165. I'm Doing Therapy… So Why Am I Still Stuck?

After infidelity, therapy often becomes the first refuge, a safe space to feel heard, understood, and grounded. But what happens when you’ve done the work, gained the insight… and still feel stuck? You can explain the pain, the patterns, the why, but the how of moving forward remains just out of reach.

In this episode of After the Affair, I explore why therapy might not be “enough” when it comes to true healing. I unpack the vital difference between understanding and transformation, and how coaching bridges that frustrating gap between awareness and action.

If you’re smart, self-aware, and still not feeling better, this one’s for you.

Key Takeaways:

• Why therapy stabilises, but often doesn’t mobilise, after betrayal

• How trauma responses (fight, flight, freeze, fawn) keep you emotionally stuck

• The six key gaps coaching fills when therapy hits its limits

• How to recognise if you're ready for movement, not just survival

• Why insight is only the first half of healing, and how to reclaim your agency

💬 Reflection Question:

Have you found yourself saying, “I know what’s happening, but I just can’t move on”?

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 you're listening to the After The Affair podcast I'm your host Luke Shillings and today this is episode number 165. Over the years I've noticed a pattern. People come to me after weeks sometimes months of therapy and they almost always say the same thing.

Therapy stabilised me but it didn't move me. I understand what happened I just don't know what to do with it. I needed someone who could explain what was happening in my head and what to do next.

Now before we go any further let me be incredibly clear. Therapy can be a vital component in the aftermath of betrayal. It offers safety, grounding, emotional containment and support that coaching is not designed to replace.

But therapy and coaching serve different purposes and when you combine them that's where transformation can really really grow. Today I want to talk to you about why you might still not feel better even after therapy and how coaching can fill the gap between understanding and moving forward. When betrayal hits your entire nervous system is thrown into chaos.

You're no longer dealing with a relationship problem you're now dealing with a physiological trauma response. Your brain detects betrayal as danger, a threat to your safety, your identity, your belonging, your future. It reacts in the same way it would to a physical threat.

Fight, flight, freeze, fawn. Your body floods with cortisol. Your sleep becomes fragmented.

Your thoughts spiral into worst-case scenarios. Your emotions they fluctuate from numbness to rage to grief all within a matter of minutes. This is dysregulation and it makes sense that therapy is often the first port of call because therapy helps you stabilise your emotions, process grief, reduce acute distress, make sense of the shock, feel supported rather than alone.

Therapy can be essential for helping you survive the impact but survival and forward movement are not the same thing. There comes a point, usually a few weeks or even a few months into therapy, where you can suddenly articulate everything better. You can explain the affair, you can explain your triggers, you can explain your attachment style, maybe you can explain your childhood, maybe you can explain patterns or you can understand why it hurts but you're still hurting.

You understand why you're stuck but you're still stuck. You understand why you react but yet you're still reacting. And this can feel incredibly frustrating because insight without direction can actually make you feel worse.

I know exactly what's happening so why can't I change it? This is where many people start to believe something is wrong with them but nothing is wrong with you. You simply need a different tool at a different phase of healing. Therapy helps you understand your internal world.

Coaching helps you navigate your external world. Therapy helps you name your emotions. Coaching helps you respond to your emotions.

Therapy gives you awareness. Coaching gives you agency. You need both just not in the same way at the same time.

Imagine this, you've fallen into a deep hole. It's dark, cold, disorienting and you can't see a way out. You're scared, you're exhausted and every attempt to climb just seems to send you sliding back down again.

Then in the corner you spot a rope. You didn't quite know how to use it at first but you grab hold of it because it's the only thing within reach and slowly, with guidance, with support, with practise, you learn how to use that rope. You manage to hook it onto something solid above you.

You start climbing, hand over hand, breath by breath and eventually you pull yourself out of the hole. Now here's the important part. Once you're standing at the top the rope isn't useful anymore.

It did its job, it got you out, it kept you alive but it can't tell you where to go next. In fact the only way the rope becomes useful again is if you climb back down into the hole, the very place you've just escaped. That's how I see the relationship between therapy and coaching.

Therapy is the rope. It stabilises you when you're drowning in shock. It helps you process the grief, the fear, the trauma.

It gives you something to hold on to when the world has collapsed beneath you. But once you're out of the hole, once you're stable, you're breathing, coping, you don't need a rope anymore. You need tools.

Tools for rebuilding, for choosing, for navigating, for moving forward. Coaching is the toolkit waiting for you at the top. It doesn't pull you out of the darkness.

Therapy already did that. Coaching helps you look around at the landscape that you've just emerged into and ask, right, where do I want to go now? Who do I want to become? How do I move with confidence, not fear? And if you keep relying solely on the rope, you'll only ever go back into the hole, back into crisis, back into analysis, back into stabilisation. The rope, it saves you.

The tools, they change you. Both are essential. They just serve different parts of the journey.

So what does coaching add that therapy doesn't always provide? Let me walk you through six of the most common gaps that my clients arrive with. Number one, they understand the pain but not the patterns. Coaching helps uncover the stories driving your reactions and then teaches you how to change them.

Number two, they don't know how to get out of emotional loops. Coaching teaches tools to regulate your nervous system, reduce reactivity, separate thoughts from facts, challenge catastrophising, build emotional authority. Three, they feel stuck between decisions.

Therapy can explore why that decision is painful. Coaching helps you actually make it and feel confident doing so. Four, they've lost trust in themselves.

Coaching is designed to rebuild self-trust through action, reflection and personal accountability. Five, they don't know how to communicate their needs. Coaching can provide scripts, frameworks and strategies for real conversations that change the dynamic in the relationship.

And six, they want to move forward, not just processing. Therapy stabilises. Coaching mobilises.

You need both to fully heal. Forward movement isn't pretending you're okay or trying to rush the healing or forcing forgiveness, deciding quickly or just being positive all the time. Forward movement is subtle and it can be easy to miss.

It actually looks like one fewer panic spirals this week or not checking your phone even though you wanted to. Maybe it's sleeping an hour longer, feeling a moment of calm, responding instead of reacting, choosing a boundary, asking for what you need, feeling proud of something again. Movement is not measured in leaps, it's measured in micro shifts.

This is why coaching works so well. It helps you see the movement you didn't realise you were making and builds momentum gradually and sustainably. This might be the most important section of the episode.

How to know if you're ready to rebuild. How do you know if you're ready for forward movement, whether that's reconciliation, separation or deeper self-healing. Here are the signs.

You're no longer drowning. You're now treading water. You're stable enough to try new tools without being overwhelmed.

You want clarity, not just comfort. You're tired of repeating the same old conversations in your head. You're aware of your patterns but frustrated that you can't change them.

You're ready to reclaim agency even if you're scared. These are the exact clients who thrive in coaching. People who want to move from what happened to me to what do I do next.

People who want meaning, direction, intentionality. People who are smart, reflective, emotionally aware but stuck. If therapy helps you stabilise but you still feel stuck, you're not alone and you are not broken.

Insight is the first half of healing. Movement is the second. Therapy shines a light on the room.

Coaching helps you walk through it and you deserve both. Not because you're weak but because what you've been through requires more than one kind of support. You don't have to choose between understanding and transformation.

You can have both. You deserve both. If this episode made something click, if you realise that you do understand what happened but you're struggling to move, then coaching might be your next step.

Inside the After the Affair Collective and through one-on-one coaching I help people take the insight they've gained from therapy and turn it into clarity, direction and confidence. If you're ready for that next step or even just curious you can explore everything at LifeCoachLuke.com or reach out directly and we'll figure out what the right path is for you. You don't have to choose between feeling supported and moving forward.

You can have both and you deserve both. So until next time, take care of yourself. I'll talk to you soon.