138. Seeking Reassurance after Betrayal: It’s Never Enough Though

You know your partner’s betrayal wasn’t your fault.

You understand the logic.

But still, deep down, you’re stuck.

Still needing reassurance after betrayal. Still bracing for the next emotional shift. Still terrified of being too much, or not enough.

Why?

Because some of what you’re feeling didn’t start with them.

In this episode, I explore how emotional survival strategies from childhood shape the way we respond to betrayal, uncertainty, and intimacy as adults. If you’ve been chasing reassurance, battling emotional spirals, or waiting for your partner to give you the peace you can’t seem to find, this episode is for you.

It’s not about blame.

It’s about awareness.

And reclaiming the power you forgot you had.

Key Takeaways:

• Why betrayal activates old survival wiring, not just current fear

• The truth about reassurance, and why it never lasts

• How emotional outsourcing creates cycles of panic and distance

• The difference between fear of what might happen… and the belief you wouldn’t survive it

• How to build internal trust using the self-coaching model and ladder thoughts

• Why your partner can’t fix wounds they didn’t create, and why you can

💬 Reflection Questions:

Where in your healing are you still waiting to be saved? And what might shift if you stopped outsourcing that safety and started practising it with yourself?

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.

Hey everybody and welcome back to the After The Affair podcast. I'm your host, Luke Shillings, and today you are listening to episode number 138. What if your desperate need for reassurance? It wasn't really about your partner. What if the craving for certainty, that ache that you have sometimes to hear the words, you are safe, I'm not leaving you are enough.

Didn't actually begin with betrayal. What if it started long before that? Before the messages, before the secrecy, before the moment that your trust cracked? What if the fear you are feeling right now? Is echoing something much older. In a recent session, somebody shared a memory that really lingered with me long after the call had ended.

Um, he described growing up in a home where everything felt really unpredictable to him, where silence at the dinner table could mean peace. Or it could mean a storm was brewing where laughter could flip into tension with no warning, and where as a child he learned to constantly scan his emotional landscape, reading tone, watching body language, bracing for change.

He says something that I think will probably resonate with many of you. It's not that I want her to change, it's that I don't feel safe until she does. And that line, it speaks to something, something a bit deeper because what he's describing isn't a relationship dynamic. It's a nervous system, still wired for survival.

And I want to be clear, this isn't about blaming our parents or romanticising trauma. This is about understanding how early emotional environments really shape us. When you grow up around unpredictability, you often internalise a belief that stability isn't natural, it's conditional, and that safety comes from hyper-awareness, that love must be earned in some way, or that conflict must be avoided.

That emotions must be managed, not just yours, but everybody else's as well. Fast forward to adulthood and suddenly you're in a relationship, maybe even one that's quite good or promising or safe, but your body doesn't know that yet. Your nervous system still believes love is only safe when nothing goes wrong.

Connection is fragile. One wrong move, and I'll be left here again. So when betrayal hits, whether through an actual affair, emotional distance, or even just a sense that something's off. Your entire survival system gets reactivated. It's not just heartbreak. It's a return to a familiar panic to the helplessness of being small in a world that just felt too big, too volatile, too unsafe.

This is why so many people say things like, I know it wasn't my fault, but I still feel like it was, or, I know they're trying, but I just can't calm down. Perhaps it's, I know I'm not the child I once was, but right now it feels like I am. And that's because the body remembers the pattern. It returns and suddenly you're no longer just responding to what your partner did.

You're responding to a thousand moments where you learned that love was something that you had to monitor, manage, or in some cases even earn. That's the weight of a childhood survival strategy. And until we name it, we keep mistaking it for relationship failure when really it's just an invitation to heal from something older than our partner's mistakes.

So let's talk about this chase for reassurance. You know, it usually starts small. Maybe it's a question like, do you still love me? Maybe it's a need to hear. I'm not going anywhere. A glance, a tone, a pause in a text reply, and suddenly your mind is spinning. And when you ask, they answer. You feel relief for about five minutes, and then the doubt creeps back in.

You wonder if they meant it or if they just said it to keep the peace, or if they're just trying to avoid conflict. And so you ask again, maybe directly, maybe subtly, maybe just by observing them with laser focus. This cycle is what I call emotional outsourcing. You've handed your sense of internal safety to somebody else, and no matter how well-meaning they are, no matter how many times they reassure you, it will never quite fill the space because the reassurance that you are looking for isn't about this moment.

In fact, it's not even about them. It's about something unresolved within you. Here's a metaphor that I often use with clients. Reassurance is like pouring water into a cup with a hole at the bottom. It might feel good in the moment, but no matter how much love validation or attention is poured in, it never stays there.

And I think this is possibly one of the hardest truths of all. It's not your partner's job to patch that hole. Y Yeah, of course they can offer support. They can be consistent. They can be kind, they can be emotionally available, but they can't make you feel secure inside of you. That's something only you can do, because as long as your sense of okayness depends on what someone else says or does, you're living in a dangerously fragile emotional situation.

Let me be clear. This doesn't mean or make you needy. It just makes you human. You needed safety, you needed affirmation. You needed someone somewhere to help you feel grounded. And if that never happened consistently, especially in childhood, of course you're looking for it now. But healing begins when you realise that no amount of external reassurance can actually replace the internal safety that only you can build.

That doesn't mean you stop wanting to hear. I love you. Like I think it's okay to hear. I love you, and have nice things said to you by your partner and for you to say nice things to them, particularly if they're meant, but the moment we depend upon them. For reassurance. This just means that your entire sense of worth rises and falls depending on what they say, and they might not always say exactly what you want them to say.

And sometimes that can be difficult to acknowledge. So the question becomes, how can I begin to reassure myself in the moments I most want it from somebody else? And this is often where the real work actually begins. So let's talk about uncertainty and the illusion of control, because if you've been through betrayal or even suspected it, you know how unbearable that that can feel.

Uncertainty makes everything feel unsafe. You don't know what's real, what's true, or what's coming next. In the absence of certainty, we do what humans have always done. We try to control it. We gather evidence, we ask for reassurance. We monitor tone, energy, language frequency. We try to get out ahead of potential pain thinking.

If we can just anticipate it, we can soften the blow. But the truth is most of what we try to control was never ours to manage in the first place. In a coaching session, I often use metaphors. One is that of winning the lottery. Think about it. If somebody told you you have a one in a hundred chance of winning 10,000 pounds tomorrow, you'd probably feel pretty excited, hopeful you wouldn't lie, awake in fear, wondering what happens if you don't win, but change the context slightly and now, now you have a one in a hundred chance that your partner will portray you again and suddenly.

Your entire nervous system is on fire. You obsess over how to reduce the odds. You try to outsmart the outcome. You panic over not being able to guarantee safety. Same probability, different emotional meaning. Why? Well, because one version flirts with hope while the other flirts with powerlessness and powerlessness.

Is what we're actually afraid of. Not the uncertainty itself, but what we believe it would mean to not survive it. The second metaphor is similar to stage fright. Ask somebody to sing in the shower. You can probably do that. All right? Ask them to sing on stage in front of 200 people. Panic. But what changed?

It's not the act. It's the context. That's what uncertainty does. It changes the emotional context of everything, and the more emotionally loaded the situation, the more intolerable uncertainty becomes. So we try to control it. We build elaborate mental flowcharts. We try to read between the lines that don't even exist.

We try to get the future to give us answers. Now the idea of controlling may be comforting, but it's not the same as safety. Real safety doesn't come from knowing exactly what your partner will do. It comes from knowing who you will be no matter what they do. That's the shift. It's not about removing uncertainty from the relationship.

It's about removing the fear that you won't be okay if uncertainty shows up because you will. You can learn to feel fear without obeying it. You can learn to feel doubt without spiralling. You can learn to move through uncertainty without losing yourself in it. And when you do, you won't just feel safe, you'll feel powerful because you'll know that I don't have to control everything to be okay with anything.

So if control doesn't really bring safety and reassurance doesn't stick, what does help? Well, the honest answer is you rebuild that internal self trust and you're probably thinking, but I didn't break this. Like, why is the work mine? And you're right, it doesn't seem fair, but it is real because even though you didn't cause the betrayal, even though you didn't ask for the emotional chaos that followed, you are the one responsible for tending to what's inside you now.

So let's look at. How that actually works. In my coaching, I use the self-coaching model. I use this to explain the, the loop and the cycle between how we think, how we feel, how we act, and what results we create. I discuss this more in episode 20, how to solve any problem, but for a quick reminder, everything in the world can be split into one of five things.

Any problem that we experience can be identified by these five categories. The first is circumstances. These are the neutral events, the neutral circumstances, the things that actually happen in the world. So this can be things that have already happened, things that people have said, things that people have done.

The. A text message that you receive the temperature outside your age, the amount of money you have in your bank account, what job you do, whether you're a parent or not. Like all of the things that are objectively true, which could, you know, be agreed by, by everybody. Then we have our thoughts. Now our thoughts are essentially our interpretations of the circumstances.

Thinking is like sentences in our minds. It's how we make sense of the world around us, and it's the filter that exists between the thing that has happened and. The feeling that we have. So our thoughts create our feelings. Our feelings or our emotions, we'll use them interchangeably. For the sake of this conversation are the experiences that we have within our bodies.

That, that hotness, the, the heaviness, the tingling sensation, the tenseness, the warmth, the cold, like all of these different physical manifestations of how we experience emotion in. Our bodies. You know, we've all had that moment where we've maybe found ourselves clenching our fists slightly, or maybe we've felt really relaxed and our shoulders are down and back.

Maybe we've had that knot in the stomach that feels uncomfortable. Maybe we've had a really tight clenching fist feeling in our chest. These are the ways in which the emotions appear within us. Then our feelings, those emotions, they drive everything that we do, which is our actions, it's our behaviours.

It's the things that we do and don't do, and ultimately the things that we do or don't do in the world produce the results for us. So we have circumstances, thoughts, feelings, actions, and results. Now it seems simple, but it's really powerful and especially when you really slow it down. So here's an example of something that I hear, you know, all of the time in, in different forms.

You know, let's assume that the circumstance is, um, rebuilding relationship or, or partner has betrayed me. And the thought perhaps might be, well, they should reassure me more often. And that creates a feeling of uncertainty, maybe, maybe with a tinge of anxiousness. And when you're feeling uncertain and anxious, perhaps you go quiet.

So these are your actions. You go quiet, you retreat, or maybe you seek more reassurance, but this time it's tinged with frustration or panic. And ultimately this produces, uh, uh, more confusion, more uncertainty, probably creates a sense of disconnect. It reduces the closeness that you are feeling or actually craving and instead actually pushes you further away rather than feeling more connected.

Not rather than feeling like you have been reassured, but you've. It's interesting how we can actually create that cycle within ourselves. So we believe that they should reassure us, and because that's not what we're seeing in some way, then our actions lead to actually even less reassurance because we've become needy and panicky and start saying things and becoming, you know, more graspy in the situation, which makes us feel even less reassured.

And then the cycle just repeats, you know? So the original thought led to the feeling of. Fear. And the fear drove a behaviour that created a result that confirmed the fear. It became a self-fulfilling loop, and this is how we unintentionally create the very disconnection that we're trying to avoid. And it's not 'cause we're broken, it's because we haven't yet learned to interrupt the pattern.

And that's where we can use different techniques. So ladder thoughts, for example, are like stepping stones between where you are and where you want to be emotionally. They're not delusional affirmations. They're believable bridges. So instead of going from, they reassure me. Sorry, they should reassure me to, I don't need anybody at all, which probably doesn't feel particularly true for you right now.

Maybe you could shift it to something like, it's okay to want reassurance, but I'm also learning to self-soothe. Or perhaps this feeling is uncomfortable, but it doesn't mean something is wrong. Or let's just think of a third, maybe I can sit with uncertainty and still show up in alignment with who I want to be.

You see the difference. You're not bypassing that fear of uncertainty or the anxiety that comes from that. You're acknowledging it and you're reclaiming your ability to respond from a place of choice, not panic. And this is how we build that internal trust. It's not in huge breakthroughs, but it's in the small moments when you pause before reacting, you offer yourself compassion instead of criticism.

You say that, I don't feel good right now, and that's okay, but I'm going to choose a response that reflects who I want to become. That's how safety begins to grow. Not because somebody else changes, but because you become someone who trusts your own capacity to handle whatever comes your way. Whatever circumstance you're faced with.

And from that place, every part of the relationship dynamic begins to shift. 'cause you are no longer outsourcing your piece, you are anchoring it from within. So here's something that perhaps is a little bit hard to hear, but it's also where real healing begins. Your partner cannot fix a wound that they didn't create.

They may have triggered it, they may have pressed right into it, consciously or not, but the pain that keeps spiralling, that deep ha of, I'm not safe, I'm not chosen, I'm not enough. That story didn't start here. It started long before them. And for many of us, the emotional panic that erupts in relationships isn't coming from our adult selves.

It comes from a much younger version of us, a child, a teenager, or a past self that still feels scared, unworthy, or unseen. That part of you doesn't care how logical your adult mind is. It doesn't care how many books you've read or how self-aware you are. It just wants to know one thing. Am I safe yet? And when that part of you doesn't get an answer, it trusts, it hijacks the moment it demands, it doubts, it freezes, or in some cases lashes out.

But here's what's important to understand that younger part of you is looking for someone to rescue. But the rescue doesn't come from your partner where you perhaps think it does. It comes from your capacity to reparent that part with compassion and clarity. 'cause the truth is you're not trying to heal the betrayal alone.

You're trying to heal the way the betrayal confirms something you already believed about yourself. Perhaps that you are unlovable or that you are easy to leave or that you are too much, or in some cases never enough. So if your healing is entirely focused on changing your partner's behaviour, IE, getting them to validate you more, reassure you more, or show up perfectly, you'll always be waiting and that weight will reinforce your wound.

Because no one can validate you in a way that lands if you've already decided you're not valid. So this is where we pivot. Healing is not about becoming immune to emotion. It's not about never needing others. It's about becoming skilled at sitting with what shows up without letting it define you. It's about choosing to notice the wave of fear instead of panicking.

Instead asking, well, what would it look like to take care for this feeling instead of outsourcing it, it's about acknowledging the voice of your inner teenager that says, if they don't respond perfectly, I'll fall apart and gently reminding that part that you are here now and you won't leave it. That's what changes.

Because we don't heal by never feeling fear. We heal by becoming the kind of person who knows that they can hold it without spiralling, without running, without handing the power of our worth to somebody else's behaviour. That's not just healing, that's emotional maturity. It's power, it's strength. So let me ask you this.

What if you stopped trying to control the relationship and started mastering your response to it? What if you stopped asking, how do I get them to show up better? And started asking. How can I show up for myself more clearly, more consistently, more compassionately? Because this, this is where the real safety begins.

It's not in their consistency, it's in yours. In next week's episode, I'm gonna take this a little bit further. I want to dive deeper into understanding how this same survival wiring plays out in conflict. How being too emotional is often just being too afraid to feel and spoiler. It's not about the fight.

It's about the fear underneath it. So until then, keep breathing, keep noticing, keep showing up. You are doing the work. If you'd like to find out more, then please visit lifecoachluke.com or contact me directly at. luke@lifecoachluke.com. You could also come and join me over at Instagram. The handle is at my @mylifecoachluke.

Okay, I will talk to you all next week. Looking forward to it.