121. Healing in the Aftermath: A Couple’s Journey Through Infidelity

In this heartfelt episode, we sit down with “Alan” and “Ann” (pseudonyms to protect their privacy) as they candidly share their ongoing journey of healing after infidelity in their 39-year marriage. Their story highlights the complexity of betrayal, the challenges of rebuilding trust, and the resilience required to hold space for one another amidst profound pain.

This conversation is a powerful reminder that healing is rarely linear, but with vulnerability, honesty, and effort, it is possible to rebuild and redefine a relationship.

Key Takeaways:

• The emotional fallout of infidelity and the layers of deception.

• How low self-esteem and secrecy played a role in Alan’s choices.

• Ann’s navigation of conflicting emotions, anger, empathy, sadness, and hope.

• The pivotal moments that led them to communicate more openly and authentically.

• The role of boundaries, patience, and grace in their path forward.

💬 Reflection Question:

What role does communication play in your healing journey, and how can you create space for both honesty and grace?

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:

It's not a bad marriage. We just had an issue and now we're going to work through that. So we still have a good marriage.

It's just re reevaluating what it means, I guess. And so I have to allow him to fail on his own. I can be there to support him, but I have to allow him to feel those feelings and then talk about those feelings or talk about those things, because I know in the big picture that that is some of the things that he has said was he didn't have any value in the home because I did it all and I thought I was helping, but I wasn't, I was just taking all of his value out of here.

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, and welcome back to the After The Affair podcast.

I'm your host, Luke Shillings, and today you're listening to episode number 121. The voice you've just heard is that of one of today's guests. It's a couple who have been navigating one of the hardest challenges a relationship can face.

For their privacy, we'll be calling them Alan and Anne, but their story is very real. And it's one that many of you will relate to. Alan and Anne have been married for nearly four decades, but their relationship has faced significant trials over the past 10 years or so, including two affairs, broken trust, and the painful journey of uncovering deception.

The first affair, which occurred a decade ago, was emotional in nature. Connection rekindled with an old friend. Over the course of several months, thousands of messages were exchanged, filled with flirtation and sexual undertones, though it never became physical.

The second affair was more recent, and it took a heavier toll. It began with flirtatious texting during business trips and escalated quickly into a physical relationship. Over the span of almost a year, tens of thousands of messages were exchanged, culminating in a discovery that shattered their marriage.

Deleted texts, denials, and ultimately the admission of physical intimacy brought everything into sharp focus, forcing Alan and Anne to confront the truth head on. Beyond the infidelity, there were additional layers of deception. Alan had been secretly smoking for nearly a decade, despite it being a significant boundary in their relationship due to family history.

This revelation, coupled with daily substance use to cope with mounting stress, added another layer of betrayal. Now, Alan is in active recovery, attending therapy and working through depression and anxiety. Anne, meanwhile, is processing a range of emotions, grief, anger, sadness, and a tentative hope for the man she knows Alan can be.

Together, they're living under the same roof, working to rebuild trust and untangle decades of shared history and recent pain. Today, we're not here to relive every detail of their story, but to dive into the realities of their healing journey. Alan and Anne will share what it's been like to rebuild after betrayal, the complexities of regaining trust, and how they're navigating the ups and downs of the day-to-day of working towards something new.

It's a raw, honest conversation, and I'm incredibly grateful to both of them for being here to show their courage and willingness to share this with all of us. So without further ado, let's jump into the conversation. Okay, Alan and Anne, thank you for being here.

Thank you for being willing to share your story. I know for many people, this will be very, very helpful. It's so easy, as we were talking about before, to talk about these things retrospectively.

I do this on the podcast all the time. I'm talking about my situation of many years ago, and sitting in it, how I feel about the situation now, reflecting back on those times is very different to being in those times in the moment. I think that most of the people I would imagine that listen to this podcast are in the middle, or at least in that recovery stage, trying to get from this shock that has landed in their lap unexpectedly, and trying to get to what the future looks like for them, having no real idea what that looks like.

So, first of all, I really appreciate you both just even being here. I'd like to actually start with you, Alan. I know from some of the correspondence that we had before that throughout this experience and prior to, you've struggled with self-esteem and a sense of low self-worth.

I just want to know from your perspective, how did those feelings influence your actions? Do you think so, both during the affairs and since? Well, I think we're a little bit older. We didn't just get married. We've been married for 39 years coming up next week.

And through that time, my self-esteem has always been a bit of an issue. But as I've gotten older, it's gotten a little bit deeper. And I think that leading up to the affair part, I was looking for attention, I guess, or validation that I was alive and somebody.

And Anne was going through things with a loss of her mother. And I kind of, maybe it sounds childish, but I wasn't getting the attention that I was used to, that I was always getting. And then I found somebody who gave me that attention and it helped build my self-esteem.

It made me feel like I was somebody, I was important. And it just led to the next steps. So did that have any kind of follow-up impact in your primary relationship with Anne? As you started to gain some sense of self-worth and self-esteem from this additional person, did that have any sort of knock-on effects? It was all a big secret, the affair part of it.

I kept it very separate. I had my life at home with my wife and I was very depressed. I had stress at work.

And I think some of the tension of me having to keep the secret, I kind of blamed on tension of work, you know, oh, I'm miserable at work and this and that. And I would come home from work. I'd play guitar and I'd just drink a bourbon every night.

And it did have a negative effect on my relationship with Anne because I wasn't really as involved with her because I was involved with this other person. And she was giving me the satisfaction of, you know, small chat and talk, you know, through texts. And with Anne, I just kind of came home and just went through the motions, you know, of being a husband and her being a wife.

So did you feel that because you were sort of feeling slightly more, I don't know, is alive the right word, you know, in terms of increasing that sense of self-worth outside of the primary relationship with your wife? Did you see that as being the reason and therefore the relationship at home with your wife as being almost like the anti-reason for it? Did you see it that way or not? Or was it completely separate and that was all there was to it? No, Luke, it kind of seemed like that because I felt alive with the other person and, you know, it was exciting. I couldn't wait to text with her because we didn't really talk much, but I couldn't wait to text her the next day. We would text all day.

And then when I got home, we'd stop texting. And then it was almost like I'd switch over to the bad side of life in my mind, of course. In reality, it wasn't as I discovered as time was going on.

But yeah, it definitely that I was happy. I was I was content with her. I was excited.

And then I'd come home to. To stew in my, I don't know, in my reality, I guess, yeah, my false reality that I thought was worse than it really was. It makes me wonder about the internal dialogue that that was potentially going on in the time in terms of sort of actively hiding your actions and how you justified that to yourself during that time.

Yeah, between Ann and I, there was very little interaction conversation wise. I would probably be shorter than normal where I would, you know, maybe we'd argue a little more and I'm sure was directly attributed to how I was feeling and what I was hiding. And I thought, though, we had our moments so that there were good times where, you know, we'd we'd have a couple of drinks or, you know, we'd sit out on our deck and talk about the neighbours or whatever the case.

And we got along fine. And I kind of took that as, well, things are good. Things are good with my wife.

And then, but I think for the most part, it was kind of, I don't know, just kind of going through the flow of just looking at rhythm, going through the motions. Yeah. And how did how did confronting the consequences of your actions change your perception of yourself? Oh, boy.

In the role of your marriage. Right. Um, yeah, when it all came out, the biggest relief was the fact that I could stop holding the secret and the tension that I had in my inner self of holding this secret was released.

And as bad as it was, it felt good to be able to release that. Anne and I have been talking almost every day. When it first began.

Two in the morning, I'd get woken up and she'd have questions and we would be talking for a couple hours and then I'd fall back asleep and have to go to work. And it was exhausting. But her and I were piecing together what happened, what could have happened, why it got to this point.

And my self-esteem issue, I actually went to a like an inpatient therapy, breakdown therapy type thing. And I went to that for six weeks. So I took a leave of absence from work and learned to work on my self-esteem and some of the coping mechanisms, you know, that you have to go through.

And one of the biggest ahas I had was, oh, I could think a different way. It was like in my mind, I was thinking down, bad self-esteem, I'm worthless and all that. And I was like, oh, I could counteract that thought in my own mind.

And from then on, I started looking at things different. And of course, Anne's been helping with that all along the way, helping with my self-esteem and being reassuring on my journey of getting better. And I still feel, you know, some of my self-esteem is low.

You take hits at work, you don't feel appreciated maybe for something going on at work. And maybe even a conversation that Anne and I have that, you know, it might be a hit that she doesn't mean to, but it's kind of like, hey, the difference is though today, her and I are speaking more about when it does hurt us feeling wise, where before I'd keep it in, she'd keep it in and then we just, until we exploded. Which is not uncommon in many relationships, you know, regardless of whether infidelity is present or not.

To try and sort of bury at least surface level emotions is very easy to do. You do that over enough period of time and you don't really notice the escalation of the things that you're hiding. It might start out just being a very subtle, slight disgruntled, slight agitation.

And then, you know, you do that and you hide it and you get on with your day, you treat it as normal. And then as the weeks, months, years, decades even go by, then you don't notice the escalation. And all of a sudden, actually, you've not just buried a few bits, you've buried like, you know, like a whole graveyard's worth of, you know, of anger and resentment and difficult, tense emotion that you're kind of like holding together.

It's like a physical tense that appears in your body. You almost don't even notice it. And then, of course, there are these times where a conversation goes a particular way and everything kind of comes out.

And at that point, you haven't had the experience or the opportunity to really learn how to handle those emotions and therefore to deal with the conflict, which can leave people in very challenging waters, let's say. I was going to say it just becomes part of you, part of your life, part of your relationship as time goes on, like you said, you know, days, weeks, and even decades. And it was kind of like my self-esteem.

I've always had low self-esteem, but it really got lower the last 10 to 15 years. You know, we've been kind of looking back on the hits that I took that kind of bring that down. I never really noticed that it was bringing me into a depression.

But as time went on, it's there. And I would have loved to have noticed it earlier. So none of this would have happened, but I didn't.

When we see anything in the world that is extreme or appears extreme from our perspective, maybe it's taboo, like it's infidelity, for example, but there's many other things like it, it becomes very black and white. It's like it's right or wrong. It's this box or that box.

It's one side or the other. It's very clear. But that's when we're faced with just the actual event itself.

You know, you discover that your partner has cheated on you, or you discover that your friends have been disloyal in some way, or you discover a job loss or anything when it's sudden and quick. It's just a very binary experience and you have an emotional response to that binary experience. However, for most things in life, it is this gradual changes over a longer period of time.

And of course, we both individually, we all go on these different journeys. So we often see this in an affair situation where the person who is involved in the affair, their journey, first of all, it started long before their betrayed spouse discovers. So it's already evolved and it's evolved very gradually over a longer period of time.

But then when the betrayed spouse discovers, it's like, bang, impact. And therefore, hugely, you know, it's like they've got all the catching up to do very quickly. And I think when people from the outside look in and they look at somebody who's a couple where infidelity has occurred, it's very easy to make a straightforward like blanket judgement about a situation without considering any of the nuances and any of the intricacies and any of the other things at play in terms of the dynamics of the relationship.

You know, challenges that you faced as a couple over the years, your own individual mental health and experience, and just so many other factors at play. Again, we're not justifying anything. We're just trying to draw attention to the fact that nothing is black and white.

And I think if people could just allow a little space, particularly if they feel triggered, particularly if they feel that like emotional response to something. That's the time, that's the calling. If you feel like a real intense drive, like you want to shut that thing down, stop it, hide it away, get rid of it, react to it.

Then that's the time when you just pause and you just allow yourself a little space and just to consider what else might be at play here before you allow your emotions to play out. Bit of a side track, but I just think it's important to draw attention to. So what has been the most, I suppose, the most difficult aspect so far in terms of trying to rebuild trust, you know, or helping Anne rebuild trust in you and how you sort of handle that kind of the guilt and the shame that you carry from that? I think one of the hardest things is the patience that I have, because as Anne and I have discussed, I've known about this whole event for longer than she has.

I've had time to digest it in my brain and realise how wrong it is and all that. But she's still coming to terms with that. And it's just difficult that I need to have patience that she needs to catch up.

She needs to digest it. She needs to compartmentalise it and figure out what her thoughts are. And she's got questions that I don't necessarily have answers for, which is frustrating for her, which switches to the patience that Anne has to show.

But my patience is key because I have to understand that she's not there yet, and I have to wait for her to get there. And I think that kind of also falls into the strength that I have to have and, I don't know, be patient and help her with what she's going through. I'm the one who caused it, and I need to help her to get out of it.

I've been stuck many times with, I don't know what to say. I don't know what that magical phrase is that'll make her all of a sudden go, oh, okay, everything's all right. Because there is no magical phrase.

It's time. It's patience. It'll get there.

It's definitely a roller coaster. We have great days, and then we have poor days. And I hate the bad days, as Anne does too.

And it seems, though, that the bad days get a little less and less, or maybe even two hours of a day, as opposed to the whole day. And I think that's a response of time, the calendar moving on. We can't just sit and do nothing and wait for six months and a year and go, okay, everything should be great.

You still got to work on it. And as painful as it is for me to revisit some of these things, because I feel horrible how I devastated her life and mine, our relationship. But when she asks a question about it, it takes me back to that time.

And it's very uncomfortable, and I don't like thinking about it. But you kind of have to, because it helps Anne. It's a very common position to be in.

And it's something that I think many betrayed spouses find very hard to grasp. Because it's like, well, you made these choices. You made your bed.

You can lay in it. You can suffer the consequences. You're just going to have to suck it up and deal with it.

That's the internal narrative that goes on. And it feels very, very justified. You know, I think it's reasonably natural for people to want to think that way.

But of course, it's also not that straightforward. Like you say, even though these were your choices, of course, and it's led this particular path, they have been going, in your mind, for a lot longer than they have in Anne's. A lot longer.

There's a lot of catching up that she has to do. And, you know, you talk about the patience that you need to have for yourself, but also allowing, and this is just equally as important for Anne to have patience with herself as well, that there is no definitive time scale. There's no definitive, you should be here by this point, and you should be here by this point, and you should be here.

It just doesn't work like that. Everybody's different. And it's not linear.

You know, there'll be bursts of acceleration, and then there might be a few steps back. And then it'll plod along for a little bit. And then a couple little, you know, it's just a journey.

And that's part of it. I think the fact that you are both sat here, of course, just even on that journey, like willingly participating in a journey that I think neither of you really wanted to be on, you know, regardless of how it came to be, it's not something that either of you want to be going through, and just holding that space for each other, regardless of the circumstances that led to it. Okay, so just coming on to you, Anne, you know, when we've corresponded before, you've described feeling a mix of anger, empathy, sorrow, and disbelief, sadness.

And, you know, I'm just wondering how you've been navigating, you know, such conflicting emotions on a day-to-day basis, and how that's changed, actually, since you discovered. Um, I would say, what has helped me the most is just recently, I've gotten another job at night. So part-time job, so I'm busy, my mind is busy, because I'm a very, like, I think about everything, I problem solve every little aspect.

And I cannot, the affair is something I cannot understand. It's a puzzle I cannot. So if he can't answer it for me, I'm spending the time trying to figure it out, which drives me crazy.

So busying my mind has helped me. Staying busy, learning a new thing at work. This is all, I feel very good for me.

And it makes me feel better, myself feel better. And it is, it's a, it is a roller coaster, because there are days that I feel really good. And then all of a sudden, a thought will come into my mind about, well, wait, how did this happen? Because I know that we discussed this, and I, and I will go back to in my mind, and then come to him about, I remember saying this to you during this time.

And now that we think about it, we know that was a lie to me. How does that make you feel now that, you know, how did it make you feel at the time? And I know that many of those times that he doesn't have an answer, that that makes me even more angry. And then all of a sudden, I am angry all over again, like from the beginning angry.

And it's, it has, as time has gone by, it has gotten easier. I think being busy has been one of the things, but that's the kind of the part that makes me sad, because emotionally, because I feel like time will, will make it less impactful. And to me, it should never not be impactful.

It should always be impactful, because it's so raw of an emotion, and it's so hurtful. So I feel like that's almost like pushing it down and saying, like softening it, it's okay. And I'm like, no, it's not okay.

So I have, I have more good days, I guess, than bad, but I would say the hardest part for me, or the best part is keeping busy with my mind, doing something else and allowing him time to unravel what has happened, and how we got to this place, how he got to this place, because it is not something that just happened. You know, like I said, our entire lives, I've known about, you know, he's had low self-esteem, and I've always felt that we handled it well. As time has passed now, I find that it wasn't enough that I was okay with all the failings that he felt that he had, and I supported him.

It didn't matter what I felt. It was, he didn't feel good about that, no matter what happened. And then what we didn't realise until now was that he began to lie about little things, but they were big things, but not like an affair, it was lying about smoking, which was a huge thing for us.

And that lie just carried on for decades. And when that, like, it was almost as if in his head, I've lied and kept this secret. So it's okay that I have another secret.

And that made him feel so bad because he knew how I felt about that, that he just pushed it down. And I guess that, you know, he isn't good at expressing that, which is what we're trying to work on now is expressing when you feel a way, don't internalise it. We have to talk about that every single time.

There's two elements to the emotion. There's the emotion that we feel, that deep sense of sadness, the physical experience, you heard me talk about this in the podcast and the sense of feeling the emotion versus our attempt to try and solve the problem that's causing the feeling. This is where we sometimes get stuck.

And I think, you know, offering yourself lots of space to feel is, well, it's just, it's essential. It's a part of healing. It's allowing that part of you have its internal say and helping you feel more comfortable with it and become less fearful of it.

And, you know, and teaching yourself that you can actually handle that feeling because you are handling it every time. You might be telling yourself that, you know, and it's terrifying and you don't want to face it again. But actually, every time you feel that emotion, you're getting through it.

You're coming out and you're having another good day, the day after or a couple of days after. And you are handling that emotion. And it is versus trying to every time you feel that emotion, trying to solve the problem by trying to make this jigsaw puzzle that's got missing pieces or actually maybe even pieces.

It's funny, literally just the other day I saw a meme or something on Facebook or Instagram, I forget which. And it was somebody had shown a picture of three puzzles that had all been put together as one puzzle where so clearly the manufacturer was using the same die to cut the puzzles for all different pictures. And it showed that you could actually mix these puzzles together.

And it's a bit like that. It's like you've got these different pictures that don't line up, yet somehow seem to be part of the same puzzle. But it's like, oh, I got missing pieces to these and nothing quite fit.

And of course, our brain is just constantly trying to solve. And that can be even more exhausting if nothing else, just trying to make those things fit. So it's how do we feel without trying to solve the problem? Because the reality is that it's unlikely that we ever get all of the pieces to the jigsaw.

Like, yeah, there's going to be a certain amount, of course, but to get all the pieces is impossible. We can't even recall our own memories, unless we're very gifted or fortunate to have eidetic memories. It's unlikely that we can even complete our own jigsaws, let alone that of other people's.

And so that can sometimes be just acknowledging that and knowing that actually just living with that emotional experience is the best work you can do for yourself in the moment. I want to think about how this has affected your sense of identity as a wife and as an individual. How would you reflect on that? I would say that the hardest part for me on that is because we've been together for so long.

I mean, we were married at 20. Well, I was 20. And I always thought I knew, you know, everything about our life.

And then, sorry. It's okay. I think this has just, I think, made me reevaluate what I thought I knew, but not only reevaluate, but I think from listening to some of the things that you've said is that taking maybe what I thought was, not that it wasn't important, but I put too much importance on something like our marriage or what I thought a good marriage was.

And maybe that's part of it, is that does this make us have a bad marriage? And I don't want it to be like that, but I think that that's the point. Like, it's not a bad marriage. We just had an issue and now we're going to work through that.

So we still have a good marriage. It's just reevaluating what it means, I guess. Yeah.

I was speaking to somebody the other day with regards to a perspective on this kind of thing, you know, and, you know, I often think about my own life in the context of it being a bit like a book. And when you're in the moment, whatever that moment is, you're engrossed in that page. Every word has like a real depth to it, a sense of meaning.

And it's magnified in some way. And then, of course, as you then move through the pages and then ultimately through the chapters, those specific words have less impact because they're now further back in the book. And I think something like this, a significant life event like this, initially it feels like it's taking up the entire book.

It's the only thing you can see. Every time you open the book, they're the only words that are visible. And then as time goes by, you realise that actually now that's actually just one chapter of the book.

And then maybe and maybe eventually it becomes just a one page of the book. And then eventually maybe we can even come down to a paragraph or and it's even best still when we can finally just put it in the index section. It's just referring to one particular part, you know.

So it's like really taking notice of that as well, because I think one of the things that actually really impacts the healing journey of anybody, and this is in any situation, not not infidelity specific, is when we recall the pain that we feel and experience. Then the next time we recall that pain, we're recalling the last time that we felt it. So and that's usually become slightly embellished.

We have additional things. So what we end up doing is just reminding ourselves of how painful the experience is of reminding ourselves of how painful the experience is. You know, it just keeps it there, prominent, right in our minds, like in our minds all the time.

It's a bit like having that one page open and own and not moving past that same sentence or paragraph, you know. And and I think by having some form, whether you use a book analogy like mine or something similar, just being able to sort of zoom back out and look at the bigger picture and then be able to use that as a reference. Otherwise, we don't pay attention to how far we've come.

We don't pay attention to the things that have changed. And so that we can reflect back on, OK, well, yes, that was it doesn't make it any less painful. It doesn't make it any less real an experience.

It doesn't mean that it needs to be deleted or erased or edited out of my story. It just no longer has the same level of prominence that it once did. Right.

And sometimes just that alone can just just give you a little bit of space, you know. Right. OK, now I can just like I'm looking at I'm looking at a chapter here rather than just a page and so on.

But in the moment, though, it's hard to get past that page. It's hard. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

It's it is. It requires intent for definite. It is very hard to get past that page.

And by no means, I'm saying that we should just ignore the page or the page out of the book. Yeah, you know, we're not tearing the page out of the book because that's the temptation. It's why in fact, actually, the temptation is just to burn the book, you know.

Yeah, but that's no, no. It's part of it's part of you. That's what we try.

Identity is like, what do I want? Who do I want to be? I often ask this question. Who do I want to be after infidelity? You know, either as the betrayed or as the unfaithful. Who do I want to be going forward now that this is part of my story? As much as I would like to just get the tip X or the eraser and just remove the word or remove the sentence, the paragraph, the chapter, whatever it's like, how do I how do I want to be given that that is part of my story? Yeah.

And that maybe just offers a sense of control. And this is for both for both of you. You know, you spoke about the guilt and the shame that you carry, Alan, and that there might be a deep temptation to just want to erase all that and, you know, and get rid of that and just just, you know, kind of demolish anything remnants of it because of the pain and hurt that you've seen it cause both yourself and Fran.

The temptation is to want to just dispose of it. But again, that's part of your story, too. So it's like, who do you want to be with that as part of your story? When it comes to where you are now and.

Trying to find like a sense of direction, what kind of boundaries have you put in place or do you have boundaries in place? How do you navigate the day to day in a way that feels safe for both of you? I feel that the boundaries that are in place are to me in my head of my boundaries that I have to follow is very strict and very narrow because I don't want to escalate anything. I don't want any of this pain to come back. So I try to to do very well with my boundaries.

I try to help out more than I have in the past. I don't want to get caught up in what I had in the past. I don't want to be smoking again.

I don't want to be having a bourbon every night when I came home. So I'm trying to keep that line. I'm trying to be here.

I'm trying to be present in our relationship. It's a boundary that I'm trying to stay within those walls of, I guess. There's not, you know, I don't have like definite boundaries for Ann to follow because she's been doing well following the unsaid boundaries our whole lives.

I think it's me that has to work on the boundaries. And I think Ann has said in the past too that she doesn't want to feel like she has to say, OK, no smoking, no texting a female, no having sex with somebody else. Like she doesn't need to spell it out.

Those are just kind of a gimme with the being married. And I don't know why I jumped over those lines and said, oh, no, it's going to be OK. And maybe it's because I felt that I was able to keep secrets so well and keep everything separate.

It doesn't work that way. Marriage is hard, folks. And I know, Ann, that when it comes to boundaries, the theory of setting a boundary is quite easy.

We can make this request and we can hope that our partners live in a line with what it is that we want them to do. And ideally, these things can go unsaid. But of course, the hardest part of any boundary is the follow through.

It's the what I do if you don't do those things. And, you know, you've you've shared and spoken about times where he has betrayed you in more than one way. And you've maybe had these boundaries in place and he has ultimately violated those boundaries.

How's that left you feeling? What do you do? Do you follow through on that boundary or do you feel like you're going against your boundary? How does that sit with you now? I don't think that I have reached a conclusion with that yet. I still feel very betrayed by all of that. Like he said, I never thought it was something I had to say like, OK, you can't have an affair.

You can't you shouldn't have a relationship with another woman when you're married. Another in-depth relationship with another woman when you're married to me. But to me, as I'm not trying to minimise that, but the smoking was a huge thing for me.

Not. You know, that's a huge boundary that I don't know how I feel about that yet. That's something that's still to come.

But I'm still trying to work that out because I don't know. I don't understand that part, like how you can lie to somebody so in-depth. Yeah, the boundary was this is a black or white.

You want to be this person and have bad health. Then that's your choice that you do without, you know, in a marriage with me. He chose to do that, but be in a marriage with me, but do it because he wanted to do it.

But now he's I see him. I don't see him struggling, but I didn't see him struggling before. So I don't really know how I feel about that yet.

I haven't come to terms with that one yet. I'm watching him and seeing how he doesn't even think about it. And then that makes me think, how could you do it? Then if you don't think about it now, how just one day it didn't matter anymore.

But for 10 years, it did. So I don't know. That's hard for me.

If you could go back 10 years, maybe more, and this is a question for each of you and say to the other, what would you what would you say to the other person in a hope to be able to prevent or change what had happened since then? So rather than rather than you sort of saying, what would you say to yourself? Is that what would you say to you and what would you say to Alan and Alan? What would you say to to to? I think that my biggest takeaway from this is is communication and being honest. Why do you feel that that needs to be done? And let's work on that because that was a bad thing all around. Any of those little choices that you made that were not conducive to our relationship should have been discussed from the beginning.

I feel this way. And what are we going to do? What am I going to do about that? And let's work through that. But that is something I don't think people just normally do that.

I think also with him is emotionally. He's always had a very difficult time with emotion. I do not, unfortunately, sometimes.

And that's not abortion. It's no, I don't think it is. But sometimes it feels that way.

He he has a hard time touching emotion. And so working on that, that's something that I just thought, well, I can't he can't be emotional, but I'm super emotional so I can carry him through that and I can't. And that is what I've learned.

So now it's. Instead of doing things or supporting him emotionally and being the emotion for him, I have to allow him to experience that emotion. And that if I could go back 10 years, that's what I would want to do.

It's really interesting. Yeah, because I think I think that is so, so true. When we were in love with somebody and we care about somebody so deeply, we want to take their load in some way, their emotional load, whatever that looks like.

You know, sometimes I can just be through chores or physical things, fixing, fixing stuff around the house and the others, it's the shoulder to cry on or whatever it looks like. But I think I will never forget this. I'm sure I have shared it before.

When my son was very young, he refused to put his coat on. Both myself and his mother would just always give in. We're always in too much of a rush to go wherever we were going.

So we'd always just put his coat on and zip it up, zip it up for him so that he didn't have to do it, basically. And then he started going to a childminder. And honestly, within no time at all, he was putting his coat on, zipping it up by himself no problem because she just didn't give him the option.

Like she was never going to do it for him. Right. Basically, don't do anything for somebody that they can't do themselves.

Otherwise, you just educate it out of them. It's like, oh, that's such a metaphor for relationships as well. You know, how we care about someone so much that we do things for them.

I think this is somehow sometimes people end up love bombing as well for the same kind of things. Like, you know, you're trying to do something for because you love them so much, you know. But by doing so, you also take away, take away their ability or their power to be able to try and figure that out for themselves.

Yes. And that is one thing we have discussed that over the course of 10, I mean, probably our entire lifetimes, but more so probably the last five years that I could be very cognisant of that the less he did or was able to do because of work or stress or whatever was going on in life. I did.

So it wasn't just working, cleaning, cooking, doing the laundry, mowing the lawn, shovelling the driveway, whatever it was. I did everything because I tried to make his life easier. Oh, he's stressed, but I wasn't helping, but I thought I was because then, oh, he's less stressed.

But yeah, none of that was true. And that is that is my big key takeaway, I guess, from all of this is that I have to and that is hard for me because I am a very giving person. My mom was that way.

I think I learned that from my mom and it's hard for me because it makes me feel like, oh, I can't do that. But I know that that didn't help. And so I have to allow him to fail on his own.

I can be there to support him, but I have to allow him to feel those feelings and then talk about those feelings or talk about those things. Because I know in the big picture that that is some of the things that he has said was he didn't have any value in the home because I did it all and I thought I was helping, but I wasn't. I was just taking all of his value out of here.

You know, he didn't have any reason to come home and do anything because I took care of it. It brings to mind that anecdote of the what is it? Is it you give a man a fish and he can feed himself for a day or you teach a man to fish and he can feed his family for life or I've probably messed up a bit, but something along those lines. So with all that in mind, Alan, what's your reflection? What would you what would you say to Anne if you could go back 10, 15 years time? What would you say? I think as she started to talk about with communication that what I've learned lately with the programme I was in and then also with the conversations that Anne and I have is act on those feelings.

If you're feeling down, depressed, something doesn't feel right, discuss it with your spouse. That's what they're there for. That's your partner.

You shouldn't keep it in because keeping it in just kind of builds that stress and it just keeps going and it gets worse and worse. So I would say, you know, to talk to Anne 10 years ago, I'd say, you know, I'm going to try my best at communicating to you the emotions that I have or the thoughts that I have, the rational thoughts maybe, and you can help rationalise them by me explaining them to you. Yeah, it would just be to open up communication.

And then as far as what she said about doing stuff for me, I kind of became complacent because I kind of expected that she'll take care of it. She'll do it. She'll do it.

And the sad thing is I kind of liked it. And since she's cognisant of it and she backs off of it, well, too bad, Alan, you got to stand up and you got to do it and you got to take care of it as nice as it was to have Anne doing stuff for me all the time. But I'm getting self-confidence or self-esteem because what I've been doing lately is we'll get up in the morning and it's almost like I have chores that I'm doing and I feel more satisfied doing those, taking the dogs out, coming in, feeding the dog, getting the coffee ready, getting maybe breakfast for Anne ready and putting that all together.

And then she appreciates it, which makes me feel good, which builds my self-esteem. And those aren't big events. They're kind of small events, but that helps.

Well, I don't think life is about the big events. It's about the small ones. They're the ones that make up the majority of our lives.

It's the little things that happen all the time. This is where that communication really is key. And yeah, it's not about one person, you know, taking all the weight or all the load.

It's about sharing that. And it will, you know, go from one side to the other from time to time and peak and trough. And I think that you've highlighted exactly that.

What does forgiveness look like to each of you, you know, both in terms of forgiving yourself and probably more so for you, Anne, in terms of forgiving Alan? I think like the chorus have a song called Forgiven, Not Forgotten. And I think as time goes on, you can forgive, but you're not going to forget the event and you shouldn't because as major of an event is, it helps you to get better. It helps you to get stronger.

It helps your relationship to get stronger because you don't want to go back to what we're going through right now and what a lot of the listeners are going through right now. You don't want to live that again. It's not fun.

But that's not the reason that you don't want to do it just because this isn't fun. You want to do it and get better because you owe it to your relationship. You know, like you said with the book, it's a whole story.

You know, if this becomes just a chapter, you can make the ending of the book that much stronger and better because you had that switch or that climax in the story that triggers it into a better ending and a happy ending. So I would say forgiveness for me is it's it's not forgiveness of the event. It's it's taking the emotional part where I don't think that he did this to me, which is what would be hurtful.

I purposely wanted to hurt you. Um, I have to take the thought of this was done for him. For whatever those reasons were.

And forgiving that is very difficult. I struggle with that every day. But when I think about the hurt and pain it's caused him to be in this place, not just for me, but for for him as well, we call it grace between us.

Like if, if I'm struggling with something and I start to, this is one of the, one of the boundaries we set with each other and I'm starting to spiral, I call it spiral into mad or sad or all those emotions. He just will say grace. And then it brings me back to, I have to have grace for him.

He has to have grace for me and we have to work from that point of grace. So, um, forgiveness is when I first heard you say it in the podcast, I was like, oh, I can never do that. And then when, then you explained it, I I'm like, oh, we have to listen to this together because this is something that is important.

And I've struggled with that. But I think as time has gone on, I found that, um, forgiveness is like you said, it's for, for you to move forward. You have to be able to forgive that.

And so I have taken out, I feel like I've taken the emotion out of it. I made it a, an event or a thing, and I'm not attaching my emotion to it. And then that is how I can begin to forgive.

And then I feel that as time has gone by, that emotion isn't as raw. You're right. Forgiveness is, you know, I described forgiveness as being something that is purely for you.

It's the only person who's experiencing the discomfort of not forgiving is you, the only person, you know, if we're struggling to forgive an event or a person or a situation, we're the only people suffering with the emotional discomfort of not forgiving. It's, it's, it's our sack, our weight is our load that we need to place down. And it's only us that can do that.

Nobody can do that for us. You know, and of course it does make it very difficult because it's not, it doesn't feel like we put it there. It doesn't feel like it doesn't seem fair, quote, unquote.

Fair. Yeah. And fairness is a big, you know, it's a big thing for all of us.

I think, you know, like this fairness, what is fair? And it's a whole, a whole other conversation, but maybe it may be a podcast episode just on fairness would be, would be useful. And, but yeah, I think, I think just, first of all, just acknowledging that the forgiveness itself is for you and it doesn't mean forgetting, you know, it's a bit like when, again, like we spoke about the book and the story and the chapter is that when the, the, the goal is never to delete it. It's just to make it less heavy, less big, less prominent, you know, and we're the only people who can do that for ourselves.

Nobody else can do that for us. And I think sometimes when we, we refuse to forgive, it's like we're giving the other person or the situation, all of the power and therefore we can't let go of it. So it remains heavy and uncomfortable.

And it is a process and it is a choice. It's not something that just happens. It's something that we choose because that's what we want.

And we start to understand what it's for and what its purposes and what the consequences are of not doing it. It doesn't, it doesn't let anybody off the hook. It, well, actually it does.

It lets you off the hook. Right. It releases, it releases all the pain that you're feeling.

Right. It's still hard. Oh, of course.

Yeah. Yeah. And I do think that that is time and it hasn't been a long time, but as time progresses, as we've talked more, I feel that that becomes easier when I, when I get to when I see the bigger picture, either through our conversations or I feel like through his opening up of emotions, letting go of, of withholding emotions that I'm allowed to forgive because I can see an emotion when I just saw an event and I didn't see emotion with it.

I could not. No. But as he learns more about himself and we discuss more than I can see it.

And it is a weight. I think we've had this conversation. I say, I don't want to be sad my whole life.

You can see it in people's posture. Yeah. You can see it.

That weight that people carry, the emotional burdens that they carry. And you can see it when that's released as well. You notice it.

One final question for people that are listening and who are feeling like healing is impossible, which I think lots of people do feel. What would be your advice for them to offer them on their journey based on your experience so far? Mine is back to what I was saying earlier about patience and strength. Be patient in the process because we mentioned, you know, there is no set timeline for it.

Your timeline, when you look back on the whole thing, you'll be like, oh yeah, it took this long, but going forward, you don't know how long it's going to take. And you got to have patience in the way that the betrayed is processing everything. You got to have patience in the way that you are processing as the betrayer.

You just have to have patience. And along with that is the strength to get to that point and to push the emotions to the right place they need to be. And they don't need to be on the forefront all the time where it could trigger off an argument or a fight or whatever.

So my takeaways would be patience and strength, both parties. What about you? I would say that honesty. I think we talked about that.

And to me, if you're just honest, not even if you can't be honest with your spouse, be honest with yourself. Because if this is what you really want, if this is something that's worth working for, a marriage is worth working for, even if you're young in the marriage, you have to be honest and then just be open to those emotions. Because I think this is my feeling.

The younger generation of men, I feel are better at that. They've been taught better. But our generation, that is not part of our generation.

My parents, the way I was raised, it was a man was strong. You didn't talk about emotions. You didn't feel you just did.

And that to me is more important. This next generation of young people is honesty, being in touch with your emotions and then discussing it with each other. Because you are in a partnership.

It is a relationship to be happy, to be together, to have a life together. And you can't have that without that honesty and that integrity in each other. Wow.

What an incredible conversation. And I just want to take a moment to thank both Alan and Ann for their honesty, their vulnerability and their courage in sharing their story. It's not easy to open up about something so deeply personal.

But by doing so, they've offered a powerful reminder to all of us. Healing is messy. It's nuanced.

And it's anything but linear. Their story highlights so many important dynamics. Alan's journey of confronting his own self-assumed struggles and the role that they played in his actions is something that many people can relate to, whether they've been unfaithful or not.

It's a stark reminder of how internal battles can manifest externally, often in destructive ways. And yet it was inspiring to hear how he's taking responsibility, finding strength in vulnerability and actively working to rebuild trust. Ann's perspective was equally moving.

Her struggle to reconcile the betrayal while navigating her own emotions, anger, empathy, sadness and hope. It shows just how multifaceted healing is. I was particularly struck by her acknowledgement that trying to piece together a puzzle with missing or mismatched pieces can drive you mad.

That metaphor really resonated with me. And I can imagine it will with many of you as well. One of the key takeaways from their journey is the importance of communication.

Not just with each other, but with themselves. Alan learning to express his emotions rather than bury them. And Ann setting boundaries to protect her well-being.

They're powerful examples of what it looks like to grow individually and as a couple. But perhaps the most poignant part of their story is this concept of grace. Grace for themselves.

Grace for each other. Grace for the process. It's not about perfection or having all the answers.

It's about showing up every day, even when it's hard. And holding space for healing to unfold in its own time. So to everyone listening, whether you're in the thick of betrayal, navigating the early stages of recovery or years into the journey, I hope that Alan and Ann's story reminded you of one thing.

It's okay to not have it all figured out. Progress isn't always visible. And healing often happens in the smallest, most unassuming moments.

But with patience, honesty and grace, it is possible to move forward. And if today's episode resonated with you, I encourage you to reflect on one question. What does showing yourself or your partner grace look like in this moment? If you're ready to take the next step in your own journey, I'd love to support you.

Visit my website at lifecoachluke.com and book a free discovery call. Or join the After The Affair community on Facebook to connect with others walking a similar path. Thank you ever so much for tuning in today.

And as always, take care of yourself and each other. I'll talk to you very soon.