141. I Know Why They Cheated - It Still Hurts Though

Understanding why someone betrayed you can be helpful. It can explain what happened. It can offer context. It can even soften the sting, temporarily.

But it doesn’t erase the pain.

In this episode, I unpack the emotional tug-of-war between empathy and accountability after infidelity. I explore how understanding your partner’s internal struggles, their fears, avoidance, or disconnection doesn’t mean you're condoning their choices. It simply means you're starting to see the full picture.

You’ll learn how empathy and boundaries can exist side-by-side, and why making sense of the betrayal is only one part of the healing process.

Key Takeaways:

• Empathy does not equal agreement; you can understand your partner without excusing their behaviour.

• Betrayal often stems from fear or disconnection, not just desire or malice.

• The pain doesn’t vanish just because you understand “why” it happened, and that pain still matters.

• You can hold compassion and boundaries at the same time.

• Real healing comes when you stop trying to make it all make sense and start learning how to sit with what is.

💬 Reflection Question:

Have you struggled with the tension between understanding and hurt?

🗣️ And if you want guided support navigating that emotional minefield, join the waitlist for our Chaos to Clarity group coaching program - doors are opening soon.

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, welcome back. It's the After the Airfare podcast. I'm your host, Luke Shillings, and you are listening to episode number 141. What if the thing that helps you move forward is the very thing that you've been resisting? What if empathy isn't letting them off The hook and certainty isn't What's keeping you safe?

After betrayal, our minds chase just one thing, and it's usually control. We want answers, clarity, reassurance, and we definitely don't want to feel empathy for the person who caused the pain, but here's an uncomfortable truth. Empathy and accountability aren't opposites and certainty. It might just be the illusion that's keeping you stuck.

Understanding isn't agreement. So let's start here because it's one of the hardest and most misunderstood parts of healing after betrayal. When Tom, not his real name, sat across from me during a recent coaching session. He said, I can understand how she ended up there, but I still don't agree with it. His face was clearly conflicted.

He wasn't looking for justification, he wasn't making excuses. He was trying to make sense of something that seemed incomprehensible to him. And maybe you know that feeling too. Maybe you started to glimpse the why behind the betrayal, not just the what. You can see the cracks in the foundation. The miscommunications, the loneliness, the avoidance, the unresolved pain that was never voiced, or the pain they never dealt with from their own past.

And even as you connect those dots, a part of you feels like you are portraying yourself for even trying to understand it. Because we've been taught something really quite binary that empathy is dangerous, that if you understand someone's reasoning. You're somehow erasing the harm, but I want to offer you this understanding is not agreement.

You can see how they got there and still hold them accountable for the harm you can hold compassion for the human in them and still protect the healing in you. Empathy doesn't mean you're soft, it just means you're awake. So, why they cheat? The deeper truth that I've seen again and again in coaching work is affairs rarely come from a single moment of recklessness.

They usually come from a thousand tiny choices that weren't addressed. Moments of disconnection needs left, unspoken resentments left to fester. Stories they told themselves to avoid the truth, and over time fear, it becomes the driver is a fear of un vulnerability, a fear of emotional rejection, a fear of losing control, or maybe a fear of being seen too clearly so they reach for something.

Or in some cases, someone that offers escape. Escape from the self they've been avoiding. This is not to excuse anything. This is not to justify or diminish or diminish the pain. This is to see it clearly for what it is. Because if all we do is label it as evil or selfish or broken, we kind of miss the point.

We also miss the deeper work. We miss the chance to reclaim our own power because what I know is this, when you can say, I see how they got there. It still wasn't. Okay. That's not weakness. That's integration. That's when you stop outsourcing your healing to their remorse and start rebuilding it from your own insight instead.

'cause empathy doesn't cancel pain. Tom said something that hit me right in the chest. He said, I just want to know it won't happen again. And of course if you've been betrayed, you probably know that longing. It's not just about wanting the truth, it's about wanting guarantees, wanting to know that you are safe now, wanting someone to look you in the eye and promise you that the pain is over, that the worst is behind you, that you can exhale.

Because here's what portrayal does. It rips away not just the trust that you have in your partner, but it's the trust you have in your own reality. And so your brain starts scanning, looking for clues, grasping for answers, trying to make sure it'll never happen again. And that's not because you are obsessive, it's because you're traumatised.

Your brain is doing its job. It's working just fine. It's trying to protect you from future pain, but the hard truth is this certainty is an illusion. You can stay hypervigilant. You could monitor everything that they say, every message they send, every emotion they express, put trackers on their vehicles or on their phones.

But even then, you won't find peace because peace doesn't come from control. It comes from trusting yourself to how handle what happens irrespective of that control. Let's imagine for a moment that you're standing on a stage, perhaps you're waiting to give a speech. You want certainty that the audience will like you, love you, even you want to know that you won't mess up.

But no matter how much you rehearse, you can't guarantee the outcome. The real work is learning how to show up anyway to stand in that moment, heart pounding, and trust yourself to keep breathing. That's the difference between control and resilience. Betrayal makes us crave control, but healing invites us to build resilience.

So instead of asking, how do I stop this from happening again? Instead ask, who do I need to become to trust myself again no matter what happens? Because the goal isn't to eliminate all risk. The goal is to stop living like your one heartbreak away from collapse. Here's something I've seen over and over again in sessions, especially with people who've been betrayed.

The moment you stop trusting your partner. You often stop trusting yourself too. You start questioning your instincts. You replay old conversations. You filter every single word, every silence through this new lens of fear. And before you know it, you're not just analysing them, you're actually pulling away.

Emotionally, physically, energetically, and the the crazy thing is that you might not even realise you're doing it. You just feel, I dunno, off like you're sleepwalking through conversations like you're holding your breath, waiting for them to prove you wrong or confirm your worst fear. One of the tools that I've shared many times during this podcast is the self-coaching model.

You know, and just as a quick reminder to break it down simply is the idea that your thoughts create your feelings. Your feelings drive your actions and your actions shape your results. So let's just use a real world example. Let's say your thought is they should be doing more to reassure me that thought creates a feeling of uncertainty.

And when you feel uncertain, well, what do you do? Maybe you withdraw. Maybe you go quiet. Maybe you start testing them, seeing how long it takes for them to notice your mood shift and then the result, well, you now feel more distant. You are not showing up in the way that you had hoped and neither are they, of course.

And you end up feeling even less safe than when you started. This could be considered a kind of reassurance trap. You're chasing reassurance, but the way you are currently seeking it is probably creating more of the disconnection that you're actually trying to heal from. It's not your fault. It's what your brains learn to do to survive.

But survival is not the same as connection. And when you live in survival mode long enough, your nervous system just forgets how to receive love 'cause it's always bracing for loss. So what's the alternative? It's not pretending that everything's fine. It's not stuffing down your need for safety. It's noticing the pattern and choosing a new response once.

That's one that's grounded in self-trust, not fear. One that says, I might still be scared, but I'm not going to abandon myself in this. That's where the healing can begin. Not in knowing exactly what your partner is going to do, but in learning how you want to show up regardless of their behaviour. So if this cycle of disconnection keeps us stuck, then what actually gets us out?

What helps us feel safe again, not just in the relationship, but inside ourselves, within our own skin, because let's be honest, this isn't just about them. It's about the, the noise, the whispers in your head when they leave the room. It's that tightness in your chest when they say, I love you, and some part of you will still wonder if they really mean it.

This is where that work really begins, and it's not flashy. It's not about getting all the answers. It's about learning how to be with the feelings that you've spent a lifetime. Avoiding feelings like fear, shame, rage. Grief, not to wallow in them, but to meet them, to say, I see you. You don't get to drive the car, but you're allowed to be here.

Imagine your emotions are like a, a guest in a house. You don't have to give them the master bedroom, but locking them in the basement, that's when the real damage happens. Why you might ask? Well, because buried emotions don't die. They leak out in sideways comments, emotional shutdowns and patterns that sabotage the very connection that you are trying to rebuild.

So what does internal safety actually look like? Well, it's pausing. Before you react, it's asking yourself, what do I need right now? Instead of, what are they thinking? It's perhaps journaling or performing thought downloads of your fears instead of firing off that late night message impulsively, it's learning to tell the difference between a trigger and a truth, and maybe most powerfully it's using tools like ladder thoughts to gradually move from helplessness to agency.

What is a ladder thought? It's a small, believable bridge between where you are and where you want to be. You don't go from, I'll never trust anyone again to everything is fine, but you can go from. I feel unsafe and that's okay to, I'm learning to notice my triggers or to I can feel unsure and still take care of myself.

Each of those thoughts becomes like a rung on the ladder and with every step, your nervous system learns something new. I don't need certainty to be okay. I just need to stay with myself through the uncertainty. That's the shift from outsourcing your safety to becoming the person who knows how to hold it, and nobody, no one can take that from you once it's yours.

So if you are sitting in a mess right now, perhaps you're grappling with fear, frustration, maybe even hopelessness, please hear this. There is nothing wrong with you, not for wanting reassurance, not for feeling afraid, not for swinging. Between anger and empathy, love loss, grief, longing. This is not a linear path, and healing doesn't come from forcing yourself to move on.

It comes from learning how to stay with yourself when everything feels uncertain. It comes from recognising that your value was never up for negotiation in the first place. And it comes from choosing again and again every day, not to abandon the parts of you that were perhaps never truly seen before.

You don't have to get it perfect. You don't have to be strong all of the time. You just have to be open, gentle, curious, because the version of you that rises from this. It won't be the same. That person, they'll be wiser, more grounded, and far more connected to what matters most you. If you want to find out more, please visit life coach luke.com, book a free discovery call, and we can work out together how to help you become unstuck.

In the meantime, have an amazing week and I'll talk to you all again very soon.