Closing Keynote:

Betrayal trauma is one of the most excruciating forms of human pain imaginable, and it can cause a profound and negative upheaval around our view of God, our view of relationship, or even around whether life has any ultimate purpose or meaning. If we focus too much attention on just trying to survive the pain, we may miss the opportunity for the darkness to become a teacher or even an ally that can lead us to a greater life. The scary sounds you hear in the darkness may not be a monster, they may be the very voice of God.

In terms of your spouse’s infidelity, the story you tell yourself about what happened may end up being more important than what actually transpired. The story you make up about why it happened can become even more critical. And if you begin to get caught up in how you could have kept it from happening, you can become completely undone. As it turns out, the story we tell ourselves is one of the most critical aspects of our recovery.

Most of us do not have a language for grief. We might have access to a few descriptive words like sad, depressed, and angry but beyond that, grief is a very difficult experience to allow ourselves to completely enter. When we’re taught from a young age to “keep it together”, to not let our emotions get the best of us, we numb our God given ability to emote, to cry out, and to honestly acknowledge the full extent of our hurt and sadness. In this session, we'll explore how to “join in” with our grief rather than fight against it through the practice of lament, which will teach us how to honor and process our pain so that we can live more freely.

Jeremy

So often, we attempt to walk through the trenches of forgiveness in expectation that once we make the decision to forgive, we’ll finally be able to see through the emotional fog. But sometimes, we just wind up just feeling stuck. We wonder if the decision and efforts to forgive were genuine. We wonder if we’ll ever break free from the chains of unforgiveness. In Jeremy’s session, he’ll describe his own story of not just making a decision to forgive in his mind but releasing his heart to forgive through a process of emotional forgiveness.