Editor's Note: Do you need sound, Biblically-based advice on an issue in your marriage or family?  Dr. David Hawkins, director of the Marriage Recovery Center, will address questions from Crosswalk readers in his weekly column. Submit your question to TheRelationshipDoctor@gmail.com.

"I'm never going to get beyond this pain," Sandy said, clutching the tissues to her face. "How could he do this to me? No one should ever do this to another human being."

Sandy's husband, Mike watched blankly as his wife tried to process the events of the past six weeks. She had just discovered he had been having an affair for the past several months. It didn't matter that that she learned about it because he had ended it and the "other woman" called her.

Jim was struggling too. His wife had left him and their two children over a yea ago, after seventeen years of marriage, "to find herself".

"We were in the middle of building our dream home," he reminisced. "I thought we were heading in one direction, toward a fantastic future, and she was obviously thinking something else. I feel like a fool. I think we're a happy couple, living the American Dream, and her dreams take her in an entirely different direction. I didn't see it coming."

Jim came for counseling to help him move through the brooding resentment he carried with him every hour of every day. He couldn't focus on his work, felt despondent, and struggled to release the anger and resentment he felt toward his wife for leaving him.

"I have to say I hate her," Jim recounted. "It's not like I want to kill her, but that she would just go somewhere and die. Maybe from a disease or something. I probably shouldn't be thinking this way, but I do."

Jake is another man I counsel, stuck in bitterness. Jake fights a battle of forgiving himself. While his wife left him, and his employer fired him, he accepts that. Caught up in meth addiction for years, he lost his wife, his home as well as his children. He now lives in a halfway house where he is trying to piece back together a life.

Propping his arms on his knees, he stared at the ground. Jake shouted, "I can't believe the wreck I made of my life. How could I let myself fall so far? How could I know what I was doing, watch myself self-destruct, and yet keep doing it? How is that even possible?"

Sandy, Jim and Jake all have work to do to move forward with their life. Each have a battle they must win—and can win. Their battle, intensely personal, will be the focus of their life for months to come. They will decide, in their own way, whether this battle makes them stronger, weaker or even more bitter. Each must wrestle with a problem common to all of us—understanding the power of forgiveness.