The True Cost of Secrecy: Truths about Betrayal Trauma--Justin & Trisha Davis

Trisha Davis: I packed up Justin's things and I tell people it was worse than death. Because if he was death, it would make sense. This was packing up my husband and kicking him out knowing he's alive and well, he just doesn't want to be with me. But for me, that was rock bottom. That was when my theology blew up from what I thought a good person does to understanding what a broken person does, and that's a very different experience.
Dave Wilson: Well, this is like a mini-series on Netflix. This story with Justin and Trisha Davis, who are back with us today, just keeps going. There's layer after layer. If you missed yesterday, you've got to get part one. Just search FamilyLife Today wherever you get your podcasts and listen to day one with Justin and Trisha Davis.
Ann Wilson: Trish, take us back to you're at home, Justin comes home and lays this on you out of the blue. There was something you noticed this morning, but now he says that. What's going on? How do you respond? What happens in your heart?
Trisha Davis: The next 24 to 48 hours was one of the biggest emotional rollercoasters of heartbreak and faith. So we have this confession and I freak out and leave the house in a very violent way. There was so much protection.
Ann Wilson: Were you yelling? Where were your kids?
Trisha Davis: They were outside playing, and I got in the car. It makes me emotional, but I could have really hurt one of them. I wasn't looking when I was leaving, when I was backing up. For someone listening, they know what it's like to be in that frame of mind where the world stops and it's going fast all at the same time. Justin wasn't broken. So in the first 24 hours, I left, I came back home, and my faith was like, "We can do this through God."
Ann Wilson: Wait, where did you go?
Trisha Davis: I went to one of our staff member's houses.
Justin Davis: I think she called the chairman of our elders, told him what was going on. He called me, was screaming at me on the phone, "This has to be some kind of joke. Please tell me this is a joke." When you're in a dark place, you have to block yourself off emotionally to the carnage you're causing to the people that love you the most and that you love. So I was just so closed off.
Ann Wilson: It's almost, and you guys have studied this too, of how we create neurological pathways. You've gone down this, you've created this whole scenario like, "Oh, it's Trisha's fault. I'm going to do this." So you created this whole lie in your head probably.
Justin Davis: The person we talk to the most is ourselves. So the stories we tell ourselves are the most powerful. I had rehearsed this scenario that this was the way that this needed to go.
Trisha Davis: I mean, we were on a cruise just weeks before. It was disorienting for everybody. I ended up going to one of our other staff member's houses, and I remember her and another staff member's wife sat us on their master bedroom and one of them was very pregnant and we just sobbed and sobbed. Then there was this moment that was like, "Why am I gone? He needs to leave." So I end up going back home and then within 12 hours, my theology was meeting up with my emotions. My theology in that moment informed me I need to forgive, I need to move on.
Dave Wilson: Not yet. You don't forgive now. You already were there.
Trisha Davis: But I was an evil person if I didn't forgive my husband because through Christ all things are possible. I am a rule follower, so it was like, "Okay, I don't trust Justin, but God's word tells me that He is faithful, He is just, He is merciful. He will give me the peace and patience and kindness." God will give me all of these things. But Justin wasn't broken and didn't want to come home.
Ann Wilson: What were your prayers sounding like to God?
Trisha Davis: I don't know if we can share those online. I was like, "Lord, just get him into an accident. Maim him just a little bit. But he is my baby daddy, so I need you to..." There was a moment where he began to realize the gravity of his choices and wanted to come back. I remember my mom handing me the phone and it was a counselor from Focus on the Family. That poor man is not counseling anymore after talking to me. I'm like, "I just want him to come home. I just want him to come home." He said, "If you really love him, you'll let him go." Now, I wish I could say I said kind things, but I did not handle that conversation well. I'm like, "You are the dumbest." All these kind of things came. I said, "If I let him go..." I'm screaming in the phone at this poor man. "If I let him go," and I'm just sobbing, I'm like, "He's going to choose her." And then he said, "He already has. And until you let him go, you will always be the reason for all of his issues." From that moment on, I went upstairs, and I think it's probably the hardest point in our whole entire process is I packed up Justin's things. I tell people it was worse than death. Because if he was death, it would make sense. This was packing up my husband and kicking him out knowing he's alive and well, he just doesn't want to be with me. But for me, that was rock bottom. That was when my theology blew up from what I thought a good person does to understanding what a broken person does, and that's a very different experience.
Ann Wilson: What do you mean by that?
Trisha Davis: I think for me, my whole life when I came to know Christ was I believed everything God said. So that meant if I followed the rules, I would live an up-and-to-the-right life.
Justin Davis: You do this, you get that.
Trisha Davis: But we live in a broken sinful world, and an up-and-to-the-right life isn't what brought Jesus to the cross. So I was missing out on the depth of what it meant to truly be forgiven, to truly know what it means to hit rock bottom. Rock bottom is still solid surface to stand, but I stood as a new person. It was like I was stripped of all of the titles: wife, mom, pastor's wife, ministry leader. It was all gone. God's like, "I still love you so much." That type of experience changes your capacity to love others. I was no longer in a hurry to fix us. I was okay just being obedient to what God wanted for me in that moment. In that moment, brokenness meant surrender to go whatever it takes. Whatever it takes in this moment meant to kick Justin out of the house.
Ann Wilson: What about your kids? What was going on with them?
Justin Davis: I don't know that they necessarily knew everything that was going on, but Trisha packed up all of my things. So I went and stayed in a hotel. When I get to the hotel, a lady from our church called and she said, "If you have any hope at all of restoring your marriage, you're going to go to this counseling session that we made for you." I had never been to counseling. 10 years, never been to counseling. I told Dennis Rainey this several years ago, but we had a year before the affair, we had a couple in our church that wanted us to go to Weekend to Remember. I blew that off too, didn't think I needed that. So I go to this counseling session really defiantly and just tell the counselor about as much as I've shared here. She said, "Why are you here? Why are you at this counseling session?" I said, "Well, if I'm really being honest with you, I want you to help me figure out how God's going to bless my life no matter who I choose. That's what I want."
Dave Wilson: You said that?
Justin Davis: She said, "Well, I can help broken people. I can't help hard-hearted people." I just thought, "This lady doesn't know what she's talking about. She doesn't know me." I had never really experienced brokenness before. I'd been a Christian since I was 10, and I'd been a pastor for 10 years. I leave that counseling session. I go back to the house I'm staying at, which is four miles from our house with a family that helped start the church. I'm in a seven-year-old's pink bedroom. They had moved her in with her sister. Everything that I owned is in boxes against the wall. As I'm walking in, the guy that was letting me stay with them said, "It's going to feel like it's over, but it's not over." I had no idea what he was talking about. Then I saw everything that I owned, and it just broke me. At that time, Trish wasn't interested in my games. So the counselor that I had gone and seen, I'd called and said, "Please give me a second chance." They reached out and said, "Do not make any contact with Trish. If she wants to talk to you, she'll talk to you." There was a mediator that helped us get our kids back and forth between the houses. I started going to counseling by myself.
Ann Wilson: What did you say to the kids?
Justin Davis: Trisha really explained more of the relational aspect of what was going on, that I wasn't living there, that I wanted to be married to someone else.
Dave Wilson: You said that, Trish?
Trisha Davis: Yes.
Dave Wilson: How old are the kids at this point?
Trisha Davis: They are nine, seven, and two.
Dave Wilson: What do they say?
Trisha Davis: Again, totally not trauma-informed. Micah was old enough to go, "Who does daddy want to be...?" He was so confused. I was like, "I will go to my grave, I will never tell him who this is," because it's my best friend of seven years. It's like his second mom. That family's kids are close to our kids. So there was so much, but Justin had a very poignant conversation with Micah. It was like God was doing something in our family. My counselor at the time said, and this is true even to today, that kids deserve to know the truth in right-sized, age-appropriate ways because, especially for kids, they start to take on as if it's something they've done wrong. The truth truly, Jesus is so brilliant that it does set you free. I remember the man that Justin, the family he was staying with, was over and Tony is this very large man. He's 6'11". So he's sitting on the stairs, my nine-year-old and just encompassing him. It was like, "Okay, I'm going to tell him." As soon as I told him who it was, his demeanor completely changed because now he had the truth to begin to grieve even as a nine-year-old. But that was really the beginning for him to have identity stripped for him as well.
Justin Davis: He basically asked me, "Are you and mom going to get divorced?" I said, "I don't know." I said, "But I can tell you one thing." I said, "I'm not going to be the pastor of Genesis Church anymore." He just flipped out. He's like, "You've got to be the pastor! You have to be the pastor! I'm the pastor's son. You have to be the pastor!" It was such an apparent moment of we had built our identity as a family not around Christ, but around my role at the church. He was invested. He invited so many of his friends and family that were coming to the church. But it was just a recognition even early on in that process, this is not about the affair, the relationship. It's about the dysfunction that has infiltrated our family, some that we knew about, some that we didn't even know about, patterns of behavior that we had allowed to become normalized, that we thought some were spiritual that were actually pretty destructive. So Trisha and I were separated for two and a half months. We didn't talk for the first 10 days. Then 10 days into our separation, she called me on my cell phone. She just said, "I hear you've been going to counseling." I said, "Yeah." She said, "Well, I'm willing to go with you."
Dave Wilson: Your kids are fighting again. Somebody spilled something sticky. The coffee's cold and suddenly you're angry before 9:00 AM. If you've ever wondered why I keep reacting this way, you're not alone. And you forgot there's poop everywhere.
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Ann Wilson: So when you came home, the boxes are against the wall, not home, but into this pink bedroom. That's when you hit rock bottom and you were like, "Okay, I need to..."
Dave Wilson: But everything at that point felt like manipulation to her because she didn't trust you. How is it when you're sitting there in that pink bedroom and there is a box of your whole life? Is the love you thought you had for this other woman, she's the one I want, does it dissipate or is it a struggle?
Justin Davis: It was almost like there were scales on my eyes that just fell off of, "What have I done?" So that started really a journey for us of counseling and of two years of healing. 30 days into our counseling, we had gone to counseling four days a week. The only reason we didn't go on Friday is because they were closed. I was unemployed, so I had nothing else to do.
Ann Wilson: Trisha, how did you end up going to counseling? Because he called and said, "I heard you're going to counseling," but you were a little skeptical.
Trisha Davis: It was like I quantified it as if I couldn't see anything. What counseling was doing is it was teaching me to see it as a prism of pain and the beauty that is found in redemptive pain, that God does use all things for good. So it was discovering to name it for what it is and then understand it and how that behavior or how that choice is affecting my life personally and then making the choice what do I want to do with it. It's not this linear, "Oh, I got on this train and it just took me." It was very difficult terrain. We were separated for two and a half months and we know if we were in the same house, it was so all over the place for both of us, we would have done more damage to each other trying to find our own path to healing that I don't know if we would have been able to make it.
Justin Davis: 30 days into counseling, our counselor's like, "Justin, you're at a really pivotal point because Trisha's starting to trust you again." He said, "If you've left anything out, now is the time to share it. Because unconfessed sin always leads to repeated behavior. So if you don't want to be back here in three years or 13 years, you better come clean now." I knew I was withholding things, not because I wanted to hurt her, but because I thought if she knew that, it would be over. So I came over to the house on a Thursday. I came over to the house on the next Monday.
Dave Wilson: So you wrestled with it through the weekend?
Trisha Davis: Well, he had shared some things in that counseling about the affair, and I lost my mind and left him. We had driven together. I left him there, and I was filing for divorce on Monday. At this point, our marriage is over.
Justin Davis: I had gone over to my pastor friend's house Friday night. I was working at PF Chang's at that time as a waiter. I said, "I need to tell you something. Trisha's leaving me. She's filing for divorce." I said, "But I've got more things I need to share, and I don't know if I should or not." He's like, "You need to share it with her." So I went over to the house that Monday morning. I said, "As far as the affair goes, I've told you everything." I said, "But I have to share more with you." She's like, "Okay." I said, "I was sexually abused when I was a kid and I've never told anyone about it. I've never gotten help for it." I said, "I'm not trying to justify my choices. I'm just telling you there's a broken part of me that I can't fix." I said, "I've struggled with pornography for the last 10 years and I've deflected it and I've denied it. I've preached against it. I've counseled people through it. I've lied to you about it. I've gaslit you about it." I said, "If you want to leave me, if you want a divorce, you can have everything. This is not about us. This is about me finally living with integrity and in the right relationship with God." I'm getting emotional. She said, "Now we can start over. Now we can begin again because I finally know the real you." I wish that was the finish line, but that was really the starting line of what became a two-year journey of finding healing from sexual abuse and freedom from sexual addiction. But I tell people all the time, it's like there's a beauty in having someone know the worst parts of you and still loving you. That's what makes grace so amazing.
Justin Davis: It's the gospel. I think we try to sanitize it and we try to make it less filthy than it really is. We miss out on the fullness of God's grace and the fullness of God's love that He knows us fully and He loves us anyway. That's the beauty of marriage, that intimacy, that being fully known and knowing that you're fully loved is such a secure place to be.
Ann Wilson: Trish, when he told you, what was going through your mind? How made you respond?
Trisha Davis: It's like being out to sea in a boat and you've just been so tired and you're seasick and you just don't even know what's up or down. This moment was like a crashing to the shore that the life that we had known had obliterated into pieces. Now it was like, "Okay, this is overwhelming at how much carnage there is, but at the same time, we don't have to pick up that piece anymore. We can actually start again." So there was such an innocence. When you lose everything and everybody knows you're a failure, there's a freedom in it of, "And guess what? God still loves me." So there's a courage that comes from that and then what we've been living in the past 20 years since then is this incredible experience of what I believe God created us for and that's to be fully known and fully loved. So now we were actually living, and I think to your point you asked how does someone choose to step out of their marriage? It's so complex of why we choose those things, but at the end of the day, it's we want to be known and we want to be loved. We were figuring out that we could know and love each other outside of the up-and-to-the-right perfection, but really the power of saying, "I just saw you do that and I've seen you repent from it." There is something powerful and beautiful and spiritual about it that creates something in our marriage relationship of a depth that is indescribable. It's why we are who we are today and why people say, "Why do you share this story? Isn't it hard?" And I'm like, "It is, but it also is the greatest gift of experiencing God in the way that we experienced then and continue to." And now we're getting older and the love is different in a sense of marriage is fun. It's a deep knowing that I believe is just such this gift that it becomes worth fighting for rather than always fighting against. I think we spent the first 10 years trying to have this just fighting against each other to get to it.
Ann Wilson: Justin, what did it feel like for you? You had received God's grace, but now when you shared everything, all of it was out right before Trish, what did that feel like to receive her grace in it?
Justin Davis: It was unbelievable and it was the first time that I ever had anyone know me completely. After this, kind of a little funny moment after all this, we get through that, we're crying, we're hugging and I said, "I gotta tell you something else." And I said, "I was never recruited to play basketball at the University of Evansville." She's like, "What?" And I said, "That's a lie I've been telling myself since my junior year of high school." So it was just this freedom to tell myself the truth. It was just such a cleanse. That prayer that David prays, "Search me, O God, and know me. See if there be any anxious way in me." I think sometimes we struggle with anxiety because we know we're keeping things from God, we're keeping things even from ourselves. Embracing that pain was hard, but it was a redemptive pain. It wasn't a destructive pain. The pain of hiding things is a destructive pain that eventually catches up to us. It had caught up to me. So I knew that it was going to be painful, but I could tell it was just there was going to be a beauty and a redemption to it and it was going to be worth it. That's what Jesus says, "The truth will set you free." What He conveniently leaves out is it will make you miserable first.
Dave Wilson: I mean, this story is crazy, isn't it? The things they've walked through and the betrayal.
Ann Wilson: Yeah, but it's also beautiful because God met them and is meeting them, and I hope is meeting you as well. Again, their book is called One Choice Away from Change, and we have it at familylifetoday.com. Just click on the link in the show notes. Guess what? We're going to have one more day with them and there's more to come in this cliffhanger. Pick up their book. You're really going to want to read this and talk about it and send this to other friends so you can talk more about it.