Transcription
[Music] What's up Daniel? How you doing?
Dr. John: Rocking on, brother. What's up with you?
Daniel: Oh, another day, man. Trying to get by.
Dr. John: You can do better. You can do better than that, dude.
Daniel: I know. I, uh, my question would be, uh, how do I forgive and move forward after my wife and one of my best friends had over a yearlong affair behind my back? And I mean, the second part of that is, is it even possible for me to move forward?
Dr. John: Um, tell me about it. Well, feel free to stop or interrupt me because I can get, there's so much that goes into this, you know, I can get ranting. But, uh, do this for me because short.
Daniel: Hold on, hold on. Based on what you just said, I'm all about the rant. I get it. I want to rant for you.
Dr. John: Okay. It's easy to get dragged down in the mud on these deals. I want you to practice just with me standing above it and looking down as far as you can on it, okay?
Daniel: Okay.
Dr. John: Give me the high level. And this isn't for, this isn't for like, good radio. This is for you to be able to begin to talk about this without getting dragged underwater by it. Because every time you go under, you get emotional. You get emotional, you act crazy. Either I'm going to let her back in, or she's never coming back, or all my f. Let's practice staying way up here on this one, okay?
Daniel: Okay.
Dr. John: So tell me, what, what happened? Um, in as few sentences as you can, okay?
Daniel: Um, last August, I got on her laptop and found that she had been on a maternity test website. Uh, our daughter just turned one. Had been on a maternity test website and questioned her about it and ended up finding out it was one of my best friends who was also my boss.
Dr. John: Whoa.
Daniel: He was in our wedding. I left my previous job for him.
Dr. John: What do you do? A job that I really, I'm a firefighter. Does that guy still have his job?
Daniel: Let's just say he was, he left good after that.
Dr. John: The research is pretty clear that somebody that cheats on their wife, that lacks that, that type of integrity at home, also lacks that type of integrity at work.
Daniel: Yeah. And this is an ongoing thing for him.
Dr. John: Yeah. Yeah. And you're a firefighter. I don't want a piece of crap like that out making sure my community is safe because that, that sucker is going to cut corners and some innocent bystander is going to die because that person lacks the deepest roots of character.
Daniel: You're 100% right. Good man. I hope that that dude's like, like grooming dogs or something right now where he can't hurt anybody.
Dr. John: All right. So, yeah, the hard part about that too was, so we actually found out she was pregnant, um, a few months before we got married. Just, we were already engaged. It just kind of happened.
Daniel: Had a reaction to that. Well, we know how it happened.
Dr. John: Yeah. I was gonna say, like, oh my gosh, no. We know how it happened.
Daniel: All right, so she had a bad reaction. What does that mean?
Dr. John: Well, so she's always had, we've been together, we're high school sweethearts. She's always had really strong Christian values. And I, of nowhere, the night they found out, they like, they flipped. Eight months before a wedding, and it was really bizarre. And I didn't understand why, like, she wanted to start, she started using things like, I'm going to do what I want to do, like comments like that, like regardless of what I think. And, um, so when she found out she was pregnant, she had told me she wanted an abortion.
Daniel: Okay. And it was really hard on me, obviously, of trying to be like, please, you know, don't do this. Like, this is our baby. Like, you will regret it.
Dr. John: Is that because she thought it was somebody else's baby?
Daniel: Yeah, which I didn't know. And she didn't tell.
Dr. John: Okay. Um, so that was before our wedding. He was in our wedding. She, that's, and she had started the affair with him. And I didn't find out until over a year later and had continued every now and then with him through then.
Dr. John: How long have you all been married?
Daniel: A year and a half.
Dr. John: How old are you?
Daniel: Uh, I'll be 25 in a few months.
Dr. John: Yeah, this girl broke your heart, man.
Daniel: Yeah.
Dr. John: And she gave you the best thing of all time too, at the same time. That little, that little kid, right?
Daniel: Yeah.
Dr. John: That messes with your mind up, right?
Daniel: Bizarre. Yeah. I'm sorry, man.
Dr. John: Um, the only way that this marriage can survive, can it? Yes, it can. Is it going to be hard? Yeah. You're a firefighter. You're not scared of hard things. The only way it survives is y'all completely control, alt, delete everything you knew about your marriage and you start completely over, and both of y'all are all in.
Daniel: And what does that mean?
Dr. John: The fact that you called and said, I looked at her laptop. My wife and I just have laptops, several actually. I guess she has her phone and my phone, but we both know the codes to each other. Like, it starts there. Yeah. You don't have secret stuff, and I don't have secret stuff. This is, we're just going to build a unified structure here, right? You wouldn't put up with that kind of logic in the firehouse, right? You wouldn't have like, I just, I'm just gonna prep this however I want. You can't because someone will die. Same, same applies in your marriage.
Daniel: Would she do that? You mean, would she be willing to control, alt, delete, start over, open up account, I mean, open up finances, share finances, open up electronics, cut off all contact with other people, and just go fully in us to ride or die, building a marriage that will last forever?
Dr. John: Well, I mean, to add the other extra layer to the situation, so that was like the night that I found out. I went up to the firehouse. Me and him work different shifts, and I confronted him. Um, and then I came back and the first thing I said was, here's what I need if we're going to fix this. And that was one of the things. Um, and she genuinely tried for a few weeks, and then it just stopped. And, and I will say, like, I'm a pursuer, and she's like, definitely a withdrawer. Like, she shuts down. Um, and so she shut down, and that lasted until the end of December. And I, we separated.
Daniel: Okay.
Dr. John: But this is, you know, I, when we separated, it's with the hope that like, maybe something will change, um, and get better. And I do see flashes of that at times. And then there's, you know, there's really high highs, really high lows. Um, I grew up with a mom with BPD.
Daniel: Mhm.
Dr. John: And I see a lot of the similar traits in her. And I genuinely believe that like, a lot of this is caused by the mental illness.
Dr. John: And my vows meant something to me. And she broke your vows, brother. She broke your vows. I know your vows meant something to you, but she broke them. You're hanging onto a ski rope, and she cut the rope, dude. And you're still trying to ski, and you're bobbing in the middle of the water, and the boat is gone.
Daniel: On, yeah. I'm just hanging on to something that I wish was there.
Dr. John: That's exactly right. That's when I tell you, you got to build something new. You got to build something completely new. And I, by the way, I, I really lately, have you, you stepped in it. You didn't even mean to. So I'm not going to direct this at you. I'm kind of over the, "I'm a maximizer, I'm a builder, I'm a pursuer, I'm a whatever." Like, I don't care. Like, I am a, uh, podcasting, YouTube, and radio personality. That's, that's on my job description here at my office. I also will go out and pull, pick up trash outside if we have a bunch of guests coming because when things get, uh, when you need to pull together as a team, you move chairs together, you just do what you got to do, right? Um, and so I don't care if you're, I'm a withdrawer, I'm a pursuer, dude, my marriage is about over. I'll do whatever I have to do. Yeah. If it's uncomfortable, if it's like, I don't care, right? So it's like, I'm just gonna do my withdrawal game. No, dude. We don't have time for games. This thing, you're about to be a single mom, and I'm about to be a single dad. And I don't want that for us. I don't want that for my baby. But yes, you are holding on to something that no longer exists. The question is not, can you get it back? You cannot. It is over. The question is, can y'all build something new? And I think you can, but it takes both of you. And she goes through one day, she doesn't think there's a chance that she would ever want to be with me again, and then the next, she acts completely otherwise.
Dr. John: All right, here's what I'm going to tell you. You, you have self-diagnosed her, and you are looking at her through a lens of some sort of mental health diagnostic. Don't do that to her. It's not fair. What you have to do is to ask yourself, because, because here's what it does. It also gives you a pass. It helps you not look at reality. And you've probably heard me say this a million times on the show. If behavior is a language, what is she telling you? I don't want to be with you. Yeah. Occasionally, I'll hook up with you. Occasionally, when we come see the baby, or when she comes to visit the baby, or you go to visit the kid, y'all have some laughs, you grab a drink, maybe she's made dinner, and it just feels like it would feel good, but it's not real. Is that, is that true or false? Tell me if I'm wrong. Man, I'd love to be wrong here.
Daniel: Very true.
Dr. John: Okay. The only thing I think left to do is to sit down and say, I need us to be adults and let's, let's say we're going to go all in. And I have done my work to say, here's what all in means. Or let's call it, because right now, you're both drowning in the maybe. And maybe, maybe there needs to be some just gray mush for a while, but it doesn't seem to, it doesn't seem to be effective. That's why I like separations to have a date and a time and a location where we're going to reconnect. What we're going to talk about when we get there. Like that separation got a purpose, and that's just to let the fire burn out in the house because things got too hot.
Daniel: Yeah. And it's been four months.
Dr. John: Has she seen somebody else that you know of?
Daniel: Uh, I asked her yesterday. She says no.
Dr. John: But you can't believe that.
Daniel: Yeah. No, I don't trust her.
Dr. John: Would she go see, she go see somebody with you?
Daniel: So we went, we went to counseling. She actually, like, the day after I found out, scheduled us an appointment with a lady. And, um, we went together like three times. And this lady and I kind of butted heads. Um, it was a lot of like, I would make the comment of how like I felt if she can't, if I can't be, if I can't trust her with her phone as far as, um, if I just asked to do something on it and she was very skittish about it. Um, the pretty much the counselor told me that I have no right to even ask that nonsense. Non-never walk in that lady's office again. It's bull crap. Well, I stopped, uh, from from pretty much the third or fourth place appointment. She said, we should want to start doing separate. And I didn't do that with her. That's absolutely nonsensical. She still goes to her, but I feel like the lady almost justifies it. Like, I don't, I don't think, I don't think it, it's, I think it's doing more harm than good.
Dr. John: Here's the deal. Here's the deal. Here's the deal. You're spending a lot of time in your wife's head, and you're making up stories about why she's doing something, what it's doing, how it's. I wouldn't do that. Judge the actual action in front of you, okay? Doesn't matter what she's doing. It doesn't matter where she's like. All, like, I, for us to stay together, I need you to be completely open with electronics. If that's not something you can do, then that's cool. I'm out.
Daniel: It's not. She's told me it's not.
Dr. John: Yeah. I think I'm just scared because I grew up, my parents divorced when I was early into my teenage years, and I had a really bad reaction to it. And grew up, you know, I'll never do that to my child. And so two things. You got to forgive yourself. You made yourself a promise that you didn't realize at a young age that takes two. And it sounds like you've worked your butt off to hold up your end of, um, of that rope that somebody else cut. And so go back and forgive your 13-year-old self for being so pissed off at your parents because you don't really know what happened. You kinda do, but probably not. And give yourself some grace, man. You went all into the ring to fight that guy as hard as you could. You just didn't know the person that was supposed to fight with you was going to cut your knees out from under you. Got to give yourself some grace on that.
Dr. John: And part two is be the best damn dad that ever existed. That little kid, she's my everything.
Daniel: I know. She is. My daughter's mine too. I mean, it made it 10 times harder to even deal with what she did because for four months, I didn't even know she was mine until the results came in.
Dr. John: I know. She'll always be your baby girl. We're not going to talk bad about Mom because she's also half mom too. Yeah. And we're going to love that little girl. She's not going to know a day in her life that Daddy's not telling her that he loves her. And if some crappy stepdad comes in the picture, your dad's going to be right there. And if Mom's not okay, Dad's going to step in. And if Dad's got to go to court and get everything sorted out, which you're going to need to do, then we're going to go get things done. But we're going to take care of that baby girl. So is that cool?
Daniel: Yeah.
Dr. John: I hate this for you, man. Sounds like you tried to do right. I'm sorry. It's been seven, eight months now of just, yeah, trying the, um, day. The first, like, uh, I wrote this book a while back, and I couldn't figure out the first way to start it. I couldn't figure out like the entry point to it. And I finally landed on a sentence on two words: choose reality. And I don't know if there's any sort of healing or mental or emotional or even physical health. I don't know if there's any way to get that without first being honest about the starting line. Here's how far I have to run. And I got to just at some point, drop my shoulders and choose reality. The reality is, my best friend in the world and boss didn't stab me in the back. He stabbed me right in the face. My wife, the mother of my baby girl, stabbed me right in the face.
Daniel: Yep.
Dr. John: That's choosing reality. That's heartbreak, dude. That's grief. That's deep grief, man. This anger, that's rage. All of it, dude. And it's all good. It's all right. And then the question is, what are you going to do next?
Daniel: I don't, I think the conversation needs to be, I mean, I'll say this, there was a little bit of conflict between the two of us yesterday, and, um, she said, you know, she doesn't want to be with me. And if that were to change, it wouldn't be for a long time.
Dr. John: Cool. Um, you need, you need to have the courage to hear her words and then go do what you got to do. You need to go to the courthouse. You need to get an attorney. You need to go do the, is the next right thing?
Daniel: I just feel like I'd be losing my daughter too.
Dr. John: No, you won't be. Because she makes it very difficult for me already.
Daniel: I know. And that's what a court order can help with. At least it'll clarify that half time or three-quarters time or whatever non-shift time. But you're trying to hold together a f. Brother, then that, it's gone. It's a ghost. And that's that, that angst, that like, I, I'll say this in a harsh way, you've already lost your daughter. Your daughter right now is tangled up in like an electric fence of chaos and tension. And I don't know who's what and where. And that's my daddy, but he doesn't live here. That's my mommy, she doesn't live here. I hate this for you, man. But it's time you call an attorney. You find yourself a therapist that isn't delusional, so ridiculous. Sorry, man. And begin taking the next step towards what comes next. Hang on the line. I'm going to send you that book, "Building an Unexist Life." That'll be my gift to you, man. Call anytime, brother. Call anytime.