Gina used to pride herself on her professional insight. As a licensed family therapist, she’d spent twenty years guiding couples through their darkest moments.

Then came that Tuesday morning.

A text message. Not meant for her. Words that turned her world inside out.

“Missing you already. Last night was perfect.”

Her husband of twenty-three years had left his phone on the kitchen counter while he showered. One notification shattered two decades of certainty.

“The irony isn’t lost on me,” Gina confided to her friend Laura over coffee. “I’ve literally written articles about affair recovery. I’ve guided countless couples through this exact situation. But now? I’m following my own advice but nothing is helping.”

Laura watched as her friend — the woman who’d helped her through her own divorce years ago — sat trembling, barely touching her coffee. “Yesterday,” Gina continued, her voice barely a whisper, “I found myself googling ‘how to install tracking devices in cars’ at three in the morning. Me! The same person who tells clients that hypervigilance only prolongs the trauma.”

“Maybe that’s exactly why this is so hard,” Laura suggested gently. “You feel like you should know how to handle this.”

Gina laughed bitterly. “Nothing in my training prepared me for this. All my professional knowledge feels inadequate now. It’s like… like knowing everything about drowning but suddenly finding yourself underwater.”

That’s when Laura mentioned Pete Uglow. “Sometimes the best healers need healing too,” she said. “Even therapists need help.”

At first, Gina resisted. What could anyone tell her that she didn’t already know? But something made her reach out. Maybe it was professional respect. Maybe it was divine inspiration. Maybe it was pure desperation. Whatever it was, that single decision changed everything.

Working with Pete, Gina discovered something profound: her clinical knowledge, had become a barrier to her emotional healing. She was so busy trying to therapize herself that she didn’t realise what had truly been missing in her own emotional system.

“Your training is getting in the way,” Pete had explained, “Right now, you need to put down the ‘therapy’ tools and just be human.”

Those words broke something open in her. For the first time since discovery, Gina allowed herself to be not the therapist, but the betrayed wife. Not the expert, but the wounded.

Six months later, Gina sat in her therapy office between clients. Her phone buzzed — a text from her husband: “Meeting running late. Should be home by 7.”

She felt the familiar flutter of anxiety, but it no longer consumed her. Using what she’d learned she checked in with herself: Was this fear speaking?

She recognised that this was old fear, not current danger. Her husband had really stepped up to help reassure her. More importantly, Gina had learned to trust herself again.

She texted back: “Thanks for letting me know. Love you.”

And she meant it.

That evening, during their weekly coffee date, Gina shared something with Laura: “You know what’s funny? I understand my clients so much better now. Not just theoretically, but viscerally. When they talk about that constant anxiety, that screaming in their gut — I get it. Really get it.”

“You’re a better therapist for having been broken,” Laura observed.

“Not broken,” Gina corrected. “Transformed. By unconditional love. I finally understand that healing isn’t about knowing the right answers. It’s about filling your emotional system with the right fuel.”

Today, Gina’s practice has evolved. When clients ask how she knows so much about affair recovery, she’s honest: “Because I’ve walked this path too. And I can tell you that healing is possible.”

In her office now sits a small lighthouse figurine. It reminds her daily that sometimes the ones who guide others through storms must also learn to navigate their own. And that’s not just okay — it’s what makes us human.

……

If you would like to learn more about the transformational power & ancient principles of unconditional love after infidelity with Pete, start here.