When I talk to people who are thinking about pursuing recovery, many times they ask me if wanting to stay just for the kids is actually enough. Adamantly, I almost always agree with a resounding “YES, it is.” It may be imperfect motivation, but it’s motivation enough. It’s an impetus to get one or both spouses into specialized help, to see if the marriage can be saved. In fact, sometimes it’s the best motivation, as our feelings fail us quite often and on any given day we can feel so much differently about our spouse. It’s just not worth trusting emotion. Especially in the middle of absolute chaos and emotional trauma, to use our feelings for any sort of rudder is to everyone’s detriment. However, with our kids, short of some disappointments here and there, our concern and love for them feels relatively constant, and passionate if you will. Our feelings of love and care for them are less fragile and many times will carry us to a point of what I call “revelatory breakthrough.”

What I mean is, when my affair and double life became exposed, I still had so much anger and resentment birthed out of rejection from Samantha and unmet needs which I thought were justified. I wasn’t at any level healed, and wasn’t at any level madly or passionately in love with her and wasn’t clamoring with some driven mantra of “Let’s go save our marriage, let’s go save our marriage.” It was more like “Let’s save our F A M I L Y….the kids need a dad in the home.” At the time, our kids were 4 years, 5 years, and 6 weeks old, and I was willing to attempt to live in the misery just so I could be with my kids.

I know it seems sarcastic and a bit dysfunctional (not to mention sordid), but it’s highly normal for an unfaithful spouse to feel this way, and even more normal for an unfaithful spouse to want to save his or her personal family arrangement more than the marriage, at least at the initial entry point of recovery.

But take courage, there is hope. More hope than you know. The motivation, although imperfect, was strong enough to get me to do whatever Samantha wanted to do to get help and see if we could save our marriage. The incredible thing was, within about 3 months of good, strong, what we call ‘infidelity – specific’ help, the passionate feelings of love and devotion for Samantha started to return. At first it was like a time release function, yet as the lights began to come on regarding how we both became so dysfunctional and how I became so selfish and self-absorbed, the marriage began to take on a whole new life. As more and more revelation and insight came to me, the passion and true love and motivation to want to be right with Samantha was almost overpowering, and continued to motivate me to do whatever it took to save the marriage.

Now, almost 8 years later, my marriage has been fully restored and is unlike anything I could ever imagine. When we launched out into the deep of recovery, I truly had no idea it could be this good at all.

As it’s been said, “You can never tell the end of the story by the beginning.”