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We have been married for 38 years, lived a very blessed life in a small town. We served everyone around us, but somehow forgot to serve ourselves. Infidelity has destroyed us both. We are in the fire, we both want to come out stronger. We just don't know how to get there. We are committed to the process, but getting help has proven to be a challenge. We both want to be the success story. We both are ready for change. We don't want to lose sight of who and what we are or had, but both know change is necessary for a better future. This could be life changing for us.

Thirteen years ago, God graciously revealed my husbands infidelity. It shook me to the core and my entire world crumbled into a heap of chaos and despair. I felt so alone. After confronting him, I thought he was sincere about stopping the affair, but it continued for another 2 or 3 years. We had little help, and I was busy working full time and raising our 2 children and just resigned myself to a life of misery, while presenting a false self to my children and the world just to get by and in hopes of giving my children a pretend normal life. I was able to receive Counselling through my church but not for this issue, and my church didn’t seem to know what to do with us or how to help us. It has been an agonizing 13 years. But, God, being rich in mercy, lovingly broke through and my husband has finally just had his heart changed to where he is beginning to understand what he did and take action to restore his relationship with God and our marriage. He has signed up for the Men’s Hope For Healing course. And I would love to be able to take the Harboring Hope course!

Two years ago my life split into two parts: the life before I knew, and the life after.

Before that day, I believed I had the kind of marriage people spend their whole lives hoping to find. I loved my wife deeply. We built a home together and raised three children together. I worked hard to provide and tried to be the steady man my family could rely on. Life wasn’t perfect—we were busy, sometimes tired, sometimes disconnected—but I believed in us completely.

Then the truth began to surface.

My wife had been having an affair. Not just a mistake or a moment of weakness. It lasted for about a year.

The person she chose wasn’t a stranger. It was someone from my past—a childhood friend. During the affair he lived right across the street from us.

He wasn’t just a neighbor. He was someone I trusted.

We helped each other with projects. We shared tools. We talked about life. Our kids played together. From the outside it looked like two families just living normal lives across the street from each other.

That’s part of what makes the discovery so hard to explain.

I didn’t find out all at once.

What started everything was a message I happened to see from him. It was small, but something about it didn’t sit right with me. My gut told me something was off.

That feeling stayed with me.

For two days I kept digging, trying to make sense of things that didn’t add up. Every step uncovered something else that hurt more than the last. Messages. Phone records. Pieces of a reality I didn’t know existed.

The moment it truly hit me was when I saw how much they had been talking on the phone. It wasn’t occasional or random. It was every day. Multiple times a day. Sometimes for hours. Seeing that laid out in front of me was the moment my stomach dropped and I knew something was very wrong.

That Monday night I came home and confronted my wife with what I had found. She told me a story about it, but something about it didn’t sit right. My instincts kept telling me there was more.

The next morning I told her I was going to retrieve the messages between them. In that moment the truth started to come out.

But it didn’t all come at once.

Over the months that followed, the truth came out piece by piece—what people often call trickle truth. Every new detail felt like reopening the wound again. Just when I thought I understood what had happened, another piece would surface that changed the picture.

Even now, two years later, there are days where I still struggle with wondering if I truly know the whole story.

Finding out felt like the ground disappeared underneath my feet. It wasn’t just heartbreak. It was humiliation, confusion, anger, grief, and a deep questioning of my own worth.

But life didn’t stop.

I still had to wake up the next morning and be a father. I still had to go to work. I still had to show up for my kids and try to make their world feel safe and normal.

So I did what a lot of men do. I carried it quietly.

On the outside I kept moving. I laughed with my kids. I helped with homework. I went to work every day and tried to be the man everyone expected me to be.

Inside, though, things were different.

Betrayal changes the way your mind works. There are moments when you feel okay and then something small pulls you right back into it—the memories, the questions, the doubt. Some days I feel hopeful. But there are still days that are incredibly hard. Days where the weight of it all comes crashing back down and I have to fight just to keep moving forward.

And on those days, I still have to be a father.

My kids don’t see the battle happening inside me. They just see their dad. And in many ways that’s what keeps me going—because even on my hardest days, they still look at me like I’m their safe place.

One of the reasons this experience has cut so deeply is because betrayal touches wounds that go back much further in my life. Growing up, I experienced abandonment more than once—my mother leaving, my grandmother leaving, and later my stepmother leaving as well. Those experiences left marks that I spent years trying to overcome.

When I built my own family, I believed I had finally created something stable and safe. Something permanent.

When the affair happened, it didn’t just break my trust in my marriage. It stirred up those old feelings of being left behind and not being enough.

Recently the weight of all this has reached a point where my wife and I even talked about the possibility of separation. Not because we don’t care about each other, but because the pain and the triggers are still there for me, and the constant revisiting of it has been exhausting for both of us. I still struggle with questions and moments that bring everything back, and she has expressed how hard it is to keep answering them.

It’s a painful place to be—wanting so badly to heal and move forward, but feeling stuck in the middle of it.

That’s why healing matters so much to me right now.

I don’t want those wounds—old or new—to define the man I become going forward. I don’t want to slowly harden into someone who simply carries this pain quietly for the rest of my life.

I want to rebuild trust. I want to be able to love again without fear controlling my heart. And most of all, I want to be the kind of father whose strength comes from healing rather than burying the pain.

Two years later, I’m still standing. Not because it’s easy, but because my family is worth fighting for—and I still believe that healing is possible.

Long story short, my husband of 10 years (together for 17) cheated with a younger coworker who he swore was just a friend. First time was a couple months and the again a couple months later for a couple weeks. To say I’m heartbroken is an understatement. I was completely blindsided. I love this man with my whole heart and completely trusted him. I’ve really struggled these last 6 months and could really use this course.

My wayward spouse did the hope for healing course and it brought out his best self. We have also done EMS couples online. Unfortunately whenever he is not reading AR materials, I feel hopeless. I’m hoping to get some agency for om this course.