When the Money Runs Out: A Pastor’s Story of Financial Resentment, Infidelity, and Rebuilding From Rock Bottom

Editor’s note: Since this episode was recorded, Sherley Altidor has taken the name Sherley Troutman. She is referred to by the name she used at the time of the interview throughout this post.

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To hear our conversation in real time, listen to the full episode below. Make sure you tune into the show. You’ll get all the raw, unfiltered moments and deeper insights.

Podcast Episode: Sherese: Business Coach

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Money problems don’t just strain a marriage — they can quietly rewrite it. On a recent episode of the Interviews series on Sherley’s Show, host Sherley Altidor sat down with pastor, business coach, and entrepreneur Sherese Shy-Holmes for a conversation that started as a business story and turned into something far more personal: how financial resentment, silence, and unmet needs opened the door to an affair that ended her marriage — and how she found her way back to herself afterward.

Sherese didn’t come on the show to be praised. She came to tell the truth about a season of her life she once thought would define her forever. What emerged instead was a conversation about the difference between safety and love, the quiet weight women carry when they become the default providers, and the slow, deliberate work of rebuilding a life after everything familiar has been stripped away.

It’s the kind of story that resists easy labels. Sherese isn’t asking for sympathy, and she isn’t offering herself up as a cautionary tale, either. What she offers instead is something rarer: an unflinching account of how she got it wrong, what that cost her, and the internal work that eventually turned things around — the same work she now helps other women do in their own lives and businesses.

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A Marriage Built on Safety, Not Love

Sherese grew up watching her grandmother run a thriving salon while raising a family, and that image of a resourceful, providing woman shaped her own relationship with money and independence early on. She always knew she was meant for entrepreneurship. But when it came time to choose a college major, fear won out over calling.

“I don’t know if I’m gonna make it,” she remembers thinking. So she chose accounting instead — safe, steady, and about as close to entrepreneurship as she could get without actually taking the leap herself. She calls it her “shadow career.”

That same instinct toward safety shaped her choice of husband. As she put it plainly on the show, she chose him because he was steady and dependable — not necessarily because the connection ran deep. He came from a well-established family, and for a while, that stability was enough.

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A Life Built Around Service — and Someone Else’s Support

Before the recession ever entered the picture, Sherese’s early adult years followed a pattern she didn’t fully examine until much later: someone else was always covering the bills while she poured herself into unpaid work. She rose through her father’s church from deacon to minister, and was ordained as a pastor alongside her husband around the time they married. At the same time, she served as the church’s volunteer financial officer — a title serious enough to sound like a paycheck, though it never came with one.

She spent roughly 25 hours a week tutoring the congregation’s children, showing up for them at school, and counseling families through hard moments, all unpaid. Grateful church members would slip her a few hundred dollars here, a birthday gift of several thousand there. It was enough that she never felt broke, even without a steady income of her own. But looking back, she can trace a clear line: from her father supporting her, to her husband supporting her, with side hustles filling in the gaps along the way. Financial independence wasn’t something she had built for herself yet — and that gap would matter more than she realized once the marriage hit turbulence.

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When the Recession Hit, So Did the Resentment

Three years into the marriage, the recession changed everything. Sherese’s husband’s family business took a hard financial hit, and his income was cut roughly in half. Rather than adjusting together, the couple began drifting into separate corners — he retreated, and she went into overdrive.

“I was like, ‘Okay, I’ll get a second job. We can make it work,'” she said. But the more she picked up the slack, the more resentment built. She described coming home late after a long shift to find him in front of the television, and the anger that welled up in those moments — anger she didn’t fully understand herself until much later.

The physical toll was real, too. Sherese gained weight, started getting sick more often, and both partners fell into what she called “a very dark space.” They tried counseling, but by her own account, the connection had already started to unravel.

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The Affair, the Confession, and the Guilt That Followed

Sherese was direct about what happened next: she had an affair. She told Sherley she had raised the idea of divorce before things went further, but her husband asked for another chance, and she — wanting to be, in her words, “a good Christian girl, a good daughter, a good wife” — agreed to try counseling instead of walking away.

The relationship didn’t end quietly. Sherese admitted that when she feels unheard for long enough, she stops trying to hide her unhappiness — a pattern she recognized only in hindsight. Her husband eventually noticed a recurring phone number on their shared bill and confronted her directly. She didn’t deny it.

What followed was a familiar cycle for many people navigating the aftermath of infidelity: guilt, a knee-jerk apology, and one more attempt to repair what was already broken. “There is this need to fix, repair, and reconcile the damage that you can physically see on someone that you loved and cared about,” she said. But the second attempt at counseling confirmed what she already knew inside — the marriage was over.

This time, Sherese made a decision that many people in similar situations find difficult: before pursuing the divorce, she cut off contact with the other person entirely. She wanted to make her next steps from a clear, sober mind rather than carrying a second relationship into the process. It wasn’t about being caught again — it was about no longer recognizing the person she had become.

“You’ve become a woman you’ve never thought you would ever be,” she remembers telling herself. “Even if you don’t wanna be here anymore, this is not you.”

She was the one who eventually packed up and moved out, though she didn’t personally deliver the divorce papers. By the time she walked out the door for good, the marriage — which had lasted about six years from start to finish, with the affair surfacing roughly three years in — was already over in every way that mattered.

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Telling Her Parents — and Falling From the Pedestal

Sherese is the daughter of pastors, the oldest grandchild, and someone her family had quietly positioned as close to perfect. Her father had spent years grooming her for leadership within the church, and she and her then-husband were ordained together shortly after their wedding.

When the affair came to light, her ex-husband told her father before she had the chance to. “It was a whole opening of unworthiness,” she said of that period — the sudden collapse of an identity she had spent years building in her family’s eyes. She was close enough to her father that there was no real hiding from him, even if she had wanted to.

It’s a moment many people who’ve experienced infidelity — on either side of it — will recognize: the fear of being truly known by the people whose opinion matters most, and discovering that love and disappointment can exist in the same room at the same time.

Sherese was quick to note that her openness with her father isn’t the norm for every family, and it shouldn’t be treated as one. Not everyone has a parent who can hold hard truths without judgment, and she was candid that her own relationship with her mother didn’t offer that same safety — a reminder that boundaries around what we share with family, and when, are a personal decision rather than a universal rule.

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Starting Over: An IRS Job, a Massage Envy Shift, and a Mustang

After the divorce, Sherese made a deliberate choice to separate herself financially from both families, knowing the fallout would be difficult for everyone. She landed a job with the IRS — one of only six hired out of more than a thousand applicants — but the pay cut forced her to take a second job in sales and commission at Massage Envy, all while living in California on roughly $37,000 a year and splitting a house with four other women.

It was a steep fall from the life she’d known, and she felt every inch of it. She traded a home she had personally decorated from the ground up for a shared bedroom situation with strangers, and a car she once drove for a modest, five-year-old vehicle — a small, deliberate first purchase that marked the start of rebuilding on her own terms. Losing her second job, which had been with her ex-husband’s family company, only added to the pressure to start over from scratch, away from both families and the fallout she knew was coming.

Then came the moment she now describes as a turning point. Standing in the laundry room of her shared house, she heard a crash outside. Two cars had collided on a street lined with parked vehicles on both sides — and somehow, hers was the only one hit.

“I’m cursed. I deserve this, for all the stuff that I’ve done.”

That’s what she remembers telling her roommate through tears. Her roommate’s response reframed everything: maybe it wasn’t a curse. Maybe Sherese kept attracting chaos because, on some level, she believed she deserved it. That single reframe — the idea that her inner world was shaping her outer circumstances — became the foundation for everything she teaches today.

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Three Lessons on Building a Life That Actually Feels Like Success

Out of that season, Sherese developed a three-part framework she now shares with her coaching clients. None of it was theoretical — it came from rebuilding her own life, dollar by dollar and belief by belief.

1. Success Is Internal, Not External

The first shift was recognizing that success can’t be outsourced. It doesn’t come from a partner’s income, a title, or someone else’s approval. “You have to bet on you,” she said. “It doesn’t start that way. Success starts with you. It’s an internal job.”

2. Redefine What Success Actually Means to You

Sherese had spent years measuring herself against her father’s definition of success — a definition she had never actually chosen for herself. Untangling her own goals from inherited ones became essential. She now walks clients through a simple monthly exercise she calls the GGR: what do you want to give, what do you want to gain, and what are your baseline responsibilities? Adding those three numbers together creates a personal monthly income goal — one rooted in an individual’s actual life, not someone else’s benchmark.

3. Commit Fully — and Balance the Masculine and Feminine

The final piece, Sherese explained, is full commitment paired with balance. She described the feminine power center as the side of us that receives, visualizes, and attracts, and the masculine power center as the side that builds strategy and executes. Leaning too far into either one creates problems — waiting passively for things to happen, or grinding without direction. Real momentum, she said, comes from combining both: envisioning what you want while also building the concrete plan to get there.

Sherley related to this immediately, noting her own tendency to lean feminine and sit in the waiting space rather than executing — a reminder that this isn’t a framework reserved for people who’ve hit rock bottom. It’s one most listeners will recognize in themselves.

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Where Sherese Is Today

Years after that Mustang was totaled on a quiet street, Sherese is preparing to leave her nine-to-five for good. She’s been consistently earning five figures a month in her coaching business for six months running and is using the transition period to pay down student debt before stepping fully into entrepreneurship.

She closed the conversation with a paraphrase of a favorite Carl Jung idea: until we make the unconscious conscious, it will direct our lives and we’ll call it fate. For Sherese, naming her patterns — the resentment, the self-blame, the belief that she was “cursed” — was what finally let her rewrite them.

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Key Takeaway

Financial strain in a relationship rarely stays confined to the bank account — left unspoken, it can quietly erode trust, connection, and self-worth long before anyone notices. Sherese Shy-Holmes’s story is a reminder that rebuilding after a season of guilt or loss doesn’t start with fixing external circumstances. It starts with getting honest about the internal beliefs driving them, a process that often benefits from the steady support of a counselor, therapist, or trusted guide alongside the personal work.

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Continue the Conversation

Sherese’s full story — including the parts we couldn’t fit into this post — is available now in the Interviews series on Sherley’s Show. Listen to the complete episode here.

For more real conversations on trust, forgiveness, and rebuilding after infidelity, explore these related reads and episodes on Sherley’s Show:

• Dr. Debi Silber: Healing From Betrayal (Interviews)
• How to Make a Relationship Work Even After a Heartbreak
• Episode 1: How to Survive in a Relationship (Conversations with Kira)

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More About Sherese Shy-Holmes

Sherese Shy-Holmes is the founder of Influential Businesswomen and defines herself as a “Business Doula” who helps ambitious, spiritually minded women monetize their purpose and break their financial glass ceilings. You can find her at the links below:

• thebizdoula.com
• Facebook: @thebizdoula
• Instagram: @thebizdoula

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