Note: In this post, I will be discussing emotional safety, healing, and forgiveness. If you are being emotionally abused, or if you fear for your physical safety because of physical abuse or the threat of it, please seek help and support as soon as possible. What I am writing about here does not apply to you.
This is the second of a series of posts about emotional safety in marriage. In my previous post, I wrote about how hurt can lead us to build walls in our marriage as a way of providing emotional safety. My intention was to write this post about strategies for tearing down those walls—but I am going to save that for next time.
I want to talk a bit about how the walls we build to keep ourselves emotionally safe can imprison us—and what we must do before we can work on tearing down the walls.
Not all heart hurts are the same in marriage, and not all walls of emotional safety are built the same way.
Some hurts accumulate over time—one brick one day, two bricks the next day, a month with no bricks, and then a week with multiple new small hurts each day. This was the way it was with my marriage. I hurt in a thousand small ways—and hurt by hurt, one brick after another was added to my wall.
Other hurts run quite deep. A wife who discovers that her husband is using pornography or who learns of a husband’s emotional or physical affair experiences a big hurt that may send her into a frenzy of wall-building over a period of hours or days.
The prospect of tearing down a wall that was built slowly, with small bricks, is overwhelming enough.
When your wall was built practically overnight in response to a deep and huge hurt, the idea may be absolutely terrifying. The wall can seem insurmountable.
Besides, we kind of like the wall, don’t we?
An emotional wall that is strong and solid gives us a safe place to retreat and begin to recover when we’ve been hurt. We may need to lick our wounds for a while. We may need to grieve the loss of what we thought our marriage was. When a husband has been in deep sin against us, a wall of emotional protection is likely necessary for a while.
We need to catch our breath and figure out how to move forward.
The problem comes when we get so comfortable inside those walls that we decide to move in rather than move forward.
We may feel safe behind the walls—but safety does not truly heal us. It just removes us from the danger.
When I was keeping a barrier against my husband and withholding my full heart, I felt protected against new hurts. I liked it that way. However, the old hurts were still there. With an impermeable barrier around me, that hurt could not be released; there was no place it could go. It had nothing to do but fester and grow.
My heart began to develop seeds of bitterness.
Bitterness fed my me-centeredness, my thoughts about my rights in marriage with nary a thought about my responsibilities, and my resentment of my husband and of the promises I had made to him.
The wall kept me safe for a time, but if I had let the bitterness grow in my heart, it would have been far worse for me in the long run.
And as Christians, it’s the long run that’s the thing, isn’t it?
Our choices need to focus on the horizon of heaven.
The bitterness in my heart interfered with my relationship with God.
Whether our wall was built to protect against a husband’s honest mistakes or against on-going and unrepentant sin, as Christians we need to forgive—not for our husbands’ sake but for our own.
Forgiveness is the balm for bitterness.
The Bible tells us to forgive.
“And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses.” Mark 11:25
“Pay attention to yourselves! If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him, and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, saying, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him.” Luke 17:3-4
Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Ephesians 4:31
God’s forgiveness of my sins restores my ability to have a relationship with Him despite my sinfulness. Likewise, my forgiveness of my husband restores my ability to have a relationship with him.
Forgiving our husbands for their sins against us is necessary for our own healing.
Forgiveness does not mean that we pretend the sin never took place. It does not mean that he gets a blank check to hurt us again and again. It doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have to work to rebuild our trust in him. It most certainly does not mean that we put ourselves at risk by tolerating abuse.
If your husband is in on-going unrepentant sin against you—as demonstrated through actions and through words—then I am not going to recommend that you tear down your walls. Talk with your pastor about how to heal, proceed according to Matthew 18, and read what Elisabeth Klein has to share (start with her list of resources for a difficult marriage).
I used to wonder how I could begin to forgive when I was still hurting so much, but then I realized:
Forgiveness is not the end result of healing.
Forgiveness is the first step of healing.
To forgive my husband means that I . . .
- release the bitterness from my heart,
- work to restore my relationship with him, and
- stop letting old hurts add new pain.
I forgive because my heart needs me to do so.
Forgiving your husband does not erase the wounds from which you need to heal.
Even in the face of a husband’s genuine repentance and obvious commitment to change, it can still be a struggle to dismantle the wall of protection we’ve built.
The process of tearing down the emotional walls is part of the process of healing.
It is okay . . .
- To take time to heal. Forgiveness can happen in an instant change of heart, but healing can still take time.
- To struggle with the process. If it were easy to heal, you already would’ve done it, right?
- To need to reprocess some things from the past to help you develop a new perspective and work through related issues.
- To ask your husband to take steps in rebuilding your trust in him. Forgiveness and trust are not the same thing.
In order to work on restoring your relationship with your husband, it is not okay . . .
- To continue to add to the wall with every new mistake your husband makes. Genuine repentance does not, unfortunately, mean that he won’t sometimes make new mistakes.
- To refuse to tear down the wall because you want your husband to feel as bad as you have felt.
- To resist healing.
Marriage is a reflection of the intimacy we will once experience with God on that horizon of eternity. It is good to restore your marriage to heal the one flesh and experience intimacy.
Healing is often messy and hard and overwhelming and a little painful at times—but as you tear down those walls, you open the possibility for new intimacy with your husband. Where there once was a wall that divided, you can rebuild unity.
To take the first step, forgive.
I will share some strategies for tearing down the wall in the next post. Meanwhile, please read what the bible says about forgiveness. If you are struggling to forgive, talk with your pastor or ask your prayer warriors to pray about this for you.
Posts in this series:
- The Wall: Keeping Myself Emotionally Safe
- When the Wall Becomes a Prison . . . Forgive
- Tear Down the Wall
- The Other Side of the Wall
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This is so hard to do. When you’ve been hurt suddenly by sinful behavior more than once you build that wall to protect yourself. Logically I know I need to start breaking down the wall, but emotionally I still want to protect myself for fear I will be hurt again. It’s a very tough place to be in and a daily struggle. I’ve done all the praying and am seeking counseling but in some cases it simply takes time, lots of time.
Yes, it can take a long time to become vulnerable again. It is scary, and it is hard to trust when you’ve been hurt.
What about if your husband isn’t really repentant? I found out my husband was using porn when he got a computer virus and needed me to fix it for him … but he was only upset because of the virus. He never apologized to me or seemed repentant because of the effect on our relationship.
If your husband isn’t repentant, then forgiveness is hard. I do think it is important to forgive because of what it does for your heart. I wouldn’t begin to trust a husband who is unrepentant; trust must be earned. I would work to restore the relationship only to the extent that I address what is mine to address–my own sins against my husband, apologizing for how I have wronged him, and removing barriers I have placed between us. None of this requires me to ignore my own hurt, to stop pressing for my husband to address his own sin, or to be happy about what he is doing.
These resources may help you think about forgiveness:
These resources do a much better job than I can do of looking at what scripture says about forgiveness. They also acknowledge how hard it can be to forgive someone who has not repented.
I would like to add that repentance can be a process that takes time. It may take a while for your husband to truly understand that you were upset about the porn and that it has affected your relationship. As a way of avoiding dealing with their own sin, some men will tell themselves that the problem wasn’t with the porn but with a wife’s overreaction. Even if your husband immediately felt bad and recognized that his actions had hurt you, it may take time for him to recognize his actions as sin and to apologize.
When I refused to have a healthy sexual relationship with my husband, I was in sin. I did not recognize it as sin right away, and even after I did, it took me two years to repent and apologize to him. It had taken me a year to recognize it as sin and repent to God. Hopefully, your husband is in the process of coming to understand that he sinned against you and that an apology is in order–but you can choose to work to forgive him in your heart even before that comes.
If you aren’t ready to forgive, start by praying for a forgiving heart and to ease the pain you feel in response to your husband’s sin against you.
Thank you for the links. I spent a fair amount of time yesterday reading through the sites. I thought I was doing really well on the forgiveness / being The Best Person Ever front because I wasn’t overtly angry, but your post made me just hit this wall. (In a good way.) I may have more digging to do there than I realized.
I’m glad you found the links helpful. I have found that when I feel hurt about something my husband has done, it often shows me far more about my heart than about his. It’s good to identify where we need to grow, even though it isn’t fun. Keep on digging, and I will pray for you.
Today’s post at To Love, Honor and Vacuum talks about forgiveness, too. It is about forgiveness related to infidelity, and this sentence stood out to me:
Even when your heart isn’t ready to forgive, your mind can commit to work toward forgiveness. A right intention can have a big impact.
This post showed up in my email this morning: http://www.kevinathompson.com/how-to-forgive-when-you-cant-forget/. He talks about forgiveness as a process.