34. Resentment Reboot - Trust yourself after Betrayal

Resentment is a heavy burden to carry, especially after infidelity. When your beliefs and emotions clash, and you feel stuck between shame and fear, it's easy to lose trust in yourself. You might ask: Do I stay or go? Was it my fault? Why can’t I let this go? This episode offers a fresh perspective to help you break the loop of emotional conflict, reconnect with your inner clarity, and rebuild trust after betrayal.

In today’s episode, I explore how self-abandonment fuels resentment and why allowing space for your conflicting thoughts is essential to healing. If you’ve ever felt torn between staying and leaving, or paralysed by indecision, this one’s for you.

Key Takeaways:

• Resentment reveals broken self-trust. Learn how unresolved emotions and unmet expectations create inner conflict.

• You don’t have to fix every thought. Allow space for opposing beliefs without trying to control or eliminate them.

• Shame and fear are emotional opposites. Discover how they play against each other and how to stop getting caught in the loop.

• Emotional avoidance prolongs pain. Resisting or blaming others keeps you stuck. Ownership brings freedom.

• You have agency. Reclaim your power by choosing how to feel and what to believe about yourself after betrayal.

💬 Reflection questions:

Have you noticed resentment showing up in your healing journey? Are you stuck between contradictory thoughts or decisions?

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 with myself Luke Shillings. This is episode number 34. When it comes to recording this podcast I usually have it planned out.

I have some kind of structure, a specific target message that I want to deliver and you know some specific objectives that I would like you as the listener to be able to take away and hopefully implement in your life. I usually record the episodes in advance so that they were ready to go live at the same time every week on the Wednesday. But this week for a combination of reasons I have ran a little bit behind schedule.

Things haven't quite gone as I'd initially hoped and I got a few a few things on so I end up actually speaking to you now on the day that this episode is being released which is very unusual for me. But because it is so fresh I was in a conversation last night with some of my coach friends. When I became certified as a coach it was done in a group of me and nine other people.

It was ten of us and it was quite an intensive journey. We became good friends. I'm still in touch with pretty much all of them now.

We've all taken different routes. Some have set up their coaching businesses much like myself and others have you know implemented the tools and concepts and skills that they learned into their own personal lives. And some have taken completely different routes.

One of the ladies that falls into this latter group had been explaining how things had maybe not developed in the way that she had perhaps anticipated or hoped in some way and this had left her questioning the value of the training. As she continued to describe her reasoning for how she was feeling she also said that she was feeling quite bitter about it. Now maybe it's the infidelity coaching me.

Maybe it's because of the kind of people I work with and those I help and my own personal experiences. But when I hear that word bitter or bitterness I link it very quickly to resentment. And I know that this is something that many people listening to this podcast will feel and have felt at least at some point during their journey towards the thing or the person that has caused them this discomfort.

Now resentment and bitterness comes from a lack of self-trust. Because when our beliefs or our anticipated outcomes fail to meet our expectations and we feel some unwanted emotion, well what do we do? We abandon ourselves internally. We split.

I mean how can you trust yourself if every time you feel something you don't want to you abandon yourself? It's a lonely place and most people don't want to remain there. So rather than face it it's often easier to blame other people. It just alleviates that emotion a little bit, that feeling and it offers perfect justification for whatever actions that we choose to do on the contrary.

Now for me a feeling of bitterness or resentment in me usually means that I'm comparing two of my own expectations that don't align. I get annoyed at myself for those expectations and then I blame the circumstance and try and change it. When we think about this in the context of a relationship, particularly an affair, how could this look? Let's say for example I had an expectation or a belief that I don't want to stay with someone who has cheated on me.

And when I'm thinking that I'm feeling shame. That's like the emotion that comes up when I say I don't want to stay with someone who has cheated on me. Because I feel like by doing so means something about me.

So I'm feeling this shame. But then I'm also thinking I don't want to throw away my relationship or I don't want to leave my relationship. And from that place I'm feeling fear because I don't want to lose something.

I'm hanging on to it. So I have these two contradictory thoughts. I know we've spoken about cognitive dissonance before.

This is a good example where you have these two contradicting thoughts that just don't align with each other. Because you can't both remain and leave at the same time. So when you take these two emotions, in this case shame and fear, well what happens? Internally they become further and further apart from each other.

Almost imagine it a bit like a figure of eight. And in one loop of the eight you've got the word shame or the feeling of shame. And in the other loop of the eight, imagine the eight's laid on its side, sorry, you've got the word fear.

And you've got this arrow sort of, I wish you could see my hand, but it's, if you could see my hand, it is tracing a lateral figure of eight. And it's like our emotions keep flipping from one to the other. It's flipping from one belief to the other.

It's going from shame to fear to shame to fear to shame to fear. And just keeps on this spiral. But of course this is a really unpleasant place to be.

And because these two are almost polar opposites, they're working against each other because they don't align. Those expectations, those beliefs are not aligned. I'm left with a broken inner trust.

And that's not a place that I like to be. So what happens? That's when we begin to react. We avoid.

We resist. So reacting might look like blaming the other person or the other thing for us feeling the way we are. Avoiding is, we're avoiding the emotion.

We don't want the emotion, so we're avoiding it. We're looking the other way. We're turning a blind eye.

We're trying to ignore it as best we can. And then we also resist. We resist taking responsibility for those feelings.

We resist taking responsibility for our own experience. So what if we look at those two beliefs? We look at those two thoughts. We have that belief of I don't want to stay with someone who has cheated on me.

And contrary to that, I also don't want to throw my relationship away. I don't want to leave. Now we can recognise that both of those things can maybe not be true at the same time.

We're not dealing with quantum physics here. We're not dealing with Schrödinger's cat where it can both be alive and dead at the same time. There does come a point where we we need to decide I'm going to either remain in this relationship or I'm going to walk away from it.

However, just because we're having those conflicting thoughts doesn't mean we can't let them be there. It doesn't mean we can't give them space. Because at the minute it's more like a game of tennis.

One thought is saying yeah but you can't be with somebody who's cheated on you. It whacks the ball back across the court. And then the other person, or the other tennis racket in this case, is saying yeah but I don't want to throw away my relationship and whacks the ball back.

And they keep arguing and back and forth and back and forth and of course no one's winning. It's a zero-sum game. So that's when the natural response is to look at some other way of avoiding, resisting or reacting to that experience.

Because it's the emotion behind the thinking that we're trying to escape from. Really it's shame holding one tennis racket and fear holding the other in this example. And one is just trying to escape the other.

It's trying to throw it back in the in the court of the opposite emotion. What if both players just put the tennis rackets down on the ground and just let them be there. Let the ball be there.

It could just sit there. It doesn't have to go anywhere. And it's the same with your thinking.

You don't have to change your thinking. Maybe you just have to allow that emotion to be there and know that the worst thing that can happen is that negative emotion. And when we become trusting in our ability to handle these negative emotions, then we can trust to make the best decision using both bits of information and then live our life intentionally.

We make an active choice to do whatever it is that we want to do next. And we're not victim to our own thinking. We're not victim to our own circumstances or our own perceived circumstances.

We're taking control. In summary, it's perfectly okay to have these conflicting thoughts. In fact it's inevitable that we will have conflicting thoughts.

But build that trust within yourself. Rebuild that self-trust by allowing those contradicting thoughts to be there. Allowing the emotion that that kind of thinking brings up for you.

Because ultimately it's the feeling that scares us. It's the feeling we're trying to escape. And I just want to offer that I've experienced all kinds of negative emotions.

For all kinds of reasons. And okay, lots of them are not that pleasant. But of every negative emotion I've ever experienced, I've always felt better at some point after.

I've always felt different at some point after. That emotion never ever stays. It's often only prolonged when I resist it.

It's prolonged when I avoid it. It's prolonged when I react to it and try and blame somebody else. I hand that control to somebody else and then I become victim to it.

Yet that's all my own creation. Because I get to choose how I act. I get to choose what I feel.

I choose to be okay with what I feel. And you can do exactly the same too. For anybody who's listening who is still struggling with their journey to recovery after betrayal, I want to remind you that help is available.

Whether you're in that initial shock stage of disbelief or maybe you progressed into a more grief state of emotional turmoil. Perhaps you're feeling a lot of self-blame and you're starting to question things. You're starting to wonder what it was you could have done differently.

How was it that you didn't notice? And you're recognising that it's becoming painful and therefore you're beginning to avoid much like I've spoken about in today's episode. Maybe even deny it slightly. It's only really now that you're sort of starting to confront this head-on.

But it's a very vast landscape and you don't really know where to look and what to do. Perhaps you're having difficulties making decisions. Deciding what it is you want to do.

What it is that you want from your relationship. Well this and much more are all of the things that I help people with every day. So if you want to find out more then please just reach out.

Drop me an email. Send me an email to luke at lifecoachluke.com or book a discovery call. Let's have a chat.

30 minutes. No obligation. Let's just talk.

Let me see if I can help you move forward in your day and see if I can just move you that one step closer to healing from betrayal. You can do that directly from my website lifecoachluke.com No spaces. In the meantime everybody have a great week and I'll speak to you next time.