104. Don't Heal - The Inverse Approach After Infidelity

In today’s episode, 'Don't Heal - The Inverse Approach After Infidelity,' I'm flipping the traditional approach to healing on its head. Instead of the typical steps to "heal" after betrayal, we're diving into something radical: the Inverse Approach.

What if instead of chasing closure, security, and control, we did the opposite? What if we didn’t aim to heal in the conventional sense, but instead, embraced the uncertainty, pain, and unpredictability that come with betrayal?

This episode is all about rethinking what it means to move forward after infidelity and finding empowerment in ways you may not have considered. If traditional methods of healing have left you feeling stuck, this episode offers a new perspective.

Key Takeaways:

Letting Go of the Need for Closure:

• Why the search for answers might be keeping you stuck, and how letting go could lead to freedom.

Embracing Uncertainty:

• How accepting the unknown can build emotional resilience and help you regain control in your life.

Non-Attachment in Healing:

• Why focusing on yourself rather than controlling outcomes can foster growth and peace.

Finding Strength in Vulnerability:

• The paradox of vulnerability: how being emotionally open can make you more resilient in future relationships.

Gratitude in Betrayal:

• A controversial idea, shifting from resentment to gratitude, and how it can transform your recovery journey.

💬 Reflection Question:

What would it feel like to let go of your need for closure and embrace the uncertainty of the future?

Connect with Luke:

• Website: www.lifecoachluke.com

• Instagram: @mylifecoachluke

• Email: luke@lifecoachluke.com

Join the After the Affair community at www.facebook.com/groups/aftertheaffaircommunity

Episode Transcript:

The After The Affair podcast with me Luke Shillings is here to help you process, decide and move forward on purpose following infidelity. Together we'll explore what's required to rebuild trust not only in yourself but also with others. Whether you stay or leave I can help and no matter what your story there will be something here for you.

Let's go! Hello everybody and welcome back to the After The Affair podcast. I'm your host Luke Shillings and you are listening to episode number 104. This as hopefully you will have come to know is the podcast where we tackle some of the messy emotional and deeply personal journeys of those who are healing after infidelity.

Today I want to flip things upside down a little bit. Instead of focussing on the traditional methods of recovery we're going to explore something that I'm going to call the inverse approach. It's all about taking a step back from conventional wisdom and asking what if we did the opposite? What if we didn't seek closure or control or even healing in the way that we've been taught? So if you've ever felt stuck in your recovery or frustrated at the typical advice I acknowledge there are 103 episodes prior to this listing at least some of the typical advice then maybe this episode is for you.

So let's get straight into it. However before we dive into maybe how this inverse approach works when it comes to healing after betrayal let's take a step back and talk about the concept of inversion itself. Now inversion isn't a new idea.

It's actually a very powerful mindset tool that we can apply to so many areas of our lives. Think about it a little bit like this. Instead of asking what do I need to do to succeed we ask what should I avoid to ensure that I don't fail? It's about flipping the script asking the opposite question and seeing things from a completely different angle.

Take everyday examples. Let's say you're trying to improve your health. Instead of focussing on all the things that you should do like eating more vegetables exercising more you instead flip it.

You ask well what are the habits that I need to stop doing to feel healthier? Maybe you could stop snacking late at night or sitting for hours without movement. Maybe I could not allow myself to go on to social media before I go to bed keeping me up way later than I intend to and then frozen my brain negatively affecting my sleep and give me less energy to do the exercise that maybe I was going to do or would like to have done the next day. So by looking at what we can remove rather than what we can add it kind of paints this clearer path to improvement.

It moves things out of the way and let's just think about that for a minute. Now last time I checked it takes less energy to not do something than it does to do something. One of the reasons that we struggle to take on new habits is because we're trying to do something that we currently don't do or didn't used to do and that requires more effort.

It requires more motivation and obviously it requires more actual energy consumption whereas not doing something takes less energy. It requires less motivation. It is by definition easier to not do something than it is to do something.

What if we think about relationships outside of betrayal? You know instead of always trying to figure out what we can do to make someone happy you could ask what should I avoid doing that might damage the relationship? It's a subtle flip but it kind of changes everything. So inverting the way that we approach a problem could bring clarity and results that we simply just miss when we're stuck in the traditional linear thinking. And when it comes to healing after betrayal the same ideas apply.

What if the solutions to moving forward aren't found in doing more of the same but instead doing the opposite of what we think we should do? And that's really what I'm exploring today. How flipping that conventional advice can sometimes lead to the breakthrough that you've been waiting for. So let's start with one of the biggest things that people crave after betrayal.

Closure. We hear it all the time. You just want to know why it happened.

It's like if you could just figure out the reason you'd finally be able to move on. But here's the thing. What if closure just never comes? What if the answer doesn't actually make you feel better even if you receive it? The inverse approach to closure is letting go of that need completely and instead of looking for reasons what if we accepted that we might never fully understand it? It might seem like a hard pill to swallow but think about how much energy we spend chasing that why.

What if we used that energy to empower ourselves to focus on moving forward by embracing the uncertainty we stopped trying to solve the past and we can actually start living again. I like to think of closure or maybe traditionally we think of closure as the closing of a book or maybe the closing of a chapter within a book. But this is on the assumption that we finish every book.

So let me ask you have you ever started a book that you haven't finished? Well why didn't you finish it? Did you not seek closure in that case? Did you not need to know what the outcome was? Okay you might be saying yeah but Luke come on a book a book not knowing how a book ends is not quite the same as overcoming betrayal and the hurt and deceit and the emotional impact that betrayal has. Well maybe that's true maybe it's not true. Let's just think about it a minute.

If we think about what it is that we are struggling with. We are struggling mostly with the story that we're telling ourselves about the betrayal. We are struggling with what we're making the actions of our partners mean about us.

We are judging ourselves. We are criticising ourselves. We are questioning whether we are good enough or whether we are enough.

But these all of these things are stories. They are optional. It's a narrative that we have created and we feel has been reinforced by somebody else's behaviour.

But it's only our perception of their behaviour. Now of course this doesn't make what they did okay. It will not justify betrayal.

Hopefully you know me well enough by that by now that I would never recommend infidelity. It would never be a choice. But when we consider the stories that we tell ourselves it's much like that book.

And we don't always have to complete the book to close it and just put it back on the shelf. Now let's talk about certainty. After being betrayed it's completely natural to want reassurance that it won't happen again.

That next time you'll be safe. The thing is relationships are unpredictable. Life is unpredictable.

We actually just can't control everything. In fact there's actually very little that we can control. So instead of chasing certainty what if we embraced the unpredictability? I know it sounds scary but think about how much resilience you'd build by accepting that relationships come with risk.

Instead of focussing on guarantees you learn to trust yourself. You trust that whatever happens you can handle it. So let me give you some examples from my own life.

There have been a few times where I think this has been really prominent for me. As some of you may know I used to own a pub restaurant and bed-and-breakfast and unfortunately it came to the point where I realised that the business was not going to be sustainable any further. And before I had somebody take the situation away from me I decided that I was going to declare myself bankrupt and wind down the business under my own terms.

Now when I made that decision I had no job to go to after this period. I had nowhere to live after this period. I would have had no vehicle because that was a company vehicle at the time.

There were some fairly significant levels of uncertainty that existed in my life in that moment. Yet I chose to embrace that discomfort and actively just go through that process and know that I had that confidence in myself that I would figure it out. And dealing with that uncertainty was terrifying.

I can't pretend otherwise. But the confidence it gave me once I'd been through that situation and I did find a job and I was able to sort out my living arrangements. Now I was able to find transport and get away and I was able to put food in my mouth.

And like all of these things they came because I was open to receiving those things at that time. And I wasn't allowing myself to be buried in fear of the uncertainty even though I was also consciously afraid of it. I'm not gonna pretend it just wasn't there.

It was there. The next time was when I was in hospital. This was a few years ago.

I had major abdominal surgery, an operation that went a little bit wrong and I ended up being in hospital a lot longer than I'd originally thought I was going to be. And it was at this point, this was at the beginning actually, or just before the beginning of my journey into going full-time with my business, I decided in that moment whilst I was in hospital that I was going to hand my notice in once I went back to work as soon as I was fit enough and well enough to go back to work. Then I was going to work my notice and then I was going to run my coaching business full-time.

That would be my primary source of income. And at that point my coaching business was not established at all and I was definitely in a situation where I was risking myself financially in that moment. I was taking a gamble on something that I could not guarantee that would work.

But I had faith in myself and the ability to deal with that uncertainty and know that if I focused on what could be and then just started taking steps one after another in front of each other during that process then it would lead somewhere. Even if I wasn't exactly sure what that was I was free to let go of that certainty. And then actually the third example I'm going to offer is this podcast.

You know when I first sat here and started recording the first episodes and what I thought I was going to do and I sat and pressed record and then pressed stop and then deleted and then record and then stop and then deleted and must have done that who knows how many times before I felt comfortable to basically press publish on that first first episode that you know, archive of what the first episode is called now. I really should know it. What is there? Anybody? This is the only problem.

Sometimes I'm sat talking to myself and nobody can answer the questions. Oh consider this. That's it.

Episode one is consider this. Sorry it's just come back to me. When producing that first episode of those first episodes I did not know what the outcome was going to be for this podcast.

I had no idea what impact it would have, how many people it would help and also like what a key element of my business it's ended up being. In every sense it's kind of the central piece both in terms of its ability to be a resource as a space for me to share and explore and to connect with you all on a way in a way that I just wouldn't be able to on such a scale without it. At least not to my knowledge.

So that level of uncertainty about what the podcast would become and how it would grow and how it would evolve well I had to let go of that uncertainty. I had no choice because if I was seeking certainty I'd have wanted to control every single element and we can't control it. So I let it go.

Okay next one. So this one is a bit tricky. Non-attachment.

Now I'm not talking about detaching emotionally and becoming cold. Non-attachment is more about letting go of the outcome. So sort of continuing on from what I was just talking about with the podcast.

It's about focussing on your own growth and well-being without needing to control what happens next. Think of it like this. Whether you stay in a relationship or leave.

Whether your partner changes or doesn't. It's not the outcome that defines your healing. It's not the outcome that defines your level of fulfilment or your level of happiness.

You define your healing. You define your fulfilment and you define your happiness by the way that you choose to live your life. And non-attachment is about finding peace within yourself, from yourself, not from the external circumstances.

Now I want to consider vulnerability. Maybe we could flip the script on that. Most of us, particularly after betrayal, build these walls to protect ourselves from getting hurt again.

And I get it. We're wired to protect ourselves. It is literally how we are physically or physiologically made up.

We have the autonomic nervous system which reacts to things and dangers in the world. The amygdala is sat there like the little smoke detector seeking danger in the world. And if it feels that something is not safe then it is going to put you into some kind of fight, flight or freeze response.

At least if it's a more traumatic response. Something that is learnt is not safe and therefore its role is to protect you. Vulnerability generally tends to get a pretty bad rap, particularly for men.

It's almost defined as a sign of weakness. If you're being vulnerable you are exposing yourself, you're risking yourself to danger and that is not wise and not safe. You can't protect yourself if you are not guarding yourself from potential harm.

But what if vulnerability was actually a source of strength? Being open to love again, being willing to risk getting hurt, is where resilience really comes from. Think about it. The more we close ourselves off the more fragile we become.

If we close ourselves off we're isolating ourselves. We're also a bit more tense. We become fragile, we become rigid, we become delicate and... what's the word I want to say? Fragile is not the word I'm looking for.

I'm looking for brittle. Brittle is the word I'm thinking of. And although brittle can be strong, you know, if we think of ceramics and pottery and things like that, these can be, they can withstand a lot of heat, they are very rigid, they're pretty tough, they can go in the dishwasher, they can go in microwaves and all these things.

But if you drop them on the floor they shatter into a thousand pieces and they're very hard to put back together and they don't retain the strength. And when you glue them back together they rarely are as strong as they were first time. And you find that that coffee cup that you loved, even though you've glued the handle back onto it three times now, is probably never going to be as strong as it was originally.

So being closed off to vulnerability and being more tense as a consequence, which can increase your brittleness in your terms of your personality and your ability to handle difficult situations, actually makes you more vulnerable to harm when the situation occurs or a situation occurs. So being open to being more vulnerable, flipping that script and accepting it, that's when we can start to be more flexible, more supple and be able to take the impacts that the world throws at us from time to time. After an affair it's easy to focus on what we've lost.

We want that affection, security and trust back. But what if we flip that? What if we focused on what we could give? Love, forgiveness, kindness, even without expecting anything in return. I know that that in itself can seem very counterintuitive, but there's real power in giving from a place of abundance, rather than need.

It empowers you, it shifts the dynamics in your relationships and it can actually accelerate your own healing. And even if, as you stand here listening to this thinking that, no well I'm not, I'm not willing right now Luke, I'm not willing to give and I'm not willing to love and forgive and offer kindness to certain people in my life, based on the situations that I find myself in. Well maybe you could start by truly giving some of that love and that forgiveness and that kindness to yourself.

Start there and then see how that can then radiate out and expand. Detaching from the idea of needing to heal. Think about it, how often do we obsess over this concept of healing? You've heard me say it, I mean I'm sure if we were to do a word count on all of the things, all of the words that I've said over the course of the last hundred or so episodes, healing would be pretty high up on there.

You know we treat it like this destination, this end goal that we need to reach to be okay again. But what if instead of focussing on healing, we focused on just being, on living fully right now, even with the pain. We accept the full human experience.

It's not about fixing yourself but about accepting the scars that are now part of your story. Healing becomes less about fixing the past and more about being present in your life today as it is with all of its imperfections. This is a shocking concept or idea given everything that I'm trying to help you with.

I'm trying to help you heal but I'm also telling you to not focus on that journey of healing and in doing so you will find that you will heal. You will actually move through that journey by focussing on the opposite. Just consider it, give it some time, allow it to settle in, come back and listen to this part of the podcast again if it helps.

Now here's the big one. After betrayal we tend to focus on the relationship and relationships, whether we remain in our current relationship or if we can move into a new relationship. How do we fix it? Because clearly if the relationship is broken down then we must have been doing something wrong.

That's at least what we're telling ourselves. So how can we rebuild trust? But what if the focus wasn't on the relationship at all? What if we put that energy into fixing ourselves first? Now you've heard me talk about the concept of relationships, about what I think a relationship is. I believe a relationship is one person's thoughts about another person.

The relationship from your perspective can only exist in your perspective. It can only exist in your thoughts and feelings. Nobody else experiences what you experience in a relationship.

Only you experience that. And whether that's the relationship with your partner, your spouse, whether it's with your children, your parents, your work colleagues, maybe it's the relationship that you have with your health or money or your job. It really doesn't matter what you insert into the category of relationship.

Ultimately it is you that experiences all of those things. So rather than shifting our focus on to the relationships, whatever they are, the external things, we focus primarily on ourselves. Because when we do focus on our own recovery, even though this might sound contradictory to the healing point I made a moment ago, whether or not the relationship survives, you're taking control of the only thing that you really can, and that's yourself.

And ironically when you focus on your own growth, your relationships actually become healthier as a result. Now to wrap this up I want to finish with something that I think we should all be grateful of, and that is the ability to experience gratitude itself. And we're going to use gratitude.

I've started with the inverse so gratitude is the inverse. But what is it the inverse of? Well in this case it's the inverse of resentment. So stay with me, I know it sounds wild, but what if we could find gratitude in the experience of betrayal? Not for the pain itself, but for the lessons it taught us.

For how it made us stronger, more resilient, more in tune with who we really are. Resentment keeps us stuck, but gratitude, strangely enough, can set us completely free. It's about really rewriting that story from one of victimhood to one of empowerment.

I think this kind of helps us maybe close that chapter in our own book, bringing us back to the closure that we potentially seek in our situation. Consider this inverse approach. Consider how you can take something that feels so painful to look at, and we become blinded by the thing.

We could become blinded by the obstacle, whatever that may be in the moment. Whether it's how to rebuild trust, whether it's the uncertainty of the future, whether it's what if it happens again. And instead we focus on the things that we actually have a bit more control over.

Over our experience, about how we treat ourselves, how we taught ourselves, and really focussing on us above these external things. I really hope that this has given you a fresh perspective. I know it isn't the typical way to think about recovery, but maybe that's exactly why it works.

If we let go of the need for closure, we embrace uncertainty, we focus on ourselves rather than the relationships, and then we can even find gratitude in our pain. Maybe that's where the real healing happens. So I'll leave it with you.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on these ideas. Do they resonate with you? Are you willing to try out one of these inverse strategies in your own journey? Reach out, let me know, and remember healing isn't the destination, it's a process. And it's a process that I love to watch.

I love to watch this process within my clients. I love to see those moments of aha, and it has all of a sudden just shone a light on this perspective, this view of their situation that they just haven't seen before, and completely frees them. It allows them to step into themselves, to allow them not just to rediscover who they were, but to kind of find out who they want to be, and how they want to identify after betrayal.

Does that sound like something that you want? Well if so, let's talk. You can visit my website at lifecoachluke.com and book a discovery call today, and we can explore what that might look like for you. I'd love the opportunity to show you how one of my coaching programmes can really provide that structure that you need to move forward in your journey.

This is way more just about being cheated on. It is way more than finding yourself in a position where you have been unfaithful to your spouse. This is about deciding who you want to be moving forward with.

Someone who's not only been through the same situation, but also helped many other people in situations just like yours. So if you have found yourself on this journey, and you've been trying to figure it out on your own, and we apply this inverse rule, then what might that look like? If working through this on your own is getting you so far, but you keep getting stuck, and you can't get beyond that next obstacle, then what might that inverse look like to you? I'm not going to spell it out, but you know where to go, you know what to do. LifeCoachLuke.com, or contact me directly at Luke at LifeCoachLuke.com. As always, such a pleasure.

I look forward to speaking to you all again next week. Take care.