32. Through the Lens of Negativity

When betrayal strikes, it’s easy to view every word, action, and gesture through a lens of negativity. Suddenly, even small misunderstandings feel like proof that your partner doesn’t care. Over time, this filter of mistrust can turn even neutral or positive moments into fuel for resentment.

In this episode, I explore how negative interpretations shape our experiences after infidelity, why we cling to painful narratives, and how to shift towards compassion and clarity. You’ll discover practical ways to question your assumptions, release resentment, and rebuild a healthier perspective without losing yourself in the process.

Key Takeaways:

• Why one negative event can outweigh multiple positive experiences in relationships.

• How repeated judgments create emotional distance and fuel contempt.

• The role of our own narratives in shaping mistrust and resentment.

• Practical ways to challenge assumptions and empty your “evidence pot.”

• How curiosity and compassion open the door to healing and relationship clarity.

💬 Reflection question:

Have you ever caught yourself replaying one painful moment over and over, letting negativity in a relationship colour everything else?

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 episode number 32 of the After The Affair podcast with myself Luke Shillings. Okay I'm going to share a story of mine from when I was a teenager.

It was Valentine's Day, I believe it was 1994. There was a girl in the same school year as me that I fancied and I wanted to send her a Valentine's card. Now to my knowledge Valentine's cards or Valentine's in general, unless you were in a relationship with a person, was an opportunity to make your feelings, your interest, let's say, known to the other person.

And this could be done through the safety of anonymity. It could be done by just seeing the response maybe on somebody's face without having to face that direct rejection. So I was in this situation, I was a young teenage boy, hormones, going through puberty, all the things, and I decided that I was going to send a card.

Now normally I think people would maybe disguise their handwriting in a hope that it wouldn't be recognised. I didn't feel confident in that. I didn't want to leave that as a possibility and bearing in mind this was you know early to mid 90s so although obviously we did have computers and things they weren't as easily and readily accessible and available and I'm not even sure that we had a printer at home at the time, I can't remember, no probably not.

So I chose to take a different approach. I decided that to keep my anonymity safe I would write the message using cut-out letters and words from magazines and newspapers. I don't know why I thought this was a good idea but it seemed at the time to be very logical, very rational, perfect way to remain anonymous and still get the message to this girl in question.

As it happened on reflection this may have looked like a card from a serial killer or a stalker and would have perhaps not given off quite the message that I had intended. When the card was received it did create a little bit of a stir amongst a small group of people. Luckily it didn't go too far.

I think I was more afraid of what other people might think if I was rejected than what I would have felt had I been rejected like in isolation. The fact that rejection was the top of my concerns says a lot about, I think, me and I think also says a lot about men in general. We often feel very afraid of rejection.

It's quite an unpleasant experience and I recognise that this is something that both men and women experience of course but it was more just to highlight the context of sometimes we do things that don't seem rational because they're driven by some deeper fear, some deeper belief about what that would mean about us, what people would think, how they would judge us based on our actions and our behaviour. And I think that this demonstrates an important example of how we are so bothered about what other people think. We sort of get in our own heads about how somebody is interpreting what we've done which, interesting enough, really is just our own interpretation of what we've done because we don't know what the other person is thinking.

Even if they act in a particular way we can't be absolutely certain of their motivations and their intent. We can only use what our interpretation of that is for us and what that means for us. So it's like having this expectation about how somebody should behave, what somebody should think, what you expect them to think and whether they do or not is almost irrelevant.

Just the fact that you're coming from that place leaves you in a very vulnerable state of being almost victim to your own expectations. It's bad enough when we get ourselves in situations where we feel responsible because of how other people are reacting but often we don't even let it get that far. We have an internal battle ourselves long before it gets out of our mind and into the outer world before it can actually be available to judge.

So think about my my mindset for example around creating a card in the fashion that I did. At that point nobody knew anything. I would have been sat at home with my scissors and my Pritt stick and who knows what, you know, constructing this this card all with the imagined idea of what I thought people would think should they find out that it was actually from me.

And in this case completely devoiding, completely escaping the reality of the purpose of the actual card in the first place. Which was to let this person know that I was interested that and to ultimately I suppose begin in some way a potential relationship of some description. You know I'm not really sure exactly what that looked like but there was that was the the core intent but I was so afraid of what what judgement would be made and what that would mean about me as a person and how I could potentially expose myself to humiliation and what it means to be humiliated.

What it means to be ostracised from the group. You know thinking back to those primal drivers that we have as human beings. What that feels like is scary as hell and I think just acknowledging that it's scary is a great step.

It's a great awareness. It's much like the episode I spoke in last week talking about self-awareness. It's that self-reflection.

It's looking back and understanding why I did something in that particular moment and what it was that was driving me and actually releasing the judgement I had on myself in the moment and forgiving myself and for understanding that actually with everything that I knew at the time with everything that I felt at the time if I was to go back to that place right now it would I would probably do exactly the same thing because how could I know otherwise if I genuinely believed that that's what it was. That was exactly what I was trying to achieve. Anyway okay so that's enough about me and my failed Valentine's story attempt.

The reason I bring this up is because of how people look not only at themselves but also others through a lens of negativity. We make assessments and judgments about people's actions and their behaviours yet we very rarely look at what it was that was driving those actions and behaviours. We simply complete our own narrative.

Let me ask you to go back to a time if you can recall when a partner of yours either in a current relationship or in a previous relationship did something that you interpreted as having a very negative intent like they you believed that they maybe they didn't care about you. How could they care about you if that's the way that they've acted and maybe you thought that they were just selfish and were not considerate of your thoughts and feelings and your role within the relationship. And then you use that distinct negative imprint that that's left on your mind bearing in mind that it can require five positive events to outweigh the damage done by one negative event.

And I think this shows up in various areas in life. I was in hospitality for 16 years. I used to own my own pub, restaurant and bed and breakfast.

And this is something that we saw very regularly amongst customers. They would potentially have lots and lots of good experiences you know where they'd enjoyed their food, there'd be a nice social environment, all of the things that you expect to gain when you come out for an evening out with your friends and family. And there would be repeat customers and then they would have one bad experience.

Maybe there was some problem with the food, maybe there was a rowdy table next door, maybe one of the staff members was having a bad day and probably didn't deal with them in the most professional way. Something led to them feeling like this experience was not what they had either come to expect or had decided to expect. And this one negative experience could be enough for them to just vote with their feet.

They would just not come back, despite all of the good things that had come before. So a negative experience can have a huge impact on how we then view things going forward. Thinking back to the motivational triad, we have this seek pleasure, avoid pain and use the least amount of energy possible.

Well avoiding pain is a pretty strong survival instinct. It's a method of keeping us literally alive. So putting ourselves in harm's way by going to something that we are predicting will create a negative experience which will lead us, when I say a negative experience, we interpret it as a negative experience which creates a negative feeling which is unpleasant.

So we want to get away from it, hence the seek pleasure. So instead we look for a different restaurant to eat at. So bringing that back to an incident within your relationship where you experience an event that you have interpreted as a negative event and the thoughts about it are creating negative feelings which is something that you don't want to experience again.

So you judge everything through that. You keep yourself at a little bit, just a little bit further away than you were before. You distance yourself just very slightly from your partner based on that behaviour because maybe it's broken an element of trust.

There's this reliability. Maybe they're not as honest as you thought they were. Maybe they're more selfish than you thought they were.

Maybe their values aren't quite as aligned as you perhaps thought they were. And rather than just believing that this is an isolated incident or that this incident was driven by some motivation that you are just not aware of because you've not paid, you've not given it the time or attention to correct it, assess it, understand it, appreciate it, even just to ask your partner why did you act that way? What was it that you were going through that made you think that that was the most appropriate way to act in that moment? This is how I feel and this is how it made me feel and even if I'm wrong I still feel it. My experience is still very real.

Why did you do that? But of course that's not what most people do. Most people get angry. Most people become resentful and that anger and that resentment builds and then the next time something happens and it doesn't even need to be anything like the severe or as intense as the first incident, just the fact that it triggers that little switch in your mind sets you on this roller coaster of defensiveness which then ironically then leads often in attack because it's safer to throw things at the opposition which when repeated five times, ten times, fifty, a hundred times over the course of the relationship, all of a sudden even the neutral positive behaviours that your partner shows can only be viewed through this lens of negativity and as this evidence continually builds, a contempt can form, a resentment can form for your partner where that's all you can see and then we actually start judging our partners from a place of disgust.

This place of disgust from a feeling of superiority even. Like we've separated ourselves gradually over time just bit by bit just by looking at this what started out as one thing that we interpreted negatively which could even be not true. It's just a subjective interpretation, a subjective experience and now we've piled on top of that many many little details.

Think back to the reticular activating system that I've spoken about before. We're seeking evidence to support what we believe is true and we're filtering out all of the evidence to support the contrary so we now have this like bucket full of evidence to show that our partner is deserving of this resentment, is deserving of this contempt and that we can actually choose to feel superior and judge them from this place. Now it doesn't take a genius to recognise that that's not helpful, that that's not driving a relationship in the direction it needs to.

So what can we do? Well we can begin by actually truly questioning the things that we see and our own actions, our own judgments about ourselves, let alone the judgments that we have about our partners and start to understand them and appreciate them and recognise that they've come from a place that maybe isn't quite as obvious as it appears on the surface and that's only actually our interpretation, is our story, our narrative that has created this illusion around the situation. Now I know some of you are going to be thinking, yeah but my wife cheated on me or my husband cheated on me. Like it's a pretty clearly that that's not good.

It's pretty clear that that says a lot about this person and I should rightly judge them from that place. But is that really true? If you ask that question, what would it have taken to have got that person to make that decision at that point in that time and come from a place of understanding? We're not talking about condoning, I'm not talking about agreeing, I'm not talking about justifying, I'm just looking at a place of understanding of what might have led that person to act in that particular way. And there could be many factors at play.

It could be something they brought up through their childhood, it could be something that they've experienced in previous relationships, it could be something that they've experienced in the current relationship. We think about the different attachment styles and when we get like an anxious attachment style and an avoidant attachment style both together, that can often create an increase in separation, a disconnect which can lead to unknown outcomes. I'll do an episode specifically on attachment styles at some point.

I think that's definitely worth looking at. But for the sake of what I'm talking about here, it's paying attention to those behaviours that we see in our partners and those behaviours that we see in ourselves and having compassion and appreciation and just exploring, just being curious, just being inquisitive as to what may have driven that rather than knee-jerking to that default conclusion based on some misinterpretation of an event that happened some time ago. Think about that evidence pot that you've been filling with those judgments and let's just empty that pot out.

Let's just pour it all away and let's just look at these incidents in isolation and question them. Because once you can actually recognise that the situation isn't quite as you thought it was, or even if it is exactly as you thought it was, at least it's coming from a very clear place of choice. You're no longer victim to what your story says you should feel and says that you should think.

You are actually questioning it, challenging it and moving forward. I hope that helps. If you have been listening to this episode or any other episodes of mine and you have found them useful and helpful in your own journey, then it would be really appreciated if you could help me spread that to as many people as possible.

That can be done through a combination of sharing it in groups and with people who you think might find it useful, but also just by rating and reviewing the podcast or podcast episodes in your respective podcast app, your preferred platform. It all really helps and there's only so much I can do from this end. Obviously I will continue to produce these episodes and continue to provide and add value to as many people as I possibly can, but your help really does make the difference.

Okay that's everything I have for today. Thank you ever so much and I can't wait to speak to you again next week.