Phillip and Carrie Herbert
Phillip: Good morning, everyone! We appreciate the opportunity to share a little bit of our journey together with you all this morning. My name is Phillip, and this is my beautiful wife, Carrie.
Carrie: Hi everybody! I grew up in middle Georgia in a stable, Christian home. My parents were high school sweethearts and have been married for 49 years. We went to church every Sunday, and faith was a very natural part of my life from a very early age. I began following Christ when I was around 8 years old. My adolescence and teenage years were spent being heavily involved in youth group at my church. I moved to Atlanta for college to attend Emory University. While it was a huge transition from the sheltered life that I had led thus far, I quickly found a church with a college ministry that I could get involved with and found a small group of solid Christian friends.
Phillip: I grew up in western Georgia and attended church regularly, though I only occasionally saw faith modeled at home. My parents divorced when I was 6, and I saw divorce and remarriage several times before I was in high school. My dad was mentally and emotionally absent during my childhood, though physically I saw him every other weekend. My former step-dad verbally and emotionally abused me, which left me feeling worthless and hopeless. I tried everything the world offered to make me feel better about myself (accomplishments, relationships, friends, sports, etc). Because of my low self-worth, I tried “self-medicating” through alcohol, partying, and pornography to try to feel better, but these only left me feeling more shame.
My third year in college, everything changed. Through a series of events, God opened my heart to hear and understand the gospel. I knew I was a sinner (low self-worth made me naturally feel this), but I was amazed that Jesus would come to this world and die on a cross in my place, taking the punishment I deserved for my sin. Ephesians 2:8-9 says,
“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”
Then He rose from the dead, showing He overcame sin and death. If I placed my trust in Him, his sacrifice and resurrection would apply to me. I placed my trust in Him, and for the first time, I felt value and hope.
I began going to church on my own and got plugged into a college ministry, where I would eventually become a leader. One night when we were training other students to serve in the college ministry, and I met a girl named Carrie.
Carrie: Phillip and I began dating right after I turned 21. We got engaged on my 23rd birthday and married the summer after my first year of medical school. My presumption based upon everything the church had taught me growing up was that Christian marriage was idyllic bliss. My rose-colored glasses were plastered to my face, and I had completely unrealistic and unfair expectations of marriage. I was absolutely crushed by unmet expectations and felt judged by Phillip. My response was to shut down.
Phillip: Early in our marriage, I knew that I didn’t want to divorce like so many in my family. I wanted to be the spiritual leader that God had called me to be. I just didn’t know how, so I tried to figure it out on my own. I ended up harming Carrie spiritually. I had thought my battles with low self-worth and self-medicating were done when I became a follower of Christ and got married, but they continued. Because I was concerned about what other people thought of me, I didn’t want to talk about any of our personal or marriage issues outside of our home, so we isolated ourselves. Proverbs 18:1 says, “Whoever isolates himself seeks his own desire; he breaks out against all sound judgment.” We relocated to Dallas so that I could go to seminary and Carrie could continue her training.
Our time in Dallas was busy. Carrie was working crazy hours, and I was in seminary full time, working part time, and serving in church. I would finish seminary and begin a training program as a hospital chaplain. This training forced me to process parts of my past, especially my father wounds from my Dad’s absence and my former step-father’s abuse, to see how powerfully they were still affecting me. This was a pivotal time when I also became a father myself (to a boy). As I continued processing my past and struggles, I had the opportunity at Watermark Dallas to go through Regeneration, which is a 12-Step Christ-centered recovery program. I was able to see the source of my struggles of people-pleasing, control, anger, lust, and low self-worth through a biblical lens. I was also able to be fully known by other guys for really the first time and identify a struggle with pride that undergirded everything else in my life.
Carrie: I spent a total of 7 years of training after medical school to become a pediatric interventional cardiologist, which I felt was God’s calling on my life. When I finally landed a job in Florida at a well-respected hospital, I truly felt that we were entering the Promised Land. Phillip got a job as a hospital chaplain at the same hospital, I got pregnant with our second son about 5 months after starting my job. Great job, great family, and we were living at the beach!
It took only a few months for my dream to become an absolute nightmare. The head of cardiac surgery left unexpectedly which brought to light significant deficiencies in the surgical program. Patients were dying, and I was spending day and night trying to salvage situations in the cath lab – many of which we just couldn’t save. We brought our concerns up the appropriate channels, but were met with hostility, open disparagement, and threats. I was battling trauma from what I was seeing and being forced to participate in at work on top of post-partum depression and anxiety – all of which led me to pretty serious suicidal ideations. I saw no way out. I didn’t know how to process everything I was going through, and I felt like I was a constant burden on Phillip because I wasn’t happy or fun to be around. My trauma response was to completely shut down. I resented Phillip because I didn’t feel supported. He had transitioned from working as a hospital chaplain to being on staff with our church, and I was super envious that he was working full-time at our church while I was living every day in hell on earth. I was angry at God for the injustice I was seeing. After being faithful to what God had called me to for so long, things had ended up like this. I was a walking shell of a human being.
Phillip: I was having a difficult time as well, though differently than Carrie. She was pulling back from us, I felt the distance between us grow. I began pulling back as well, and in a lot of ways we functioned as roommates. I was trying to grasp onto control, which wasn’t working. I wasn’t restraining my anger, and I was negatively interpreting Carrie’s viewpoint. I was even falling back into the pattern of self-medicating with alcohol and occasionally pornography. I knew something had to change. Carrie was recruited to come back to Dallas where she trained, so we relocated back to Dallas, even with me not having a job. Shortly after coming back to Dallas and plugging back into Watermark Dallas, we started going through Re:Engage, which is a ministry designed to bring couples together, learn about God’s design for marriage, and apply biblical principles for healthy relationships.
Carrie: Phillip’s willingness to leave Florida was the start of my healing. God brought a more seasoned, godly woman into my life through a national mentoring program and was an answer to a very specific, desperate prayer. My faith began recovering. By the time we started re:engage, I felt ready to get our marriage back on track.
Re:engage got Phillip and me talking at gut-level for really the first time in our marriage. I realized that I had upheld a view of marriage that wasn’t realistic, and I was holding Phillip to a bar that only Jesus could meet. I became less afraid of conflict and more willing to hear Phillip’s side of things. Rather than seeing Christian marriage as two people who needed to look perfect (because that’s how we are supposed to look), I finally started to understand that a Christian marriage is comprised of two sinful, broken people who love Jesus and are lovingly committed to each other – and there was freedom in that level of authenticity within our marriage.
Phillip: God showed his faithfulness to us so much during our months in Re:Engage. I saw that my insecurities around my self-worth made me quick to anger and want to control situations. Instead of coming alongside Carrie, I would try to “fix” her, which would invalidate her. I also saw how I was prone toward negatively interpreting her viewpoint. I was able to confess my self-medicating through alcohol and pornography, and I was able to see how my struggles fed her insecurities and kept us from experiencing the level of oneness God desired us to have. We were able to communicate our struggles and truly hear each other. James 5:16 says,
“Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed.”
This was the first time I can think of in our marriage when I wasn’t holding anything back from Carrie. We experienced a greater sense of oneness than we ever had. Having this with Carrie made me not want to pursue the counterfeit version that pornography offers, which has lost its appeal.
During this same time, my Dad moved in with us for a few months. He had struggled with alcoholism that almost killed him, and he needed a place to recover, so we opened our home to him. We continued seeing God work as he healed much of the wound my father had caused in my heart by his absence when I was younger. It was redemptive to see him pursue relationships with my wife and boys.
Carrie: Re:Engage got our marriage back on track, but I clearly had hurts and hang-ups that I needed to work through. After processing through the major trauma with a licensed professional, I entered Re:generation to dig in and process some of my underlying issues that include but are not limited to people pleasing, low self-worth, and lack of trusting God. It was through Re:gen that I began to understand that forgiveness is between me and God and isn’t dependent on others’ actions or responses. For the first time in my life, I truly began to see my identity as who I am in Christ and find my security in that rather than in the performance-based identity that had defined my entire life.
Don’t get me wrong, even after going through ReGeneration and ReEngage, we still struggle sometimes. God is still working on us, both individually and as a couple. And the issues we’ve overcome didn’t happen overnight; they took time, diligence, and God working on our hearts. We are thankful for the tools God’s given us. Thank you for letting us share our story.
