Rise and Shine: A Day with Kathie Lee Gifford

Rebuilding Trust

Did the Giffords write back? "I'm not going to say. I'll just say that you find yourself a member of a club nobody wants to join. But if you can use your own painful, horrible experience to be a blessing to someone else going through it, why not?"

More than a decade after her own crisis she still fields questions from women wondering whether they should continue their marriages after a serious breach. "I can't tell you the amount of letters I get from people saying, 'I saw what you went through and I thought if Kathie could stay for her kids' sake, for her husband's sake, I can do it, too.' There's no pill you can take for infidelity to make it go away. You have to decide whether the relationship is worth saving or it isn't."

She is not for staying when there is a continued pattern of bad behavior or abuse. But she points to a certain pragmatism required in modern marriage, telling Today viewers that "if you stay in a relationship long enough, you're going to be disappointed." And with any sort of letdown, she adds, you'd do well to remember what you pledged on that blissful first day: "You have to forgive. You promised to when you got married. Let's go back to those vows. We promised thick, thin, we promised through problems. Problems can make you better if you stick around long enough."

I ask her how she was able to make her own peace when the man she was so sure of hurt her so deeply -- and on tape. "It doesn't seem possible that you can come through it at the time," she says. "But the truth is, if you love something more than you love yourself, you will get through it. I'm talking about the children. If it's all about you, you're guaranteed not to get through it."

Still, she says she needed a sharp-eyed guide on the bumpy road to forgiveness. "When Frank and I went through it all, my dear friend the counselor said, 'If you can't forgive your husband, forgive your children's father.' It changed everything. Because my children's father is the finest man I know. He's easy to forgive, rather than the one who hurt me personally. The minute I got my eyes off me, that's when the real healing started." She's not suggesting that everything changed instantly when she shifted focus. "It's so hard. Trust takes one second to lose and a lifetime to rebuild."

I am curious about another sort of forgiveness -- the kind extended to or denied the Other Woman. Given today's fractured and blended families, millions of husbands and wives must find some uneasy peace with an Other. Gifford's transgressor virtually disappeared after the publicity, but surely she remained a spectral third party. "You want a miracle in your life?" Gifford asks. "Do this: Pray for somebody you can't stand. Pray for somebody that's just done such evil. It's impossible to hate somebody you've just prayed for. It works! When you choose love, hate runs like the cockroach it is."