Has infidelity impacted your marriage? Do you feel like you need guidance through recovery and rebuilding your marriage?
A few months ago we ran a 15 Day Marriage Challenge and were absolutely stunned by the number of people going through that process who were dealing with betrayal in the form of an affair or infidelity.
Caleb created the 30 Day Betrayal Devotional set as a response to this need. This is a very unique product in the marketplace and in this podcast episode Caleb answers some questions and tells us about it.
By the way, these were written for the more common situation of husband betraying wife. If you are a couple where the roles are reversed, and the wife has betrayed the husband, just switch books and pronouns.
Broken Couples Need to Heal From Affairs Together
The first thing we recognized is that both the betrayer and the betrayed need to be working through their own issues in this process, but they need to be doing so in a way that opens them up to each other. These devotionals comes in a set of “His” and “Hers” and are complementary to each other. They’re two separate journals but come in a set.
What happens is that you are working on things that complement and correlate with what your spouse is working on. For example, a few days in Caleb speaks to the betrayer about being willing to acknowledge his spouse’s feelings and is talking to be the betrayed wife about sharing her feelings rather than always pursuing facts about the betrayal. The two parts match up day by day as you go through this journey.
And some good news: rarely is there a couple recovering from an affair where there was not some sort of intimacy deficiency in the marriage. Those couples who make a sincere effort to rebuild and recover often speak of their marriage being WAAAY better than before. What changed? All of a sudden everything becomes open and vulnerable. It’s incredibly painful and risky but you have two people who are seeing way further into each other than they did before. As they heal and rebuild, they don’t let go of this newfound intimacy!
Recovering From Infidelity Needs a Proven Plan
The second thing that we realized is that couples need a plan. To be honest, we initially didn’t want to do a devotional because we didn’t want to string together some warm fuzzies and lead people down an unrealistic pathway that was sprinkled with Christian platitudes.
So, Caleb wrote these devotionals with some very challenging Scripture readings but he also integrated them with a clinically proven pathway towards rebuilding and recovering from an affair.
This is a proven process that you’re stepping through.
The first ten days help you confront the facts of the affair but move towards owning the feelings and the trauma of the affair: how it impacts the betrayed spouse, but also showing the betrayer how to demonstrate accountability and honesty.
The next 10 days deal with the ‘why’ of the affair. This is the part where you really start to make meaning of the affair. It’s a very touching part of the devotional where you go deep with root causes in order to find the healing. By the end of this, you still won’t like that the affair happened or the pain it caused, but you should be able to see that there is hope, there is purpose and that God is going to turn your grief and pain into blessing and recovery.
The last 10 days takes you through the decisions to forgive and reconcile. Do you want to do it? If yes, then it becomes about walking you through that as well. That is a very tough process to navigate through without guidance.
Recovering From An Affair Should Result in Transformation
We would never recommend having an affair in order to catalyze growth and transformation. However, since this has happened and it is a part of what you have experienced, the next thing I’m looking for is how can we take this heart-breaking, profoundly betraying, devastating discovery and turn it into something that is transformational.
Obviously, this is a self-help tool so the transformation really depends on how sincere and how deeply you go with the challenges in the devotionals.
But our goal for you would be, as the betrayed spouse, that by the end you will have:
- Made sense of why the affair happened
- Processed the grief and trauma of the betrayal
- Understood how to begin trusting again
- Learned how to forgive and reconcile
- And moved towards affair-proofing your marriage.
And for the betraying spouse, my goals for you are that you will have:
- Supported your spouse properly through recovery from the betrayal
- Learned how to begin earning her trust again
- Learned how to make amends for the infidelity
- And moved towards affair-proofing your marriage.
Who is This For? and Not For?
These devotionals are for couples recovering from affairs and infidelity. It’s ideal if you both can do the devotionals. There are journalling and workbook sections throughout so you are engaging with the Scripture reading, with prayer and the counsel given in the devotionals.
You could do this on your own if you like and you will receive some benefit. We only sell them as a pair because that is really how we’d like you to come to this.
These are not intended for couples recovering from discovering a sexual addiction or pornography addiction where you now know that this is something that was brought to the marriage.
If you are in an abusive marriage and your spouse is abusive in any way toward you, we do NOT recommend that you engage in any process that makes you more vulnerable, which this would do. Your first step is to find safety.
So it’s not that we don’t want to sell a lot of these – we’d love to reach as many distressed marriages as we can. We just want to be really honest about who this is and who it isn’t for.
Remember, affairs take all shapes and forms: if your spouse had an emotional affair or a physical affair; it is was a coworker or a random person; whether you feel like you were at fault or not. The variety doesn’t remove the effectiveness of this resource.
If you’re recovering from infidelity, these 30 Day Betrayal Recovery Devotionals are an outstanding resource that we’re proud to offer to you. They’re printed in full colour on top-quality paper and they come with a wire binding so they open up and lay flat as you work through them.
30 Day Betrayal Recovery Devotionals
That way it is easy to pray over what you’re learning, do the writing and journalling that’s involved and just really focus on recovering from this huge blow you’ve experienced.
To purchase your devotionals, simple go to www.onlyyouforever.com/betrayal-devotionals/
Remember, if you have any questions about this or anything else, be sure to get in touch!
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