176. Pacing: Why Rushing Your Healing Slows It Down

When you’ve been betrayed, urgency can feel like your only anchor. You want clarity, resolution, and peace, now. But the pressure to move quickly isn’t always coming from your wisdom. It’s often driven by fear. The fear of staying stuck, the fear of being left behind, the fear that if you don’t “fix” it fast, it’ll all fall apart.

In this episode, I dive into the misunderstood concept of pacing in infidelity recovery. I’ll walk you through why slowing down is not weakness, but one of the most powerful acts of self-trust you can make. You’ll learn how rushing can sabotage your healing and how to create a rhythm that supports deep, sustainable transformation.

Key Takeaways:

• Urgency is often fear in disguise. It can feel like intuition, but it usually stems from a disrupted sense of safety rather than clarity.

• Rushed healing may look productive on the outside, but inside, nothing is integrating or stabilising.

• True pacing means moving at the speed your nervous system can absorb, not just tolerate, creating real emotional progress.

• Consistency beats intensity. Slow, steady effort builds durable trust in yourself, unlike forced decisions or premature forgiveness.

• Pacing is an act of self-respect. Every time you delay a pressured choice, you’re saying: “I trust myself to move when I’m ready.”

💬 Reflection Questions:

Do you feel like you’re racing to feel better, make decisions, or "get over it"?

Take a moment to reflect: What would it mean to trust your pace instead of fearing your progress?

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 Affair podcast I'm your host Luke Shillings and today you're listening to episode number 176. Following on a little bit from last week's episode where I would been talking about essentialism and really the overall concept being do less.

I mean that's the simple way of putting it. Often when we're trying to heal we try to add more and more and more things. There must be a better way, there must be a new technique, there must be a different podcast episode or a different book or a different concept or a different tool but actually all of that is just adding more noise.

Or maybe it's not even any of those things. Maybe it's just a case that you are asking more questions wanting to find out more. You'll feel safe when you know everything but of course that also doesn't tend to help.

And in actual case it's the reduction of all of those things whether that be the questions or the tools or the techniques or the methods or the books or the podcasts or whatever it is that feels like you're making progress. It's actually the reduction of those things and the isolating the ones that are most important, most essential to actually help you move forward. Now that's an important part of the process and in fact it's something that's hugely important in life full stop.

Making sense or choosing what it is that you actually want and need from life. Today I want to talk about how we pace those things because obviously we can't actually do even if we do highlight the things that we want we can't do them all at once. And of course when it comes to healing and moving through betrayal the same is true.

It's the same story. So let's talk about it. One of the things that often drives a lot of the suffering is speed.

More specifically it's the pressure to move forward quickly. Maybe it's just we want to feel better, to know, to decide, to resolve. So pacing and why slowing down is often the most skilful possible thing that you can do is a pretty important thing to consider on your journey.

After betrayal many people feel a uncomfortable urgency that's quite difficult to explain. It's not always loud and dramatic. Often it sounds really reasonable.

I just need clarity. I don't want to waste time. I should know where this is going by now.

But underneath that is this deeper fear. If I don't act soon something bad is going to happen. That fear doesn't mean you're weak by the way.

It means your sense of safety has just been disrupted. When trust collapses time feels dangerous. Uncertainty feels somewhat, sorry that's not even a word.

Uncertainty feels intolerable. Stillness feels like risk. So the nervous system does pretty much exactly what it's designed to do.

It pushes for movement. But movement is not the same as progress. Pacing can be misunderstood.

It's not avoidance, it's not indecision and it's definitely not passivity. Pacing means moving at a speed your system can integrate, not just endure. So just before we go further into this, as somebody who runs I remember learning a pretty painful lesson regarding pacing.

When I first started running I wanted to run as quickly as I could for as long as I could. And what I learned very quickly was that my body could not match my brain's desire to achieve said pace and speed over a given distance. This meant that in those moments it felt like giving up was the best option because this is too hard, I'm not like other people, I'm not built for running etc etc.

A whole list of internal reasons as to why I should not continue this activity, this habit. But for reasons I could go into at a different time I chose not to allow that internal narrative to dictate my path and continued running anyway. And quickly I learned that if I was able to adjust my pace according to the journey, according to the distance that I was running, then I could achieve could achieve way more than I thought I was capable of, just by distributing my energy levels, by being able to expend that energy evenly over an extended period of time.

This probably became most valuable and most true to me during mid to late 2019 when I embarked on a 12-hour overnight run. This was a endurance or ultramarathon event where we ran backwards and forwards across the Humber Bridge in the UK. Leading up to it I became injured, which is nothing new if you know anything about my running journey, and I had this difficult decision to make as to whether I was going to continue or not on that event.

Anyway I decided to but I was going to try and pace myself. That meant running for a certain amount of time and then walking for a certain amount of time. I forget the exact details now.

Something like running for six minutes, walking for two minutes, something like that, and then just repeat that for as long as I could. I did that successfully for the first probably one to two, maybe two hours nearly, just short of two hours, and then the injury started to flare up and I couldn't go, or at least I couldn't continue to run. So I tried to make some adjustments to my pace to try and buy a bit more time, and that got me a little bit further, but ultimately it did come to a point where I couldn't continue to run.

Now I'd calculated by this point that if I continued walking at as essentially as quick a rate as I felt comfortable or capable of doing at the time, then I could average one lap, which was essentially across the bridge and back again a four mile, roughly a four mile loop. I could do one of those per hour if I was to maintain this pace, and then with that quickly sort of calculated in my mind what that would look like if I was to continue this for the remaining ten hours. This of course was not in my original plan.

It was a complete shock and adjustment to the system. I had never ever in my life walked for that length of time continuously, and I didn't know what to expect from it. But I set out with a pace in mind and I just focused on that, and ultimately, long story short, that is essentially what happened.

I then walked consistently for ten hours and I was able to cover a grand total of, I think, 52 miles, which was again an incredible achievement despite the impacts it had on my body afterwards. But my point is, by being clear about what my goal was and then pacing myself accordingly, I was able to achieve something that my brain would be pretty willing to opt out of very, very early on. So, bringing this back to the context of betrayal and thinking about how pacing really does mean moving at a speed that your system can integrate, because it's not just about enduring it.

There's a huge difference between tolerating something and actually processing it. Rushed healing often looks productive. They can be conversations, decisions, actions, but internally nothing's landing, nothing's settling, nothing is stabilising, whereas paced healing is quieter.

It doesn't create dramatic shifts, but it builds durable ones. When betrayal happens, something fundamental breaks. Predictability.

And predictability is one of the nervous system's primary sources of safety. Without it, the system goes looking for substitutes, answers, explanations, decisions, commitments. Not because any of those things heal, but because they create the illusion of control.

Speed starts to feel like certainty. Action starts to feel like safety. This is why people often say, I just need to decide, then I'll feel better.

But decisions made under pressure rarely create any sense of relief. They create temporary quiet, but then it's usually followed by doubt. One of the most confusing parts of this process is that urgency can feel like intuition.

It can feel clear, decisive, compelling, but intuition has a different quality. It's calm, grounded, non-urgent. Urgency says, now or never.

Intuition says, this can wait until I'm steady. After betrayal, learning the difference really does matter, because urgency often comes from fear, not wisdom. When healing outpaces your natural integration, a few things tend to happen.

People tend to make decisions that they later reverse. They force forgiveness that really doesn't hold, doing it just because that's what they think they should do. They have conversations that aren't resourced for, so sometimes it can be being able to expose a difficult conversation, which then causes an emotional response for which then they can't handle, so the conversation itself becomes the problem.

But that's not true. It's the response to the conversation that's the challenge. Then maybe that leads to some kind of burnout, particularly emotionally, even though they're doing all the right things.

So what do they do? They conclude something, and it's usually that something must be wrong with me. Usually though, nothing is wrong. The pace was.

Healing that keeps unravelling isn't necessarily flawed, it's just usually rushed. For people who are used to functioning well, slowing down can feel really quite dangerous. There's often this quiet belief, if I pause, I'll lose momentum.

If I don't push through, I'll get stuck. But healing isn't a performance. It's a process of recalibration.

Slowing down doesn't stall healing, it creates the conditions for it. Pacing isn't abstract. It shows up as spacing difficult conversations instead of stacking them, letting behaviour stabilise before drawing conclusions, postponing decisions without avoiding them, limiting exposure to triggers when your system is already flooded, choosing consistency over intensity.

It's active restraint, not avoidance. It's saying I will move, but not at the cost of my stability. Something really quite important when we think about pacing as an act of self-trust.

Pacing isn't about your partner, it's about your relationship with yourself. Every time that you slow down, instead of forcing clarity, you're sending yourself a message. I don't need to rush to be okay.

I trust myself to respond when the time is right. That's how self-trust rebuilds, not through certainty, but through self-respect. Healing doesn't respond well to pressure, it responds to safety, to consistency, to space.

You don't heal by outrunning uncertainty, you heal by learning how to stay with yourself inside it. And pacing is exactly how you do that. So if you feel like you're behind, or maybe you feel like it's taking too long, or not moving fast enough, pause.

That urgency isn't a deadline, it's a signal. You don't need to decide faster, you need to feel safer while deciding. And that happens at the speed of trust, not fear.

If you're feeling pressure to rush decisions, or just to be better by now, support can help you really slow that process down without stalling it. In my practise with my one-to-one coaching clients, I help them hold pace, stabilise and rebuild trust in themselves before making those life-altering choices. If you want to find out what that looks like, come visit me at LifeCoachLuke.com or over on Instagram at MyLifeCoachLuke.

Feel free to reach out directly, drop me a DM or an email, I read every message that comes my way. You don't need more urgency, you need a steadier rhythm. Alright, I'll talk to you all next week.

Take care.