So how did... keeping struggles hidden affect your mental health, your marriage, and your overall well-being?

Sure.

I really lost myself through this whole long process, to be honest.

There were times where the addiction just really took over our life so much that there were days where I just, like, literally joked to myself, thinking, like, I don't even remember my favorite color, you know? Like, this...

really like consumes your life.

And for me, luckily, I think a really big important thing is that I had a really great platform already for myself to begin with when it came to taking care of me.

I had gotten in a really bad car accident in my 20s.

So how did you discover that true recovery involves much deeper emotional and physical healing?

So Katie, tell me about your feelings related to children and why you didn't want to have them.

Yeah, I feel like I never really had like that maternal like instinct.

I just can't wait to have children and carry a child and all the things.

Years of watching also like a lot of my friends struggle with having a baby and then having miscarriages was just so heartbreaking to watch.

If I had married the guy that had proposed to me, I probably would have had kids just because of like societal norms of a checklist of, okay, done, let's do it.

And then the more I thought about it as I got older, it was just like there were so many factors.

This is incredibly scary where we're at, especially with how much technology is progressing.

Katie, what about your therapy? What about your addiction recovery, so to speak, while Chris was going through this? How long and what did you do?

So what did, what did that look like?

Um, it was really ugly for sure.

Um, I, again, just like, you're just kind of stuck into this fight or flight mode.

It's your baseline when you're like both kind of in the, in the addiction and all of the roller coaster of lies and deceit and hiding and, you know, like you're really just trying to like get through it, but your baseline is chaos.

And so as the, as like when the anchor, as the anchor, and I think as the adrift, like really together.

Yes.

Cause it's just this, this chaos of it's not contained.

And if you were sitting with little Katie, what would be the belief that you would pray through her life she would detach from?