Heartfelt Journey 💔 to Redemption: Overcoming Infidelity! 🌟

I mean, we were— I had a lot of good worldview perspective ingrained in me from an early age. There's never been a time in my life where I didn't believe that the Bible was real, that I didn't believe that God was real. And yet I didn't own a lot of those things in terms of like on a practical level. I was not living it out. And the thing is, I knew my Bible and I knew it's like, well, you know, Bible says like, you know, 1 John, like if I'm not living by the light, then what does that say about me? And so like, So I so quickly got to this point, by the time I was married and continually looking at porn, continually having sexual affairs with, with women, and then just all that, this whole double life, and just lying and lying and lying and abusing my wife emotionally and verbally and all these things. And quickly, you know, as a dad too, we had our first boy 11 months after we got married. So very quickly I got to this point where I'm like, okay, I don't know how to stop doing this. There's part of me that doesn't want to stop. Like, there's a big part of me that wanted to stop, but there's also part of me that wanted to keep chasing it. And I remember just laying in bed going, you know, God, why did you create me? Why did you put me on this, on this earth when all I do is hurt people? All I do is hurt my wife. All I do is hurt my, my boys, you know, by, by not being the type of dad that they need. So it was like I had this very heightened awareness of what I should be, of what my role should be as a husband and as a dad. But I also, I knew what I was doing. And that, that is one of the incredible things that I'm thankful for with recovery is— for me, and for me it boils down to extreme ownership— is because I am the one who made these choices to get myself in this place, I also can work on those unhealthy things. I can work on those habits and routines. Now, to try to do it by myself, to try to do it without outside help, to try to do it without submitting to a different way of life, whether that's, you know, a 2-year voluntary house arrest therapy, you know what I mean? It could look like different things, but it's this dichotomy of I can't necessarily just— I can't just hit an off button and decide I'm, I'm just gonna live differently completely. I'm not— I don't ever— the enemy is not other people. The enemy is Satan, sin, you know, lust. That's the enemy. Um, but you know, but in my old life, I would want to sexually objectify pretty much every woman, every woman I could. So lady walks in front of me at the grocery store, and I, you know, I noticed that she has a low-cut shirt, and I noticed that, and I, and I don't bounce away for a second. Well, that's— in that moment, I didn't choose the healthiest option, which would be like, you know what, I don't— that doesn't need to be in front. I don't need to be looking at that, so let me, let me bounce away. Um, the healthiest thing would be to immediately bounce away and just like, I don't need to, I don't need to look at that. But even if I look for a second before bouncing away, in my old life that would quickly turn into this landslide, this mudslide of like, well, I did that, I might as well keep looking, I might as well start thinking about it. Because again, she— when I got into my recovery, a couple months later she started going to recovery for sexual betrayal trauma. That there was a group that she went to that she now leads a chapter of called Partners in Process. And by God's grace, uh, my mentor's wife was her mentor, so, which was just an awesome thing too. And she was taught to trust one thing: don't trust what your husband says or promises. And, and that's— that can be taken out of context. Again, we're dealing with addiction, we're dealing with a husband who had been a liar and manipulator for years, right? So don't trust what he says, don't trust what he promises, but you can trust his behavior over an extended period of time. And that might be healthy or unhealthy, but either way, what somebody shows you over an extended period of time, that's trustable, right? And, and really, let me— that's, that's true of anyone. I can— you can say something and I can, I can decide to trust that or not, but I can definitely trust what you've shown me with your behavior over a while, right?