LISA: When Al and I look back on this time today, we realize that what drove me to cheat on him had its root in my childhood abuse. This is no excuse for my behavior; it’s simply a statement of what I believe the root cause of my problems to have been. As we have spoken with other couples whose marriages have suffered an affair, we have learned that a sinister bond exists between abuse and infidelity. We cannot explain this psychologically, but we have observed it to be true experientially.
I am convinced the first and most dangerous seed of darkness ever planted in my life took root when I was sexually molested as a child. Not only did his inappropriate behavior violate something deep and sacred in me, it was also the reason I learned to hide my true feelings and to keep secrets. That was the time in my life when I began to believe my sole purpose for living was to please men and to be what they needed me to be. It was all so sick, so wrong, and so far-reaching.
Childhood sexual abuse of any kind has severe ramifications. The biggest problem with this is that victims often feel so ashamed or so dirty or so “wrong” that they never process what happened or tell anyone about it. So they go through life making one mistake after another (some of them tragic)—and they become masters at keeping secrets.
Secrets are nothing more than hidden dishonesty, kind of like what happens when a person talks about a situation but does not tell the whole story and leaves out important points that would make a big difference. Secrets rob you of lasting relationships. They are ticking time bombs that Satan sits on until he sees an opportune time to expose them—the worst possible time for you and the best (most devastating, destructive) time for him.
When a relationship is built on secrets, it’s just a matter of time before it all blows up in your face. If you have secrets or hidden sins that you think are buried and will never surface, you are wrong. You are walking on top of hidden land mines. One misstep, one slip of the tongue, one lie that doesn’t add up—and it’s all over.
If you hold secrets in your heart, hoping no one will ever find out about them, let me encourage you to take that power out of Satan’s hands and give it to God. Trust Him to take it and eventually use it for your good. One way God has used my experience with secrets for good is that because I know how destructive secrets can be, I teach my granddaughters that there are no secrets between them and me. They know they can tell me anything and we will work it out. These girls will not grow up as I did; they will grow up knowing the truth will set them free (see John 8:32).
In his book, The People Factor, Van Moody summarizes the damage secrets can do to individuals and to relationships:
Most of us are familiar with the saying, “What you don’t know won’t hurt you.” The problem with that assertion is that it’s wrong. What we don’t know can hurt us; in fact, it can destroy us and devastate our relationships. Secrets build invisible walls around us, walls that other people perceive but cannot penetrate. What we don’t know [secrets] also prevents transparency, openness, and intimacy. It forces us to tiptoe around certain subjects, and it will keep us from giving all of ourselves to another person and from fully receiving all the good others offer us. Keeping secrets will exhaust us, perhaps frighten us, and ultimately separate us from the people we love.I
I couldn’t agree more! My secrets definitely separated me from the people I loved and came within a razor-thin margin of devastating the relationships that meant the most to me. I now also know the powerful and transforming truth of Romans 8:28, that “all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.” Everything about my secrets was bad, but God has ultimately used it all for good. Not only am I teaching my granddaughters not to keep secrets, God is also allowing me to expose the harm secrets can do and help lead other secret-keepers out of darkness into honesty and truth.
Don’t let another day go by with the time bomb of secrets attached to your life. I quoted this statement from Miss Kay earlier in the book, but it’s worth repeating again. Regarding the sin in our lives, she says: “Confess it. Own it. And move on.”
AL: From the vantage point of the “victim” in Lisa’s affair, it would be easy for me to say everything was her fault and that I just married a bad person who proved that she couldn’t be faithful to me. That was my early instinct when the truth finally came out. It was also the advice of a lot of friends and family who meant well and were trying to help me. But over a little time, I learned that this oversimplified way of thinking was not true.
My betrayal of Lisa as a young man, my threats, my willingness to be the lord of her life—all contributed to the recipe of a brewing disaster.
I make no excuses for Lisa’s behavior. What she did was terribly wrong and would have been enough to wreck most marriages permanently. In my case, when some of the pain had subsided, I was able to look at the totality of our relationship and see how I had contributed to the setup of this disaster.
Affairs aren’t usually built in a bubble; they are crafted by the evil one over a period of time. Like earthquakes, they build slowly with time and pressure until one day they release and explode with devastating results. My betrayal of Lisa as a young man, my threats, my ignoring of problems in our relationship, my willingness to be the lord of her life—all of these issues contributed to the process and the recipe of a brewing disaster. Satan was the mastermind of the affair, and Lisa was a willing participant, but there were other contributors as well—the abuse she suffered as a child, other illicit relationships, our problems, and the man with whom she conducted the affair.
I have since learned that a healthy, honest relationship with God and an honest, working marriage are the best defenses against affairs. Lisa and I no longer keep secrets in our marriage, and the results of that one decision, in addition to other healthy choices we have made, have been amazing.
I. Van Moody, The People Factor (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2014), 117.