What's up everybody? This is the Betray, the addicted, and the expert. My name is Brannon and I am the expert.

And I'm Ashland and I was the portrayed.

And I'm Kobe, the recovering addict.

What you're gonna get is three unique perspectives on recovery

and tools for hope and healing.

Okay, so part two of denial.

We're going to talk, last time we talked about denial for the addict and how denial is the addict's best friend.

Totally. So let's talk about denial for the betrayed and how that plays itself out and

and it definitely denial can step up and and help a

spouse avoid pain but the problem is it causes more suffering by staying in denial so that's interesting yeah so

and Ashley I'll ask you to speak to this in a second but I but I've run a lot of groups where I'm the first contact for a person who's dealing with this issue.

And so they'll come into a group and oftentimes a wife will come in and she'll sit down and as soon as I start talking or as soon as I ask them to just kind of introduce themselves or check in, they just start crying.

They just start, the emotions just start coming out.

And it's an interesting thing because a lot of these women who come in, they've been in denial for a long time.

And all of a sudden, there's a therapist standing in front of them, talking to them about the problem.

And it's scary and it's it's painful and so everything starts

coming up and coming out so interesting yeah so for you, how was it with dealing with the betrayal and did you feel like you use denial to avoid the pain of it?

Yeah.

For most of our marriage, 14, 15 years.

Yeah.

And it was just that numbing feeling, and I think I've talked about this before

when we went to our second or third therapist that we'd tried.

...