A few months ago I wrote a blog called “life after the other women”.  It was my journey on learning how to re-trust and allow God to work in our marriage instead of letting Satan win.  I since then have reformatted the 180 Website so I took all my personal blogs and moved them to my personal blog page.  In the process of doing that I put of Facebook that I had moved my page and to check it out, I then received a message that I did not quite understand so I asked this person to call me the next day

What if the other woman is not a person but …

A few months ago I wrote a blog called “life after the other woman”.  I received a call the other day from a lady who said “what if the other woman is an ‘addiction’”.

Pondering this question for the past few days I posed it in Jail to the guy’s class on Monday and said….” You do know that you all are talking about being better husbands and better fathers but what about “the other woman”?

I had their attention so I proceeded to say… “You know the drug or alcohol you are having an affair with”?

Putting their addiction in the form of an extramarital affair got their attention.

To work on their marriage/relationships we needed to come at it as such.  They understood what their addiction had done to them now as they were looking at life with a new lens and lenses that included healthy relationships we needed to address the “affairs”.

Life after an affair is filled with trust issues.  These issues have to be openly talked about no matter how hard the questions may be.  One of the questions that kept arising was: a human is easier to see than a drug/alcohol/pornography addiction so how do you learn to trust when the unseen is “the other woman”?

• Trust has to be earned when it is broken.
• Trust is a 2-way street.
• Trust needs communication.

To recreate trust both persons needs to feel safe when they are talking and or asking questions.  So no matter what party you are in this, you need to make sure you put your pride away and allow for God to work.

The 2 Way Street means that you the offended party don’t start doing things to intentionally ruin the progress.   You know a way to get back at them, make them hurt like you have been hurt. I know that as the offended party you want to think you don’t have any blame in this… and they may be true…BUT we all have our “JUNK” and have not always been blameless.  Right?  And you the party who has offended, don’t give up because you are done answering questions over and over again.

Lastly trust needs communication on BOTH parts.  A lack of communication on how you really feel goes back to how safe you feel in the relationship;  how the other party will react when you talk with them and share your true feelings.

So lessons to be learned here is to:

• avoid raising your voice,
• avoid throwing things,
• avoid words like never and always

and one part of anger that people forget is

• don’t exaggerate the truth to make your side seem better or to get more people on your side
• only confide in a few “true” friend
• don’t make it public on Facebook, myspace or google+.

The reason for these last 3 items is because when you allow God to work redemption and reconciliation is His answer and why would you want to immediately have to start the process all over because you were angry and made the wrong comment on the wrong public site.

Hope this helps my dear friend….