E37 - Are You Ready for Restoration?
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[00:00:00] Before we get started, I wanna share something really exciting. If you believe God has a better marriage for you than what you can see right now, you don't wanna miss out on being at the Wise Wife Conference, September 12th to 13th, 2026 in Atlanta. You'll work with me personally as we break through the barriers blocking your peace, wage war for your legacy, and discover what it truly means to be clothed with strength and dignity regardless of your current circumstances.
You can find out more at wisewife.co, and I am really looking forward to meeting you
She actually needed to heal herself first.
You are not a victim. You may be victimized right now, but you still get to choose whether you play the part of victim or not.
Because here's who you become on the other side of that healing, a warrior who makes demons tremble.
He heals the most critical wound first.
That's not neglect. That's divine triage.
Because this [00:01:00] fight was never really about your marriage.
Welcome back to the Wise Wife podcast, where we equip women to stand firm in their faith, fight for their marriages God's way, and grow in wisdom as wives. I'm your host, Natasha Drisdelle. Okay. Women come to me to heal their marriages. And after all these years of doing this work, here's what I found almost every single time.
She actually needed to heal herself first. I know. I know. That is the last thing you wanna hear when you're looking at so much brokenness in your husband right now, but hear me. We are not here to dictate a timeline for anyone else's healing We are here to get honest about where our own priorities for healing are.
Because I know what it's like to be so locked in on his wrongs that I couldn't see the real threats against my own heart and my own life. And now that I can see just how close I came to walking [00:02:00] away from God completely, all because of my hurt and my offenses, I really don't want anyone else to ever fall for that trap.
Okay, straight talk. You are not a victim. You may be victimized right now, and I've got plenty of episodes on submission and boundaries which should help you navigate that, but you still get to choose whether you play the part of victim or not. So today, we're getting real about these three things. First, why God seems to be taking forever to answer your prayers, what healing actually looks like, and why I pray God restores you before He restores your marriage.
All right, let me give you a picture of the Natasha that existed before my life imploded in 2008 and before I got right with Jesus. And what I want... I want you to catch this because when I say got right with Jesus, understand that for most of the 20 years before the moment I'm about [00:03:00] to describe happened, I was a worship leader, a small group leader, a born-again Christian.
And this is why I'm always coming back to this question here on this podcast, where is the fruit? I was doing a lot of Christian-looking things, but I really didn't have a lot of fruit. And, you know, sure, I had worldly kind of fruit, a marriage, a great career, children, family all around me, but the real fruit, the, the love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, yeah, those were on empty.
I did not have a lot of those. So okay, by this point, we'd been married almost 10 years, and most of that was a battle. I... Not like an aggressive battle, you know, but battle nonetheless. Like, I'd cry out desperately for change, just so desperate for change, and he would shut down, stonewall me, or just straight up leave.
I felt alone and rejected, and [00:04:00] he felt attacked. Marriage was just a constant disappointment for both of us. And so, of course, I did what a title-driven, career-driven woman does. I went looking for the validation that I couldn't find at home at work. And w- that might not be yours, but we all have one area where we go looking for validation, and mine was work.
And that fed the darkest parts of both of us because my self-righteousness and pride- And my self-efficiency poked at his fear of rejection, and then his fear of rejection poked at my pride, and around and around, merry-go-round of demons that left us feeling just angry, forgotten. And of course, I wasn't angry at my own blindness.
I wish. But I was angry with God. I was rejecting His ways, right? I'm, I'm sitting there living in a way that was not in line with Him, and then upset that He's not just coming in and bailing me out. See, the, the saddest part is that it was true that my h- my marriage was broken. My husband was a hot mess.
We were in dire need of help. I was in dire need of help, but I was dead wrong [00:05:00] in my assumptions of how all that needed to change because I didn't think I needed to look at my own issues when my husband's were so obviously hurting us, right? And then it all came crashing down. My husband snapped. he left.
I was left to be face to face with my pride and arrogance. And you know, here's the truth: I don't take credit for fighting for my marriage all those years, and I don't cr- take credit for the restoration that we have today. It was literally the grace of God that finally let me see the real destruction in our lives, this corruption in my heart, and the trauma-inflicted wounds that were stealing my husband's God-given purpose and destiny, the demonic influence we had literally put a welcome mat out for practically, um, just inviting it into our home.
So I could have walked into, you know, that quote unquote, "justified divorce," married someone else, felt completely right about it, and in fact, I had pastors and pastors' wives telling me what a great option that was. And if I had [00:06:00] taken their advice, I would have missed all of it, the healing in me, the healing in my marriage, and the wholeness that my family really gets to live in now.
So if you're sitting there asking, "Why is God taking so long?" I see you because I was you. Years and years and years of begging God to change things, and honestly, it grew offense in me, and I don't want that for you. And I was truly offended by God. If you can relate to being frustrated that God hasn't handed you what you've been begging for, then you might be a little offended, too, okay?
And isn't that the root of frustration, that we think we deserve something that we aren't getting? And this is why our walk toward biblical wifehood is so much bigger than a happy marriage. It's about healing your identity in Christ and your picture of who God is, His character. It's about stepping into your place as matriarch over your family and your bloodline.
But that kind of [00:07:00] authority, it really requires something first. You have to be made whole yourself. You cannot give what you don't have. And you wanna be a safe place for your husband, somewhere he can finally be honest about his own fears and failures, and that type of marriage- Only comes when God first heals you.
'Cause you have to be able to handle that. And this is really critical. Maybe you relate to my story and your husband doesn't feel safe around you because you demand too much. Yeah, yeah, you get me, right? But I know there are probably another half of you who don't relate to that at all. You're the total opposite.
You demand nothing. Well, guess what? Your husband may feel safe with you, but that's not the kind of safety I'm talking about. That... Just being coddled and having permission to do and say whatever he wants without any consequence, that's not actual safety. And that kind of [00:08:00] safety doesn't lead to him confronting his own fears and failures.
It just leads to more bullying. So regardless of what end of the spectrum you skew to, my point remains, if you want to be a safe place for your husband so that he can finally be honest about his own fears and failures, that type of marriage comes when God first heals you Because here's who you become on the other side of that healing, a warrior who makes demons tremble.
Not one who's driven by her soul wounds, her childhood hurts, or the vows she made in trauma, her triggered reactions. No, no, no, no, no. A whole woman can petition heaven for a breakthrough in her husband, her kids, her family, her church, her city, or even her nation. So let's talk about that healing. Okay? Last week, we talked about soul wounds, how my Fruit to the Root workbook is a free resource to help you heal from [00:09:00] soul wounds.
Get that at wisewife.co/root. But to quickly define soul wounds for anyone who isn't familiar, soul wounds are the unhealed emotional pain from our past that continues to influence how we think, feel, and behave as adults. They can form when someone experiences trauma or deep hurt but doesn't receive comfort, healing, or maybe even truth in that exact moment.
So instead of being healed, the wound becomes a spiritual entry point where the enemy can attach a lot of lies and demonic oppression, and demons exploit those wounds, right? They whisper accusations, shame, and fear into that person's mind because they've been given access through, through the trauma, and that leads to cycles of continued brokenness and continued demonic access.
Okay? That's why healing soul wounds is so important. And today I'm going to show you how soul wounds behave exactly like flesh wounds. [00:10:00] Ignore them and they get infected. They fester. They spread. Soul wounds left unhealed will fester and spread to your marriage, your family, your faith, all of it. But God didn't leave you to figure it out alone or blindly walk through the healing process, okay?
He has given us the framework. So for me, I teach this as the spiritual wound care. It's a biblical picture of what real healing looks like, okay? Not Band-Aids, not spiritual bypassing, not surface level relief. We're talking lasting healing from the Great Physician Himself. Okay, so when medical doctors treat a flesh wound, they follow a protocol.
Some refer to it as the seven steps to wound management. It's often taught as a, just like a practical clinical workflow that they go through, and it turns out that those same seven steps map almost perfectly onto healing a soul wound or a spiritual wound. Okay, let's break it down. Step one in healing a wound, wash your hands clean.
A [00:11:00] doctor doesn't go from an infected patient straight to operating on the next one, right? He scrubs in. Treat a wound with dirty hands, and you drive bacteria into a place that's already broken and vulnerable. Spiritually, every healing starts with repentance. Wash your hands. Try to move forward without coming clean before the Lord, without naming the sin, without turning from it, and you drag filth into the wound, right?
Skip this and you delay your own healing. You actually hand the enemy access and sabotage your own healing. This is why we are called to have a contrite heart. So just like in real wound care, where they must wash their hands first, we must wash our hearts first, step one. Step two, when dealing with a flesh wound, stop the bleeding.
Right, if you're gushing blood, you don't reach for a Band-Aid. You apply pressure to stop the bleeding. It is the same in the spirit. When you surrender to the Great Physician, He applies pressure. We [00:12:00] want the bleeding to stop right away, but first there needs to be pressure that stops the bleeding. It's, it's not to punish you, but to protect you from simply continuing on in old patterns.
So sometimes that pressure is just having to confront the reality of what you were too afraid to confront before. And sometimes that looks like circumstances getting darker and hidden things coming to the surface, and pain rising up and having to be addressed. But his pressure is never cruel. It's necessary.
The world hands you Band-Aids, divorce, co-parenting, moving on. But a Band-Aid on a soul wound just leaves you bleeding under the surface until you bleed through. So every time my husband took another step away from restoration, um, maybe moving out or dating other women, renouncing his faith even, the pressure felt unbearable at times.
But God was doing surgical work in me while letting my husband have his [00:13:00] own sanctification journey. And I had to keep myself and therefore my marriage on the operating table to let Him finish. Let God finish. I had to let God press down and stop the bleeding. Even while someone else, my husband, seemed to be bleeding out beside me, I had to let God do the work in me Step three, clean the wound.
So this is the scrubbing. It stings. Nobody likes it. A- an unclean wound stays infected. So this is where we see soul wounds start to be healed. Spiritual wounds can be healed, where you may have to cut away toxic attachments, generational strongholds, old habits rotting you from the inside. Sometimes this is deliverance, identifying and casting out what came in through pain, through sin, generational curses, iniquity, that sort of thing.
Sometimes it's severing an unhealthy tie, even with family, so you can heal enough so that one day you can be in healthy relationship with them [00:14:00] again, right? So this is cleaning it out. Because the beliefs and habits that brought your marriage here are never quarantined to your marriage. They're, they're leaking into all the relationships in your life.
So when God says, "Cut it off, even for a season," we obey. When he's like, "Clean that thing out," you clean it out, as painful as it is. And for those of you with men in active addiction, I think this is es- this especially pertains to you. There just isn't room for active addiction in restoration, and I'll die on that hill.
Relap- relapses are one thing. They can happen. But when someone is okay with living in active addiction, especially when they refuse to call it what it is, your restoration is the least important thing to be concerned about right now. And the longer you stay in agreement with addiction and make excuses for it, the longer the misery will drag out, okay?
Name your fears. Do what you need to do. Get safe, please, because it's not safe to be with someone in active addiction. All right. So that was my side note there for that. [00:15:00] No matter, though, what state my marriage was in, and yours, there is a battle raging for it, and we need to be shrewd as a serpent, gentle as a dove, making sure that we're not letting toxic, toxic attachments come between me and my husband.
And in some cases, that means removing myself from the toxic attachment with my husband, right? Those are healthy boundaries. Not demands, okay? Those are very different, very toxic in their own right, and I share more about that in episode 28, Should I Let him Move Back In?, difference between boundaries and demands.
All right. We've cleaned the wound. What do we do now? Step four, apply the ointment. So once the wound is clean, you keep it clean. Spiritually, you're filling that space with the Word. And when we know the Word, we can make confident declarations about who we are in Christ and continually keep that wound from reinfection.
Because God's truth is like a healing balm, especially over the places you were wounded or deceived 'cause that's where you're vulnerable. So you get in the Bible, not [00:16:00] once a week, not only when you're desperate. Daily. As, as often as you can. Like I said, I always carry mine in my purse. Speak scripture over your mind, your heart, your marriage, the exact area God is healing.
See, the enemy cannot reinfect what has been saturated in that ointment, the truth. And then we go to step five, protect the wound. So just like with a real flesh wound, healing takes time, and a healing wound is vulnerable. And in the same way, our spiritual wounds can take time. Yeah, deliverance can be instant, and that's amazing, and I encourage everyone to seek that.
But you still must walk out the healing. You discipline your flesh while the healing is brought to completion. And, and this is why it's so important that we heed the warning in 2 Corinthians 10:5 which says, "We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ."
So we're demolishing the arguments that we have for ourself, okay? And we're taking those thoughts [00:17:00] captive and making them obedient to Christ, meaning we're guarding our minds from those old lies 'cause those old lies are not obedience to Christ. So we don't go back to the pigpen that we once lived in.
We don't let seven of the demon friends come back to roost, so we're then worst off, worse off than we were before. Because the enemy will try to reinfect that wound, especially right before you're fully healed. He's always coming in hot right before the breakthrough. All right, step six, change the dressing.
So if you've ever had a surgical wound, and I have, changing the dressing is gross. And I'm sorry in advance for those who get squeamish, but with flesh wounds, your body has leaked all kinds of fluid as it attempts to restore balance as it heals. And soul healing is the same. Sometimes it feels like everything gets worse before it gets better.
And s- some of that is sometimes setback in our own flesh, some of it's just growth and opportunity to grow, and some of it's just straight up spiritual warfare. But either [00:18:00] way, it's your spirit pushing out the poison while your soul fights back to balance. None of us are perfect, and sanctification was never about perfection.
We will not be perfect this side of heaven. But as you learn to submit your life to the Lord as Lord, yeah, you'll stumble along the way. We all do. Fear can pull you back into old lies or old habits, and new circumstances might have you reopen that old wound. But when you do, this is where the enemy whispers con- condemnation, right?
He wants you to believe that you're better off just living with that old wound. Like, forget trying to heal it. It's not that bad. It, it'll go away on its own. Those are all lies. What we really need to do in that moment is go back to the doctor and change the dressing. So hear me. Needing to change the dressing is not failure It's part of healing sometimes.
We get back up. We go back to step one, wash our hands and repent, submit to the pressure again, refuse to quit, clean the wound, and refi- and, and [00:19:00] rethink what to do differently. Apply the ointment, get back into the Word, and protect what God is doing by remembering who you are in Him and what He's already done in you, and you just keep going, crawling if you have to, 'cause it's worth it all.
God only knows there were times when I had to crawl. So once we have this wound triaged, bandaged, healing well, lastly, we're going to want step seven: observe the symptoms. In medicine, healing one wound often uncovers a deeper one underneath. So once they deal with the most pressing issue, the physicians are going to start looking for any other signs of injury.
Soul healing works exactly the same. You get free from lying, and then next thing you know, you've got a spirit of pride under that. You break the fear of man and end up surfacing a root of rejection, so you gotta deal with that. Good. Don't panic, and don't start dumping on yourself because that exposure, while it may not feel great, is often a sign [00:20:00] that God is going deeper.
Every wound that gets exposed is an invitation to more wholeness. That's sanctification. So you don't beat yourself up. You don't agree with the enemy's bait that you're a screw-up, you're a disaster. Just stop trying. You praise God for the chance to clean out one more wound, and you go right back to step one with it.
You don't let the devil convince you that you're beyond repair, that this proves you're too broken. No. No. You step into the invitation to heal even more. Flip that script, and you thank Him for not giving up on you, for trusting you with the next phase of healing. Now, here's something I need you to understand.
God heals in order of importance. Okay, picture someone wheeled into the ER after a bad accident with multiple injuries. The team doesn't set the broken leg while the lady's bleeding internally, right? They [00:21:00] triage. They stabilize what's about to kill her first. The ruptured spleen takes priority. They might ice the leg to slow the swelling, but they're not touching that bone until the internal bleeding is handled.
That's exactly how the Lord works in our soul healing and our life's healing, right? We're desperate for Him to fix this thing over here, our marriage, but God sees the deeper rupture inside you that would be fatal if He left it, if He left it for later. So He starts there. He heals the most critical wound first.
That's not neglect. That's divine triage. He knows what has to be healed in you first so you can even survive the rest of the healing. And while we're at it, let's remember that healed wounds, they leave scars. These things, they're here with us, okay? These injuries, even when we heal. You know, people often commend us for being so open and honest about our past and our story.
Tim [00:22:00] and I both really have a hard time accepting it because when Jesus heals your wounds, the scars may remind you it happened, but it truly feels like it happened to someone else. For example, we'll celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary this month. And one thing we like to do every anniversary is write down where we are for that anniversary, and then every anniversary we'll, like, go and review and reminisce about all the different years.
So whether it was our 15th at a Michelin Star restaurant in Paris or homemade pizza in our kitchen on our 12th anniversary, uh, it's, it's great. We just look at them all. But we can't ignore the fact that 2009 is a blank line. Tim was living a prodigal life, and I was probably at home praying some of the very things you're praying, that God would heal us.
And while He did all that and more, that scar, and many others, remain as a reminder of the injury that we endured. And not to shame us, but to remind us. In fact, [00:23:00] once we restored fully in 2012, we decided that we would no longer celebrate our wedding anniversary alone. We would invite the boys, and now our daughter, too.
And each year we would tell them a little more about our story, age-appropriate, of course, in hopes that they would grow up with a better sense of not only our story and celebrating with us every year, but really understanding more about what marriage actually requires. And so while the scars don't hurt us anymore, they prove we went through something and that God brought us out.
It's why Jesus still had His scars after being risen from the dead. Victory didn't erase the evidence of the battle. So even now, over 15 years since our restoration, we're still observing the symptoms. We're still working on not letting anything go undetected, but instead refusing to compensate for hidden wounds, and just going back to step one whenever we find a new one.
And they're always gonna come at you. So [00:24:00] wherever you are, whether you're just waking up to the infection or you're halfway through, don't quit. Let the Great Physician finish what He started. Stay on the table. Trust the process. And walk out your healing one step at a time. Because this fight was never really about your marriage.
Yes, your marriage is the pressure God is using to get your attention. But marriage is not eternal. It is not the prize. Your soul is eternal, and so are the souls of everyone your marriage touches. That is what this battle is actually about. That's why there's so much opposition to your marriage and so many attempts to keep you idolizing it.
Because the enemy knows that when your eyes are fixed on the real battle and the real stakes, you'll surrender everything to Jesus, including your marriage. You'll lay it all down for His glory. And a woman fully surrendered to Jesus, whew, not only does she leave [00:25:00] the ER faster, but she stops re-injuring herself.
A woman like that is telling the enemy of her soul that while she may need the occasional hospital visit, so help her God, she is ready for her healing Let's pray
Thanks for joining me for this episode of The Wisewife Podcast. If it encouraged you, share it with a wife who needs hope today. And if you wanna go deeper, please join us inside the Wisewife mentorship community, where we walk this out together. Until next time, stand firm, wise wife ​[00:26:00]
