All of us have made poor choices, but how can you learn to let go of the shame that you feel and to forgive yourself?

And today we'll talk about how you can do that if you've experienced infidelity in your marriage.

I'm John Fuller, joined by Dr. Greg Smalley and his wife,

Aaron. They lead the focus on the family marriage department. And Greg, sometimes it can be

difficult, if not seemingly impossible, to forgive ourselves for bad choices we've made.

Absolutely. I experienced this. I've shared this before. As a matter of fact,

even in the show notes, we'll put a little link to the video of me kind of telling the story

about how earlier on in my life, my early 20s that a girlfriend and I made a choice to abort

pregnancy.

And you talk about shame.

You talk about getting locked and just stuck in this prison of shame that lasted for years for me.

And what that does then within a relationship is the more that I'm experiencing shame buying into that, seeing this

poor choice, horrible choice that I made reflected who I really was. It just spiraled me into such

a deep, dark depression. And so when we're in that place it we can't see beyond that i was so aware of

my own pain and my own shame that it was very difficult for me to even come alongside other people

and empathize maybe with what they were going through because i was so consumed and overwhelmed by what I was going through.

So you add now that sort of shame from infidelity within a marriage.

So as I stay locked into that sort of shame inside my marriage,

I can't go to a place of compassion and empathy for my spouse

because I'm just consumed with that.

And that's why it's so important to deal with that.

Go to see an individual counselor really go and deal with that with an individual Christian

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