140. Am I Going Crazy? Real Words from the Betrayed

Betrayal leaves behind more than heartbreak; it leaves questions that echo in your mind day and night.

“Was it real?”

“Did I miss the signs?”

“Is this my fault?”

“Will I ever trust again?”

In this episode, I, Luke Shillings, walk you through the most common thoughts and questions that come up in the aftermath of infidelity, based on real conversations from hundreds of discovery calls and coaching sessions.

Whether you're feeling stuck in self-doubt, unsure what to believe, or just desperate to feel normal again, this episode is for you. I’ll explore where these thoughts come from, why they’re so persistent, and what it actually takes to rebuild trust, not just in your partner, but in yourself.

Key Takeaways:

• You weren’t “stupid” for not seeing it; you were committed.

• Betrayal shakes your trust in them and in your own perception.

• Feeling hurt without proof doesn’t make you paranoid; it makes you aware.

• Emotional safety is rebuilt slowly, and your body decides what safe feels like.

• You’re not just mourning the relationship, you’re mourning who you were in it.

• Coaching helps you hear yourself again beneath the panic and pain

💬 Reflection Question:

What’s the question that’s been haunting you most since the betrayal?

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 back to the After the Affair podcast. I'm your host, Luke Shillings, and this week you are listening to episode number 140. Now every week I speak. To people who have been betrayed. Sometimes it's just days after discovery, and other times it's months or even years. And no matter what the details are, I hear the same phrases, same questions over and over again, not because people are just simply repeating each other, but because portrayal itself creates patterns, not just in.

But often in how we respond to those situations, emotionally, psychologically, and somatically. So in today's episode, I want to share with you some of the most common things. I hear the words people share through their tears, and in many cases, often for the first time on a call, because I want you to know that you're not broken, you're not overreacting, and you are not alone.

One of the first questions I remember asking myself was, How didn't I see it? Or, or how could I be so stupid? This comes up almost every single time. Even the most intelligent, intuitive, grounded people question themselves after betrayal, and not just with a passing doubt, but the deep, painful questioning, the kind that keeps you awake at night, replaying everything.

Whispering things like, How didn't I see it? Or why didn't I just ask more questions? Was I just naive? But the truth is, it's not just that your partner lied. It's that your reality lied to you. The life you trusted suddenly has holes in it. The nights you thought they were working late, the stories that once felt ordinary.

The moment you now can't stop examining like a detective with a magnifying glass. You trusted your home, your routine, you trusted the conversations, you trusted your life, and now every memory feels like it's been taken away. And yes, of course, you're trying to make sense of it. Of course, your brain is screaming for answers. That's when after infidelity healing starts.

Because betrayal doesn't just break trust in your partner. It breaks the trust you have in yourself. But let's be clear that hindsight you're sitting with, it's harsh. It has no context, no compassion, no mercy. You weren't stupid. You weren't blind, you weren't weak. You were in, you were building a life with someone, believing what they told you, acting on love and loyalty and the best information that you had available at the time.

And that is not something to be ashamed of. It's something to grieve because what you lost isn't just a person's fidelity, it's the version of reality you thought you could trust. And grief is exactly what that deserves. Another question I hear all the time is, you know, is natural. We, we turn things inwards upon ourselves.

Once we have been betrayed and we start to question what's wrong with me? There's this internal collapse that happens after Betrayal. It's like your mind rewrites the story to make it your fault, because if it's your fault, then maybe you could have stopped it. Maybe you could control it. Maybe there's something you can do now to fix it, and that's when the question starts circling often, like vultures, was I not attractive enough?

Did I nag too much? Maybe if I hadn't gained that extra few pounds, or if I'd been a little bit more confident, or if it maybe if I'd just been a bit easier to love. You know, it's this quiet, cruel erosion of self-worth that starts from the inside, one that happens in whispers. It doesn't scream, at least not to begin with, and it can often say, you know, if they didn't stay, I must have not been enough to stay four.

And my heart breaks every time I hear that because the truth is, you were never meant to carry the weight of somebody else's choices. Affairs don't happen because of your flaws. They happen because of disconnection. Often that can be disconnection from self, from integrity, from courage, from the willingness to face the discomfort and speak honestly rather than seek, escape, or validation elsewhere.

Somebody's betrayal is not evidence of your inadequacy. It's evidence of their misalignment. Just let that sink in. Your value wasn't missing. Their clarity was your love. It wasn't lacking. Their capacity was you are not the reason someone broke a promise. They are the reason they broke a promise, and your healing begins the moment you stop letting their behaviour define your worth.

Another question that comes up quite regularly is, I don't know what's real anymore. Betrayal doesn't just fracture your trust in them. Like I mentioned before, it fractures the trust that you have in yourself. You start reexamining everything with a microscope. Was that smile real or rehearsed? Did they mean it when they said they loved me?

Was the intimacy genuine or was it just part of the cover? Did I miss something? Was, was I naive? Am I full in this story? It's like your entire reality gets called into question, and it's not just painful, it's destabilising. Because if you can't trust the memories, if you can't trust the moments, if you can't trust your own perception, then how on earth are you supposed to trust?

Again, this is what I call the crisis beneath the crisis. It's not just about them, it's about your relationship with you. Your intuition, your instincts, your sense of safety in the world and the road back is not paved with their words or promises. It's paved with yours. You people trust not by waiting for someone else to convince you you are safe, but by listening to that small, quiet voice inside you when it says this doesn't feel right.

By choosing rest when your mind says. Keep pushing by naming your needs. When your fears say, don't cause a scene by setting a boundary, even when that part of you worries, will they still love me if I do? That's how you begin. Again, one small act of self-trust at a time, and you don't have to feel confident to begin.

You just have to be willing to hear yourself again and choose not to silence that voice this time. Because you don't rebuild trust through their behaviour. You rebuild it through yours. This next question, it has a habit of haunting those who have been betrayed. Should I stay or should I go? It circles in your mind often day and night, and no matter how many pros and con lists you can write, no matter how many conversations you have, it never quite feels settled.

And it's not because you're indecisive, but often because both options carry grief. Staying can feel like you're betraying yourself, like you're silencing the pain just to keep the structure standing. It's like you're abandoning the part of you that wanted more, more truth, more respect, more emotional safety, but leaving.

Well, that's actually not any easier. Even if you perhaps thought it would've been, that can feel like tearing down everything you've built years, decades, even shared history, family routines, memories. It's the death of a future that you imagined, uh, letting go of not just the person but the version of yourself who believed this would last.

And here's the part that most people don't talk about. Most of the time, you're not actually asking for a decision. You're asking for certainty. You're asking, how do I know I'll be okay either way? How do I trust that I'm not making a huge mistake? How do I stop second guessing myself the moment after I choose?

You're not looking for a clear yes or no. You're looking to feel safe. Safe enough to follow through, safe enough to trust your choice without drowning it in regret or self-doubt, and that's the real work. That's what we focus on, not giving you the right answer, because honestly, there is no universal right.

There's only what's true for you, and that truth gets louder the moment you stop rushing toward a conclusion and start building the kind of clarity that can actually hold your decision, whatever that may be. We don't force the answer. We create the foundation that allows the answer to appear naturally from your body, from your values, from your inner wisdom, not your fear.

Um, have you ever asked yourself or made this statement, I just want to feel normal again. Again, this is something that I hear very, very regularly. It's. And it makes complete sense because after betrayal, everything familiar becomes completely foreign. The show you used to watch together now feels tainted.

That little restaurant where you shared so many positive memories now feels like a stage kind of set from another life. Even the way they look at you, it's the same eyes, it's the same smile, but it suddenly feels like a, a mask you're trying to read through. Everything becomes a trigger, and it's not because you're being dramatic, but because your brain and body are trying to make sense of something that's shattered the safety that you once felt.

Even when your partner is doing everything right, they're being transparent, apologetic, available, you still might not feel settled because betrayal isn't repaired through behaviour alone. It's not fixed by changed passwords or shared calendars or GPS Tracking is repaired through something deeper emotional safety.

And emotional safety isn't just about what your partner does, it's about how you feel in their presence. Do you feel seen? Do you feel safe to express the hard stuff? Do you feel like you can collapse without being abandoned? And of course, if the answer is no, then no amount of doing the quote unquote right thing will bring peace.

That's why healing isn't about getting back to normal. Because, let's be honest, normal probably wasn't working. And what even is it anyway? It's about becoming somebody that you trust in a completely new way. Someone who can sit with discomfort without losing themselves. Someone who knows how to name their needs without apology.

Someone who chooses to rebuild, not because they're desperate to go back, but because. They're committed to moving forward with clarity, courage, self-respect. So no normal as you knew it, at least may not come back, but something better can take its place. Something more honest, more secure, more you Are you just being paranoid?

This is a common question that I think we all ask ourselves when we have been betrayed. It is where there's no clear confession. It's where there's no undeniable evidence. It's just a nagging feeling often that something's off and it's in those situations, the internal conflict can be overwhelming. You don't want to accuse them.

You don't want to seem insecure or irrational. You also don't want to feel like you are gonna be the one responsible for potentially ending or damaging the relationship. What if you're overreacting? You've maybe already heard things like you're imagining things, or you're just too sensitive, or can't you just let this go and so you second guess yourself.

You tell yourself to calm down, you stop being so paranoid to be the cool partner. And here's what I often say in these situations, like suspicion obviously isn't proof, but it is information. Your body knows something is off. And even if your mind can't specifically name it quite yet, that nervous system of yours, the part of you that scans for danger, it picks up on micro cues.

It remembers what safety feels like. And it's responding to it, and that response, it, it doesn't mean you're broken. It just means that you are aware, you are attuned, you're paying attention even if that attention is painful. So please hear this, you don't need permission to feel uneasy. You don't need hard evidence to justify your discomfort, and you don't need to guilt yourself for asking questions that are rooted in care, not control.

This isn't about accusing, it's about staying connected to your own inner compass, especially when somebody else's actions are trying to throw you off course. Whether your suspicions are confirmed or not, you are allowed to explore them with compassion. You're allowed to honour your experience, and you're allowed to seek clarity, not because you want to catch them out, but because you want to come back to yourself.

Okay, next up, let's say that your partner is doing therapy and they're saying all of the right things, but you still don't feel better. This is probably more common than many people realise. In fact, it often catches people off guard because from the outside things might look better. Your partner is showing up, they're apologising, they're reading the books, they're saying the right things.

They're doing therapy, ticking the boxes, and part of you wants to feel better, wants to believe it's working, wants to close the chapter and just move on. But there's something external inside that just feels off. It's still guarded, still a little unsure, and there, that's where the doubt just creeps in.

And it's not just about them, but it's about you. You know, much of what we've spoken about today is far less about your partner and far more about you as the individual. You know, you wonder, you sit there thinking, well, why can't I feel closer? Why am I holding back? Why isn't the progress that they're making enough for me?

But the truth is trust isn't rebuilt through just behaviour alone. Yes, it's one component of course, but it's not a checklist. It's not about whether they're saying the right things or doing the right things. It's about whether you feel safe. Yourself again, in and around this person and their behaviour, because safety isn't intellectual, it's physiological.

You can tell yourself you're safe all day long, but if your nervous system doesn't believe you and doesn't believe it, your heart won't either. And here's the really important part. You're not broken for feeling unsure. You're just healing. And healing doesn't happen on somebody else's timeline. Just because they're ready to be close again doesn't mean your body is, just because they want to move on doesn't mean your heart can.

And that doesn't make you slow or difficult or punishing. It just makes you honest. 'cause the goal isn't to rush back to connection. It's to build it for real. To build it in a way that your system can actually hold and not just perform and not just wear a mask. So if you are doing the work, if they're doing the work and you still feel distant, you're not failing.

You're simply being asked to go deeper to honour the pace of your body, to trust your own readiness, not theirs. That that's a deeper kind of healing, that any checklist just can't measure, and it's from this place, we can often feel like you've lost yourself. You know, I hear this. I feel like I've lost myself.

This is the one of the, this is one of the most painful parts of betrayal, and it's also one of the least talked about because after an affair, you are not just grieving the relationship you had, you're grieving the version of you who lived inside that relationship. I remember coming through my own situation and being, uh, stricken by the, the sense of grief I had for the identity shift.

It's like I wasn't the person that I thought I was, I wasn't no longer in the situation that I, that I thought I was. I didn't have the future that I had predicted in my mind. Perhaps you pictured yourself as the person who laughed without ever second guessing, or perhaps the one that felt confident without the need for reassurance.

The one who trusted their gut and believed it would lead them somewhere good. But now it feels like you've lost that. Not just because your partner portrayed you, but because in the aftermath you stop recognising yourself. The confidence, the clarity, the the lightness. It all starts to feel like someone you used to know.

And maybe the people around you just don't get it. They're saying things like, just leave or just stay, or You'll be fine. But they're not living inside the hollow space that you now occupy. Because when betrayal hits, it's not just a relationship that's shaken. It's you, your voice, it gets quieter, your thoughts become more foggy.

Your smile feels like something that you've had to perform for. Well, for as long as you can remember now it's like you've disappeared, but you're still there watching it all happen and it hurts deeply. But here's what I want you to know. That version of you, you are missing. It's not gone. It's not broken.

It's just buried. Buried under fear, buried under grief, buried under layers of what's wrong with me and why wasn't I enough? But it's still in there and you don't have to reinvent yourself to find it. You just have to come home to it little by little, through moments of honesty, through moments of stillness, through moments of choosing your own voice, even when it shakes.

This isn't about going back to who you were. It's about reclaiming the parts of you that were never lost. There were just quietened. And when you do that, you don't just recover, you rise not as a new person, but as someone who's finally fully you. There's a really strange paradox that occurs after we've been betrayed.

I want to know everything. But I'm also really afraid of knowing, and this is probably one of the most painful paradoxes that I see. You know, people say, I just want the truth. But what they're really saying is, I want the kind of truth that makes me feel safe again. And I get it. After betrayal, your world feels upside down.

Every certainty now has a question mark beside it. So naturally, your instinct is to start digging, to ask every question. To hunt for every detail to piece together the puzzle, because somehow knowing feels like control, but the truth is more information doesn't bring more clarity, at least not always. In fact, more often than not, it brings more pain because each answer opens the door for 10 more questions, and suddenly, when you're not moving forward, you're circling.

The drain of why, how, when, where, and what else haven't you told me? The pursuit of complete understanding can become its own internal prison, not because your curiosity is wrong, but because your nervous system is already overwhelmed, because the truth isn't always what heals. Safety is, and safety doesn't come from details.

It comes from grounding yourself in what you need now. So lemme say this quite clearly. You get to decide how much you know, you get to say, I want the truth, but only the pieces that help me heal, not the pieces that rip me apart. Clarity doesn't mean knowing everything. It means knowing enough to make empowered decisions.

It means knowing yourself well enough to say. That's too much for me right now, or that's a question I may have to come back to later. You don't need every detail to reclaim your peace. You need to trust that you can choose what kind of truth supports your healing. That's not avoidance. It's wisdom, because sometimes less really is more, and clarity is not about the answers specifically, it's about the alignment with them.

I'm going to touch on one more and because I think it's important, and that is often the question of, I just want somebody to tell me what to do. It makes sense. You feel lost. You feel uncertain. You feel doubtful. You're afraid alone. This one shows up all the time when we're running low on our own internal resources.

You know when you're done, you're done thinking, you're done hurting, you're done trying to make sense of something that just, just doesn't make sense anymore. You're tired. You're tired in your body, in your mind, you're tired in your soul, and in that tiredness you crave certainty, a clear answer, a right decision, a fixed path that someone can hand you so you can finally exhale.

And I get it. I really do. But here's what I tell my clients gently. Always gently, of course, you don't need somebody to tell you what to do. That's not what your soul is asking for. What you need is someone to help you clear the noise, to sit with you in the mess without trying to always fix it, to ask questions that bring you back to yourself, because underneath the panic, underneath the doubt, beneath all of that exhaustion, there's still a voice.

And it's yours. It's the one that knows what matters to you, what you value, what you can live with, and what you can't. What's calling you forward even when you're scared to answer, but you've been drowning in the chaos of betrayal in everybody else's opinions is survival mode, and that voice, the one that holds your truth, has been hard to hear.

That's what coaching offers. It's not always just about advice or a to-do list or even a guarantee. It's space reflection, clarity, purpose, intention. Not the kind that comes from somebody else's certainty, but the kind that comes when you start recognising your own. So if you have been feeling lost, not just in your relationship but in yourself, this is your invitation.

You don't need a command, you need a mirror, and that's where we begin. So if you've said or silently thought any of these things, I want you to know that you're not broken, you're not behind, you're not being dramatic, you're just being human, and you don't have to figure this out alone. This podcast, this space, the work I do.

It's all here to help you stop spinning and instead to start healing one small, clear, courageous, step at a time. Visit lifecoachluke.com to find out more. I look forward to talking to you all again next week. Take care.