Woman of Strength: A Program For Wives Needing Help and Healing Through Their Husband’s Addiction
By Leah Eppen
A Woman With a Heart for God
Couples that have been together for 40… 50… and even 60 years always seem to have rich advice to give–born from both the joys and difficulties of marriage. They often talk to you while holding hands or sitting close, giving each other looks, and maybe disagreeing as they try to remember how something really happened. They tell their stories with warmth and contentment and it’s easy to see that their love and shared life has stood many tests and trials.
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Rita Taylor, owner and founder of Fully Integrated Ministries. Rita provides a virtue-based approach to Catholic coaching and healing molded and shaped by her Masters of Science in Psychology from Divine Mercy University.
I was awed during our conversation by her experience, perspective, and thoughts on building a long-lasting marriage. Despite the youth of her marriage, the fruits of her journey offer us a similar understanding that most tried and tested 60-year old relationships do: there is always hope when things become difficult and painful.
Married for 7 years, Rita has since experienced marriage in every facet: beautiful, intimate, joyful, laborious, empty, lonely, and painful. Her husband has joined her in sharing their story because they know they are not the only ones who have struggled in this way and so, they’ve spent the last 4 years leading engaged couples through marriage preparation workshops where they unreservedly share their story.
Before they were married, Rita knew her husband struggled with pornography but it wasn’t until after their marriage had begun that she discovered his addiction to alcohol.
“I felt like the ground had crumbled beneath my feet. Did I make the wrong decision? If I was wrong about this, the most important decision of my life, what else have I been wrong about? How can I know what’s real anymore?” Rita recalls the burning questions that spun through her mind over and over again after her discovery.
“For the first couple of weeks, I was shocked and mad. How could God allow me to enter into a marriage that would make me miserable for the rest of my life?”
In her turmoil, Rita recalled an experience a few years before she got married when she was discerning cloister life. She remembers that in the silence of the retreat, “God revealed to me that ultimately I was afraid of marriage because I was afraid that my holiness would be dependent on my husband’s and that my worst case scenario was that I’d marry a man and then find out he was an alcoholic.” As her fear weighed her down in her discernment between marriage and religious life, she was gifted a moment of perfect clarity. She felt God’s words reverberate through her, saying, “I’m not calling you to marriage so you can be happy, I’m calling you to marriage so you can be holy.”
For Rita, this was not a promise of happiness or reassurance that marriage would be free of difficulties. Rather, it was a loving challenge to see marriage in it’s true light: the primary goal and purpose of marriage is not happiness but holiness and if you place happiness as the goal of your earthly marriage, you risk losing the possibility of eternal joy with God.
“Naturally, as you grow in holiness, you experience joy,” Rita says. “Marriage has to be well-ordered in it’s purpose.”
A desire for holiness out of your marriage is like a rock falling into a pond. The ripples from that primary desire for holiness are happiness, joy, and intimacy. But the reverse isn’t true: you can’t put happiness as the primary purpose of marriage and expect holiness to be a happy consequence.
So what do you do when you find yourself married to a man you just discovered struggles with addiction, post-wedding vows?
Remembering God’s revelation to her during that retreat long before her marriage was a critical turnpoint in her discernment of how to handle this new situation with her husband.
The reality is that we do not have the power to change anyone's behaviour other than our own-even our spouse. However, we can choose to live our lives in a way that will merit grace for others and catalyse change in their lives. We can live a life of intercession and virtue and in doing so become a doorway of grace for our spouse. And we find the strength to live in this way by first developing security in God.
A New Program: Becoming a Woman of Strength
As Rita searched for resources to help guide her through her trial, she found very little that was truly helpful and that honoured the Sacrament of Marriage.
So what was she to do? Create her own program, of course!
Woman of Strength is a new program through Fully Integrated Ministries launching later this year for married Catholic women whose husbands struggle with addiction.
Rita explains that the niche for the program is specific because “the program is heavily based on the Sacrament of Marriage and is so most relevant for women sacramentally committed to their spouse. The grace and the commitment is different for wives.”
Woman of Strength will include an online membership and provide community, formation, and mentorship, which includes live group coaching sessions.
Rita explains that the community facet of the program is designed as a space of safety, nonjudgment, and solidarity. “I wanted to protect my husband from shame and judgement, so I felt I couldn’t talk about it with just anyone,” she says. “It can cause harm if you don’t talk to the right people.”
The title of the program refers to Proverbs 31:10-31 and the program itself incorporates insights from these scripture verses. Notably, the Hebrew context here is illuminating. Despite the variability of the translation for this passage–“women of strength”, “women of worth”, “a virtuous woman”–the Hebrew phrase is eschet chayil. Interestingly, “chayil” is used over 150 times throughout scripture usually with a military implication and means more directly, “brave”, “mighty”, and “strong”.
The goal of the Woman of Strength program is to help increase grace and desire for holiness in your life, not just for yourself, but for your spouse and your family. This program is designed to help you grow in virtue and thus, experience fruits of the spirit such as: joy, peace, love, patience, and long-suffering (which is ultimately resilience).
“Patience and long suffering are the fruits that allow us to experience peace and joy in suffering,” Rita says.
It took Rita years to recognize the impact her husband’s struggles with addiction were having on her as an individual. A central characterization of her suffering was deep loneliness and it manifested emotionally and spiritually in her life. Rita illustrates how she felt deep despair, like she’d never again experience authentic intimacy and joy in her marriage.
But she started asking herself… what changed?
“One day I was happy to be married and I was experiencing joy and intimacy and the next I was devastated. The harsh reality is that all that changed was my knowledge of the addiction. He had it before I knew.”
This imparts to us a powerful revelation: being happy doesn’t depend upon your husband’s holiness and freedom from addiction and ultimately, we cannot root ourselves deeply in anyone or anything except the God who is always and forever faithful. The joy of Christ can become our joy, anytime and anyplace.
With this realization, Rita began to discern how to approach both of her husband’s addictions and she came to a couple of founding principles upon which she bases the Woman of Strength program.
First, “my husband needs God’s grace to change and so my main job as his wife is to do whatever I can to increase grace in his life.” And that meant increasing grace in her life as well. Rita quickly discovered the most efficient way to do this was to invest consistently in her relationship with God and better understand who he is and who she is in Him.
“I also needed to detach myself from the idea that I was in charge of fixing my marriage or resolving my husband’s behaviour. It’s easy to believe the lie that your husband’s addiction is the reason you’re not experiencing joy and intimacy in your life and your marriage. But the truth is that you are not dependent on someone you can’t control. As devastating as this reality is, it’s also incredibly hopeful. You do not have to wait to experience joy and intimacy in marriage.”
The Woman of Strength program isn’t going to fix your marriage (although that is a hopeful fruit) and it isn’t going to free your husband from addiction. But it is going to teach you tools and skills that will help you grow in virtue and experience joy and intimacy anyway.
Know Thy Enemy… Because It’s Not Your Husband
When asked if there was one final primary message she wished to convey to women interested in the program, Rita said, “You need to know your enemy… and it’s not your husband.”
Let’s remember that the real enemy are the forces of evil. They don’t want you or your husband to grow in holiness. They want your marriage divided and they participate in influencing temptation, addiction, anger, despair, and blame to make it happen.
“Our Lady of Grace crushes the head of the serpent beneath her feet. And he chokes under Mary because she is a woman of strength,” Rita says. Interestingly, as a young girl following Judaism, Mary would have grown up with the understanding of a woman of strength or a virtuous woman being “eschet chayil”. It seems so right that as the mother of God that she crushes evil because by virtue and grace, womanhood is mighty, brave, and strong.
Our Lady of Grace and St. Rita of Cascia, patron of impossible cases, difficult marriages, and parenthood, pray for us!
You can join a waitlist for the Woman of Strength program details here!
Rita can be found at
www.fullyintegratedministries.com
Or Fullyintegratedministries@gmail.com
Or Instagram: @ritataylor.msp
