56. ’Humping’ After the Affair - Navigating the Emotional Terrain of Recovery

Feeling like you should be further along in your healing? You’re not alone. Betrayal brings emotional chaos, and just when you think you’re making progress, something knocks you back. In this episode, I unpack what it really means to get over the emotional "hump" of infidelity recovery, and why those frustrating plateaus are more normal, and more important, than you think.

If you’re battling self-judgement, stuck in a cycle of reactive thoughts, or simply exhausted by the weight of it all, this episode will offer relief, perspective, and a way forward.

Key Takeaways:

• Understand why plateaus in recovery happen and how to navigate them with compassion

• Learn how the “chimp paradox” explains emotional reactivity after betrayal

• Discover how to reframe painful thoughts and emotions without suppressing them

• Explore how self-judgement can keep you stuck and what to do instead

• Use tools like journaling and self-coaching to track growth and create emotional clarity

💬 Reflection question:

Have you hit a “hump” in your recovery journey?

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. You're listening to episode number 56 with myself Luke Shillings. Now I'm hoping the title got your attention.

Humping After The Affair, what on earth is Luke going to talk about today? Well in this episode I'm going to tackle the highs, the lows and everything that comes in between. No pun intended of course and let me tell you it's far more about the uphill battles than the under sheet tussles. Of course today is a Wednesday, it's hump day and I'm going to help us get up and over that hump in your emotional recovery journey after betrayal.

So let's get stuck right in. Every time I work with a client or I speak to somebody who has experienced betrayal and I can also tie this in quite closely to my own story, there's a point on the journey where we recognise that we are responsible for our experience. You know much of the message that I deliver is about taking responsibility, that self responsibility because ultimately we cannot control the other people in our lives.

We cannot control some of the circumstances that come our way yet we still have to deal with them, we still have to process them, we still have to understand them and where the key difference is we start to take responsibility for them by acting intentionally, by acting in a line with our values, by being considerate and compassionate to ourselves to make clean decisions from a very intentional place rather than the emotional reactive almost emotional childhood type place. I don't know whether any of you are familiar with the book The Chimp Paradox. This was developed by psychiatrist Steve Peters I think.

He's a psychologist, psychiatrist and he created the psychological model that suggests that the human mind has two competing areas, two competing like centres of control, the human and the chimp. So the human is the rational, logical and it always works with facts and truth whereas the chimp on the other hand is the emotional, it's reactive, it jumps to conclusions based on its own interpretations and often these two entities are in direct conflict with each other leading to some real internal emotional struggles. You've heard me speak about the different parts of us well this is talking along those same lines in a quite simplified way but really powerful and effective.

It's a great read the book and understanding this chimp paradox is really about recognising these two distinct ways that our minds operate and learning how to manage the emotional, the less rational chimp to make better decisions and ultimately better outcomes in our life. So I suppose this hump that we're talking about is a little bit like recognising your chimp, knowing that there is that part of you that is going to react in certain situations even though logically and rationally the human brain is able to overcome those and is able to make more intentional decisions, the chimp's incredibly powerful. In fact I think Steve talks about it as being a ratio of almost 5 to 1 or 4 to 1 or 5 to 1 that the strength of the chimp and I'm not sure if there isn't an analogy that references the almost the physical strength differences between a chimp and a human.

Chimps are incredibly powerful animals and much much stronger physically than humans. Well it's this analogy that relates directly to the to these two parts of our brain if you like, two parts of our mind where the chimp is much stronger than the human brain and it's this strength that ultimately prevents us from getting over this hump, this hump on our healing journey, it's like our recovery process plateaus in some way, it's like it gets drawn to a halt and we can't move any further forward and can seem pointless. When I was healing from infidelity myself one of the things that I recognised was that I could not control my partner, I could not control the affair partner, I could not control the interactions that he would have with my kids and all of these things that as much as I wanted to I couldn't actually control those.

What I could control was how I chose to think about it and that gave me autonomy over how I could feel about it and logically that all made perfect sense, I could rationalise it, I understood it cognitively and it actually gave me a little bit of hope, it's like okay right now I understand that I'm not quite as powerless as I felt like I was literally a few days, weeks or maybe a month or so before where I felt complete victim to the situation, like I had no control, all that control had been taken away from me and although there were still things happening in my life that I kind of preferred wouldn't, the reality was I was able to make much more intentional decisions. However the chimp, it has things to say, so when my kids would come over and they would say that the affair partner had maybe taken them, they'd gone out and bought an ice cream or something like that, my chimp was not happy about this situation I can assure you and it wanted to react, it wanted to send a message to my to my ex and it wanted to you know try and make these demands about what he could or couldn't do and what the rules I was going to implement around the kids and and all these things which as tempting as that was, I knew it was coming from an unuseful place, it wasn't coming from a clean place but I was still feeling those emotions and because at this point I recognised that I was responsible for how I felt, that it felt like I was failing myself, it's like well I know that I have control of this, I know I have the ability to control this but I can't and I felt helpless. It was a time where I was telling myself I should be doing better, I should be further along by now, I understand why I'm feeling the way I'm feeling yet I don't seem to be able to do anything about it, I was resisting it, I was expecting it to be easier, I was hoping that it'd be over quicker, that I had that that control in that sense but what I was really doing was not allowing myself to to really feel the feelings, you know, I was avoiding, I was trying to do anything I could and just trying to fix it.

I'm a problem solver, it's who I am, you know, I identify as a problem solver and that could be restrictive in some ways but it's also been something that I found very helpful throughout my life. I like to try and fix problems, usually it's other people's problems and of course when it's your own you want to be able to do just as good a job and I put a lot of expectations on myself and it took a lot of work to really understand that and get through that and it's actually by doing that work and getting through that I recognised some of the shortcuts, I recognised some of the areas which made sense and were worth working on and those which actually didn't help me move forward in that moment and actually kept me stuck and kept me trapped and that's exactly what I'm trying to deliver through the message throughout these podcast episodes and with the message that I'm trying to deliver and help my clients with. So do you recognise that you feel like you're not as far along your journey as you should be? Which is interesting, you know, you'll have heard me speak about the word should before, these list of expectations about how we should be or how we should behave or how we should react but of course these expectations are all created by ourselves and they are our own set of rules that we create and then beat ourselves up because we fail to achieve those expectations.

So this should word is one that could be redefined in your vocabulary and we could explore in more detail but for now we're going to talk about the psychological factors behind why people hit these plateaus. Think about the cognitive dissonance that is experienced in the human and the chimp. Cognitive dissonance being that in a conflict where we have two separate thoughts or belief that don't align with each other.

A simple example would be somebody who smokes. There's one belief that knows that smoking is unhealthy for them and puts them at a much higher risk of something like lung cancer but they also like smoking. They like how it makes them feel and therefore there is this conflict in belief of this is good.

So when we're in this state of cognitive dissonance often it causes us to not face the problem and we just do what's easiest. We do what comes more naturally to us. We do what is habit something that we've continued to do for a long period of time because actually stopping that is more discomfort and we don't like discomfort.

The chimp is pretty clear on that but rather than it being something that holds us back what it can actually do is offer a window into our thinking and we can start to explore those beliefs because there are many beliefs that humans have that we have brought up from our childhood. We have taken from others. You know think back to the societal expectations we were talking about last week but many of these beliefs and many much of this thinking might not actually be true for us anymore.

We just haven't looked at it for a long time because when we felt that in a conflict we've just looked the other way. We've just carried on doing the thing that was easiest. We have chosen not to explore further.

Now one way that we can begin to look at our thinking is through the the idea of the self-coaching model. If you refer back to episode number 20 how to solve any problem we can look at breaking down the different elements that make up the way you think and remember the important part of that is that our thinking creates our feelings and then it's our feelings that drive our actions and of course our actions produce the results that we get in the world. So when I had beliefs of the affair partner shouldn't be interacting with my children or something to that effect it created a feeling of frustration of anger and then from that place of frustration and anger I would want to do things that were very reactive.

Like I said I wanted to you know try and control the situation try and put demands on my ex and and how she lived her life with her in the new relationship. These things were very very real but what ended up happening was that I just started to judge myself. I could see how the situation was playing out.

Child tells me something about the affair partner. I think he shouldn't be getting involved with my kids. I feel angry.

I choose to try and control the situation through method of message or a phone call or interaction but before I actually acted that out that was the temptation that's what I wanted to act out I was able to recognise that that probably wasn't going to lead to the best outcome. It was coming from like I say not coming from a clean place. So then I would start to judge myself because I recognised how counterproductive this thinking was.

This thinking was leading to this feeling of anger which was creating the desire to do these particular actions which I knew wouldn't lead anywhere good but yet I was still thinking this thing and I was still feeling the anger but yet I knew that if I played that out it wasn't going to go anywhere good and I felt stuck in a cycle. So how do we move beyond this? Well we can start by offering ourselves some compassion some self-compassion and actually by reframing the thinking. That compassion to say that actually if this is what I currently think and believe then feeling anger and frustration and whatever the emotion is is absolutely appropriate perhaps and and that's okay.

It's okay to feel that way and just because I feel that way doesn't mean I have to then go and do the thing. Because when we think about the negative emotion well what's the worst thing that can happen? Well it is just that emotion. That emotion itself cannot hurt you.

It's just a vibration in the body. It's just something that we feel. It doesn't force us to do anything.

It's just uncomfortable and the temptation to get away from that, to resist it, to react to it, to avoid it is very strong but we don't have to do any of those three things. We can just let it be there and we can just accept that actually this is part of our process, is part of our healing and the more we do this the better we get at it. It really is a case of practising.

Every time we act out from that place from that particular emotion is when we validate the experience and then that keeps us stuck in that cycle and we keep going and going and going and then really beating ourselves up about why we're so stuck even though we understand why we're stuck. We're just still not choosing to do anything different. So just by initially taking a step back and offering compassion for ourselves that it's actually completely understandable to want to act in that way if that's how I'm feeling and it's also completely understandable to feel that way if that's how I'm thinking and this also then leads into the opportunity to reframe that thinking.

You know I was thinking the affair partner shouldn't be interacting with my children. Well what else could I think? It seems like that's the only option. You know I don't want to do that therefore that is the only option and that's all there is to it.

But I've just discovered that by thinking that it's causing me to feel anger and then wanting me to do things or it's creating this desire to do things that probably aren't going to help my situation. So some alternative thoughts that I maybe could put in place might be the affair partners presence is a reality that I can't change. What's more important is how I guide my children through this situation.

Or perhaps I could think my children will encounter difficult people and situations in their lives. This could be a learning experience for them. Or rather than focussing on the affair partner should I focus on empowering my children to make judgments about the people they interact with.

Or better still maybe I've raised my children to be smart and discerning. I should trust their judgement while also keeping an open dialogue. You see there are multiple ways that we can look at the same situation and interpret it differently.

And it's by doing this that gives us the power to then create a different feeling which then creates a different set of actions which leads to more desirable outcomes. So what I experience a lot with my one-to-one clients is that they learn this. They start to get a better grasp of the idea of the model and how it works and how it's playing out in everyday life.

But they then become stuck because they recognise this. They see that their thinking is not creating the result that they want in their life and then they feel stuck. But having that compassion and exploring alternative ways of looking at the same situation completely changes the overall journey.

And it's helping you get over that hump that's keeping you stuck in that moment that really is the power behind some of these tools and concepts and ideas. Because this self-judgement really is counterproductive and it does not help you move forward. One additional thing that you can do is actually just make record in some way shape or form of the milestones of the progress that you're making.

Again something else that I include in the coaching programme is this shared document that we have between myself and the client. And this is essentially a record from day one until the completion of our coaching whenever that is dependent on the individual situation. It's a document where we are able to track the things that have been discussed.

We're able to look at how the client was thinking in that particular moment. And then of course this is a fantastic way of referencing back to be able to look at how far they've come. Because the changes that we have in our healing journeys are often so gradual and they're a bit roller coaster like.

Here we have these peaks and troughs, these humps and these these low parts. It can be really difficult to pinpoint our actual progress and can often leave us feeling like we're not making it. We're not moving forward.

And then the reality is that's just not true. But we need some way, some measure stick of doing that. And you can do that yourself.

You can do that simply by journaling. Doing a thought download. Just offloading a few thoughts about a particular situation.

Just takes you five minutes. A piece of paper. Grab a pen and paper and just write down what you're thinking about that particular topic, that particular circumstance, that particular situation.

And just get it down on paper and just explore it a little bit. Ask some questions of yourself. How are those things true? How are those things not true? Is there another way of looking at it? And then you can reflect back on this.

You don't have to read everything that you've written. But just flicking back through a journal, looking at something that you wrote a month ago or six months ago, can be a real eye-opener to how far you've come in understanding. And then the final element really is this role of acceptance.

Because sometimes there really is this hidden layer of non-acceptance that holds people back. There's this rational logical idea of I want to learn the tools and skills to help me move forward in my healing journey. But there's a deeper belief that isn't really accepting the fact that they do have that control.

They're not really accepting the fact that this circumstance that happened, whether it be betrayal or any other incident or a thing that's happened in their life, is not responsible for how they're feeling. And I know that's a really hard concept to understand for some people. Because when you've experienced betrayal, that person has made this choice and it has caused all of this pain.

For them to have some guy on a podcast tell you, well you're kind of creating your own situation, is a pretty tough message to take. And I want to deliver it as gently as I can. Because the reality is that we do have autonomy.

We do have the ability to control our experience. And even if we can't change our thinking there and then in the moment, we absolutely have the ability to handle the emotion that that thinking brings up. And as we build up that resilience, we become accepting of that.

Then it allows us to get over the hump and really propel ourselves forward. So I hope that some of the things that I've discussed today have shone a little light on your situation. Maybe helped you see some things from a slightly different perspective.

If you want to go deeper in this, I'd love to have a conversation with you. We're now a few months out until the end of the year and the impact, the change that you could have between now and then is significant. And remember there is no time like the present.

Think of the Chinese proverb, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. This proverb is so rich in wisdom and it suggests that it's never too late to take action on something that can really change your life.

While it may have been ideal to start something a long time ago, the next best opportunity is the present moment. So with that in mind, you know how to get in touch. But just in case www.lifecoachluke.com or email me directly at luke at lifecoachluke.com and we can organise.

We can talk over message, over WhatsApp or we can arrange a discovery call and talk about your situation in more detail and see how I can help. For anybody who would like to get a better understanding of the trust that they have in their relationship, then there is a quiz that you can take which gives you a trust score. Gives you an idea on where you are with trust in your relationship and helps you with some incredible pointers on where to correct and move forward in those situations.

If you visit www.lifecoachluke.com forward slash trust then you can enter that quiz straight away and have your score in less than two to three minutes. Okay thank you ever so much everybody and I'll speak to you all again next week.