57. Between Culture & Infidelity - A Journey of Identity, Love and Self Discovery with Yasmin Majid

Navigating life after betrayal is never easy. If you're grappling with the pain of infidelity, feeling like you've lost your sense of self, or stuck between cultural expectations and personal truth, you're not alone. In this episode, Yasmin Majid shares her deeply personal story, one shaped by a dual heritage, a marriage shaped by obligation, and a profound journey of healing through coaching, therapy, and self-love.

Yasmin's story is not just about infidelity. It's about the courage to let go, the heartbreak of realising love is not always enough, and the strength it takes to rebuild from rock bottom. If you're looking for honest insight and hope, this conversation is for you.

Key Takeaways:

• How cultural pressure can shape relationship choices and lead to self-abandonment

• The emotional cost of people-pleasing and the journey back to self-worth

• Why discovering an affair isn’t the end, but a pivotal moment for personal growth

• How therapy and coaching served different roles in Yasmin’s healing process

• The impact of intentional nutrition, self-care and mindset work in reclaiming identity

💬 Reflection question:

Have you ever felt like you've lost yourself in a relationship, or that your culture, family, or expectations kept you from choosing what you really wanted?

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. You're listening to episode number 57.

In this episode of the After The Affair I speak with Yasmin Majid, a resilient woman who has navigated a range of challenges including a troubled marriage and discovering an affair. Yasmin grew up in a multicultural household blending her Kashmiri heritage with British culture, a background that influenced many of her life choices. In this episode she discusses the cultural pressures that led to a hasty marriage and subsequent hardships.

Yasmin also opens up about her experiences with abuse, shedding light on the different forms that it can take and the importance of coaching and therapy in her healing process. She highlights the importance of intentional work, reframing setbacks as growth opportunities and the crucial role of relationships in shaping her self-worth. Yasmin's story is one of resilience, self-discovery and empowerment built on a foundation of self-love and authentic connections.

So let's get straight into this week's conversation with Yasmin Majid. Hello Yasmin, thank you so much for joining us today on the After The Affair podcast. I always like to try and allow my guests to offer a little introduction so today is going to be no different.

So would you be kind enough to share with the listeners a brief summary of who you are and what has got you to here? Hi Luke, thank you for having me on your podcast. I'm Yasmin, I'm 55 years old. I am a coach.

I say coach because I coach in many different modalities, because I almost do a bespoke programme for my clients once I get to know them. And I cover things like nutrition, positive intelligence, lots of self-care and kind of look at things from a physical, emotional, mental and spiritual perspective and kind of do a package for each individual. So catering for the uniqueness of us all because we are all unique and we all are on our own unique journeys.

We just sometimes need a little bit of guidance and somebody to hold your hand. And that's, you know, something that I've benefited from. And that's what led me into a coaching profession after having been in education for the best part of 30 years.

So I think that actually offers a good segue into like, well, could you take us back a little bit to where you were before embarking on this sort of coaching this transformative journey? What was life like for you? Just a little bit of background. If I take you back, I mean, I'm 55 years old, so that's five and a half decades worth of life. But just to kind of... The bullet points.

My early childhood, I was born in Buckinghamshire. My parents were migrants from Kashmir, which is north of India, north of Pakistan. My father had come in his late teens and then gone back and married my mum.

And I came along in the cultural and home life was very much almost like still being in Kashmir because my parents spoke the language, the food was there, the cultural kind of celebrations were all happening at home. But then I was celebrating everything that was British and a Brit at heart because I was living in a British culture. I had British friends.

I was in a school. I was speaking English while at home. I had to speak the local language, which was Punjabi.

So I was kind of a cross between two cultures. The reason that's important is because I kind of abided by a lot of the cultural rules. So when it came to getting married, the question about marriage started kind of popping up and conversations around that in my late teens, when I didn't think I was old enough to be considering this.

But my father, who was encouraging us to get educated, actually wanted us either engaged or married before we went to university. For some reason, I think there were fears that we'd go away and maybe we won't come back or we might find someone ourselves. And that wouldn't be culturally acceptable.

It would just be a matter of honour and it would be just too much of an insult for them. So I ended up having an arranged marriage. My father chose the person I married.

And having an arranged marriage was that you just met somebody two or three times, you barely knew them. All you knew about them is what other people told you about them. So you're kind of going into into one of the most important relationships of your life, but blindfolded, literally.

But I was of the attitude that, yes, okay, life's dealt me these cards, but I'll make the most of it. And I kind of saw a little bit of freedom in that as well. Because I thought, he's an educated person, he'd been travelling even while he was at university.

So I thought, wow, I'll be able to do things that I haven't been able to do while I've been in the confines of my family home. And I didn't go back home because there were lots of vacant promises or we'll do this, we'll do that. But we never really did the things that were just promises that might happen someday.

But as a child, you kind of hung on to them. One of them being that my father said, when you get a university degree, I'll buy you around the world ticket. You can go and travel anywhere you want to.

Since then, I've got a master's degree, and I still haven't seen that ticket. And my sister's even got a PhD, and she's still waiting for it. But we've nevertheless travelled around the world ourselves.

But it's just going back to getting married and confiding, confining to the rules, the cultural rules, the family rules, and just keeping everybody happy. What was that? Was there a lot of inner conflict there? You said you were almost living a double life in some respects, your home life and your outside of home life appear very different. One was essentially like living in Kashmir, and the other one was being in Buckinghamshire in the UK.

How was that for you? Very hard, because I remember being invited, when I was doing my A Levels, being invited to, because a lot of people turn 18 while they're in their second year of A Levels, to their 18th birthday parties, and they're good friends. But I would have to make excuses why I couldn't turn up at the pub or at the nightclub. Because now, you know, that's what everybody wanted to do.

Because we're 18, we can do this. We can go clubbing. Come on, we've got to go.

Yes, you're coming. I'm saying yes, and at the last minute, I'm making an excuse. That's like a last minute excuse that I can't come because it just simply wasn't acceptable.

Did that lead to, I think you probably did allude to it slightly, but like an air of people pleasing, that you were always feeling like you were having to please not only your parents, and the lifestyle that was expected at home, but also that of your friends? Yes, yes, very much so. It's something that I didn't realise that I was doing so much of until probably in the last 10 years. And in fact, I actually, when I got married, I think about five, six years later, one of my cousins said to me, so you got married in the year, that year, 88, didn't you? And I said, Yes, I did.

Yeah. And I said, I said, Oh, I said, we had a terrible time, you know, the year before my grandfather, my mother's father had passed away. We'd had another uncle pass away.

And some other tragedy that had happened within the family. And I thought we'd had a miserable time. I thought I'd cheer everybody up.

When the question of you're getting married, and I said, All right, let's have a wedding, then they'll cheer everybody up. And I actually really felt like that. And it didn't dawn on me until the vows were being exchanged.

And I'm like, what the hell have I done? That's incredible. So even something as significant as the life partner, whether it was arranged or not, just that belief that this was in some way to just help other people to make people feel better as a result of other things going on in there in your life and relationships at the time. Yes, very much so.

And it was it. And I remember, because you have to say the equivalent of I do, yes, I accept, I accept. I'm saying it, and I can hear it loud in my head, but the words were not coming out.

And then my cousin actually came right close to me. And she goes, You okay? Okay, I'm on. She is saying yes, but you know, we can't hear her.

So I had to say yes. And I had to kind of nod. So it was like, almost like my soul was like trying to stop me from making this commitment that wasn't going to make me happy.

But that's now on reflection. You know, when you look back, yeah. Yes, very much so.

So you'd experienced this sort of conflict, this this contrast of life as you as you were growing up, and then you had an arranged marriage and not knowing this person at all, apart from, like you say, maybe a few meetings before the actual day of the wedding, and then you're stood there and there's this realisation, perhaps, of like, I'm too far down the road now. I can't turn back. What was that? Was that was the with the desire to run away? Or was it more just a shock? Or was it what? What did you feel in that moment? I just felt suffocated and felt like I didn't want to be there.

I didn't want to embark on this journey. It was like almost jumping into the abyss into the unknown. And I'm going to be with this person.

I'm being attached to this person for life. That's what what petrified me more than anything else. Yeah, I'm not surprised.

Listening to it. It's an incredible situation, something I, of course, I can't certainly can't relate to directly, but I can empathise and try and put myself in that position of what that must have been like. And I can imagine it being very frightening and, like I said, very, very suffocating and probably a sense of feeling very alone in that moment as well.

So you've, although retrospectively recognised some of the people pleasing behaviour that you carried out during your your youth as you were growing up, and then you you meet your husband and you get married. How did that behaviour then play out in the marriage? Did it or did you take a different path? I think, I think initially, I tried to take a different path and ended up being the same in lots of ways. The, you know, there's always gifts and opportunities and everything.

And there was gifts and opportunities in the marriage, despite the fact that we didn't, we didn't always have much in common, right from the beginning. We didn't, we were very different people. But I tried very hard to make the marriage work, because to me, the consequences were pretty strong.

Not just the fact that I'll be disappointed, I actually thought I'd kill my father, if I if I got a divorce. If I if my marriage came to an end, that'd be it, because my father will be so devastated that he'll just die because he'll just have a heart attack and die. Through shame or? Through shame and just disappointment, I think.

Disappointment and just shame, disappointment, family honour, all of those things. And I think I put meaning to those are the meanings I put to situations when, in reality, obviously, those things don't happen. My father's still alive and kicking at 91 now.

So it didn't kill him. You know, yes, he was upset because, you know, my ex-husband, he was like a son to him, and he was very close to him. But that all happened later on.

But in the marriage, just going back to that, the opportunity and the gift that I saw was the fact that this man encouraged me to be independent, like, as in to do things, go out and do things, be independent, do things, even though he didn't want to do things with me, he didn't stop me from doing things, which meant that even though I'd married him straight after A-levels, I could go and study, I could, I think, in some ways, he just wanted me to keep busy doing my thing, he could have his own life and I'd be quite happy like that, and maybe not want children, and we'll just live parallel lives and just keep everybody happy. Until, you know, a few years later, I wanted children. But the thing was that that then gave me the opportunity to kind of explore other things.

I trained as a Montessori teacher, I met lots of people, I got to travel with him around the world, because that was one thing we did together. So, was it a surprise to you? I mean, did you have an expectation of what you thought a husband would be like? Was there some picture that had been painted, pre-marriage, as to what marriage looked like to you? So were you expecting the amount of sort of, I said, essentially the freedom, there's, you know, I'm thinking from the concept of an arranged marriage is something where you as an individual lack control, because you are not making those choices, somebody else is making those choices for you. And maybe naively, from my perspective, I would imagine in my position, I would imagine that if I then went into a marriage, then that control would be, would continue, it would just hand over to the husband rather than the family or the honour or the father or whoever it or whatever it was that was dictating that.

That's very interesting, you should bring that, because the thing is that you, I had an arranged marriage, but so did he. I see. He didn't want to either, nor did I. So we became kind of mutual in rebelling against our parents.

How fascinating. Because we came to that agreement that, well, you didn't want this, I didn't want this, let's make the most of it, because, just to annoy them, and do things that we want to do. Because, you know, once you're married, and I think that happens in all cultures, not necessarily within the Asian culture, you're married 18 months down the line, two years down the line, you haven't had any kids, are you pregnant? Have you had a checkup? All of that comes into play, to the point that family members, including my mother and my mother-in-law, would say, it's okay, if you want to do other things like work and study, that's fine.

Have the baby, we'll look after it. I'm like, you've done your bit. Thank you very much.

You've brought up... So interesting is that the control still existed in the overall family on everything that had come, that remained. So there was still control, it just didn't come from the husband. It didn't come from the husband initially.

So did you become... I mean, it sounds like you say you were put together, literally, and both, you know, under duress to some extent, even if it maybe wasn't displayed outwardly in some respects. Did you become good friends because of that commonality? Yeah, we did. We became very good friends.

We reconnected and, you know, I was with him. I got to know him really well and I fell in love with him. A few years down the line, I was very much in love with him to the point that I started loving all his flaws as well, because that's what happens when you love somebody.

You actually don't see any of their flaws. No, this is very true. And I think that's a really important point to make.

I think if your love is conditional, then is it really the love that A, you're seeking? Is it really the love that you expect in return? Is it even really love? Is it something else if it's conditioned? And I talk about unconditional love on the podcast on occasion, and it's it's such an important thing to consider that really we we take our partners. Like I say, flaws and warts and all that, and that really is true, you know, you don't have to like and love every I'm sorry, you don't have to like every single individual component of your of your significant other, but you get to love them for that, for being that individual, for being unique, for being different to you. Actually, that's one of the things to really celebrate.

So you alluded to the fact that you are not married anymore. Let's just talk a little bit about how that came to be. Did you say you mentioned did you did you have children in the end? Yes, yes.

Eight years into our marriage, we were blessed with with a daughter. And those eight years building up to to getting pregnant, so the seven years in, I'd suffered from a lot of ill health. I had psoriasis since I was very young, like two and a half, but a year.

Not more than 18 months into the marriage, so I was still 21, I had a fall, which then led to the start of psoriatic arthritis. Now, apparently only 5% of people with psoriasis get the arthritis. So I drew the lucky ticket on that one, which led to me being pretty slow at doing things, pretty disabled in some ways.

I couldn't do much at all. Climbing stairs was a chore. I'd be bandaged up like I'd have to wear like wrist supports, knee supports, I'd wear walking boots everywhere because they had ankle supports.

I couldn't wear definitely couldn't wear high heels. All of those things kind of limited, limited me. And my husband was was a darling.

He looked after me, made sure when my skin was bad, made sure I was creamed up because obviously it's hard enough getting creams on your back at the best of times. But if you're arthritic, you definitely can't reach your back. And with the arthritis, there'd be times where I couldn't turn over.

I couldn't pull the duvet over me and he would support me. And at times when I'd wake up in the morning and I'd be so stiff that I could barely get out of bed, he'd help me and run a hot bath for me for just the point where it was bearable for me to get into the bath, which he assisted with me every step of the way. And sit there for a good half an hour to kind of loosen up so I could function for the day.

It sounds like you've formed a really good bond over and above, certainly the expectations heading into the relationship anyway. Yeah. So but things started going sour, I'd say, because we were married for 23 years.

So kind of like probably about 18, 16 to 18 years into the marriage where he started kind of throwing his weight about a bit. At this point, he was at the top of his career. Bearing in mind, I married him literally when he finished.

He's in the medical profession. So he'd literally finished his degree and done his first six months or a year, no, first year, which is still part of their training. And we got married.

So I saw him through all his career, which led to me moving around the country as well as travelling around the world, which which is fab because I've got to live in different parts of the UK. So I kind of find that as a privilege. Again, I look at the opportunities and the gifts because I have friends all over and I can go and stay with people all over, which is really nice.

But what what changed in him was that I was the person who would always and that's what you're supposed to do as a partner. You when when one of them, one of you starts flying high as a kite, the other one pulls the other one down and keeps them grounded. And I think I used to do that a lot to him.

Which he did the same to me. I'm not saying that that wasn't the case, but I think a man, you're a man. So you know, you guys as men, you need somebody who kind of always blows your trumpet a bit more, who's always there kind of acknowledging, I think is more important rather than saying that or noticing those things.

When I stopped noticing those things about him. Well, I didn't notice them and I'd not not compliment him, but maybe I didn't compliment him as often as he would have liked. Yeah, we'll just add in there just from a personal perspective, because I think I can definitely recognise that.

I can certainly recognise it in my younger self, particularly like almost an expectation that that my partner or the most important people in my life should notice the things that I'm doing to some extent. And I've already been quite I've always been quite self-motivated. So I get a lot of satisfaction out of doing things myself and just patting myself on the back.

You know, I've always had that. But of course, it is nice to come from the people that you care about the most. It has shifted for me over the years.

Maybe there's maybe it's semantics, but when you said noticed, that's all I feel that I would like. And I'm not dependent on it, but I like I like it if my partner notices something that doesn't have to be a, hey, well done, that's amazing or any any of that. I don't need any of that.

But just the just that awareness rather than it, you know, to feel like there's some communication, there's some two way link, which I think is really important. Well, the fact that somebody's noticing what you're doing, I don't think I did any less of it. But sometimes, you know, it wasn't a two way thing that I would never get acknowledged, but I never needed it.

To me, it was always just satisfying just talking about what I was doing. Because I just talk about it and I'll be on such a high. I'd feel great about it because I've shared it.

And and I was the kind of person who'd share everything with him. Even to the point when other girlfriends would tell me about their husbands having had affairs or the fact that they were having an affair for 10 years and they were oblivious to it. And I'd say to him, aren't I so glad I've got you and give him a big hug and say, you would never do that to me, would you? And he'd just smile and leave it at that.

But all of these people that I talk about would always accept the infidelity and carry on with the guys or for the sake of the children or it's much easier. You know, I can't do this. And I think he knew.

Deep down. That I would would never leave. Or never want to separate, regardless, because it again, culturally, he'd never experienced that.

So what was the pivotal moment for you? What was what was the thing that that changed that? Because you're obviously not married anymore. So I'm not married anymore. His belief around you not leaving.

Was wrong, ultimately, was wrong, because to me, the ultimate betrayal was that you well, it all started with him just saying to me one evening. Sitting at the dining table after dinner, I'm having a I think a mint tea that I can smell the mint still and I can see the garden at twilight and he's sitting there with a coffee and he just looked at me and said, Yasmin, you're an amazing person and I care deeply for you and I'm very, very fond of you. But I don't love you now, Yasmin's never been short of words to say, but that was a moment in my life that just left me dumbfounded and struck in a way that I couldn't say anything, I just it's like a huge frog in my throat where I just couldn't utter anything and I just welled up and just started crying. Because here I was, 22 years of dedication to this man. Loving him to bits and he's now telling me he doesn't love me.

He thinks he's fond of me and well, I can name a whole load of people who are fond of me. People are fond of me, even if they sit next to me on an aeroplane and I've had a long chat with them and we've exchanged numbers and they stay in touch. That means they're fond and they like me.

Is that all I get from you after 22 years? But Yasmin being Yasmin. Once I realised what was going on, still tried to fix it. Tried to, tried a good six months to try and fix the marriage.

In what way? Try and cook his favourite meals, make mealtime special, find out when he was free, make sure that we went out for a walk together. We were quite blessed. We lived at the edge of the Peak District, so we could go into the Peak District.

But just making that time to spend time with him, even in the evenings, make sure that when he's not working, say, all right, we're going to watch TV together and just have that time with him and not just the three of us, because by this time, our daughter's a teenager. And spending that time getting him special birthday presents. Not that I didn't get him birthday presents, but really thinking about them and getting him something special that will really surprise him.

I did all of that, but by that stage, it was too late because these things should be done every year, not just after a number of years. You know, you should make your partner feel special. You should.

And in return, they should make you feel special. But I hadn't got that either because for years I hadn't got a birthday present because it's just a waste of time. It's an interesting point because there's conflict in the approach when it comes to relationships and what we should or shouldn't do for our partners and how much we should give and how much we shouldn't give.

And for me, it comes down to what we expect on the other side of that giving. If that giving, whatever that looks like, is conditional, it requires something specifically in return, then it's not genuine. It's not clean.

We're acting from a place of inauthenticity. We're not being true to ourselves because we're actually trying to get the other person to do something to make us feel better. And it's tough because in moments like that, you know, it was a shock.

It was, you know, the true rug from underneath your feet. It's like a complete blindside. And it's only natural for us to want to try and do anything that we possibly can to fix it.

And yeah, it's interesting because I think in those situations often it's easy to then try and blame yourself for not being good enough, for looking back, well, I didn't do it for all these years beforehand, or I'd eased off, I'd this, that and the other, or I'm somehow judging what I'm doing based on what he's doing. And it's like, well, again, it's complex. I'm not saying it's a simple thing, but it's just, it can be quite sad to see that play out sometimes.

Yes. And it's clutching at straws because you clutch at straws and you blame yourself. You actually, you're not objective because if you feel you haven't been doing it, they haven't either.

Exactly. So when you were first married, even though the love wasn't there, you'd always get flowers regularly, a treat on Valentine's Day, whether you went out for a meal, whether you got that single red rose, the effort was made. But then for years, oh, it's all commercial, you know, we're not going to bother with this.

But funnily enough, that year he did get me something for Valentine's Day. It was very interesting because that's when he was having the affair and he got me a cactus, a cactus for Valentine's Day. I was like, whoa.

It was heart-shaped. There's definitely some symbolism going on in there somewhere. But it was a cactus.

And the fact that he alluded to who he was having an affair with and I didn't click because he said, oh, somebody at work said that these are all the rage and everybody's giving these at Valentine's Day. Well, yeah, he gave me a cactus, but he sent her roses, which I found out, you know, a few weeks later. But the point is that I'd never, ever received flowers from him in the post or that people would, I was working in a school, all my colleagues or quite a few of my colleagues would get, their partners would send their flowers to work and it'd be like, oh, oh, he's making such a fuss and everybody feel really good.

Never got anything like that. So we've got to this point where, you know, your husband has told you that he doesn't love you anymore. This has come as a complete and utter shock.

You have done everything you can for the next six months to try and resolve that. And presumably that was unsuccessful in, at least from your objective. What happens next? Well, it all kind of, the crux of it and the make or break of it happened when I'd done all of that and I was trying to initiate a meeting so we can kind of plan out the next year and the next five years of what we want to do.

And the reply I got was, I haven't got time to do this. It's all your fault that everything's not the way it should be. You're to blame.

You fix it. I see. Did you believe that as well? I didn't actually believe that because that's when it dawned on me that I could be anybody.

You know, I could change the way I looked, I could dress differently, I could be differently or do the different things, but he doesn't like me as a person. It sounds like it's interesting listening to sort of the various stages throughout your life that you mentioned earlier, how when something that doesn't necessarily go your way or it doesn't come the way you expected, you're able to take it still as an opportunity and do something different with it. So, of course, you're faced with this life changing, you know, revelation in many ways, both in terms of the loss of love, but also the discovery of an affair.

And, you know, for lots of people who I know because I work with some of these people who really take a very, very downward dive and it can be. Years, decades, even before they're able to sort of, you know, work through and sometimes they don't at all, you know, it's a case of there's a lot of work to be done and if it's not really intentional and trying to sort of reframe the situation, it's like, well, how what can I learn from this? How can I move forward from this? So with that in mind, you've got this slightly alternative mindset, what steps did you take? What did you do next? Well, I kind of planned out my exit, so to speak. We had a conversation, we actually had more conversations once we decided we were getting divorced.

The wall comes down. Yes, and we've accepted it and we've decided we're getting divorced only after I'd had my last lot of IVF. I mean, I'd had four lots of IVF by that stage.

And funnily enough, my 15 year old at the time, my daughter was 15 and I said, I'm trying for another baby. And she said, do you think that's going to fix your marriage? And I'm like, oh, you're wiser than your age, you know, you're way ahead of me. Now, looking back, she could see things that I couldn't.

But quite often when you're in it, you can't see it. Oh, no, absolutely. Absolutely.

And I think this is one of the reasons why, although it's so tempting to beat ourselves up about the things that we didn't see, the things that we didn't miss, the reality is we couldn't have done. It's kind of impossible because the way that our brains filter out all of the bits of information that don't support our belief, i.e., I love my husband, he loves me, we're happily married, whatever that looks like, anything that doesn't align with that, we ignore. It's a bit like seeing some polarising political view on social media and you turn it off because your brain doesn't want to acknowledge that somebody else thinks something very different to you.

So it just deletes it. And of course, this happens in our household. It happens in our day to day lives with the subtlest of things.

And, yeah, it's interesting that when you have that sort of removed subjectivity and you're more and more objective, you have, in this case, your 15 year old daughter being able to see things without that direct emotional blinker system. And it's very interesting because you're always thinking the best and the way our brain works, and this is something while I've learnt through coaching and studying coaching, is the fact that it's a survival method to kind of stay in the same area and the same place where we are and not come out of our comfort zone. It's a survival mechanism.

It's our body trying to protect us. Because if we were in prehistoric times and we wanted to venture out and there's a chance that we might get attacked by a sabre tooth tiger or a woolly mammoth might turn up, start chasing us, then we might as well stay in the cave. And we all end up staying in the cave in lots of ways.

And that's what I was doing. So me fixing stuff, doing things to kind of, I was clasping at straws to try and keep what I had. And I'd had, and here I was, you know, in my 40s, early 40s, that's all I'd known.

And I'd known my parents' home and I'd known my husband's family and home. And I'd kind of spent 20 years there, 23 years there. So equal time, equal times in both places.

And that's all I knew. So everything else was unknown. And it was like an open, like a desert in front of me that I wouldn't, how am I going to find my way through this? How did you get from where you were then to where you are now? What were some of the steps that were taken? The crucial steps that I took were, initially, obviously, I got a lot of advice from friends, which has its good and bad points.

Sometimes we talk to people and it feels good at the time, but it's never helpful because they're not trained people and they're not trained to give you therapy or give you any support of any kind. They're just siding with you or siding with my husband or, and that's all you're getting. And you might, you just get, in a way, sometimes just getting out of your system gives you a little feel-good factor, but there's no progress.

There's a lot of validation. Yes, yes. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of, this is how you should do it.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, you were right. You're right.

You've got to get this. You've got to do this. And sadly, that then kind of keeps you pumped up for a bit.

But you end up wallowing in the self-pity and in the sadness and the grief of it all because you've got to go through all those stages. Oh, a hundred percent. And I, and we don't want, we don't want to though.

No, we don't want to. We definitely don't want to. And when you're in it, it's like, it doesn't matter how, you know, you have somebody, you learn this stuff, you see the messages, you have someone say it.

And you don't want to, you'd rather be with your friends being validated and supported and all the things. And I think there really is space for that in everybody's healing journey. But like anything, if you stay in the same place all the time, you don't move forward.

So there really is a combination of these things that really help us progress and recognising that there's some things do just keep us stuck. And that can be one of them. So, so with, with the validation of friends and all of that, I did stay in that for like almost two years, which ended up me getting into another relationship, which only lasted eight weeks, by the way.

And I had to, I had to run for my life. Because I'd, I'd married somebody who was who I consider a psychopath, who was literally cutting me off from all the contacts I had and isolating me and then wanting me to spend all the money. And I thought I was in London.

I thought I'm going to end up at the bottom of the Thames and nobody will know where I am. I need to get married for eight weeks. Yeah, married for eight weeks, because I couldn't live with someone, you know, I come from a Muslim background and it just wouldn't be the done thing to be in a relationship and live with someone.

You had to be married to them. So, so I'd taken the plunge, got married. I could have just got away with just having the religious marriage, but no, I had the religious marriage and the court marriage at the registry office at the same time.

And then eight weeks later, I had to plan an exit. And that is where I hit rock bottom. I ended up in a women's refuge in the south of the country, all on my own.

And just feeling really, really down and didn't know which direction to go. And that's when I had therapy. For about four months, I had therapy and I did a course which was focused on domestic abuse and women who have come out of domestic abuse, which I didn't know such things existed.

And to be honest with you, I didn't even know what kind of abuse could exist. I only saw abuse as being beaten up and left black and blue or killed. That's all I saw, the physical abuse.

But I didn't see the emotional abuse. I didn't see the financial abuse. I didn't see any of that.

I didn't I didn't even know about it. I didn't know the terminologies. I didn't know that somebody could have narcissistic personality and how they behave around you.

None of this. And that was a huge education for me for the 12 weeks that I did that course. And it awakened me in lots of ways.

But the therapy helped me to talk through things and just have somebody listening. When it wasn't my friends or family members who would then give me advice. This person just listened and it helped me process some of my things.

But immediately after that, I came across a coach who had been through a really painful divorce and I signed up with her for a six month period to get her support. And that really helped me because therapy helped me to process what has happened in the past. But the coaching helped me, yes, this has happened, but how am I going to move forward? And everything has its value.

The therapy had its value in its place and the coachings had its value in its place. But I find that if we stay in therapy and we just stay there, we'll just that to me is just staying and wallowing in. It's just it's just another place that you can stay a bit like a bit like the time with your friends.

It's like it's recognising that there's going to be a different part of your journey is an ongoing up and down, non-linear thing. And there are going to be different components at different points of the timeline. And of course, as you evolve and grow and learn and implement and better understand yourself, then each individual bit is going to have more impact at a different part in the journey.

And I think just recognising that, that there is no there is no one magic pill that solves everything. It is a combination of just adjusting and evolving as things happen and you move on from one thing to another. And for me, it was it's now sitting today in 2023, looking back over the last 15, 20, 30 years.

You know, it's like that famous quote that Steve Jobs says that you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking looking backwards. And now when I look back, I see, oh, yes, that therapy that was useful because that led me to this and that led me to this, because then once I had had the coaching for six months through that coaching, I realised that I was capable of way more than I thought I was.

And even though I'd been a teacher for a number of years and at that point, I was still teaching, but I could I could venture and travel and teach. So I moved abroad. I went to become a governess.

I became Mary Poppins and went and travelled the world. And I literally did because the kind of people I worked with, I had the opportunities of living in different places and travelling. And the first place I went to was Saudi Arabia.

So I was in the middle of the desert, literally. And that gave me. So much reflective time to really find myself.

Because detaching myself from my life, from my family, from parents, I would be working a set amount of hours, but then then my time was my own. I started reading. I started studying.

I watched films that I'd never watched. And all of that was all education, you know, and different times, you know, when different people come along. And I discovered Wayne Dyer.

Now, I'd heard little bits about him, but that's when I really discovered him while I was in the desert. And it's again, there's another quote by I think it's Lao Tzu, something like when when the student's ready, the teacher will appear. Yes.

I'm not sure where it comes from, but I have heard. I think it's Lao Tzu who was a Chinese philosopher. And that's what happened.

And then that got me on a journey of discovery, which led to learning more about coaching and just kind of learning, growing more spiritually and mentally in that area. And at the very beginning, you mentioned you mentioned three things you mentioned. Obviously, you're a coach and that you help people through a combination of nutrition, positive intelligence and self-care.

I mean, there were the three things that you mentioned. So just sort of one by one, would you like to talk a little bit to each of those and how they've happened? I mean, as a woman in my 50s now and going through the menopause, I had significantly well and going through my divorce and everything else, life in general, I had piled on the pounds significantly. And every time I tried to get rid of them, because, you know, the convention is that go and exercise.

You need to hit the gym, go out for a run. I actually piled on more because what I was doing was inadvertently actually creating more stress in my body because I had all these health conditions that would counteract that. I mean, somebody who's perfectly healthy and has exercised all their lives, then they can go and still hit the gym and be maintaining their weight or reducing their weight.

But a lot of funny stuff happens in your body with hormones as well during the menopause that kind of counteracts all of that. And one of the key things is that we're not nutritionally satisfied all the time because we live in a world where we eat a lot of processed foods and even the foods that we think are wholesome and are full of nutrients, lacking those nutrients because our soil quality is now so down compared to what it was a thousand years ago. So I was struggling and in 2020, when Covid hit, I was really struggling and really petrified because at that point I was living and working in Dubai.

Everything stopped and the key thing that we were being told was that anybody who has an autoimmune condition is going to die. And I was desperate to find something that I could do to build up my immunity so I didn't get Covid because I knew I already had an autoimmune condition because psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis come under that umbrella. And one of the things being of the mindset that I was, I classified Covid as an opportunity so I can learn things.

So I took up two languages that I was doing on an app and I was listening into seminars and learning things because you just had that much free time that, oh yes, well, might as well utilise this. So I started doing online courses. And I discovered a seminar where they were talking about nutrition and how through nutrition, because what the point was by this chap was the fact that we are nutritionally, we're overfed and undernourished, basically, that's the term he used.

We eat a lot, but we don't get the nourishment. And I'm like, oh, what do you mean? And he says, well, our food is lacking in nutrients. We need to optimise our nutrition and exercise is good.

But if we're not optimally nourished, then the exercise is counterproductive. So true. We need to be nourished first.

And I'm like, oh, OK, tell me about it. So he went through all how it worked and what it was and and that it was a side effect that you shed a few pounds. And I'm like, oh.

So you're optimising your nutrition, you're making yourself feel healthy, you're actually bringing out, optimising your health. And the emphasis isn't on the exercise, because more often than not, any kind of diet programme I'd done in the past or anything I'd done, it was always what everything went hand in hand. You do this and then you do this, then you do this.

There is an oversimplification of eat less, move more. And although there's some truth to that, of course, this is not always as simple as that. No.

So so and so I'm like, OK, I'm on board and I changed my life in three months with that programme. With that programme in three months, the photos I took in at the beginning of September and then at Christmas, I look totally different. And people who hadn't seen me since the summer and then saw me at Christmas were like, what the hell happened to you? And I'm like, well, everybody was putting on the covid pounds.

I just shed them. I don't go with convention. Amazing.

Well done to you. So so that was what brought me into into sharing that with with clients to take that journey. But you see, what I've learned is in my years of study is that when you get your health and fitness in line, then everything else starts to fall in place.

So these are kind of the crux. So this is like the foundation. So when you get your your optimised nutrition and your fitness back, because by the end of that programme, because it's over three months, you want to move.

Your body naturally wants to move and you're encouraged then to move and exercise. But you're you're you're actually increasing your metabolism and you're shedding the pounds because you're you're optimised nutrition. So that then led me to work in PQ because that was the foundation was the health programme, which has a knock on effect, actually, because it's classified as a nutrition programme.

But it's actually a transformational programme, which then pours over into the rest of your life as well, because the way things are done in that and how it's built up over the 13 weeks, anybody can apply those principles in other aspects of their life and actually have similar results. So that's where I'm coaching. And the positive intelligence actually.

Really nicely fits in with that as a as a programme, because there's aspects of the positive intelligence. What is your behavioural psychology that that happened within the nutrition programme? The positive intelligence is. A programme about how we can actually improve our outlook and be more in flow.

So when when we're when when we can be either in flow or we can be not in flow and when we're not in flow, we are familiar. I'm very familiar with not in flow. Are we all? When we're not in flow, we have lots of things going on in our head.

So we have all these voices going on in our head and they're pulling us this way and that way. And when we're in flow, we're just there and we're getting things done. And you must have experienced it, Luke, when there's times where you feel like you've been doing something because the amount of work you've got done, you feel like you spent like six hours doing it and you've actually achieved it in less than an hour.

It's an incredible feeling. And it is definitely something I experience on a pretty regular basis, if I'm honest. And I think in some respects, it's because I am so aware it exists and I have yet to found the the key set of steps to reliably maintain it or to get it when I want it, rather than just, oh, I'm in it, you know, like, go, go, go, go, because it always seems to be right at the times when I don't really have the time or I've got something else I should be doing or, you know, I've got a deadline.

In fact, deadlines often play a part in it. Yeah, deadlines do help. What the programme does is it gives you an app and it helps you to strengthen the muscle, the PQ muscle.

So when you strengthen the PQ muscle, you're more you're going to be more in what they term a sage, which is being in flow. So the more you do that, the more the stronger it gets. So so the voices start to die down and you're more in flow.

That's kind of a synopsis of it. And it's a very short programme. It's a six week programme.

And then people have got the app for a lot longer to carry on using and applying those practises. I found it. Do you guide people through that or is it? Yeah.

Yeah. So the app is there to to prompt people on a daily basis to do the exercises while they're building up the muscle, and then they've got the option of carrying on and continue the the work afterwards. Amazing.

That sounds really good. And I think I mean, I added self-care as the third thing, but by the sounds of it, having the the nutrition in place, which is fuelling your body properly, fuelling your brain properly so that you can then actually be much more intentional about everything that you do to build that positive intelligence, to get you into that flow state so that you can be more creative and productive and ultimately achieve more things in the world, whatever that looks like, either on a personal, professional or any level that you you consider. When you when you're optimum, you optimise your nutrition.

It's it's not the fact that, you know, a lot of people worry about the weight, but it's not just the weight. You get all sorts of other benefits, like clarity of mind. You get so many ideas popping up in your head.

You sleep so much better. Your productivity goes through the roof. That's what happened in the self-care.

I mean, I've kind of developed lots of self-care routines of how to look after myself and how to maintain myself. Yes, you do the do the three month programme with me. But then how do we maintain that lifestyle? Because somebody holds your hand for three months, but you need it a little bit longer to kind of ingrain all those habits and ingrain the strength and to have somebody there to kind of fall back on, you know, oh, I've had a bad day.

We have a bad day and we think that's it. It's the end of the world. Like, oh, well, that's it.

I've had enough now. I've failed. But we haven't failed.

So we've just gone off course a bit. We've just got to read the map and come back on course again. And that's how people do that.

So how do people find you? Where are all the things? Where are all the things? I will give you all those details to put in the bio for sure. But I'm known as Wellbeing with Yasmin. And what I offer is a discovery call.

So come and chat to me so I can do like a bespoke programme for you, because we are all unique. We are all on our own journeys. And we all want to be heard and we all want to solve our own problems.

So, you know, just like all the fingers aren't the same, nor are all the individuals in the world. Have a chat with me and see how I can help you. Well, thank you ever so much for your time today.

Yasmin, it's been an absolute pleasure. And look after yourself and I hope you have a great rest of your year. Thank you.

And there we have it. So I think to summarise, having witnessed Yasmin's journey through her differing cultures, her battle with an abusive marriage and her inspiring transformation really serves as a reminder that even in the darkest times, there is always a glimmer of hope. We've learned the importance of unconditional love, accepting our partner's flaws and celebrating their uniqueness.

Yasmin's unwavering determination to learn from her experiences and rebuild her life is truly commendable. As I close this episode, I'm left and hopefully you are with a profound sense of admiration for the strength and valuable insights that have been shared. It's a reminder to us all that setbacks can be, in fact, opportunities for growth and that intentional work and reframing our situations can lead to a much brighter future.

It's perfectly normal to feel lost after betrayal. It can feel like we're in quicksand and there's nothing to grip a hold of. Something as simple as understanding your trust and the type of trust that you have in your relationship could be a powerful anchor and starting point to help you rebuild trust within your relationship.

You can do this right now by going to LifeCoachLuke.com forward slash trust and take the Trust Score After Betrayal quiz. By doing it, you will gain a deeper understanding of the trust within your relationship, identify potential areas for improvement and receive a tailored report. It takes less than three minutes and you will receive detailed feedback and actionable steps of how to move forward.

So that's LifeCoachLuke.com forward slash trust. Join me next time on the After The Affair podcast as I continue to explore stories of love, loss and resilience. And remember, there is always hope after the affair.

I'll speak to you all next week.