28. Breaking the Cycle

After betrayal, it’s easy to get stuck in repetitive patterns like searching for answers, seeking validation, and reliving painful memories. Your brain craves predictability, so it forms emotional loops that feel familiar… but not necessarily helpful. If you’ve ever felt like you’re going in circles, asking the same questions, having the same arguments, or feeling the same frustration, this episode is for you.

In today’s episode, I dive into how after infidelity cycles are formed, why they’re so hard to break, and how they may be keeping you from the very healing you’re trying to achieve. You’ll hear real-life examples, psychological insights, and practical tools to help you recognise these patterns and take meaningful steps toward breaking free.

Key Takeaways:

• Understand how your brain creates emotional cycles, whether they serve you or not.

• Learn why seeking "just one more answer" often leads to more questions, not closure.

• Recognise self-sabotaging behaviours that feel like connection but create distance.

• Explore the difference between helpful routines and harmful relationship habits.

• Get practical strategies to disrupt unhelpful cycles and reclaim your healing journey.

💬 Reflection questions:

Are you caught in a cycle that feels safe but isn’t serving you? What pattern are you ready to break?

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 to the After The Affair podcast episode number 28 with myself Luke Shillings. As this episode is released it's a few days before Easter. There's something about Easter that stands out from many of the other dates that we have throughout the year.

Mainly because it just doesn't follow the solar calendar, it instead follows the lunar calendar which causes the date it falls on to vary each year. From memory I think it can be anything from around the 20th of March to the 20th of April, I forget the exact date. But unlike the other dates on our calendar like Christmas and our birthdays and the fact that the year is divided into 12 months, 52 weeks and each of those weeks contains seven days and each day contains 24 hours and so on and so on, they can all be sort of subdivided into these regular categories, these regular patterns that you might call cycles.

A cycle being a series of events that are regularly repeated in the same order and when I think about Easter it's kind of like it's playing by its own rules. You know it's like, you know, not bothered about your solar calendar, it's gonna do what it wants, when it wants. Now as humans we like cycles, we like things that repeat, it becomes easier.

I've spoken about it before when talking about the motivational triad. Remember the use the least amount of energy possible? When you're learning a new pattern or habit it's very tiresome, it requires a lot of effort, a lot of repetition, but over time the brain's like yeah I've got this and it takes it from that prefrontal cortex and moves it back to a deeper part of your brain known as the basal ganglia where the habit becomes automated, it becomes habitual and that is very safe for that process to be because it requires very little energy. Now it doesn't really matter whether the habit is desirable or not.

Its desirability is subjective and from the perspective of the habit-forming part of your brain it just wants to make this particular task that you keep repeating easier. So it's going to automate that process for you so you no longer have to consume your day-to-day energy in doing so. This process shows up in all areas of our lives including the physical tasks and skills we attempt to acquire but also in the way that we communicate and specifically the way that we communicate with our partners.

So when we are in a relationship for any length of time it's not that long before certain habits start to form. Maybe you have agreed to sit down and watch Netflix with a pizza on the same day each week and of course that was carved out originally because you're wanting to spend that quality time with your partner particularly if you've got kids or you have other commitments like work so you want to put something in the calendar to ensure that you do do that thing. It becomes almost ritualistic.

Now with many of these habits they have probably been formed with some positive intent like I mentioned before. Over time though it becomes routine and now the only reason you're doing it is because it's something you've always done and it's not because of the original incentive which was in this case to create that quality time. It's now just become habitual.

It's your new cycle that series of events that are regularly repeated. When you pay attention to your date night now it probably looks quite different. You now sit down on the sofa with your partner, barely say a word to each other, both sat looking at social media on your phones whilst the TV is on in the background.

You occasionally make some repetitive comments about the food or ask the other to top up your drink when they get up to go to the loo. The most exciting part of the night is when one of you says time for bed. Essentially you are just regurgitating the same script spoken the week before.

This is a time when you should question. Is this still what we want? Is this still fulfilling the objective that we had originally set out? Most people don't question that. Why should they? It's easy.

It requires very little effort. You don't have to think and thinking is actually quite hard work. It takes a lot of energy.

Now I'm not a neuroscientist but I do recall reading somewhere that the brain makes up approximately two or three percent of the mass of the body yet it consistently uses about 20% of the energy that the body has available to consume. So without noticing, over time you fall into your own kind of solar calendar or relationship calendar and then you just continue to play out that time and time and time again because it's the easiest thing to do. It requires the least amount of effort.

Unsurprisingly after infidelity these cycles don't stop. They just change. The brain's objective is still the same.

It's still wanting to automate repetitive behaviours and remember it's not paying any conscious attention to what those behaviours are or whether they are serving you. When you are faced with a situation of betrayal, the betrayed spouse is wanting to seek and understand why their partner was unfaithful. Why aren't they good enough? Why did it happen and what could they have done differently? How can they be sure it won't happen again? How can they rebuild trust? A kind of hyper-vigilance can form in their mind, constantly wanting to know the answers, constantly wanting to seek reassurance, constantly wanting to have approval or validation for the way that they're feeling and thinking.

They want their partner to understand how much they've hurt them and they keep telling themselves that they'll only feel better when their partner truly understands how much pain they're in. How much pain I'm feeling as a result of your actions. Only at that point can I let it go.

The problem is that point doesn't really exist. It's not achievable. There is no point where that can ever be.

How could you ever know what your partner is actually feeling? Because that is what would be required to truly know if what they are feeling is anything like the pain and hurt you are feeling. It's actually not possible yet the temptation is to believe that it is. Remember that it requires a lot of effort to seek this elusive piece of information, this final bit of data to the question that you have that will help you or at least you believe will help you move forward in your healing journey.

But it doesn't matter what information you get back, what answers you get to the questions you have, when you have those answers, sorry, when you have those questions answered, which has usually required a lot of effort just to get to that point, it just creates more questions and then they get piled back in at the top of this cycle which is now formed because the brain has got familiar with this pattern. If I keep telling myself that the answers lie beyond the horizon of the information that my partner is providing or hiding then if I keep heading in that direction eventually I'll reach the destination. It's a bit like trying to get to the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.

The belief that it's there is what keeps you on that journey, seeking the illusory pot of gold and this is very much the same when you're trying to get a better understanding, to rebuild trust, to maybe find out some more details about the affair and why it was that your partner was unfaithful and what it was that they saw in the affair partner that you didn't have. All of these questions that you have that you feel that if you had the answers to them you could move forward. Well maybe that just doesn't exist.

There will never be a conclusion to that and even if your partner was able to give you the information in as much detail as they possibly could, to the best of their ability, based on their own mental capacity, their memory, their recollection of that memory, their interpretation of the events as they happened and what they remember that they think they were thinking at the time. And let's assume that they could. Let's assume that they could do it just like that, you know, dead accurately.

You would still have more questions. So as the brain recognises this pattern it then starts to form this cycle, this habitual cycle, where it becomes its own positive feedback loop, self-fuelling. The following is an example from a recent client of mine.

There was a repetitive cycle that had been playing out not just for a few weeks or months but actually years. Yet this cycle hadn't been apparent to my client. At least from the overall zoomed out perspective there were certain things that happened that were repeated.

So in this particular case my client had strong feelings related to his partner's affair and these feelings were triggered by certain events. He would dwell on the issue for a length of time, this could be weeks, months and in some cases even longer, and this would often be exacerbated by reading articles or online forums and Facebook groups, maybe watching YouTube videos, but in general consuming content that would act as a confirmation bias or at the very least offer some validation to support how he was feeling. He'd want to discuss it with his wife, in part for some emotional intimacy and oftentimes comfort, but this usually ended up in tense exchanges which led to frustration and misunderstanding.

This created a disconnect, a breakdown in communication. It would often lead to him literally walking out of the situation and they would part company for a period of time. This could sometimes just be for a few minutes, sometimes it could be a few hours, sometimes it could be spending a couple of nights apart.

This appeared at first to be the end of the cycle but that wasn't the case. After the fallout and the time apart came the last part of the cycle which in this case would usually involve reconnecting, some deeper discussion around the original topic, which was often uncomfortable but usually it led to a sense that he better understood his wife and gained a little more insight into the original question or topic that he'd originally been trying to seek answers for. In the moment this felt good, the cycle was creating a short-term reward, but the problem was as he came out of it, as the dust settled, he would now have more questions and the cycle would then repeat over and over again.

Still he'd feel there was something missing, even though he'd got the answers he was originally seeking, he still didn't feel fulfilled, which then created the beginning of the next cycle. However, there was more and more damage being done to the relationship because every time he reacted to the trigger it would lead to a disagreement, often an argument, and then a physical separation. Because of this he would then suppress the urge to speak about it.

He believed that the relationship would stay stable as long as he avoided talking about the affair or saying anything that could potentially make his wife feel devalued or misunderstood. When we have a situation like this, the brain recognises the pattern, it recognises the habit, and then the cycle starts again. The trigger occurs, the urge to react is resisted, this leads to over-dwelling on the situation for an extended period of time.

This is then eventually released in the form of questioning, in this case, and probably not in a way that he'd envisaged, probably not in a way that was aligned with his values. This was frustrating, which led to tense exchanges, which then led to disconnection, and they would therefore part ways for a period of time, finally leading to a reconciliation of sorts, and actually attaining this connection that he'd been seeking, this deeper conversation and answers to questions, but ultimately still left the overall cycle feeling unfulfilled, and now with more questions. Once we had recognised this cycle and how it's playing out, and then he was able to use this framework and say, oh yeah, I've seen this happen in this situation, and this situation, and this situation, and he could look back over a period of time and recognise how many times this pattern had played out in his relationship, and what damage maybe it potentially been doing, because it was never actually fixing the problem.

It was still essentially just creating another cycle. So to get to the bottom of it, we had to look at what it was that was driving this cycle in the first place. In this case, there was a belief that by just getting this final answer, this one last bit of information, then everything would be okay.

I could then move forward, I could then start healing, but of course every time he went through this cycle and gained a bit more information, and gained some answers, all it did was create more questions, which then just refuelled the cycle, and it continued. Not really realising for all this time, he'd actually been self-sabotaging his relationship in terms of trying to rebuild it, and this was ultimately creating the exact opposite of what it was he wanted. So let's try and wrap this all together.

We have concluded that there are patterns and cycles of which we as humans like to conform to, because it's easier, because it's the way our brains work. It's something that we can slot our lives into, and we can work without any excessive effort. We, probably unknowingly in most cases, create some of these cycles ourselves.

What I want to offer is, be more like Easter. Easter doesn't stick to the same pattern. It is a metaphorical way of saying, look, just because this is how things have always been, doesn't mean that this is how they always need to be.

Recognise the patterns within your relationship that aren't serving you, that aren't getting you to where you need. Imagine that your current routine, your current cycle, is equivalent to the solar calendar. What I'm suggesting is that, if that's working for you, great.

But if it's not, then maybe look at a different calendar. Look at the lunar one. Maybe find something completely different, and mix things up.

Because one thing is certain, when you keep doing the same thing, you will get the same results. And if that's not moving you in a direction that you want, then it's time to make a change. If you've been listening today, and you recognise anything in yourself about the topics that I've been talking about, the situations, but you still feel stuck, then let's talk.

Reach out directly. You can email me at luke at lifecoachluke.com or you can book a free 30-minute chat just to explore your situation and gain some clarity. I will help you see your situation in a different light.

Let me help you move you in a direction that you want. Book your call today at lifecoachluke.com. That's everything for today. I will talk to you all next week.