brought light and said, "Matthew, you can. Look what you're capable of doing. You are capable of stopping an addiction that was infiltrating your whole life, pulling cancer out of your life and starting fresh. That's what you're capable of. I know you can handle this parenting moment, or I know you can handle this one experience that feels too big for you." That's really to me where I could tell something was different—where I started to feel like, "No, I know what I'm truly capable of."

Relationally, it was where Joanna started to be vulnerable and she would start to share, and a lot of times that would be she would share her pain, she'd share what she was struggling with. But that's what told me I'd created something different for us. I had created a safety and a bond for us for her to have that space to step back in. So it wasn't just my vulnerability now; it was the vulnerability of her stepping back in that truly felt like it ignited our intimacy all over again.

Ron L. Deal: Speaking of intimacy, you guys talk about the intimacy pyramid, and one of the things you want to help people get to is not just—they don't want to repair the bad relationship they had because then it's still bad. You want them to go beyond that, right? You want them to really build in the stuff that they didn't have and go beyond that. I know we don't have time to unpack that whole model. I'm wondering, though, if you could just sort of give us a flyover of what people can learn about if they pick up a copy of your book.

Joanna Rabsmith: Absolutely. We've touched on a lot of the levels already in our conversation. But if you want to imagine a visual, we're kind of starting at the bottom of this pyramid. It's very similar to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, so if you think of that but in terms of what a relationship needs to be healthy and strong.

That foundational element is the honesty. Once you build that honesty, which includes self-awareness and being on the same page in terms of information of what's happened in the relationship, then we can build safety. A lot of this safety level is built through self-regulation: learning how to be self-aware of what's going on inside of me, how to regulate that.

Once you build safety, that's when the trust begins to flow in the relationship. That's when you really start to be an "us" again. You feel like, "Okay, we're on the same team building something together." It's when you get to that place you step into the next level of vulnerability, where you really start to risk. You start to step into those scary places. But it makes sense that you would risk because you've experienced honesty, safety, and trust in the relationship at that point. So you have this strong foundation that lets you step into vulnerability. Then finally, as two people are stepping into vulnerability with each other, that's when you start to build that last layer of intimacy.

Ron L. Deal: Most of us just think intimacy is having sex, or, "Man, we had a great conversation," or—it's so much more than that. I think for a lot of us, it's just even the part about coming to even know ourselves and being willing to be open about the worst parts of ourselves. Now, I get it. If your relationship today is super risky, that doesn't make sense for you to share at that level. But it's something you're working toward, and at some point, I'm going to have to give a whole lot more of me than I feel comfortable giving. That's what opens the door when safety is there. That's what opens the door for depth to be created.

Guys, thank you so very much. I've just been sitting here listening to you during this conversation thinking so many people need what you have because it's just so—it's such a common experience for all of us to have things that happen in life, but in particular in this day and age, the sexual betrayals that are involved with pornography, etc. Thank you for what you're doing and your dedication in this space. We want people to find you. So let me just say thank you for being with me today.

Joanna Rabsmith: Thanks for having us. We really appreciate it.

Matthew Rabsmith: We really do, and we're so thankful that God has worked in our lives and is working in the lives of others. So it's just great to be a part of this conversation.

Ron L. Deal: To our viewer or listener, you want to learn more about them, we've got a link in the show notes where you can learn more how you can get connected to the work that they are doing. And don't forget to share this with a friend or, if you haven't subscribed yet to our audio or YouTube version of this podcast, do that because we don't want you to miss what's coming.

The number one email question I get as we're wrapping up today is, "How do I find a qualified counselor for our marriage, our family, in particular for our blended family?" That's a good question because honestly, most therapists don't get any training in family dynamics, let alone stepfamily dynamics. Well, I want you to know we have a growing list of what we call Smart Stepfamily therapists and coaches who have invested time and energy in learning how to be more helpful to blended families. They've gone through my specific advanced clinical training and they're ready to help. So check the show notes for a link to how you can get to that list.

And if you happen to be a coach or a counselor, or you know somebody who is, and they want 12 continuing education credits for going through this training, we would love to have them go through it. You go through this training and you're on our referral network for life, no extra cost. That's just something we want people to find you. So take a look at that in the show notes and get connected or tell a friend about that.

Next time on FamilyLife Blended, I'm going to be talking with Gayla Grace. She's back in the studio with me again. We're going to be talking about this idea that God hates divorce. Right? I mean, you've heard that. It's in the Bible, isn't it? Are you sure? That's next time on FamilyLife Blended. I'm Ron Deal. Thanks for listening or watching, and thank you to our production team and donors who make this podcast possible. FamilyLife Blended is part of the FamilyLife Podcast Network, helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.