Maya Angelou said, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”
When it comes to betrayal recovery and marriage restoration, sometimes all you can do is the best you can.
Recovery takes hard work.
You start with you. I remember thinking, “If I could just get Dave to do XYZ, then we’d be good.” It made perfect sense to me because he’s the one who looked at porn, not me.
By focusing on what he needed to do, I couldn’t see the flagrant personal issues I had yet to work through. Dave did have individual work to heal, of course. Yet, my broken places also needed healing, and I wouldn’t find them by concentrating on his issues.
In a recent podcast interview, a colleague and spouse mentioned the same thinking. The betrayer recognized their problems, but the betrayed didn’t understand the importance of working through their issues, at least not immediately. They stated, “We had to work on ourselves first before we could work on the marriage.”
So true.
Betrayal recovery is individual work. Relationship recovery comes later.
Our natural human response to betrayal recovery involves focusing on the person who hurt us. We reason that if they fix their stuff, then we’ll feel better. It doesn’t work that way, however.
More than ten years after discovering her husband’s struggle with porn, Bev (not her real name) and I worked together. When she reached out for help, she told me that her husband had done the hard personal work to identify his issues and stopped using porn to medicate those issues. She had evidence of his changed nature and actions.
Yet still she struggled.
The accumulated anger, shame, and distrust she carried continued to damage the relationship with her husband even though he had done the work and lived a sober life for many years. But Bev hadn’t gone through her healing process.
Her eyes opened to her negative thought patterns and rearview thinking, which trapped her in this anger cycle. As her betrayal wounds healed, Bev discovered joy and freedom she never thought possible.
As Bev worked through her pain, she realized something profound—she had been waiting for her husband’s healing to fix her own. But healing doesn’t work that way. No matter how much someone else changes, we still carry our own wounds, and only we can do the work to heal them.
The good news? Healing is possible.
Like Bev, you don’t have to stay stuck in the pain of betrayal. Your healing is for you—not just for your marriage but for your heart, your peace, and your future. When you do the work to heal, you gain clarity, strength, and a renewed sense of self. You do the best you can until you know better.
Then as you heal and know better, you do better.
And when both partners are healing, the marriage has the best chance of restoration.
If you’re feeling stuck like Bev was, you’re not alone. Let’s talk. Schedule a complimentary Find Hope Again session today and take your next step toward healing.