I learned a lot of things at our EMS session. I learned that no matter what happened to my marriage, I was going to be ok.  This wasn’t something I had really internalized before.  I would be ok, no matter what.  I learned that I didn’t have to trust Ryan.  In fact, I shouldn’t trust him.  He is an imperfect human being and will make mistakes.  So I don’t trust Ryan, but I do trust God with Ryan. I learned that it was possible to deal with the feelings that I had and was taught how to do just that.  Rick had us go through an exercise where we pictured ourselves next to a river and then we allowed all the hurt and anger to float down the river.  This was very effective for me.  So much so that I now have a painting of a river hanging over our bed (painted for me by another member of our EMS group).  The biggest miracle that happened for me at EMS was that for the first time in my life, I felt God’s love for me.  I learned a new concept of God and I learned that healing was possible.  For the first time in my life, I had lost all control of everything around me and had no choice but to let go.  I did this at EMS and felt an overpowering freedom that has changed my life.  I finally felt healed from all my childhood abuse.   So, for me personally, EMS was miraculous but it also was for our marriage. 

I finally felt like Ryan got the magnitude of what he had done and how he had hurt me.  I felt his true sorrow and desire to make things right.   I learned how to deal with my feelings towards the affair partner and I learned what forgiveness meant.  I learned that I needed to grieve my old marriage as I knew it because that would never be again.  Either we would end up divorced or we would build a much better and different marriage than the one we had. And a better marriage was exactly what I wanted. We both went home committed to working hard to build a better marriage.  We set aside time every evening to work on EMS follow up lessons and to work on communicating and connecting with each other.  We did this daily for several months after EMS.  We were seeing a marriage counselor after we got home that helped us with doing daily things to strengthen our marriage.  We put other things aside to make the time to do this work. We began connecting in a way that we had never connected before.  We became closer than we had ever been.  Little did we know how important that was going to be for what was coming next. 

The strength of our marriage was tested and I know it wouldn’t have survived had it not been for the things we learned at EMS.  Two months after we attended EMS we learned that the affair partner had changed her mind about there having been an affair and instead accused Ryan of raping, kidnapping, and drugging her.  She was literally crazy.  We spent the next two years fighting this and are still not free of her today.  She still tries everything she can to disrupt our lives.  She made something that should have been very private into something very public.  The good thing is that most of our friends and fellow church members know she is unwelland she was not successful with the police.  However, she was successful in destroying Ryan’s career.  Since she had been a patient and he did not deny the affair, his license was suspended for five years. I became the primary financial support for the family as Ryan had to start a new career.  This was a period of incredible stress on us and normally stress like this would have driven us apart.  But this time it was different.  We remained connected and continued working on our marriage in spite of the stress and today our marriage is better than I could have ever imagined it could be.