134. Betrayed and Ready to Give Up? Listen to this First

There are moments when it all feels like too much, when the pain of betrayal, the weight of healing, or the sheer exhaustion of trying to hold it together leaves you questioning your strength.

In those moments, the most important decision you can make is not to fight harder, or fix everything, or know exactly what to do.

The most important decision is to not abandon yourself.

In this episode, I offer a deeply grounded reminder:

You don’t have to be fully healed to keep going.

You don’t need all the answers to stay.

But you do need to stay in the room with yourself.

This is your invitation to light a candle in the dark, to choose presence over escape, and to remember, you are worth not giving up on.

Key Takeaways:

• Why our instinct is to check out or overfunction when things get hard

• The lie pain tells us about our worth and capacity

• What it actually means to “stay in the room” with yourself

• How small acts of self-loyalty build resilience and self-trust

• A grounding metaphor to carry with you in your lowest moments

💬 Reflection Question:

What’s one small way you can stay with yourself today, especially if you feel like giving up?

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 and welcome to the After the Affair podcast. You're listening to episode number 134. Yes, 134. Um, you may notice. Throughout the recording of this particular episode, I did it in two sections, as one was at the beginning of the day, and then I spent the day coaching and talking and doing a variety of things.

And now here I am, uh, recording the, this intro and, uh, also a latter part of the episode. And you might notice that my voice sounds different as I have worn it out. It would seem so note to self, um, record episodes in all in one go so that it doesn't show when you, uh, you change it anyway. Okay. More importantly, uh, let's get back into the main part of the content.

So if you're wondering why my voice is changing, you now know why. You know, there's sometimes where it just feels like everything's just too much. You wake up and you're already exhausted. You try and hold it together for everyone else, but inside. Things are just falling to pieces. You are tired of the pain.

You're tired of wondering if things will ever feel okay again. Tired of the effort it takes just to even stay afloat. And in those moments when the world goes quiet and your thoughts get loud, the most tempting thing to do isn't actually always to lash out. It's to give up. It's to check out. It's to slowly but quietly disappear.

But I want to tell you something that hopefully lands. This is the moment that you stay. You stay right here, right now. Especially now. You don't have to fix everything today. You really don't. There's no gold star for solving your pain in record time. There's no prize for pretending that you are okay when you're not.

You don't have to know how the story ends. You don't have to know if the relationship will even survive. You don't have to know what version of yourself you'll become. The truth is none of us get to know that, not fully, not ahead of time, and you don't even have to feel strong because strength isn't a feeling.

It's a choice. It sometimes it looks like getting outta bed. Sometimes it looks like letting yourself cry. Sometimes it looks like making it through the next 10 minutes, but what you do have to do, what matters the most is that you stay in the room with yourself. Not the perfect version of you, not with the one who has it all figured out, but with you as you are messy, hurting, confused.

Human because not giving up doesn't always look like fighting harder. It's not about pushing through and forcing progress. Sometimes not giving up looks like, well, slowing down, like staying instead of running, like choosing presence over escapism. It's like saying, I don't have to solve this, but I'm not gonna abandon myself in it either.

You see when the pain hits the instincts to pull away, we go into survival mode. We numb, we scroll, we binge, we drink, we zone out. We over-function, we stay busy. We take care of everybody but ourselves. We hide behind humor, behind silence, behind an attempt at control, and slowly without even realizing it, we leave ourselves behind.

We tell ourselves this, this is too much, that I'm just not built for it. What's the point anyway? But those thoughts, they're not the truth. They're just the fear. Talking and fear is loud. When it's dark, it's pretty damn persuasive too. It'll whisper that you are not enough, that you are wasting your time, that there's no point in trying.

But just because it's loud doesn't mean it's right and you, you are not someone who gets left behind, especially not by you. So if you are still here listening, breathing, maybe quietly holding on by a thread, then something in you already knows this. There is power in staying even if it's uncomfortable, even if nothing feels clear, even if you are not sure how to take the next step.

Staying doesn't have to be loud. It doesn't have to look brave on the outside. Sometimes staying looks. Like closing your eyes and placing your hand over your heart and just saying, I'm here, and I'm not talking about staying or leaving the relationship. I'm talking about staying with you in the discomfort right now.

Think of yourself like a candle burning in a dark room. The storm is raging outside. The walls are creaking, the lights are out and still there you are. Flickering, yes, unsteady maybe, but still burning. And that light, your presence, your decision to stay in this moment, it matters more than you think. You don't need to turn the storm off.

You don't need to rebuild the whole house in one night. You just need to keep that flame alive. 'cause over time, that quiet flame becomes something stronger. It becomes a signal to your nervous system. We're not going anywhere. We are safe here. We are staying with ourselves no matter what. And that's how trust is built.

Not through grand declarations, not through certainty, but through tiny repeated acts of self loyalty. You stay, you breathe, you respond. You keep the flame alive, and even if no one else sees it, you will feel it. When I was growing up, I remember having a, a somewhat challenging relationship with my patients.

This would sometimes display itself in forms of anger, momentary aggression, slamming doors, throwing things across the room. I used to see it a lot, particularly if I was engaged in a particular activity that. I enjoyed, but wasn't achieving what I was hoping to achieve. I played games, consoles, and a particular favorite game of mine was the grant to Ismo series.

In this game, there were challenges where you had to achieve certain lap times or get from point A to point B in a particular set of conditions within a particular timeframe, and depending on how well you did you. Were rewarded with a, a digital, bronze, silver, or gold medal or trophy. I would do these tasks and, and fall a little bit short, and after a few attempts, my frustration would take over and it would often result in a PlayStation controller flying across the room, sometimes narrowly missing my sister's head.

Sorry, sis. But over time, what I noticed was that even though I felt that frustration and that discomfort and that often resulted in me lashing out in some way, it never helped. It was during this time that if I felt passionate or, or I believed that I could do better than I was doing, then I had the ability to keep doing that thing.

Eventually I got to a point where every time I fell short of achieving the particular goal or target on the game, I was able to press the pause button, press, restart, and go at it again. And I could do this repeatedly for in sometimes even hours on end. And I would keep doing it no matter how stressful it got, no matter how close I got to achieving what I was trying to achieve, but ultimately falling short.

I was still able to, over time, get to a place where I could maintain my composure, or at the very least, I would increase my capacity to deal with the discomfort. And I think in many ways, ironically, it's interesting how this has then shown up in my, my adult life, in, in ways for which I can. Deal with certain levels of discomfort.

It was almost as though going through those, those periods as a child, particularly sort of during my puberty and my adolescence, that it built up a, a resilience within me. It made me aware how sensitive I was to the discomfort and how easily it result in me lashing out, which didn't help. I think that was the real key point.

I realized how much it didn't help and I was able to do to reface those situations repeatedly anyway, it was really embracing that discomfort, which at the time I didn't really realize what I was. Creating for myself, I didn't realize I was building this ability to, to sit with that, that unpleasant feeling, and know that just because it was hard, that wasn't a reason to give up and I would just go back and do it again.

And I would keep doing it until I achieved the thing that I wanted to achieve. And I think this has served me well in both my career, in my, you know, my professional life and in some cases, even my relationships. Where I've not walked away from something just because it's hard. In fact, if I'm truly honest with myself, in more recent years, I am drawn more to the things that create and generate discomfort.

Because I believe that when I embrace that, that level of discomfort, it creates opportunities and it puts me in places and positions and situations that I otherwise wouldn't have done. And I expose myself to potential growth that I would've previously cut myself short of, and I refuse to do that anymore.

And if I were to try and pass on some moment, some bit of wisdom to you listening to this right now, then it would be that, and maybe that is you right now. Maybe you are the one sitting in that challenging situation. It feels like a wreckage. It feels like you are fighting. An overwhelming sense of discomfort, and the temptation is just to want to give up and walk away.

It seems impossible to even consider that you are worth rebuilding. It's worth rebuilding, but of course you are worth rebuilding. You are absolutely not broken beyond repair. You're not too far gone and at this moment, this one that might feel. Like there's no way forward. Like there's like, this is even your rock bottom.

This could be the very place where you really begin again, where you embrace that discomfort and you do it anyway. I. And it doesn't have to be with grand gestures. It's just about these small, quiet, ordinary acts. The ones where you show up and prove to yourself that you can do it regardless of how terrifying it can sometimes feel.

You don't need to be fearless to be faithful to yourself. You just need to stay committed to the task at hand. To stay when it's hard to stay. When you are not completely sure to stay, even when part of you really wants to just run away. 'cause every time you do stay for yourself and commit to yourself every time you don't abandon yourself, you build something, you build resilience, you build trust, you build that muscle, that muscle of I am here.

I am worth staying for. And that that's the foundation of healing. It's not perfection, it's not performance, it's just presence. And doing it persistently today, I really wanna ask you, what's one way that you can show up for yourself? In fact, what's one small way you can show up for yourself? And I'm not talking about a to-do list, we're not here to prove anything, but just as an act of self-respect.

Maybe it is something as simple as drinking that glass of water that you've been putting off. Maybe it's canceling a call because your heart's not in it. Maybe it's sitting in silence for two minutes just to be with yourself. And trust me, I realise how uncomfortable that can be for some people.

Whatever it is. Do it not because it fixes everything. It might not even change anything specifically in that moment, but it's because you are worth it. It's because you are listening to this and this makes some sense to you and you're not prepared to give up. Especially now, especially when it's hard.

You don't have to be fully healed to keep going. You don't need a perfect plan to move forward. You just need to stay in the room with yourself because the part of you that wants to give up isn't weak. It's just wounded. And what it needs more than anything right now is not a solution. It just needs a friend, a companion.

So let that companion be you. If this episode spoke to something inside of you, of course, I'd love to hear from you. You can connect with me on Instagram at my life, coach Luke, or you can visit my website@lifecoachluke.com and I'll look forward to speaking to you very soon. I'd also like to thank you for tolerating my changing voice during this episode.

I feel like I've, uh, let you behind the scenes a little bit in terms of the production of the After the Affair podcast, but we're all friends here. I'm glad to be able to support you, and I thank you ever so much for being here, as always, and I genuinely do look forward to speaking to you all again next week.

Take care.