May 29, 2025 • 44 mins
Cooperate with God in redeeming your marriage! Dannah Gresh will encourage you to stop pretending everything's OK, to let the Lord strengthen you, and to fight for your husband rather than with him. Discover seven beliefs essential to marital survival and participate in your spouse's redemptive journey. You'll acquire a love that endures as Christ heals the broken places in your union.
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S1 (00:00):
Hi friend, thanks so much for downloading this broadcast and
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because he's such a superb writer, and in this particular book,
he takes the story of Paul's shipwreck, recorded in the
(00:20):
book of acts, and gives us ten principles of how
we push through the storm, learning to trust in God
and all that he has done for us. It's a
magnificent book. It's a short book, and in typical Robert
Morgan writing style, it is a powerful book. I strongly
recommend that you have a copy of The Mediterranean Sea Rules,
because trust me, every single one of us will find
(00:40):
ourselves on stormy seas at some point in our voyage
through life. As for your copy of the Mediterranean Sea
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(01:03):
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(01:25):
the truth tool the Mediterranean Sea rules. Thanks so much.
And now please enjoy the broadcast. Hi friends. This is Janet. Partial.
Thanks so much for choosing to spend the next hour
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us and enjoy the broadcast.
S2 (01:47):
Here are some of the news headlines we're watching.
S3 (01:49):
The conference was over. The president won a pledge.
S4 (01:51):
Americans worshiping government over God.
S3 (01:53):
Extremely rare safety move by a 17 years.
S5 (01:57):
The Palestinians and Israelis negotiated this.
S3 (02:00):
Is not the way.
S1 (02:15):
Hi, friends. Welcome to In the Market with Janet Parshall.
You just heard the cacophony out there of the marketplace
of ideas. And here's what I know. Even though the
first Samuel tells us that man looks on the outward appearance,
but God looks on the heart. You might not be
able to tell from the outside, but there's a lot
of hurting people out there hurting married people, married people who,
when they said those vows and had the wedding, not
(02:37):
necessarily thinking about marriage at that point, they thought that
they would be living happily ever after. And then real
life comes along, takes up residency, and things begin to unravel,
and you find yourself fighting with your husband rather than
fighting for your husband. What happens when marital infidelity creeps in?
Whether it's a sexual addiction, an extramarital affair or even
(02:59):
the use of pornography. How do you get back to
that place where you can, in fact, live happily ever after?
That's what we're going to talk about this hour with
Dana Gresh. She is the co-host of Revive Our Hearts podcast.
She's the founder of True Girl, a ministry dedicated to
providing tools to help moms and grandmas decide disciple their
(03:19):
7 to 12 year old girls. She's a speaker. She's
an author. She's got over 2 million books out there
that have reached women and girls in more than 100 countries,
and she and I have a lot in common in
that we love farms and we love animals, particularly those
who have four legs, and we love to take care
of them when we're not doing the other work that
God has called us to. So, Dana, what a joy
(03:41):
to have you with me. Thank you for joining me
to talk about happily ever after. Let God redeem your marriage,
your brand new book, and a shout out to the
home team published by Moody Publishing. I'm really looking forward
to this conversation.
S6 (03:52):
Oh me too Janet. I just love being with you today.
S1 (03:56):
Thank you so much. All right, so when Bob proposed
to you, you knew at that time that he struggled
in the area of sexual integrity. Didn't stop you from
accepting the ring and saying, I do, but you must
have had thoughts as a couple engaged and privately in
your own heart about, uh oh, is this just going
to go away, or is this something that's going to
(04:16):
manifest itself in our married life? Tell me how you
dealt with that.
S6 (04:20):
Oh, we were totally naive. We both thought, this is
a man who's a virgin who has really fought this
thing and subdued it to what God says. You know,
you need to live pure, and you need to be
a virgin on your wedding night. So we thought it's
going to go away when he has real sex, right?
That's a lie that so many women and men tell
(04:41):
me they believed too, before their marriage entered into that
great battle of integrity. So, um. We were naive. We
didn't even think about it twice until that first year
of marriage. We were like, oh, it didn't go away.
That's because lust and pornography have almost nothing to do
(05:02):
with real sex. God. God talks about sex in terms
of intimacy. The Hebrew language uses the word yada to
describe sex. Adam lay with his wife, Eve. Adam yada
with his wife, Eve. That word means to know, to
be known, to be deeply respected. It's a word of intimacy.
And pornography. Unless divorces intimacy from the sexual experience. And
(05:26):
so they really have very little to do with each
other other than the mechanics.
S1 (05:31):
So let me take your question and flip it the
other way. What do pornography and lust have to do
with then, if it's not about love?
S6 (05:38):
Well, okay. Here, here's here's the answer to that is
Satan is very strategic. He knows that the marriage relationship
is a picture of Christ and the church. He knows that.
And so what he does is he says, how can
I take that picture and distort it to a place
where the picture of Christ's love is unrecognizable. Well, I
(06:01):
will divorce it from the intimacy. And so he takes
the plumbing and the mechanics. Listen, all of us know
that the purpose of turning a light on in a
room is not to watch it plug into the wall. Right. It's. No,
we're not excited about the outlet on the wall. We're
not excited about the cord on the lamp. We're excited
about the warmth of the light. We're excited about the
fact that we can see one another's faces. But when
(06:24):
it comes to sex, Satan has us fixated on the
things that it's not really even about. How things plug in.
And what it's really about is the intimacy that I
can look into your eyes and see who you are,
that I can feel closer to you than anybody else
on the planet. And we have the sexual revolution has
(06:45):
just divorced emotions from sex, and we have bought that
lie hook, line and sinker.
S1 (06:53):
You said something very important. I want to underscore underscored.
And that is when we think about marriage, I think
it's incumbent upon the men and women of God to
really understand that this isn't just about companionship. It isn't
just about procreation. It is a representative of this deep,
mysterious covenant between Christ and His church. And I think
we ignore that at our own peril. Maybe we would
(07:15):
fight more for our marriages if we understood that a
God who's not willing that any should perish tells us
and tells us and tells us again, and this intimacy
that Christ has with us is born out in this
idea of marriage. And it would, it seems to me,
it would make our whole trajectory in fighting for marriage
be completely different if we understood that it was a sacrament.
(07:36):
There's an old fashioned word, that sacrament that's worth fighting
for and worth defending. You think I'm right or wrong
on that?
S6 (07:43):
Oh, I think you're so right on that. It is
a holy sacrament. And, um, it it's because it is
that that is why Satan has so deceived us. And
as a culture we have made a lie. Our refuge
in this culture. We have really believed the lie that
we have to have sex, that we can't live without it,
(08:05):
that it's like the air that we breathe. And that's
why we have made all these things that are evil pornography, lust,
gender confusion. We have not only just made them acceptable,
we have made them good. And we have believed a
terrible lie because God says that the marriage relationship, because
(08:26):
it is so sacred, because it is so holy, it
needs to be separated, it needs to be set apart.
It needs to be kept clean and pure and precious.
And listen, every woman listening to my voice right now,
and every man who has felt the pain of pornography
and lust, knows that what I'm saying is true, because
(08:47):
the reason they hurt so badly, the reason they're so lonely,
is because sex is so sacred.
S1 (08:55):
Mhm. Wow. Well you can see where this conversation is
going to go. This hour. And that's just segment number
one already filled with some richness. We're going to continue
our conversation with Dana. Her brand new book is called
Happily Ever After. And of course that's the goal. That's
what we want to get. But what happens when sin
takes up residency? Bob and Dana are to be commended
for their openness and their transparency in this book. But
(09:17):
if God can work in and through their lives, he
can do exactly the same thing in yours. Back after this.
When the storms of life hit with hurricane force, how
do you respond? This month's truth tool is the Mediterranean
(09:38):
Sea Rules, where Robert Morgan writes how God will redeem
our tragedies for his purposes. Don't just survive the storms.
Learn to serve God in the midst of them. As
for your copy of the Mediterranean Sea Rules, when you
give a gift of any amount in the market, call
877 Janet 58. That's 877 77 Janet 58 or go
to in the market with Janet Parshall. We are talking
(10:01):
to award winning author and speaker and podcaster and farmer
Dana Gresh about her brand new book that I have
been mispronouncing, which will tell you where my brain has
been all along. Happily ever after, of course, is that model,
that goal that we see in the fairy tales. It's
what we all want in our marriage. But in this
clever change of a word that now accurately reflects the
(10:21):
title happily, even after. What do you do in your marriage?
And can you be happy even after sin has taken
up residency in your marriage? So the book is called
Happily Ever After. Let God redeem your marriage. So, Dana,
let me go back because you are open in the book,
in the fact that that integrity issue that you and
(10:43):
Bob talked about pre-marriage in your engagement period did come
and it took up residency. You're made out of the
same stuff as the rest of us, to quote Shakespeare.
If you prick us, we bleed. And Bob tells you
something that just absolutely is a punch in the gut.
And you talk about the numbness you felt when he
confessed to you that he had fallen in this particular area.
(11:04):
Walk me through the thought process, because I think in
some respects, God sometimes gives us that numbness as an
anesthetic to the pain that we're about to step into.
But the mind begins to race because you've got what
the world is telling you, and you've got what the
world is telling you. And to quote him again, as
the Bard pointed out, there's a tempest in your soul.
Talk to me about the decision making thought process when
(11:27):
you first heard this.
S6 (11:29):
Well, here's the thing I knew before I knew. And
so many women tell me that that's true. About 18
months before Bob confessed to me. I just felt something
was off and I didn't know what it was. I
felt crazy, quite honestly. And it just kept getting worse.
And I began to manifest physical symptoms, um, pain in
(11:49):
my body, inflammation in my body, joint pain, headaches, things
like this. And I now know that, um, that was
the beginning of what is clinically understood as betrayal trauma.
What happens is your body starts reading cues that your
heart is unwilling to read, so your husband doesn't make
eye contact with you. Um, he's starting to emotionally withdraw.
(12:12):
You don't really know why. And maybe it's not overt,
but there's something. He's just not really there. He's not
present in the room when he is in the room.
And for some women whose husbands are having affairs, that
wasn't my story. But he might not even be there.
He might not be at home. He might be, quote unquote,
working late. And your body starts to read those cues
(12:34):
and you feel it. Your body tells you, hey, pay
attention to what's happening here. But, you know, we want
to believe the best and we want to to think
that our husbands are being faithful in every way, shape
and form. So we kind of push it away. Well,
so when Bob sat me down in the red leather
chairs in our living room and said, I need to
(12:55):
tell you something. I've been fighting for about 18 months,
so hard to find my way back to God without
breaking your heart, but I haven't been able to find
a way to do it. And then he did. He
broke my heart. And he told me. He disclosed to
me the deepest details of everything he'd explored on the internet.
(13:16):
So I knew before I knew. And graciously, the Lord,
in my case, gave me a numbness. I'll tell you
what I did, though, and this is something that that
a lot of women don't do. I looked at him
and I said, you know, I think I need to
go for a walk and process this. And I went
for a walk in the woods, and I took my
phone and I called my best friend, Donna Vanliere, and
(13:37):
I said, I'm not going to hide in secrecy. I'm
not going to let Satan isolate me. He walks around
as a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. And
I've seen lions hunt on the safari, I know that
they go after the Lone Prey. They don't go after
the herd. So I ran to my herd. I ran
to my Christian girlfriend, and I told her this is
(14:00):
what happened. Now here's what's funny. I was so numb
that I wasn't crying. I wasn't emotional. But my girlfriend,
because she loves the Word of God, said, you know,
I'm going to pray over you. And she said, Lord,
Deanna doesn't know what to do. She's feeling numb right now.
But your word is a lamp to her feet and
a light to her path. So will you show her
(14:22):
the next step to take? And as soon as she
began to quote Scripture, prayer, pray scripture over me, tears flowed.
That's how powerful the Word of God is. It's alive
and active. And here's the next thing she said to me. Deanna,
how much light does a lamp for your feet give you?
And I was quiet. She said, not a lot, just
enough for the next few steps. But you know what?
(14:44):
That was an invitation for me to run to the word,
to run to my girlfriends, and to run to the word.
And those two things were very instrumental in keeping me
from getting isolated and lonely as Bob and I entered
into the fight of our life.
S1 (14:57):
Oh, wow. So you write in the book that divorce
was never an option. You and I had decided. You
and Bob had decided that that's exactly what Craig and
I did. We made an overt decision before day one.
In fact, Craig referred to it as the corral. You
could go as far in the corral as you wanted to,
but you couldn't jump the fence. And so that has
always been a wonderful way to look at it, because
we thought, no matter what, we may have to, you know,
(15:19):
duke it out and fight like crazy for our marriage,
but nobody's ever going to jump the fence. And yet
you would have had some even in the church, Dana,
who could have said to you, well, this is a
form of adultery. I mean, there was a third person.
Even if it wasn't a physical person, there was a
third person there. So you have a biblical justification for
an opt out. You ran to your friend. You ran
to the Word of God. You ran to the power
(15:40):
of prayer, but you didn't run for the trap door
of divorce. Tell me why.
S6 (15:44):
Mhm. You know, Bob and I sat down in those
very same chairs that we we hit ground zero in
those red leather chairs just a few weeks ago. We
called all the Christian therapists that walked us through those
hard things, and there were a bunch of them because
we were a mess. And we asked them, what did
we do? Right? And one of them said, Dana and Bob,
(16:04):
you had buckets of want two buckets of want to.
And I thought, what was that? Buckets of want to. Well,
that was the firmly held belief that marriage is a
sacred picture of the gospel. And because it's a sacred
picture of the gospel, when the picture is just marred
by graffiti, when it's not appearing as it should be,
(16:25):
you do the work to fix it because it's a masterpiece.
And because we had that belief in our belief, the
roots of our belief system. That was our buckets of
want to. That was what was coming up. You know
what else? There were others. Some lies in the belief
system that Bob and I had to rip up by
the roots, because that's what changed the behavior of how
(16:46):
we both operated towards each other because Bob was reaching
for pornography as his form of medication pornography. Unless I
was reaching for workaholism and perfection. We both had stuff
in the roots of our belief system that needed to
be ripped up so that we could experience intimacy with
one another, true intimacy and friendship the way God designed
(17:07):
marriage to work.
S1 (17:10):
The book is rich. It's filled with guidance from the lamp,
the flashlight of God's Word. And it really does walk
you through the different things you feel when this sort
of sin shows up and take residency. There's much more
to Dana's story, and we'll continue as we talk about
her brand new book. Happily, even after. Back after this.
(17:35):
Is our guest. She is the co-host of the podcast
Revive Our Hearts and the host of the podcast True Girl,
based on the ministry she founded called True Girl. She
joins us today with her brand new book in a
series of best selling books. This one's called Happily Ever After.
And then the subtitle tells you what this book is
all about. The athleticism of redemption. Let God Redeem Your
(17:56):
Marriage is the subtitle. And she not only lets you
know that she has been wounded in this area, but
she reminds us how God puts us in a position
of real redemption. I was thinking during the break that
there are a lot of people who would say, listen,
you've been involved in ministry for as long as most
people know your name. And so naturally you have the
entire architectural system in place. The foundation is there, the
(18:19):
two by fours are up. It's a good roof. You know,
the front door in it's all there. So boom. When
sin takes up residency and the pain hits, you can
turn to the Lord because you already have a long
established intimate relationship with him. You're talking to people all
across the country who were not, or are not necessarily
where you are at spiritually. The house hasn't been built.
(18:40):
The foundation is sand. The rafters are not in place.
It's not there. And yet they're feeling the exact betrayal. Pain. Hurt. Isolation. Fear.
Talk to that person for a minute. Because when the
system is there, the choice is to go to him
if the system is not there. That's a kind of
isolation that defies imagination. Talk to me about that.
S6 (19:02):
Well, you know what? The woman at the well comes
to mind. I don't think she had much of a
spiritual system in place. Um, but we meet Jesus in
our brokenness. I mean, that's where we all start. And
by his grace, by the time I got to this brokenness,
he'd already met me in so many other brokenness that
I was able to walk through some pieces of it
(19:24):
with more grace than others. But there were still things
that threw me for a loop, and I had to
meet him in that brokenness, just like the woman at
the well. And here's the thing. Like she runs off.
And a whole community, as far as we can tell
from the scriptures, is changed just because this woman who
didn't know him before says, look, he told me everything
(19:45):
I ever did. And he's changed me. And, um. That's.
I guess what Bob and I are just trying to do. We're.
Let the redeemed of the Lord say so. He has
redeemed so much in us, and we just want to
tell people.
S1 (19:58):
Wow. Amen to that. There's a hard heart brokenness to
this heartache. And that is your husband is, in theory,
your best friend. And yet that's where the grievance is.
So in some respects, during this time where trust is
being rebuilt, where intimacy is being reestablished, your best friend's
not there. How did you cope?
S6 (20:15):
Mhm. Yeah. Well that's really hard. Loneliness is a really
big factor here. Um, the research tells us that people
who are lonely use pornography, and pornography makes people lonely.
It's kind of a which comes first, the chicken or
the egg type thing. But what we know is that
(20:36):
if there's a home that's being impacted, a marriage being
impacted by lust and pornography, that couple is also being
deeply impacted by loneliness. And you have to get to
the root of why that loneliness is there. So for me,
I had to look at my husband and my sweet man.
(20:57):
He was 13 years old when he saw pornography for
the first time, and it was a curiosity. But there
were deep hurts in his life that he didn't know
who to talk to about those deep hurts. And then
comes along, this thing that medicates it and takes the
hurt away. What we know about pornography is the dopamine load.
(21:18):
The dopamine hit of pornography is very, very powerful. When
we eat, you know, chocolate cake, we get a dopamine hit.
But 30 minutes later, that hit is gone. Um, for
somebody that uses cocaine or heroin, they get a dopamine hit.
It's a very, very big dopamine spike. But again, an
hour and a half later, it's gone. Pornography and lust
(21:40):
is a really unique dopamine spike. Bike. It's it's strong.
It's not as strong as heroin or cocaine, but it's much,
much stronger than food. But five hours later, there's still
no drop. That's medication. That's medication. We didn't understand that
20 years ago when the internet showed up with pornography
(22:02):
in a different form. We didn't understand that. We understand
that now. And I want women to hear that and
understand that because you need to look back. Ask your husband.
When was the first time you saw this? What do
you think you were medicating when you didn't tell someone?
I saw a bad picture. I saw a picture I
shouldn't have seen, or I saw a video, like because
13 year old, a ten year old, 11 year old
(22:22):
should probably say that to their parents. And that's the
average age of the first inception of pornography these days.
And if you ask most men, that's about when they
first saw it. But they didn't tell anybody why. Well,
because it was medicating something. What were they medicating? Well,
when we start to find that out, then we start
to rip up the roots. And then Satan, he doesn't
(22:43):
have the lies and the belief system of that little boy.
And we can start to have some success in overcoming it. Now,
I know that that sounds really crazy for people who
are like, as I am a lover of the Word
of God, but I believe that I can apply the
Word of God and also gain some understanding from research
and behavioral science and what we know about how the
(23:05):
brain functions. And so I became a woman when I
got bookish and started to understand these things. A woman
who was like, okay, now we got this understanding. We
understand how hard the dopamine hit is. We understand how
addictive it is. I made vows that were for sickness
and in health. This sounds like sickness to me. So
(23:27):
for a while I need to roll up my sleeves,
sleeves and walk beside a partner who is unwell. And
that's what I did. And my husband would tell you
that that's what I did. He's a very strong man,
a very well man today. And, um, he's walk behind
beside me and some of my sicknesses. That's what marriage is.
(23:48):
But when we apply God's Word with understanding, we have
a whole lot more power.
S1 (23:53):
Mhm. That's what fighting for your husband rather than fighting
with your husband sounds like. It's a rich, rich book.
I'm hop skipping and jumping through it, but there's some
real depths to plumb when you read happily. Even after
the new book by Dana Gresh, we're going to take
a break and come back. There's so much to explore
in this particular area, but to know that God is
(24:13):
with you through all of this struggle. Oh boy, what
a whole different perspective you have on dealing with this
sin that's taken up residency back after this. How do
(24:35):
you keep your finger on the pulse of America while
listening to the heartbeat of God's Word? On in the market,
we look for God's perspective on current events. Become a
partial partner today, and keep this Christ centered program on
the air. As a benefit, you'll receive exclusive resources every
week prepared just for you. You'll get behind the scenes
Intel from my email to yours. Call 877 Janet, 58
(24:55):
or go online to in the market with Janet parshall.org.
We're visiting with best selling author Dana Gresh. She has
written books with titles like And The Bride Wore White
and Lies Young Women Believe. And also she's written Lies,
Girls Believe. She's the co-host of Revive Our Hearts, which
(25:15):
is a national podcast, daily podcast for women, rather. And
the founder of True Grit talks about the mom daughter connection.
And that all comes out of the ministry that she founded.
And the podcast is called True Girl. Over 2 million
books out there reaching women and girls in more than
100 countries. Her newest book is very precious, I am
sure to her, because it's very much about a battle
(25:36):
that she waged within the parameters of her own marriage.
It's called happily, even after let God redeem your marriage.
And then Dana does just that. She walks you through
the steps of fighting for your marriage and understanding that God,
who specializes in redemption, can even redeemed a marriage where
there has been brokenness, where there has been failure, or
there has been a lack of integrity. It's tough stuff,
(25:58):
but it's important stuff. And it reminds us of how
great our God is. Dan, I want to go to
the woman listening who goes, wait a minute. You gave
us a little insight into pornography and lust. You talked
about that dopamine hit. Not only does porn hurt you
emotionally and mentally and spiritually, but there's a physiological reaction
to this. There's literally a rewiring in the brain. It is,
(26:20):
as you so rightly stated, a sickness. But one of
the residuals of the sickness is the wife looks at
herself in the mirror and says, was I not enough?
Was I not young enough, or thin enough, or pretty enough?
Why couldn't I have supplied what my husband needs? Now
it seems to me that that thinking is predicated on
the idea that this is about sex, when in fact
(26:40):
it really isn't. Talk to me about that.
S6 (26:43):
Yeah. Um, every wife is going to feel that. And
here's the best advice I can give you about that
for right now. You need to tell the enemy, no,
I'm not going to believe lies about myself. I'm going
to put myself over here on the shelf for just
a second till I get my husband headed in the
(27:04):
right direction. Um, to to understand the physiology of how
bad pornography impacts the brain, you really have to see
a picture of it. If you took a functional, um,
scan of a man's brain, you'd. A healthy brain would
be nice and smooth. But if you looked at a
(27:25):
brain on pornography, it would. It would, it would look
like it has holes in it. It would look like
Swiss cheese. It looks very similar to a brain on heroin.
And so what began as a sin problem is now
a A physiological brain problem. And, you know, trying to
get your husband to be in tune to your physical
(27:48):
needs and tune to your emotional needs, in tune to
all of that while he is unwell, is kind of
like asking a man whose legs have been destroyed and
he's in a wheelchair to stand up. It's not going
to happen, right? Now, that doesn't mean it can't happen.
It means that as women, we have to rise up
(28:08):
in our strength, the strength that God has placed in
us and not believe the lies of the enemy and
put our own healing kind of table it for a moment. Now,
that doesn't mean that we can't experience our own healing.
My husband and I just shared with our staff the
other day, kind of, we're like, you're in the inside circle.
So do you have any questions about this book coming out?
(28:29):
He said the most wonderful thing. He said, listen, for
far too long, the church and the recovery industry has
made the man the focus of the healing work, and
the wives are deeply traumatized and wounded, and they deserve
and need help. So I want to say you deserve
(28:50):
and need help, but it's almost like your husband has
driven your car into a tree and, um, you're both bleeding,
but his injuries are life threatening. The ambulance needs to
triage both of you and say, ah, this one needs
to get to the hospital faster. The second one, the
second ambulance is coming for this girl. And then when
you get your husband in the ambulance, whatever that is,
(29:12):
then you need to take care of yourself. You need
to do the healing work that needs to happen for
your own heart and mind. If you both kind of
get your own healing work done, then you can come
together as a couple and help one another heal. But
if you start by helping each other heal or worrying about, ah,
maybe it was we didn't have sex enough. Or maybe
(29:34):
I'm not beautiful enough. If you start there interacting with
your husband, you're just going to make the trauma worse. Um,
I've seen it too many times. Go get him the
help he needs. Clinically informed care that is rooted in
the word of God has to be rooted in the
word of God. And then get that for yourself, and
then you can come together.
S1 (29:55):
Oh, well. Great counsel. You know, I've often said sometimes
it'd be just so much easier if God didn't give
us emotions. And yet you say that emotions are essential
when it comes to intimacy. And yet also in the
book you write how many times you literally shut down.
And this was something observed when you were in counseling
as well. It's protective. It's perfectly understandable. I call it
dead bolting my heart. Right. You can hear the sound
(30:17):
of the lock going, and then you don't have to
deal with the emotions. But how do you become? Emotions
are in many respects a kind of vulnerability. If they're
out there, you've opened that box. You've unlocked that. How
do you deal with emotions after you've been hurt? How
do you emotions are tied into intimacy and vulnerability? How
did you and Bob Re-establish this with emotions in your
(30:39):
life as well, because there's so many other things. Before
those seeds are planted, that ground has to be turned
over again and again and again. How did you do it?
S6 (30:47):
Well, we hurt. We hurt deeply. We hurt badly, and
we hurt in ways that we didn't want to hurt,
but we allowed ourselves to hurt. And here's why. Um,
God created our emotions. And he says right in Genesis
that everything he created is good. That means our emotions
are good. Even the bad emotions grief, sadness, anxiety, fear
(31:07):
those are useful because they're messages from our spirit telling
us that something needs to be addressed. And when we
shut those emotions down, they they don't have the ability
to lead us down the trail, usually to our belief
system of what's wrong so that God can heal us
(31:29):
and redeem the way we think about something. And so
that requires us to feel and what's happening. Most cases
in a in a couple where pornography has run rampant,
where lust has run rampant, and maybe someone listening. It's
an affair. It's escalated to affairs. Um, there is what
I would call intimacy anorexia, emotional anorexia. You have shut
(31:54):
the you have shut it down. And unless you turn
that back on and feel and hurt, you feel the loneliness,
you feel the grief, you feel the fear of, will
he do this again? You feel all of those things
and you talk about it. You say, listen, this is
what I felt when you told me that. And he says, listen,
(32:17):
this is how fearful I was of telling you. But
I didn't know how to get back to God and
you without telling you. And you start to have that
kind of a conversation. You see, that's intimacy. That's intimacy.
My husband loves to say a definition of intimacy is
into me. See? So when I tell you, Look. Look
(32:37):
how much you hurt me. Um. And you say it
with a control in a controlled way. Not. Not a
hurtful way. Not a not a accusatory way. You start
to build that intimacy muscle. I'm telling you, you crush
Satan's plans. When you do that, you must maintain your
emotional intimacy. And when you do that, when you reclaim
(33:00):
it and maintain it, you really start to turn the
tide of the battle.
S1 (33:04):
Mm. So you're saying something impliedly that I want to underscore,
because in a post-truth Western world, we tend to, both
in and out of the church, flee from negative stimuli.
You know, if you took your high school biology class,
you looked under a microscope. A single cell amoeba moves
away from a negative stimuli. It's the same thing for
us as grown up, full developed people as well. And
(33:25):
yet you have a quote from our mutual friend Johnny Erickson, Tada!
That said, suffering provides the gym equipment on which my
faith can be exercised. So what you're saying is there's
an invitation here, because there will be a benefit here
of coming into some suffering. Now, you got to realize
that falls hard on post-truth ears in the 21st century.
(33:45):
Do we need to reconsider? And I don't mean self-flagellation.
I don't mean a monastic posture on this at all.
But do we need to reconsider that? Sometimes pushing through
this refining fire brings out the gold on the other side,
but you're not going to get there without the refining.
S6 (34:02):
Yeah, you're not going to get there without the refining.
And one of the the the Bible, Jesus said, um,
those who are my disciples will know my word and
they'll know the truth, and the truth will set them free. Um,
that sometimes is a really painful thing to go to
the Word of God and let it be that which
separates the truth from the lies. And for some women,
(34:26):
they're like, I could never hear the disclosure of my
husband's sin. It would destroy me. No, it wouldn't. It
would hurt. It would be like a surgeon taking a
scalpel to cut out that which is unholy and unhealthy
for your from your marriage. It would feel like that.
But the truth never destroys us. It always sets us free.
(34:49):
And of course, I'm talking about little t truth. It
does give us clarity, but without big T truth, that's Jesus.
Jesus is truth. I am the way and the truth
and the life, said Jesus. You really can't experience the
full freedom. That's why we can't build our recovery on
the world's recovery industry. We must pursue the redeeming power
(35:13):
of Jesus Christ in this process.
S1 (35:16):
Wow. Wow. Even if you think you might get some hurt,
it's worth it. Did. When you were going through this process,
did you say, Lord, I'm hurting? Help me. Help me
feel the right way. Help me. Comfort me in my pain.
Because I understand that this suffering, if I can use
that word again, is going to be paramount in getting
to the other side as we go through the redemption process.
S6 (35:38):
Yeah. Oh, over and again I pleaded with the Lord
every day. Redeem the way I think about this emotion, Jesus.
Redeem the way I think about this thing Bob just
told me. Jesus, redeem it all.
S1 (35:49):
No, the book is called happily Even After Let God
Redeem Your Marriage and again, predicated not just on Danny's
knowledge of the word, but really because she can tell
you what Jesus has done for her and Bob and
their marriage, that he stands on the ready to do
just exactly what she says. Redeem your marriage. Don't give
(36:10):
up hope back after this. Brand new book is called
(36:34):
happily Even After Let God Redeem Your Marriage, and it
really is how you can fight for your marriage, not
with your husband. And it's a very powerful, timely, and
important book because there's a lot of hurt and there's
a lot of brokenness out there, particularly in this area
where there is a failure of sexual integrity because there
is a lot of isolation. That's why Dana writes about
(36:54):
the importance of community in the book as well. Shame,
guilt and the idea of being isolated is so very
much front and center in this issue. But she reminds
us that the Lord is standing there on the ready
all the time. So many questions I want to ask you.
I was thinking about this during the break because there
is a rewiring of the brain and I saw a picture.
I appreciated the pictures you put in the book of
(37:15):
the Healthy Brain, the brain on heroin, the brain on pornography,
and the parallel between the brain. As you noted earlier on,
heroin and pornography. Identical. So there is this physiological impact
underscoring that we're fearfully and wonderfully made. And there is
an impact in all of this. But it is a sickness,
and it's a sickness as much as it is a sin.
What happens do you now get beyond the idea that
(37:37):
Bob could fail again? Is there always? Yes. But trust
but verify. Not sure if it happened once. It can
happen again. In other words, to go forward happily, even
after the failure and all of the work that you
two did in the counseling. How do you deal with
the fact that what if he fails again? What if
this happens another time?
S6 (37:57):
Well, that's the cycle that most women are living in
and they're experiencing. It's it's not the cycle that Bob
and I are in anymore. Not right now. Um, he
has found two things that have been really dramatically powerful.
One is he went from weekly accountability to daily accountability,
and that's just what his brain required. He needed it
(38:20):
every single day. You know what that is? Accountability with
men is another form of intimacy. Um, I can't emphasize
enough how much that matters. God created us as social beings.
He is a social being. God the father, God the son,
God the Holy Spirit who created us to have more
of a social outlet. And he created us to be social.
(38:41):
And that's what Satan is trying to distort and destroy
in our lives. When you experience intimacy with other people,
it really does defeat this. Incredibly, the other thing I
want to say is a great piece of hope is
the brain. There's something called neuroplasticity. And that means that
the brain learns new things. So yes, a brain can
(39:01):
be damaged by heroin. It can be damaged by pornography.
It can also be healed. It can learn to function differently.
One of the things that's really fascinating that in my
research was the hippocampus is the part of the brain
that stores map memory. Well, you go to they they
did some brain scans of taxi drivers in London. They
have these muscled up hippocampus. They're just like huge because
(39:25):
they've used them so well. That's neuroplasticity. And that's why
when your grandma does Sudoku, It's healing her brain. It's
making it stronger. Well, when you practice intimacy, when you
deny the pornography, your brain starts to heal and it
gets smooth again. So I have a husband now who's
operating with a really healthy brain. Um, it's not a
(39:48):
perfect brain, but neither is mine. We're both aging. Um,
and so there's that. Um, but there's hope. Jesus made
us for hope. Uh, do I wonder if Bob will
fall again? Um, I guess that's a question that a
lot of people are asking me as I start to
do interviews. I'm just enjoying how beautiful our marriage is
(40:10):
right now, and that God has redeemed it and that
he has not only redeemed listen, he's even redeemed the
chairs Bob confessed to me in because my my daughter
in law wrote this beautiful note to me about how
my red chairs are holy, because that's where we nurtured
our twin grandbaby girls after they came home from the
(40:31):
NICU and she said, listen, these chairs are holy. How
could these chairs be holy? This is where my heart
was broken. Well, it's because Jesus redeemed them. He redeems everything.
And that's what Bob and I are living in right now.
How could he fail me someday? Well, that's the whole thing,
is that as we age, one of us is going
to fail each other. I don't know if it will
be pornography and lust, but we're going to fail each other,
(40:53):
and we're going to be living up to our marriage
vows in that failure, whatever it is, as we experience
God's redemption through that brokenness.
S1 (41:03):
Again, such a good word. Wow. Where does forgiveness fit
into this? Because forgiveness is tough. I don't know that
we as a as a follower of Jesus, generally have
a good understanding of forgiveness. We draw a parallel between
forgiving and forgetting. We think that forgiveness is something that
we're giving the other person, but is it really more
about something we give ourselves? Talk to me about that.
S6 (41:24):
Yeah, well, I think God has a sea of forgetfulness.
It says something about that in the Bible, I do not.
I did not get that in my system. So, um,
at the same time, forgiveness is something we're commanded to do.
Like it's almost conditional, like God's Word says, hey, listen,
if you want to receive my forgiveness, you have to
(41:45):
operate in forgiveness. So there's something there's a command that
we forgive each other, and that includes our husbands. And
we can we're commanded to forgive over and over again. Now,
at the same time, it has to be a holy forgiveness.
It can't. We probably need to do a disclaimer. Um,
(42:06):
we're not looking for women to walk into abusive relationships
with men who sneer at their pain and aren't repentant.
We're looking at men who are deeply repentant, who are
willing to be confronted by their sin and have their
feet held to the fire in that kind of a
safe relationship. Forgiveness is a beautiful tool and it's not abusive. Um,
(42:32):
and so we if you are feeling like you're in
an abusive marriage and your husband has sneered at your
pain and he doesn't think there's anything wrong with his sin,
go to someone in your church and your community that
will confront him with you, because you're worthy of that,
and Jesus would want that for you. He wants your
heart to be protected. But if you're in a relationship
(42:53):
with a man who is, um, safe, forgiveness can unlock
some of that intimacy in both of your hearts that
you need to heal.
S1 (43:04):
Well, you told us the story that when you heard
the news sitting in the red chairs and you decided
to take a walk or took your phone, you reached out.
That was the first thing you did to the woman
for whom this information is brand new, and she's still
in that cocoon of numbness. What would you advise her
to do as the first step?
S6 (43:23):
Tell someone. Tell someone that can pray with you and
walk you through this.
S1 (43:29):
Thank you so much. I want to point out that
there's so much more in the book. Books that are
rich and deep and based on God's good and perfect
word are always that way. And Danny's book exactly is
that it's called happily, Even After. You can learn more
by going to our website in the market with Janet parshall.org.
Click on that red box. It says program Details and audio.
(43:50):
It will take you over the information page. I have
a link directly to Danny's website, so you can follow
all of the amazing things she does with her ministry.
But there's the book on the right hand side, I
don't think. By the way, if you're in that pain
place right now, you were hearing this by accident. Maybe
the Lord wooed you to this conversation so you could
get a cup of encouragement from Dana and realize that
God is there, ready to redeem your marriage. Thank you
(44:12):
so much for joining us, friends. We'll see you next
time right here on In the Market with Janet Parshall.
Hi friend, thanks so much for downloading this broadcast and
it is my hope that you'll hear something that will
challenge you, grow you up in him, and get you
out into the marketplace of ideas. But before you start listening,
let me take a moment and tell you what this
month's truth tool is. It's the Mediterranean Sea Rules by
Robert Morgan. I talked to him often on the air
because he's such a superb writer, and in this particular book,
he takes the story of Paul's shipwreck, recorded in the
(00:20):
book of acts, and gives us ten principles of how
we push through the storm, learning to trust in God
and all that he has done for us. It's a
magnificent book. It's a short book, and in typical Robert
Morgan writing style, it is a powerful book. I strongly
recommend that you have a copy of The Mediterranean Sea Rules,
because trust me, every single one of us will find
(00:40):
ourselves on stormy seas at some point in our voyage
through life. As for your copy of the Mediterranean Sea
Rules by calling 877 Janet 58. That's 877 Janet 58.
Or go online to. In the market with Janet Parshall.
Scroll to the bottom of the page. There's the book.
Click it on, make Your Gift and we'll send you
a copy. My way of saying thank you because we
are listener supported radio. Your gifts keep this broadcast on
(01:03):
the air. By the way, if you'd like to give regularly,
you're called a partial partner. You give every single month
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writing and a little audio piece as well. So pray
about it and thanks in advance. Just call eight 7758
or online at in the Market with Janet Parshall. Again
(01:25):
the truth tool the Mediterranean Sea rules. Thanks so much.
And now please enjoy the broadcast. Hi friends. This is Janet. Partial.
Thanks so much for choosing to spend the next hour
with us. Today's program is prerecorded so our phone lines
are not open. But thanks so much for being with
us and enjoy the broadcast.
S2 (01:47):
Here are some of the news headlines we're watching.
S3 (01:49):
The conference was over. The president won a pledge.
S4 (01:51):
Americans worshiping government over God.
S3 (01:53):
Extremely rare safety move by a 17 years.
S5 (01:57):
The Palestinians and Israelis negotiated this.
S3 (02:00):
Is not the way.
S1 (02:15):
Hi, friends. Welcome to In the Market with Janet Parshall.
You just heard the cacophony out there of the marketplace
of ideas. And here's what I know. Even though the
first Samuel tells us that man looks on the outward appearance,
but God looks on the heart. You might not be
able to tell from the outside, but there's a lot
of hurting people out there hurting married people, married people who,
when they said those vows and had the wedding, not
(02:37):
necessarily thinking about marriage at that point, they thought that
they would be living happily ever after. And then real
life comes along, takes up residency, and things begin to unravel,
and you find yourself fighting with your husband rather than
fighting for your husband. What happens when marital infidelity creeps in?
Whether it's a sexual addiction, an extramarital affair or even
(02:59):
the use of pornography. How do you get back to
that place where you can, in fact, live happily ever after?
That's what we're going to talk about this hour with
Dana Gresh. She is the co-host of Revive Our Hearts podcast.
She's the founder of True Girl, a ministry dedicated to
providing tools to help moms and grandmas decide disciple their
(03:19):
7 to 12 year old girls. She's a speaker. She's
an author. She's got over 2 million books out there
that have reached women and girls in more than 100 countries,
and she and I have a lot in common in
that we love farms and we love animals, particularly those
who have four legs, and we love to take care
of them when we're not doing the other work that
God has called us to. So, Dana, what a joy
(03:41):
to have you with me. Thank you for joining me
to talk about happily ever after. Let God redeem your marriage,
your brand new book, and a shout out to the
home team published by Moody Publishing. I'm really looking forward
to this conversation.
S6 (03:52):
Oh me too Janet. I just love being with you today.
S1 (03:56):
Thank you so much. All right, so when Bob proposed
to you, you knew at that time that he struggled
in the area of sexual integrity. Didn't stop you from
accepting the ring and saying, I do, but you must
have had thoughts as a couple engaged and privately in
your own heart about, uh oh, is this just going
to go away, or is this something that's going to
(04:16):
manifest itself in our married life? Tell me how you
dealt with that.
S6 (04:20):
Oh, we were totally naive. We both thought, this is
a man who's a virgin who has really fought this
thing and subdued it to what God says. You know,
you need to live pure, and you need to be
a virgin on your wedding night. So we thought it's
going to go away when he has real sex, right?
That's a lie that so many women and men tell
(04:41):
me they believed too, before their marriage entered into that
great battle of integrity. So, um. We were naive. We
didn't even think about it twice until that first year
of marriage. We were like, oh, it didn't go away.
That's because lust and pornography have almost nothing to do
(05:02):
with real sex. God. God talks about sex in terms
of intimacy. The Hebrew language uses the word yada to
describe sex. Adam lay with his wife, Eve. Adam yada
with his wife, Eve. That word means to know, to
be known, to be deeply respected. It's a word of intimacy.
And pornography. Unless divorces intimacy from the sexual experience. And
(05:26):
so they really have very little to do with each
other other than the mechanics.
S1 (05:31):
So let me take your question and flip it the
other way. What do pornography and lust have to do
with then, if it's not about love?
S6 (05:38):
Well, okay. Here, here's here's the answer to that is
Satan is very strategic. He knows that the marriage relationship
is a picture of Christ and the church. He knows that.
And so what he does is he says, how can
I take that picture and distort it to a place
where the picture of Christ's love is unrecognizable. Well, I
(06:01):
will divorce it from the intimacy. And so he takes
the plumbing and the mechanics. Listen, all of us know
that the purpose of turning a light on in a
room is not to watch it plug into the wall. Right. It's. No,
we're not excited about the outlet on the wall. We're
not excited about the cord on the lamp. We're excited
about the warmth of the light. We're excited about the
fact that we can see one another's faces. But when
(06:24):
it comes to sex, Satan has us fixated on the
things that it's not really even about. How things plug in.
And what it's really about is the intimacy that I
can look into your eyes and see who you are,
that I can feel closer to you than anybody else
on the planet. And we have the sexual revolution has
(06:45):
just divorced emotions from sex, and we have bought that
lie hook, line and sinker.
S1 (06:53):
You said something very important. I want to underscore underscored.
And that is when we think about marriage, I think
it's incumbent upon the men and women of God to
really understand that this isn't just about companionship. It isn't
just about procreation. It is a representative of this deep,
mysterious covenant between Christ and His church. And I think
we ignore that at our own peril. Maybe we would
(07:15):
fight more for our marriages if we understood that a
God who's not willing that any should perish tells us
and tells us and tells us again, and this intimacy
that Christ has with us is born out in this
idea of marriage. And it would, it seems to me,
it would make our whole trajectory in fighting for marriage
be completely different if we understood that it was a sacrament.
(07:36):
There's an old fashioned word, that sacrament that's worth fighting
for and worth defending. You think I'm right or wrong
on that?
S6 (07:43):
Oh, I think you're so right on that. It is
a holy sacrament. And, um, it it's because it is
that that is why Satan has so deceived us. And
as a culture we have made a lie. Our refuge
in this culture. We have really believed the lie that
we have to have sex, that we can't live without it,
(08:05):
that it's like the air that we breathe. And that's
why we have made all these things that are evil pornography, lust,
gender confusion. We have not only just made them acceptable,
we have made them good. And we have believed a
terrible lie because God says that the marriage relationship, because
(08:26):
it is so sacred, because it is so holy, it
needs to be separated, it needs to be set apart.
It needs to be kept clean and pure and precious.
And listen, every woman listening to my voice right now,
and every man who has felt the pain of pornography
and lust, knows that what I'm saying is true, because
(08:47):
the reason they hurt so badly, the reason they're so lonely,
is because sex is so sacred.
S1 (08:55):
Mhm. Wow. Well you can see where this conversation is
going to go. This hour. And that's just segment number
one already filled with some richness. We're going to continue
our conversation with Dana. Her brand new book is called
Happily Ever After. And of course that's the goal. That's
what we want to get. But what happens when sin
takes up residency? Bob and Dana are to be commended
for their openness and their transparency in this book. But
(09:17):
if God can work in and through their lives, he
can do exactly the same thing in yours. Back after this.
When the storms of life hit with hurricane force, how
do you respond? This month's truth tool is the Mediterranean
(09:38):
Sea Rules, where Robert Morgan writes how God will redeem
our tragedies for his purposes. Don't just survive the storms.
Learn to serve God in the midst of them. As
for your copy of the Mediterranean Sea Rules, when you
give a gift of any amount in the market, call
877 Janet 58. That's 877 77 Janet 58 or go
to in the market with Janet Parshall. We are talking
(10:01):
to award winning author and speaker and podcaster and farmer
Dana Gresh about her brand new book that I have
been mispronouncing, which will tell you where my brain has
been all along. Happily ever after, of course, is that model,
that goal that we see in the fairy tales. It's
what we all want in our marriage. But in this
clever change of a word that now accurately reflects the
(10:21):
title happily, even after. What do you do in your marriage?
And can you be happy even after sin has taken
up residency in your marriage? So the book is called
Happily Ever After. Let God redeem your marriage. So, Dana,
let me go back because you are open in the book,
in the fact that that integrity issue that you and
(10:43):
Bob talked about pre-marriage in your engagement period did come
and it took up residency. You're made out of the
same stuff as the rest of us, to quote Shakespeare.
If you prick us, we bleed. And Bob tells you
something that just absolutely is a punch in the gut.
And you talk about the numbness you felt when he
confessed to you that he had fallen in this particular area.
(11:04):
Walk me through the thought process, because I think in
some respects, God sometimes gives us that numbness as an
anesthetic to the pain that we're about to step into.
But the mind begins to race because you've got what
the world is telling you, and you've got what the
world is telling you. And to quote him again, as
the Bard pointed out, there's a tempest in your soul.
Talk to me about the decision making thought process when
(11:27):
you first heard this.
S6 (11:29):
Well, here's the thing I knew before I knew. And
so many women tell me that that's true. About 18
months before Bob confessed to me. I just felt something
was off and I didn't know what it was. I
felt crazy, quite honestly. And it just kept getting worse.
And I began to manifest physical symptoms, um, pain in
(11:49):
my body, inflammation in my body, joint pain, headaches, things
like this. And I now know that, um, that was
the beginning of what is clinically understood as betrayal trauma.
What happens is your body starts reading cues that your
heart is unwilling to read, so your husband doesn't make
eye contact with you. Um, he's starting to emotionally withdraw.
(12:12):
You don't really know why. And maybe it's not overt,
but there's something. He's just not really there. He's not
present in the room when he is in the room.
And for some women whose husbands are having affairs, that
wasn't my story. But he might not even be there.
He might not be at home. He might be, quote unquote,
working late. And your body starts to read those cues
(12:34):
and you feel it. Your body tells you, hey, pay
attention to what's happening here. But, you know, we want
to believe the best and we want to to think
that our husbands are being faithful in every way, shape
and form. So we kind of push it away. Well,
so when Bob sat me down in the red leather
chairs in our living room and said, I need to
(12:55):
tell you something. I've been fighting for about 18 months,
so hard to find my way back to God without
breaking your heart, but I haven't been able to find
a way to do it. And then he did. He
broke my heart. And he told me. He disclosed to
me the deepest details of everything he'd explored on the internet.
(13:16):
So I knew before I knew. And graciously, the Lord,
in my case, gave me a numbness. I'll tell you
what I did, though, and this is something that that
a lot of women don't do. I looked at him
and I said, you know, I think I need to
go for a walk and process this. And I went
for a walk in the woods, and I took my
phone and I called my best friend, Donna Vanliere, and
(13:37):
I said, I'm not going to hide in secrecy. I'm
not going to let Satan isolate me. He walks around
as a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. And
I've seen lions hunt on the safari, I know that
they go after the Lone Prey. They don't go after
the herd. So I ran to my herd. I ran
to my Christian girlfriend, and I told her this is
(14:00):
what happened. Now here's what's funny. I was so numb
that I wasn't crying. I wasn't emotional. But my girlfriend,
because she loves the Word of God, said, you know,
I'm going to pray over you. And she said, Lord,
Deanna doesn't know what to do. She's feeling numb right now.
But your word is a lamp to her feet and
a light to her path. So will you show her
(14:22):
the next step to take? And as soon as she
began to quote Scripture, prayer, pray scripture over me, tears flowed.
That's how powerful the Word of God is. It's alive
and active. And here's the next thing she said to me. Deanna,
how much light does a lamp for your feet give you?
And I was quiet. She said, not a lot, just
enough for the next few steps. But you know what?
(14:44):
That was an invitation for me to run to the word,
to run to my girlfriends, and to run to the word.
And those two things were very instrumental in keeping me
from getting isolated and lonely as Bob and I entered
into the fight of our life.
S1 (14:57):
Oh, wow. So you write in the book that divorce
was never an option. You and I had decided. You
and Bob had decided that that's exactly what Craig and
I did. We made an overt decision before day one.
In fact, Craig referred to it as the corral. You
could go as far in the corral as you wanted to,
but you couldn't jump the fence. And so that has
always been a wonderful way to look at it, because
we thought, no matter what, we may have to, you know,
(15:19):
duke it out and fight like crazy for our marriage,
but nobody's ever going to jump the fence. And yet
you would have had some even in the church, Dana,
who could have said to you, well, this is a
form of adultery. I mean, there was a third person.
Even if it wasn't a physical person, there was a
third person there. So you have a biblical justification for
an opt out. You ran to your friend. You ran
to the Word of God. You ran to the power
(15:40):
of prayer, but you didn't run for the trap door
of divorce. Tell me why.
S6 (15:44):
Mhm. You know, Bob and I sat down in those
very same chairs that we we hit ground zero in
those red leather chairs just a few weeks ago. We
called all the Christian therapists that walked us through those
hard things, and there were a bunch of them because
we were a mess. And we asked them, what did
we do? Right? And one of them said, Dana and Bob,
(16:04):
you had buckets of want two buckets of want to.
And I thought, what was that? Buckets of want to. Well,
that was the firmly held belief that marriage is a
sacred picture of the gospel. And because it's a sacred
picture of the gospel, when the picture is just marred
by graffiti, when it's not appearing as it should be,
(16:25):
you do the work to fix it because it's a masterpiece.
And because we had that belief in our belief, the
roots of our belief system. That was our buckets of
want to. That was what was coming up. You know
what else? There were others. Some lies in the belief
system that Bob and I had to rip up by
the roots, because that's what changed the behavior of how
(16:46):
we both operated towards each other because Bob was reaching
for pornography as his form of medication pornography. Unless I
was reaching for workaholism and perfection. We both had stuff
in the roots of our belief system that needed to
be ripped up so that we could experience intimacy with
one another, true intimacy and friendship the way God designed
(17:07):
marriage to work.
S1 (17:10):
The book is rich. It's filled with guidance from the lamp,
the flashlight of God's Word. And it really does walk
you through the different things you feel when this sort
of sin shows up and take residency. There's much more
to Dana's story, and we'll continue as we talk about
her brand new book. Happily, even after. Back after this.
(17:35):
Is our guest. She is the co-host of the podcast
Revive Our Hearts and the host of the podcast True Girl,
based on the ministry she founded called True Girl. She
joins us today with her brand new book in a
series of best selling books. This one's called Happily Ever After.
And then the subtitle tells you what this book is
all about. The athleticism of redemption. Let God Redeem Your
(17:56):
Marriage is the subtitle. And she not only lets you
know that she has been wounded in this area, but
she reminds us how God puts us in a position
of real redemption. I was thinking during the break that
there are a lot of people who would say, listen,
you've been involved in ministry for as long as most
people know your name. And so naturally you have the
entire architectural system in place. The foundation is there, the
(18:19):
two by fours are up. It's a good roof. You know,
the front door in it's all there. So boom. When
sin takes up residency and the pain hits, you can
turn to the Lord because you already have a long
established intimate relationship with him. You're talking to people all
across the country who were not, or are not necessarily
where you are at spiritually. The house hasn't been built.
(18:40):
The foundation is sand. The rafters are not in place.
It's not there. And yet they're feeling the exact betrayal. Pain. Hurt. Isolation. Fear.
Talk to that person for a minute. Because when the
system is there, the choice is to go to him
if the system is not there. That's a kind of
isolation that defies imagination. Talk to me about that.
S6 (19:02):
Well, you know what? The woman at the well comes
to mind. I don't think she had much of a
spiritual system in place. Um, but we meet Jesus in
our brokenness. I mean, that's where we all start. And
by his grace, by the time I got to this brokenness,
he'd already met me in so many other brokenness that
I was able to walk through some pieces of it
(19:24):
with more grace than others. But there were still things
that threw me for a loop, and I had to
meet him in that brokenness, just like the woman at
the well. And here's the thing. Like she runs off.
And a whole community, as far as we can tell
from the scriptures, is changed just because this woman who
didn't know him before says, look, he told me everything
(19:45):
I ever did. And he's changed me. And, um. That's.
I guess what Bob and I are just trying to do. We're.
Let the redeemed of the Lord say so. He has
redeemed so much in us, and we just want to
tell people.
S1 (19:58):
Wow. Amen to that. There's a hard heart brokenness to
this heartache. And that is your husband is, in theory,
your best friend. And yet that's where the grievance is.
So in some respects, during this time where trust is
being rebuilt, where intimacy is being reestablished, your best friend's
not there. How did you cope?
S6 (20:15):
Mhm. Yeah. Well that's really hard. Loneliness is a really
big factor here. Um, the research tells us that people
who are lonely use pornography, and pornography makes people lonely.
It's kind of a which comes first, the chicken or
the egg type thing. But what we know is that
(20:36):
if there's a home that's being impacted, a marriage being
impacted by lust and pornography, that couple is also being
deeply impacted by loneliness. And you have to get to
the root of why that loneliness is there. So for me,
I had to look at my husband and my sweet man.
(20:57):
He was 13 years old when he saw pornography for
the first time, and it was a curiosity. But there
were deep hurts in his life that he didn't know
who to talk to about those deep hurts. And then
comes along, this thing that medicates it and takes the
hurt away. What we know about pornography is the dopamine load.
(21:18):
The dopamine hit of pornography is very, very powerful. When
we eat, you know, chocolate cake, we get a dopamine hit.
But 30 minutes later, that hit is gone. Um, for
somebody that uses cocaine or heroin, they get a dopamine hit.
It's a very, very big dopamine spike. But again, an
hour and a half later, it's gone. Pornography and lust
(21:40):
is a really unique dopamine spike. Bike. It's it's strong.
It's not as strong as heroin or cocaine, but it's much,
much stronger than food. But five hours later, there's still
no drop. That's medication. That's medication. We didn't understand that
20 years ago when the internet showed up with pornography
(22:02):
in a different form. We didn't understand that. We understand
that now. And I want women to hear that and
understand that because you need to look back. Ask your husband.
When was the first time you saw this? What do
you think you were medicating when you didn't tell someone?
I saw a bad picture. I saw a picture I
shouldn't have seen, or I saw a video, like because
13 year old, a ten year old, 11 year old
(22:22):
should probably say that to their parents. And that's the
average age of the first inception of pornography these days.
And if you ask most men, that's about when they
first saw it. But they didn't tell anybody why. Well,
because it was medicating something. What were they medicating? Well,
when we start to find that out, then we start
to rip up the roots. And then Satan, he doesn't
(22:43):
have the lies and the belief system of that little boy.
And we can start to have some success in overcoming it. Now,
I know that that sounds really crazy for people who
are like, as I am a lover of the Word
of God, but I believe that I can apply the
Word of God and also gain some understanding from research
and behavioral science and what we know about how the
(23:05):
brain functions. And so I became a woman when I
got bookish and started to understand these things. A woman
who was like, okay, now we got this understanding. We
understand how hard the dopamine hit is. We understand how
addictive it is. I made vows that were for sickness
and in health. This sounds like sickness to me. So
(23:27):
for a while I need to roll up my sleeves,
sleeves and walk beside a partner who is unwell. And
that's what I did. And my husband would tell you
that that's what I did. He's a very strong man,
a very well man today. And, um, he's walk behind
beside me and some of my sicknesses. That's what marriage is.
(23:48):
But when we apply God's Word with understanding, we have
a whole lot more power.
S1 (23:53):
Mhm. That's what fighting for your husband rather than fighting
with your husband sounds like. It's a rich, rich book.
I'm hop skipping and jumping through it, but there's some
real depths to plumb when you read happily. Even after
the new book by Dana Gresh, we're going to take
a break and come back. There's so much to explore
in this particular area, but to know that God is
(24:13):
with you through all of this struggle. Oh boy, what
a whole different perspective you have on dealing with this
sin that's taken up residency back after this. How do
(24:35):
you keep your finger on the pulse of America while
listening to the heartbeat of God's Word? On in the market,
we look for God's perspective on current events. Become a
partial partner today, and keep this Christ centered program on
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week prepared just for you. You'll get behind the scenes
Intel from my email to yours. Call 877 Janet, 58
(24:55):
or go online to in the market with Janet parshall.org.
We're visiting with best selling author Dana Gresh. She has
written books with titles like And The Bride Wore White
and Lies Young Women Believe. And also she's written Lies,
Girls Believe. She's the co-host of Revive Our Hearts, which
(25:15):
is a national podcast, daily podcast for women, rather. And
the founder of True Grit talks about the mom daughter connection.
And that all comes out of the ministry that she founded.
And the podcast is called True Girl. Over 2 million
books out there reaching women and girls in more than
100 countries. Her newest book is very precious, I am
sure to her, because it's very much about a battle
(25:36):
that she waged within the parameters of her own marriage.
It's called happily, even after let God redeem your marriage.
And then Dana does just that. She walks you through
the steps of fighting for your marriage and understanding that God,
who specializes in redemption, can even redeemed a marriage where
there has been brokenness, where there has been failure, or
there has been a lack of integrity. It's tough stuff,
(25:58):
but it's important stuff. And it reminds us of how
great our God is. Dan, I want to go to
the woman listening who goes, wait a minute. You gave
us a little insight into pornography and lust. You talked
about that dopamine hit. Not only does porn hurt you
emotionally and mentally and spiritually, but there's a physiological reaction
to this. There's literally a rewiring in the brain. It is,
(26:20):
as you so rightly stated, a sickness. But one of
the residuals of the sickness is the wife looks at
herself in the mirror and says, was I not enough?
Was I not young enough, or thin enough, or pretty enough?
Why couldn't I have supplied what my husband needs? Now
it seems to me that that thinking is predicated on
the idea that this is about sex, when in fact
(26:40):
it really isn't. Talk to me about that.
S6 (26:43):
Yeah. Um, every wife is going to feel that. And
here's the best advice I can give you about that
for right now. You need to tell the enemy, no,
I'm not going to believe lies about myself. I'm going
to put myself over here on the shelf for just
a second till I get my husband headed in the
(27:04):
right direction. Um, to to understand the physiology of how
bad pornography impacts the brain, you really have to see
a picture of it. If you took a functional, um,
scan of a man's brain, you'd. A healthy brain would
be nice and smooth. But if you looked at a
(27:25):
brain on pornography, it would. It would, it would look
like it has holes in it. It would look like
Swiss cheese. It looks very similar to a brain on heroin.
And so what began as a sin problem is now
a A physiological brain problem. And, you know, trying to
get your husband to be in tune to your physical
(27:48):
needs and tune to your emotional needs, in tune to
all of that while he is unwell, is kind of
like asking a man whose legs have been destroyed and
he's in a wheelchair to stand up. It's not going
to happen, right? Now, that doesn't mean it can't happen.
It means that as women, we have to rise up
(28:08):
in our strength, the strength that God has placed in
us and not believe the lies of the enemy and
put our own healing kind of table it for a moment. Now,
that doesn't mean that we can't experience our own healing.
My husband and I just shared with our staff the
other day, kind of, we're like, you're in the inside circle.
So do you have any questions about this book coming out?
(28:29):
He said the most wonderful thing. He said, listen, for
far too long, the church and the recovery industry has
made the man the focus of the healing work, and
the wives are deeply traumatized and wounded, and they deserve
and need help. So I want to say you deserve
(28:50):
and need help, but it's almost like your husband has
driven your car into a tree and, um, you're both bleeding,
but his injuries are life threatening. The ambulance needs to
triage both of you and say, ah, this one needs
to get to the hospital faster. The second one, the
second ambulance is coming for this girl. And then when
you get your husband in the ambulance, whatever that is,
(29:12):
then you need to take care of yourself. You need
to do the healing work that needs to happen for
your own heart and mind. If you both kind of
get your own healing work done, then you can come
together as a couple and help one another heal. But
if you start by helping each other heal or worrying about, ah,
maybe it was we didn't have sex enough. Or maybe
(29:34):
I'm not beautiful enough. If you start there interacting with
your husband, you're just going to make the trauma worse. Um,
I've seen it too many times. Go get him the
help he needs. Clinically informed care that is rooted in
the word of God has to be rooted in the
word of God. And then get that for yourself, and
then you can come together.
S1 (29:55):
Oh, well. Great counsel. You know, I've often said sometimes
it'd be just so much easier if God didn't give
us emotions. And yet you say that emotions are essential
when it comes to intimacy. And yet also in the
book you write how many times you literally shut down.
And this was something observed when you were in counseling
as well. It's protective. It's perfectly understandable. I call it
dead bolting my heart. Right. You can hear the sound
(30:17):
of the lock going, and then you don't have to
deal with the emotions. But how do you become? Emotions
are in many respects a kind of vulnerability. If they're
out there, you've opened that box. You've unlocked that. How
do you deal with emotions after you've been hurt? How
do you emotions are tied into intimacy and vulnerability? How
did you and Bob Re-establish this with emotions in your
(30:39):
life as well, because there's so many other things. Before
those seeds are planted, that ground has to be turned
over again and again and again. How did you do it?
S6 (30:47):
Well, we hurt. We hurt deeply. We hurt badly, and
we hurt in ways that we didn't want to hurt,
but we allowed ourselves to hurt. And here's why. Um,
God created our emotions. And he says right in Genesis
that everything he created is good. That means our emotions
are good. Even the bad emotions grief, sadness, anxiety, fear
(31:07):
those are useful because they're messages from our spirit telling
us that something needs to be addressed. And when we
shut those emotions down, they they don't have the ability
to lead us down the trail, usually to our belief
system of what's wrong so that God can heal us
(31:29):
and redeem the way we think about something. And so
that requires us to feel and what's happening. Most cases
in a in a couple where pornography has run rampant,
where lust has run rampant, and maybe someone listening. It's
an affair. It's escalated to affairs. Um, there is what
I would call intimacy anorexia, emotional anorexia. You have shut
(31:54):
the you have shut it down. And unless you turn
that back on and feel and hurt, you feel the loneliness,
you feel the grief, you feel the fear of, will
he do this again? You feel all of those things
and you talk about it. You say, listen, this is
what I felt when you told me that. And he says, listen,
(32:17):
this is how fearful I was of telling you. But
I didn't know how to get back to God and
you without telling you. And you start to have that
kind of a conversation. You see, that's intimacy. That's intimacy.
My husband loves to say a definition of intimacy is
into me. See? So when I tell you, Look. Look
(32:37):
how much you hurt me. Um. And you say it
with a control in a controlled way. Not. Not a
hurtful way. Not a not a accusatory way. You start
to build that intimacy muscle. I'm telling you, you crush
Satan's plans. When you do that, you must maintain your
emotional intimacy. And when you do that, when you reclaim
(33:00):
it and maintain it, you really start to turn the
tide of the battle.
S1 (33:04):
Mm. So you're saying something impliedly that I want to underscore,
because in a post-truth Western world, we tend to, both
in and out of the church, flee from negative stimuli.
You know, if you took your high school biology class,
you looked under a microscope. A single cell amoeba moves
away from a negative stimuli. It's the same thing for
us as grown up, full developed people as well. And
(33:25):
yet you have a quote from our mutual friend Johnny Erickson, Tada!
That said, suffering provides the gym equipment on which my
faith can be exercised. So what you're saying is there's
an invitation here, because there will be a benefit here
of coming into some suffering. Now, you got to realize
that falls hard on post-truth ears in the 21st century.
(33:45):
Do we need to reconsider? And I don't mean self-flagellation.
I don't mean a monastic posture on this at all.
But do we need to reconsider that? Sometimes pushing through
this refining fire brings out the gold on the other side,
but you're not going to get there without the refining.
S6 (34:02):
Yeah, you're not going to get there without the refining.
And one of the the the Bible, Jesus said, um,
those who are my disciples will know my word and
they'll know the truth, and the truth will set them free. Um,
that sometimes is a really painful thing to go to
the Word of God and let it be that which
separates the truth from the lies. And for some women,
(34:26):
they're like, I could never hear the disclosure of my
husband's sin. It would destroy me. No, it wouldn't. It
would hurt. It would be like a surgeon taking a
scalpel to cut out that which is unholy and unhealthy
for your from your marriage. It would feel like that.
But the truth never destroys us. It always sets us free.
(34:49):
And of course, I'm talking about little t truth. It
does give us clarity, but without big T truth, that's Jesus.
Jesus is truth. I am the way and the truth
and the life, said Jesus. You really can't experience the
full freedom. That's why we can't build our recovery on
the world's recovery industry. We must pursue the redeeming power
(35:13):
of Jesus Christ in this process.
S1 (35:16):
Wow. Wow. Even if you think you might get some hurt,
it's worth it. Did. When you were going through this process,
did you say, Lord, I'm hurting? Help me. Help me
feel the right way. Help me. Comfort me in my pain.
Because I understand that this suffering, if I can use
that word again, is going to be paramount in getting
to the other side as we go through the redemption process.
S6 (35:38):
Yeah. Oh, over and again I pleaded with the Lord
every day. Redeem the way I think about this emotion, Jesus.
Redeem the way I think about this thing Bob just
told me. Jesus, redeem it all.
S1 (35:49):
No, the book is called happily Even After Let God
Redeem Your Marriage and again, predicated not just on Danny's
knowledge of the word, but really because she can tell
you what Jesus has done for her and Bob and
their marriage, that he stands on the ready to do
just exactly what she says. Redeem your marriage. Don't give
(36:10):
up hope back after this. Brand new book is called
(36:34):
happily Even After Let God Redeem Your Marriage, and it
really is how you can fight for your marriage, not
with your husband. And it's a very powerful, timely, and
important book because there's a lot of hurt and there's
a lot of brokenness out there, particularly in this area
where there is a failure of sexual integrity because there
is a lot of isolation. That's why Dana writes about
(36:54):
the importance of community in the book as well. Shame,
guilt and the idea of being isolated is so very
much front and center in this issue. But she reminds
us that the Lord is standing there on the ready
all the time. So many questions I want to ask you.
I was thinking about this during the break because there
is a rewiring of the brain and I saw a picture.
I appreciated the pictures you put in the book of
(37:15):
the Healthy Brain, the brain on heroin, the brain on pornography,
and the parallel between the brain. As you noted earlier on,
heroin and pornography. Identical. So there is this physiological impact
underscoring that we're fearfully and wonderfully made. And there is
an impact in all of this. But it is a sickness,
and it's a sickness as much as it is a sin.
What happens do you now get beyond the idea that
(37:37):
Bob could fail again? Is there always? Yes. But trust
but verify. Not sure if it happened once. It can
happen again. In other words, to go forward happily, even
after the failure and all of the work that you
two did in the counseling. How do you deal with
the fact that what if he fails again? What if
this happens another time?
S6 (37:57):
Well, that's the cycle that most women are living in
and they're experiencing. It's it's not the cycle that Bob
and I are in anymore. Not right now. Um, he
has found two things that have been really dramatically powerful.
One is he went from weekly accountability to daily accountability,
and that's just what his brain required. He needed it
(38:20):
every single day. You know what that is? Accountability with
men is another form of intimacy. Um, I can't emphasize
enough how much that matters. God created us as social beings.
He is a social being. God the father, God the son,
God the Holy Spirit who created us to have more
of a social outlet. And he created us to be social.
(38:41):
And that's what Satan is trying to distort and destroy
in our lives. When you experience intimacy with other people,
it really does defeat this. Incredibly, the other thing I
want to say is a great piece of hope is
the brain. There's something called neuroplasticity. And that means that
the brain learns new things. So yes, a brain can
(39:01):
be damaged by heroin. It can be damaged by pornography.
It can also be healed. It can learn to function differently.
One of the things that's really fascinating that in my
research was the hippocampus is the part of the brain
that stores map memory. Well, you go to they they
did some brain scans of taxi drivers in London. They
have these muscled up hippocampus. They're just like huge because
(39:25):
they've used them so well. That's neuroplasticity. And that's why
when your grandma does Sudoku, It's healing her brain. It's
making it stronger. Well, when you practice intimacy, when you
deny the pornography, your brain starts to heal and it
gets smooth again. So I have a husband now who's
operating with a really healthy brain. Um, it's not a
(39:48):
perfect brain, but neither is mine. We're both aging. Um,
and so there's that. Um, but there's hope. Jesus made
us for hope. Uh, do I wonder if Bob will
fall again? Um, I guess that's a question that a
lot of people are asking me as I start to
do interviews. I'm just enjoying how beautiful our marriage is
(40:10):
right now, and that God has redeemed it and that
he has not only redeemed listen, he's even redeemed the
chairs Bob confessed to me in because my my daughter
in law wrote this beautiful note to me about how
my red chairs are holy, because that's where we nurtured
our twin grandbaby girls after they came home from the
(40:31):
NICU and she said, listen, these chairs are holy. How
could these chairs be holy? This is where my heart
was broken. Well, it's because Jesus redeemed them. He redeems everything.
And that's what Bob and I are living in right now.
How could he fail me someday? Well, that's the whole thing,
is that as we age, one of us is going
to fail each other. I don't know if it will
be pornography and lust, but we're going to fail each other,
(40:53):
and we're going to be living up to our marriage
vows in that failure, whatever it is, as we experience
God's redemption through that brokenness.
S1 (41:03):
Again, such a good word. Wow. Where does forgiveness fit
into this? Because forgiveness is tough. I don't know that
we as a as a follower of Jesus, generally have
a good understanding of forgiveness. We draw a parallel between
forgiving and forgetting. We think that forgiveness is something that
we're giving the other person, but is it really more
about something we give ourselves? Talk to me about that.
S6 (41:24):
Yeah, well, I think God has a sea of forgetfulness.
It says something about that in the Bible, I do not.
I did not get that in my system. So, um,
at the same time, forgiveness is something we're commanded to do.
Like it's almost conditional, like God's Word says, hey, listen,
if you want to receive my forgiveness, you have to
(41:45):
operate in forgiveness. So there's something there's a command that
we forgive each other, and that includes our husbands. And
we can we're commanded to forgive over and over again. Now,
at the same time, it has to be a holy forgiveness.
It can't. We probably need to do a disclaimer. Um,
(42:06):
we're not looking for women to walk into abusive relationships
with men who sneer at their pain and aren't repentant.
We're looking at men who are deeply repentant, who are
willing to be confronted by their sin and have their
feet held to the fire in that kind of a
safe relationship. Forgiveness is a beautiful tool and it's not abusive. Um,
(42:32):
and so we if you are feeling like you're in
an abusive marriage and your husband has sneered at your
pain and he doesn't think there's anything wrong with his sin,
go to someone in your church and your community that
will confront him with you, because you're worthy of that,
and Jesus would want that for you. He wants your
heart to be protected. But if you're in a relationship
(42:53):
with a man who is, um, safe, forgiveness can unlock
some of that intimacy in both of your hearts that
you need to heal.
S1 (43:04):
Well, you told us the story that when you heard
the news sitting in the red chairs and you decided
to take a walk or took your phone, you reached out.
That was the first thing you did to the woman
for whom this information is brand new, and she's still
in that cocoon of numbness. What would you advise her
to do as the first step?
S6 (43:23):
Tell someone. Tell someone that can pray with you and
walk you through this.
S1 (43:29):
Thank you so much. I want to point out that
there's so much more in the book. Books that are
rich and deep and based on God's good and perfect
word are always that way. And Danny's book exactly is
that it's called happily, Even After. You can learn more
by going to our website in the market with Janet parshall.org.
Click on that red box. It says program Details and audio.
(43:50):
It will take you over the information page. I have
a link directly to Danny's website, so you can follow
all of the amazing things she does with her ministry.
But there's the book on the right hand side, I
don't think. By the way, if you're in that pain
place right now, you were hearing this by accident. Maybe
the Lord wooed you to this conversation so you could
get a cup of encouragement from Dana and realize that
God is there, ready to redeem your marriage. Thank you
(44:12):
so much for joining us, friends. We'll see you next
time right here on In the Market with Janet Parshall.
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