Heart Work After Betrayal | Infidelity, Marriage, Forgiveness, Loneliness, Trust

Have you been exhausted from trying to fix your marriage doing everything you can to hold it together and quietly wondering why nothing seems to be working no matter how hard you try?

Are you battling the shame of being another Christian couple with infidelity in the story telling yourself this was not supposed to be your testimony and desperately trying to fix it before anyone finds out how broken it actually is?

Have you been so focused on him getting fixed, his healing, his recovery, his progress, that you have completely lost sight of what God might be trying to do inside you?

This month I am celebrating 25 years of marriage and 5000 podcast downloads and as I reflect on this Sabbath season of rest and gratitude I want to share the moment that changed everything for me. Not when the marriage got fixed. But when I finally stopped trying to fix it and let God renew my mind instead.

In this episode I am sharing 4 false beliefs that were keeping me completely stuck after my husband's betrayal and what the renewal of my mind actually looked like for each one. Drawing on Romans 12:2, Dallas Willard's concept of the renovation of the heart, and my own turning point in a support group where I finally saw the pattern I had been living in, this episode is for the woman who is exhausted from fixing outward and ready to let God do something real on the inside.

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CONNECT WITH JULIA AND NEXT STEPS

Contact → [email protected]

Next Steps:

Step 1: Sign up to receive weekly encouragement and practical support and be the first to know what's coming! → Subscribe to receive a weekly love note from me

Step 2: Have a question for me or a topic you'd love for me to cover on the podcast? → Ask me a question

HEART WORK HEALING CIRCLE ***COMING SOON””"

After betrayal and/or infidelity, it's easy to believe your job is to keep being on the alert. Watching for warning signs. Watching your husband's behavior. Holding the marriage together. Managing everyone's emotions while quietly losing yourself in the process.

In this Monday Heart Check, I’m inviting you into a simple two-minute Sabbath practice called The Shift, a gentle way to turn your attention away from managing everyone else and back toward your own heart.

Drawing from Dallas Willard's picture of the heart as the command center of our lives, you'll learn why healing begins when you stop asking, "How is he doing?" and start asking, "How am I doing?"

This practical exercise will help you:

If you've been longing to experience true rest and want to start rebuilding trust and experience true healing instead of constantly carrying everyone else's emotional load, and worrying about the future, this episode is for you.

 RESOURCES AND LINKS MENTIONED

CONNECT WITH JULIA AND NEXT STEPS

Contact → [email protected]

Next Steps:

Step 1: Sign up to receive weekly encouragement and practical support and be the first to know what's coming! → Subscribe to receive a weekly love note from me

Step 2: Have a question for me or a topic you'd love for me to cover on the podcast? → Ask me a question

Step 3: HEART WORK HEALING CIRCLE ***COMING SOON***

Do you wonder if healing from infidelity and betrayal is even possible, or if your marriage is just going to survive instead of thrive?

Are you still wrestling with whether staying or leaving was the right decision, even years after the betrayal happened?

Do you find yourself waiting to celebrate any progress in your marriage until trust feels completely rebuilt?

In this episode, I'm celebrating two milestones: 25 years of marriage and 7 months of this podcast by getting honest about what healing from infidelity and betrayal, and rebuilding trust, actually taught me. If you've ever wrestled with lack of trust, felt alone in your healing, or wondered how forgiveness after betrayal really works, this episode walks through the real, unfiltered shifts that took place in me over these 25 years. This is not a formula for how to trust again, but a testimony of what emotional healing and safety can look like when you stop striving for perfection and start rebuilding trust to yourself, to God, and eventually, to your husband.

RESOURCES AND LINKS MENTIONED

CONNECT WITH JULIA AND NEXT STEPS

Contact → [email protected]

Next Steps:

Step 1: Sign up to receive weekly encouragement and practical support and be the first to know what's coming! → Subscribe to receive a weekly love note from me

Step 2: Have a question for me or a topic you'd love for me to cover on the podcast? → Ask me a question

Step 3: HEART WORK HEALING CIRCLE ***COMING SOON***: 

Have you been trying to forgive your husband after betrayal and wondering why it never seems to stick, maybe you say the words and mean them in the moment but the anger and the hurt keep coming back?

Do you feel confused about what forgiveness actually means? Whether it means reconciling, whether it means pretending it did not happen, whether it means you have to trust him again before you are ready?

Are you longing for the kind of freedom that people talk about on the other side of forgiveness but you have no idea how to actually get there?

In this episode I am continuing my conversation from last week with a licensed marriage and family therapist and this time we are going straight to the heart of one of the most misunderstood concepts in the entire healing journey after betrayal: Forgiveness.

We will discuss the following questions: 

This is Part 2 of a two part conversation. If you have not listened to Episode 40 yet go back and start there first.

 RESOURCES AND LINKS MENTIONED

 CONNECT WITH JULIA AND NEXT STEPS

Contact → [email protected]

Podcast → Heart Work After Betrayal on Apple Podcasts

Next Steps:

Step 1: Sign up to receive weekly encouragement and practical support and be the first to know what's coming! → Subscribe to receive a weekly love note from me

Step 2: Have a question for me or a topic you'd love for me to cover on the podcast? → Ask me a question

Step 3: HEART WORK HEALING CIRCLE **COMING SOON** A private healing community for women doing the hard holy work of rebuilding after betrayal in their marriage. Get your name on the waitlist, you will be the first to know when the doors open. → Join the Heart Work Healing Circle Waitlist

DISCLAIMER: This podcast is for informational and encouragement purposes only and is not a substitute for professional therapy or counseling. If you are in crisis please reach out to a licensed mental health professional.

Does your head tell you that you should forgive because you know that is what God wants while your heart is still carrying anger, fear, and hurt that just will not go away no matter how hard you try?

Do you feel guilty for the gap between what you know theologically and where you actually are emotionally like a bad Christian because your feelings have not caught up with your faith yet?

Have you been performing okayness before God, maybe you are bringing Him the version of yourself that has it together instead of the real, divided, struggling version that actually needs Him most?

In this Monday Heart Check we are standing at a threshold moving from the grief series into the forgiveness conversation. And before Thursday's powerful episode with Rafael I want to give you something that I believe is the missing piece for so many women in this journey:

The gap between what you know and what you feel is not failure. It is not a sign that something is wrong with you spiritually. It might actually be the most honest and holy place you have been in a long time.

In this episode I am walking you through a guided reflection rooted in Scripture from David's cry for truth in the inward parts in Psalm 51, to Paul's commitment to a clear conscience in Acts 24, to Peter's call to keep a clear conscience even in suffering to help you understand what it actually means to be honest before God right where you are. And how that honesty instead of performance, pretending, or forcing your feelings to match your theology is the very thing that opens the door to real grief and real forgiveness.

This is a short, quiet, contemplative episode. Find a still moment. Bring your honest heart. That is all you need.

 RESOURCES AND LINKS MENTIONED

CONNECT WITH JULIA AND NEXT STEPS

Contact → [email protected]

Next Steps:

Step 1: Sign up to receive weekly encouragement and practical support and be the first to know what's coming! → Subscribe to receive a weekly love note from me

Step 2: Have a question for me or a topic you'd love for me to cover on the podcast? → Ask me a question

Step 3: HEART WORK HEALING CIRCLE **COMING SOON**

Have you been wondering if you are grieving the wrong way or not grieving enough, or too much, or in the wrong order and quietly judging yourself for how messy and unpredictable your healing has felt?

Do you find yourself reaching for busyness, distraction, or anything that keeps the grief at a safe distance and then wondering why you still feel so stuck months or even years later?

Have you ever asked yourself how long is this going to take and felt frustrated, ashamed, or hopeless when you could not find a satisfying answer?

In this episode I am sitting down with a licensed marriage and family therapist who has been on this show before and together we are having one of the most honest, reframing, and practically helpful conversations about grief after betrayal that I think you will ever hear.

We are covering 7 truths about grief after betrayal and what gets in the way of it including

He also shares a perspective on grief that completely reframes the whole process not as something you endure but as something you actively participate in by identifying what your needs are first and then taking ownership over how to meet those needs.

This is Part 1 of a two part conversation. Part 2 drops next Thursday where we continue the conversation and cover the connection between grief and forgiveness.

RESOURCES AND LINKS MENTIONED

CONNECT WITH JULIA AND NEXT STEPS

Contact → [email protected]

Podcast → Heart Work After Betrayal on Apple Podcasts

Next Steps:

Step 1: Sign up to receive weekly encouragement and practical support and be the first to know what's coming! → Subscribe to receive a weekly love note from me

Step 2: Have a question for me or a topic you'd love for me to cover on the podcast? → Ask me a question

Step 3: HEART WORK HEALING CIRCLE **COMING SOON** A private healing community for women doing the hard holy work of rebuilding after betrayal in their marriage. Get your name on the waitlist, you will be the first to know when the doors open. → Join the Heart Work Healing Circle Waitlist

DISCLAIMER: This podcast is for informational and encouragement purposes only and is not a substitute for professional therapy or counseling. If you are in crisis please reach out to a licensed mental health professional.

Are you sick of being ambushed by your emotions, triggered out of nowhere, overwhelmed in the middle of an ordinary moment, and wondering why you still cannot seem to get ahead of the grief?

Have you been staying so busy, so distracted, so focused on everyone else that you have barely had a moment to sit alone with what you are actually feeling after the betrayal?

Have you ever considered that what looks like coping on the outside might actually be avoidance and that the grief you have been postponing is quietly fueling the triggers that keep catching you off guard?

In this Monday Heart Check we are wrapping up our grief series and before Thursday's special guest episode I want to give you one simple practice to prepare your heart for what you are about to hear.

In this episode I am sharing a simple three step reflection practice called What Am I Reaching For? I encourage you to see honestly what you have been using to avoid the pain of betrayal and take your first step toward something different. Honesty gets you connected to reality. And nothing disconnected from reality will ever truly work. That is something we will learn more about on Thursday, as I just directly quoted the therapist I will have a conversation with on Thursday. This practice is your first step toward that honesty.

RESOURCES AND LINKS MENTIONED

 CONNECT WITH JULIA AND NEXT STEPS

Contact → [email protected]

Podcast → Heart Work After Betrayal on Apple Podcasts

Next Steps:

Step 1: Sign up to receive weekly encouragement and practical support and be the first to know what's coming! → Subscribe to receive a weekly love note from me

Step 2: Have a question for me or a topic you'd love for me to cover on the podcast? → Ask me a question

Step 3: Want more personal support? If you are tired of carrying this alone — together we will work on rebuilding clarity, learning to trust yourself again, and taking your next step with God, yourself, and your marriage. → Apply for a 1:1 Private Clarity Call with me

HEART WORK HEALING CIRCLE **COMING SOON** A private healing community for women doing the hard holy work of rebuilding after betrayal in their marriage. Get your name on the waitlist, you will be the first to know when the doors open. → Join the Heart Work Healing Circle Waitlist

DISCLAIMER: This podcast is for informational and encouragement purposes only and is not a substitute for professional therapy or counseling. If you are in crisis please reach out to a licensed mental health professional.

Have you been wondering what grieving well after betrayal actually looks like in real life in the daily reality of being a wife and a mother and a woman who is trying to hold everything together while her heart is completely broken?

Do you feel like you have been trying to heal but nothing is really moving like you are doing all the right things but there seems a deep disconnect? 

Are you longing to hear from someone who has actually walked this road and come out the other side really and truly healed?

In this episode I am setting the teaching aside and just talking to you, sharing what grieving the loss after my husband's betrayal actually looked like for me. The beach walks. The prayer journals. The first time I walked into a support group and cried because I finally felt safe. The photo albums I had to put away. The scheduled cry in the car with classical music playing. The raw, searching, honest prayers.

Underneath all of those stories I am going to show you the three connections that I believe made healing not just possible but inevitable: connection with yourself, connection with God, and connection with others. This is what I know to be true: the only path through grief after betrayal is moving toward connection when everything in you is screaming to run away from it.

RESOURCES AND LINKS MENTIONED

CONNECT WITH ME AND NEXT STEPS

Contact → [email protected]

Podcast → Heart Work After Betrayal on Apple Podcasts

Next Steps:

Step 1: Sign up to receive weekly encouragement and practical support and be the first to know what's coming! → Subscribe to receive a weekly love note from me

Step 2: Have a question for me or a topic you'd love for me to cover on the podcast? → Ask me a question

Step 3: Want more personal support? If you are tired of carrying this alone, together we will work on rebuilding clarity, learning to trust yourself again, and taking your next step with God, yourself, and your marriage.

→ Apply for a 1:1 Private Clarity Call with me

HEART WORK HEALING CIRCLE  **COMING SOON** A private healing community for women doing the hard holy work of rebuilding after betrayal in their marriage. Get your name on the waitlist, you will be the first to know when the doors open. → Join the Heart Work Healing Circle Waitlist

DISCLAIMER: This podcast is for informational and encouragement purposes only and is not a substitute for professional therapy or counseling. If you are in crisis please reach out to a licensed mental health professional.

Do your emotions still take over out of nowhere. maybe in the car, in the middle of a normal conversation, right before you fall asleep and you cannot figure out why you are still feeling this way?

Have you been powering through, staying busy, keeping the routines and yet something still feels tender and unresolved underneath all of that functioning?

Have you ever wondered if what you are calling exhaustion or numbness or irritability might actually be grief that has simply had nowhere safe to go?

"Sometimes what we call being tired is actually grief that has had nowhere to go."

In this Monday Heart Check we are continuing our grief series and this week I want to give you one of the most practical and relieving tools in the entire healing journey after betrayal.

In this episode I am sharing a simple three step practice for creating a sacred space for your grief, a specific time, a specific place, and a gentle way to tend the vineyard of your heart with God, so that grief stops ambushing you in the moments you least expect it and starts moving through you the way it was always meant to.

Because a grief container does not mean grief gets to run your whole life. It means grief is allowed to be here, in its own space, with God, and where it can finally begin to move. Grief showing up again does not mean you failed. It may simply mean another layer is ready to be tended.

This episode is for the woman who has been strong for everyone else and has not yet given her own heart somewhere safe to land.

RESOURCES AND LINKS MENTIONED

CONNECT WITH JULIA AND NEXT STEPS

Contact → [email protected]

Podcast → Heart Work After Betrayal on Apple Podcasts

Next Steps:

Step 1: Sign up to receive weekly encouragement and practical support and be the first to know what's coming! → Subscribe to receive a weekly love note from me

Step 2: Have a question for me or a topic you'd love for me to cover on the podcast? → Ask me a question

Step 3: Want more personal support? If you are tired of carrying this alone, together we will work on rebuilding clarity, learning to trust yourself again, and taking your next step with God, yourself, and your marriage.

→ Apply for a 1:1 Private Clarity Call with me

HEART WORK HEALING CIRCLE *** COMING SOON ***A private healing community for women doing the hard holy work of rebuilding after betrayal in their marriage. Get your name on the waitlist, you will be the first to know when the doors open.

→ Join the Heart Work Healing Circle Waitlist

DISCLAIMER: This podcast is for informational and encouragement purposes only and is not a substitute for professional therapy or counseling. If you are in crisis please reach out to a licensed mental health professional.

Have you been trying to forgive your husband's betrayal, saying the words, praying the prayers and yet the wound keeps reopening and the anger keeps coming back no matter how hard you try?

Do you feel stuck in your healing and cannot figure out why?  It feels like you are doing everything right but it still seems you cannot move forward?

Are you months or even over longer into this journey and still asking yourself why you cannot find the healing and the peace you so desperately are longing for? 

If forgiveness has felt impossible after your husband's betrayal, this episode is going to give you the answer you have been looking for. And it is probably not what you expect.

In this episode I am sharing the 8 hidden layers of loss that most women never name after betrayal in their marriage and why carrying these unnamed losses is the most common reason healing stalls and forgiveness feels out of reach. Using the powerful picture of the heart as a vineyard from Proverbs 4:23 we are going to walk the rows together from the most visible surface damage all the way down to the deepest root of all. You will walk away from this episode with clarity of what you are actually grieving and the ability to begin to do the HEART work with intention.

This is Episode 2 of our grief series and it builds directly on Episode 34. If you have not listened to that one yet go back and start there first

RESOURCES AND LINKS MENTIONED

CONNECT WITH JULIA AND NEXT STEPS

Contact → [email protected]

Podcast → Heart Work After Betrayal on Apple Podcasts

Next Steps:

Step 1: Sign up to receive weekly encouragement and practical support and be the first to know what's coming! → Subscribe to receive a weekly love note from me

Step 2: Have a question for me or a topic you'd love for me to cover on the podcast?

→ Ask me a question

Step 3: Want more personal support? If you're tired of carrying this alone, together we'll work on rebuilding clarity, learning to trust yourself again, and taking your next step with God, yourself, and your marriage.

→ Apply for a 1:1 Private Clarity Call with me

HEART WORK HEALING CIRCLE ***COMING SOON*** A private healing community for women doing the hard, holy work of rebuilding after betrayal in their marriage. Get your name on the waitlist, you'll be the first to know when the doors open.

→ Join the Heart Work Healing Circle Waitlist

DISCLAIMER: This podcast is for informational and encouragement purposes only and is not a substitute for professional therapy or counseling. If you are in crisis please reach out to a licensed mental health professional.