6. Unexpected Guilt

You’ve come a long way. The chaos, the heartbreak, the endless questions, they’re no longer your daily reality. But just when you start to feel more like yourself again, a surprising new emotion creeps in: unexpected guilt. Why do you feel bad for doing well, especially when your partner, the one who betrayed you, is now struggling?

In this episode of After the Affair, I explore the often-overlooked emotional twist that can show up in your healing journey. We’ll unpack why you might feel guilty when your partner suffers, even if they caused the pain in the first place, and how to shift that guilt into something far more empowering: compassion.

Key Takeaways

• Healing brings unexpected emotions - including guilt for feeling better when your partner is not.

• Your emotions are no longer dependent on their actions - and that’s a powerful shift.

• Guilt and compassion can be easily confused - learn how to tell the difference.

• Cognitive dissonance reveals your growth - your old self might have wanted what now feels unattractive.

• You deserve to feel good - your healing isn’t conditional on someone else’s suffering.

💬 Reflection question:

Have you experienced guilt as you’ve started to feel better? How did you respond when your partner began to struggle?

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 you're listening to episode number six of the After The Affair podcast with myself Luke Shillings. Today I would like to talk about how you feel a little further on in your journey of healing.

I'm not talking specifically to those people who have recently discovered betrayal, those who are still in shock or maybe in denial and it's also not specifically for those experiencing intense anger. This is aimed beyond that. However it is still worth listening.

It'll still be valuable to anybody regardless of the stage you're at but just be warned that there may be things that I say here that perhaps don't seem like they're possible for you right now or they may not even seem like they are possible for you in the future. I want to offer that this isn't necessarily the case and you can't possibly know that anyway. What you can know is that things often don't turn out how you expect and that includes how you got where you are now.

You're in this place that you probably didn't expect to be in even just a short period of time ago and yet you are and there's no way that you could have really predicted it. So give yourself some space and acknowledge that if you didn't expect or know that you could have gotten here then there's a good chance that you won't be able to predict where you might go exactly in the future. For those of you a little bit further on into their healing process and things are looking a little bit better you might be able to say things like you know well things are good now my life has improved and I'm no longer in that daily dysfunction stage where you can't bring yourself to get up every day and go to work and do the things that maybe even you know your personal hygiene is suffering and your friendships are suffering and now you're at this point where maybe you've made some new friends and some new opportunities have opened up and you've been able to take advantage of those.

You've had more success at work or maybe you started your own business. You've now built up this confidence in yourself where you've now realised that the limits are perhaps not exactly where you thought they were. You've proved to yourself multiple times that you can do hard things and getting through the difficult part of your healing process from infidelity has been one of those.

It wasn't easy and you don't actively want to experience it again but you know that the worst thing that happened on reflection was just feeling those negative emotions. It was that was how it felt. That was what was hard.

Yes there might have been some logistical challenges. You might have been physically tired. You might have been strained in other ways but that was only exaggerated or in some cases even created by the negative emotions that you were experiencing.

You see our emotions drive everything that we do so if you're feeling motivated then the things that you do to complete a task are going to look very different compared to if you were trying to complete the same task when you're coming from feeling discouraged. This increase in confidence has brought trust back into your life. You can now say things like I trust myself again.

I know that I can't control other people and therefore I know that the trust I believed I had lost in my partner was really more about the ability I had to trust my own judgement. Knowing this you get to believe that the trust you have in yourself is all that matters. You can only deal with the information you have available at the time.

You're now in a place where you start to come up to a point where you're happy for whatever happens to your ex regardless of whether you have remained in the relationship or not. You have more unconditional love for your partner now than perhaps you ever did but ironically it has been the pain that you went through and the betrayal itself that it taught you to do that because you are no longer dependent on the actions of others to make you feel a certain way. So what about when something isn't going so well for your partner? Well the expectation is that perhaps you should feel avenged.

I mean you probably really wanted to see your partner suffer at that point where you know they should have experienced the same pain that I did. But why? Well they deserve it and I suppose it's an attempt to make you feel better. It's like okay well how would that make you feel? Perhaps it made you feel self-righteous? Morally superior? Egotistical? How about smug? It's like okay well are these good things? It doesn't sound like it to me.

Though I mean there's plenty of self-serving traits which are desirable such as self care and compassion, understanding and patience which don't paint the same potentially narcissistic picture that the likes of a self-righteous, egotistical, morally superior, smug person you know might do. So is that really how you want to feel? And I would argue that although that might, that may very well have been how you did want to feel, it's probably not where you are now. So how do you feel now knowing that your partner is struggling? You might feel sad.

If you've seen something happening in your partner's life that maybe isn't going so well, they're struggling a little bit for whatever reason, maybe their behaviour has changed. They're seeing these improvements in you and now well that's becoming more attractive because you're displaying confidence and certainty and you've got it together. One of the things that we see when we start to go through this process is that we really start to focus on the self.

So one of the key changes, one of the key things that's worked on, that's worked on sorry, during any recovery process is to step in and deal with all of the things that are holding you back as an individual. So as you're making this change into this new improved version of yourself then it can be quite sad to see your partner show signs of weakness. So what might that look like? Well maybe they start love bombing you, you know with increased communication, the possible disrespecting of boundaries, becoming more needy, maybe giving inappropriate gifts, although this might be more relevant if you've separated.

However I think it can also show up if you're still together, especially if the unfaithful partner is seeking a quick resolve. Think you know sweeping the past under the carpet. It's often packaged in a more subtle way though.

All of a sudden they have started saying lovely things, you know maybe turning up at work with flowers or gifts. They're you know fantasising and sort of exploring your future together. They're including you in their plans, which is you know amazing given that up until now you've not really ranked too highly in their you know in their plans let's say.

The key point is they are trying to get you to forget what happened from a place of desperation which for the first time now seems totally unattractive to you. Ironically this is exactly what the old hurting version of you might have craved. You know all of this attention and these gifts and this desire to build a future together.

But of course now there's this disconnect between what your past self would have wanted, what your current self has and probably more importantly what your future self needs. It's a kind of unexpected experience of cognitive dissonance. So for anybody who isn't familiar with the term, cognitive dissonance is when a person feels some kind of discomfort as a result of their behaviour not aligning with their beliefs.

Okay so a couple of examples. One is like you you need to eat nutritional foods and keep physically active to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Yet your brain also wants you to eat all the cookies in the jar and have takeout three times this week while sitting watching Netflix.

So there's this cognitive dissonance whereby you know what you should do versus what you want to do. They don't really align. Another example would be smoking.

So you know I believe at least that most people who smoke are aware of at least some if not most of the consequences of smoking. The shortened lifespan, the increased risk of lung cancer, the literal smell and unpleasantness that it creates for the people around them. Yeah there was a time where maybe it was cool but for anyone who still smokes I'm sorry but that time has passed.

However smoking is habitual, it's addictive, it's something that's not easy to just stop. Now in both examples there are contradictions in their behaviours. So eating junk food, being inactive and smoking, that they just don't support their beliefs and desires of I want to be healthy.

So you can perhaps see how in the old version of you you were living out this cognitive dissonance. You were perhaps in a relationship, you're acting in a certain way to try and gain all of these things that you're that you really wanted to get from your partner and you just weren't getting, you weren't getting the love and the attention and the affection and the things that you needed or you you believed that you needed to be happy and to to feel love. Yet you were acting from a place of desperation which as you can now see now having been on the other side of it how unattractive those traits are.

So although this may not relate directly for everybody you might be able to see traits in your partner's current behaviour that is not dissimilar to how maybe you behaved in the past and having that reflected back retrospectively is an unusual experience. Because it's only now that you can say well actually with all the information my my beliefs are that that is not the best way to behave to get my desired my desired outcome. And that's where this cognitive dissonance comes in because there's this mismatch between what you want and what you end up getting.

So what is it that you do get? Well we've already spoken a little bit about the the sadness that you you might experience seeing your partner behaving the way that they are doing currently. You may also feel pity and possibly even sorrow. There's also underlying, if you dig a bit deeper, there's a possibility that you might feel guilt.

You're doing okay. You were in a really awful place and it was really hard for you to get through but you've done it and you've got through it and you're on that other side of the you know you're on the downward slope. And now you're watching your partner climb up the side that you had to do X amount of time ago.

There's there's this element of feeling guilty about feeling good when somebody else isn't. Like almost there's an element of I don't feel like I deserve to feel good while somebody else suffers. Which given the circumstances is you know on the one hand not unreasonable.

You know as a caring loving human being you know we don't like to see other people suffer. Even if we're really really honest with ourselves, even those who have done us wrong. Because that being done wrong, that justification to be angry at someone and to blame somebody and to resent somebody.

You know it might all feel very moral and motivating but the reality is it just makes you feel pretty rubbish and well actually way beyond that. It's a really unpleasant experience. But on the other hand of course you do deserve to feel good.

You did work through this. You have put in the time and the effort and the tears and the heartache and all of the things that have been required to get you from where you were to where you are now. So you absolutely deserve to feel good.

But you're not feeling good because the other person is suffering. That's where the change has come. There's no need to feel guilt because you're feeling good has nothing to do with the other person anymore.

You're not dependent on them in any way. It's purely now because of how you choose to do the things for you that serve you best. Okay so let me try and wrap this up.

So have you ever had an experience where you thought about something that might happen in the future and I don't know you predicted how you think you would feel when you were actually in that situation. If that particular thing came true. Enjoy.

It sounds kind of funny me saying it out loud because it makes me realise well actually Luke yeah that's kind of what you do all the time. That's literally everything we do is because of how we think it's going to make us feel. That's why we make decisions.

We hope that the future is going to you know lay out in a way that we somehow predicted and we want that because we're going to feel better for it. We're seeking something more positive or we're getting away from something that's negative. Okay so let's just rewind a little bit.

In regards to how to feel about guilt towards your partner, I want to offer that instead of feeling guilt for somebody else's choices, let's say, consider feeling compassion for the emotions that they are experiencing. There may have been a time when you felt it was completely appropriate for your partner to suffer and want them to hurt but it actually makes no difference to you and if you're honest with yourself, especially if you're still together or you have children together, then it's not going to serve your current or future relationships either. So that's everything I have for you today.

Thank you ever so much for listening once again. If you have any comments or any questions then please reach out to me. As always you can contact me directly at LifeCoachLuke.com where you can also download my free first steps guide or access my social media at MyLifeCoachLuke both on Facebook and Instagram.

I look forward to speaking to you next time. Take care!