Faith to Face Fear

Photo by James Wheeler: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-pathway-surrounded-by-fir-trees-1578750/

I belong to a religion where members of the congregation are asked to provide "talks," or sermons on specific topics for each Sunday meeting. Near the end of my marriage, I was asked to give a talk. The topic I was assigned was overcoming fear with faith and when I heard it, I laughed. Sometimes I don’t think God is very subtle. And I didn’t think it was fair that He would push me like that, when I had been pushed so much already. I told Him that. I went for a walk in the nature park, my mountaintop for spiritual communication, and I felt like His response was that since I am a procrastinator, I work best with deadlines. That made me laugh, too, but I still did not feel like resolving my fear in just one week. I wanted time to deal with this, time to make the right decisions and not end up where I had ended up so many times in the previous year. I wanted time to be angry. I wanted time to forgive. I didn’t want to be rushed. I was reminded that my topic was fear. It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t forgiveness. I could work on fear for that week. I could take all the time I needed to work on the anger and forgiveness.

It scared me to work on my fear. I worried that overcoming my fear and reconnecting with faith would also resolve some of the anger and help me to find forgiveness for my partner. My head told me that wasn’t so bad, was it? How much fun was I having living emotionally separated, angry at my husband? But my heart told me it was not time yet. I knew I was not ready to go back to where he could hurt me again and at that point, I knew he was not in a place where he would not hurt me.

Being hurt was one of my biggest fears. It had been such a constant in my married life. Is it like that in marriages that aren’t laced with addiction and abuse? I know we are all human, we all make mistakes. But in my marriage we had developed a pattern that was very painful and involved me feeling constantly to blame. After more than 10 years together, I had gotten accustomed to the pattern. Things would seem to be good and I would start to feel safe. Then my husband would come to me to admit he had slipped into looking at porn. He was always very sorry. He wished he could be satisfied with me, but I just wasn’t enough. I wasn’t giving him enough. The first times this happened, I felt deeply betrayed, cheated on. I felt pressured. I felt blamed. I felt ashamed that I couldn’t be enough. He told me how much he loved me. He told me how he knew, if I just gave a little more, I could help him be stronger. He reminded me of the covenants we had made, the promises we had made in our marriage ceremony, to support one another and to be true to each other. If he wasn’t able to be true to me, our marriage would fail. He would lose his standing with God. He promised that I could keep that from happening if I just tried a little harder, gave him what he wanted, focused on him, didn’t let the kids or my personal life get in the way of being there for him. It was what God wanted for marriage - for the partners to support and love and prioritize each other.

Because there were things that I believed in what he said, I had a hard time holding onto the idea that he was not correct to blame me for his behavior assign me the responsibility of keeping him faithful to the covenants he had made. I did love him. I did want our marriage to succeed. I knew that we had promised to be there for each other and support each other. I believed he loved me. He was so genuine when he told me how he felt. Each time this happened, I committed to do better. But each time, I was also deeply hurt. First, it hurt to know that he intentionally went to find other attractive people to look at. What woman doesn’t struggle with body-image issues? I knew the women he was finding to look at were not built like me and did not act like me. I understand the addictive nature of porn and its easy availability. But that doesn’t change the feeling of betrayal that I had when I thought of him looking at someone else in a way that I had hoped he would only look at me. Second, I was hurt by the constant gentle reminder that this was my fault, that I was not enough. No matter how hard I thought I was trying, it kept coming back to me. I just was not enough. I felt horrible but I was too ashamed to seek help.

As the years passed, I became numb to our pattern. I just accepted it each time it happened again and did what I thought would help, knowing that it was just going to happen again. I tried to play the part he asked me to play and I accepted that it would never be enough. Things started to change when he started therapy and I started to think about maybe there being hope for us. After he’d been doing it for a while, I started therapy of my own, and then things started to fall apart. I learned about setting boundaries. I tried to learn to believe in myself. I learned that maybe, just maybe, his choices were not my responsibility. And things got very complicated very quickly.

By the time I was asked to speak in church about fear, I had started to pull away from him. We were trying to do what our therapists said. We were trying to work things out, but things were only feeling worse and worse. The "check-ins" our therapists asked us to do turned into lectures on my failures at forgiveness and my grudge-holding attempts to hurt him, rants about my cold-hearted withholding of affection, or heartfelt professions of undying affection and promises to give me all the time I needed. My head was spinning. I wanted out, but I could not believe that was the right choice. I had committed to this man and married in the temple. Plus, how would I survive on my own? I had been a stay-at-home mom for years. I had no real work experience. How would I provide for myself? I was afraid to try. My husband was adored by everyone who knew him. How would people respond if I left him or if I admitted that our life together was a mess? If he was so universally adored, maybe he was right about me being the problem. Maybe I really wasn't enough.

I was also afraid of what would happen if I stayed. We had our patterns. He knew how to break me down. I knew he would not give up when there was something he wanted. I had learned that it was faster to give in, suck it up, give him what he wanted as quickly as I could and then I would be free to move on, at least until the next episode. Even if we both tried to change, it would always be too easy to fall back into old habits, and I was terrified of how much the old habits left me feeling hurt and used.

I was afraid of his power to control me. I feared that I would let him because he presented his intentions as unquestionably good. He wanted me to be happy. So why not let him control me? But if I did, I knew I would end up back where I started, feeling like his possession, locked in the cage he built claiming it was meant to make me happy.

I was afraid that things with my husband could never be better than this, that we would always have these slips. I was afraid that, for the rest of our lives together, he would love me in a way that made me feel trapped and used and guilty because I should be grateful to be so very loved and ashamed because my love back to him was never as much as he needed. I was afraid that he could not live with me without objectifying and using me. I was afraid to trust him again because it hurt so much when he did that.

The question I had to face to prepare my speech was "how do I overcome this fear?" I was scared to trust him. I was scared to give him another chance. I was afraid to end things and take on life on my own. How would I overcome that and move past my fear in whichever direction I chose?

I realized that part of the issue was that I needed to overcome my fear through faith, but not faith in my husband or in my marriage. I needed faith in God - faith that God was in control of my life. I did have faith in God. I love God and I turn to Him for help and guidance all the time. I felt Him close to me as I struggled with this. But how was that going to help? I still didn’t trust my husband and I was still angry and not ready to go back to living with him. Maybe that wasn’t the issue. Maybe the issue was finding faith that what I was doing, distancing myself and not trusting him, really was the right path for me. The peace I needed to find to get out of this fear was not to be found by going back to trusting him and giving him what he wanted, complete control of me physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. The peace I longed for would come when I realized that I was doing what I should when I stepped away from him.

I had a lot of fear. I feared that I was doing this recovery thing all wrong. I feared that I was just at the beginning, that I kept making a mess of things. I feared that I was failing. This was where I needed to find my faith. I needed faith that I was doing what was best for me and that I was on the right path. I needed faith that what I was doing would actually get me to a better place, whether or not it got him anywhere different.

I needed faith in God and faith in me.

I went to the scriptures to prepare my talk. I found story after story of righteous people doing difficult things. I wrote the talk and delivered it standing in front of my congregation with my husband sitting behind me as a member of the Bishopric. No one knew exactly what I was talking about at that time except for him and me. I think he could tell things were coming to an end for us. I was learning to overcome my fear.