64. Benefits of Healing from Infidelity

When you’re in the middle of betrayal recovery, it’s easy to believe that healing is only about surviving the pain of infidelity. But what if the lessons you learn during this process could transform every area of your life?

In this episode of After the Affair, I share the surprising ways that healing from betrayal helped me grow, not just in relationships, but in parenting, work, and my sense of self. These tools go far beyond surviving infidelity. They equip you to handle challenges, strengthen resilience, and choose yourself with confidence.

If you’ve ever wondered whether the effort of deep emotional work is worth it, this episode will help you see the lasting benefits of healing from infidelity.

Key Takeaways:

• Learn why separating what you can control from what you cannot is the foundation of healing and clarity.

• Discover the power of journaling and thought downloads for untangling painful emotions.

• Understand how thoughts, not other people, create feelings, and why this shift changes everything.

• Explore the importance of emotional awareness and how to process, not suppress, difficult feelings.

• See how skills gained in betrayal recovery strengthen confidence in work, family, and future relationships.

💬 Reflection Question:

How has healing from betrayal shaped other areas of your life beyond relationships?

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 64.

In this episode I don't want to spend really any time talking about infidelity specifically but more about the tools that I've used to help me overcome infidelity and how they have impacted other areas of my life. So there are a handful of things at play. If I think about my journey, my own personal journey, the key things that made a big difference were, drum roll, it's actually quite simple, getting clear on the difference between what I could control and what I could not.

That was the first one and I did that through initially journaling and then that later evolved into the concept of a thought download. A thought is a sentence in our mind and if we can extract it from our mind and put it onto paper then it is separate from us. We're able to look back at it and reflect on it in a very different way.

We can start to question it and challenge it and decide whether that's something we still want to believe. I found that incredibly useful in so many areas of my life and particularly in relationships but I mean all relationships not just the relationships with your romantic partner but relationships with my children, relationships with my parents, relationships with my colleagues. The next thing was finding at least one resource, a person, a group, something where I could just talk freely and not be judged.

So slightly separate to, I suppose it's just a progression from journaling. It was being able to get my words out and have them reflected back to me and just know that they're being consumed by another human being who isn't judging me for the things that I'm saying and thinking in that moment. The third thing was when I realised that thoughts create feelings.

It seems like such a obvious thing to say to me now but I'm not so sure that it seemed so obvious at the time. I'd spent much of my life believing that other people were responsible for my feelings, my partner was responsible for my feelings and you might be listening to this and still thinking well yeah they are aren't they? Or you may have listened to all my episodes and realised that actually that's not true and it's not useful. Other people do not control how we think and feel despite how it sometimes seems.

Our emotions are driven by the way that we interpret the actions, behaviours, the words of other people, not necessarily by those actions and behaviours themselves. It's just our interpretation, our judgement on them that gives it meaning that then creates our experience and we know this because two people could witness the same thing and give it different meaning and feel something different and they're feeling something different because they're interpreting it in a different way. Then the final step for me really was becoming much more in tune with my emotions.

Now I was always very aware of my emotional experience. I know that some people are not and some people have buried those emotions deep down and do everything they can to avoid them. I'm not so sure that I necessarily process emotion like that previously.

I did acknowledge the emotion that was there. I just apportioned the blame for that emotion externally rather than taking full responsibility and really just understanding where that emotion was coming from. I felt somewhat victim to my own emotions believing that they just shouldn't be there.

I shouldn't feel this way and I had these expectations about how I should handle any given situation which on reflection was not helpful. It kind of kept me stuck. When I think about just little incidents, little events where somebody, like a work colleague for example, I spent many years working at a particular company that I found actually very challenging to work at.

The management was disorganised and quite frustrating I found it at times and then there were other colleagues that just didn't seem to care and they weren't in a line with what I thought was right and that was okay that people don't align with my expectations. What the problem was is I was giving them the power to allow me to beat myself up because I shouldn't feel this way. I should be able to get over it.

I should be able to handle it and the reality was I wasn't equipped to do so. I've never really explored it in that way. When we think about how to process our feelings it can seem certainly for many people, I was going to say stereotypically men, but actually I meet many women as well who also have buried their feelings away in some respects, particularly the deep ones, the feelings of shame, feelings of low self-worth, like they've not done what they should have done.

They've not been a good enough wife or mother or sister or daughter and although they've been very emotional it doesn't mean that they're actually feeling the feelings. If we think about, there's been a lot of research done that suggests that women in general are higher in neuroticism, the sensitivity to negative emotion, so they experience the emotion perhaps more greatly than men on average. However that doesn't mean that they're necessarily any better equipped to actually handling and processing the emotion.

So it's arguably more of a level playing field than we might imagine when it comes to how to handle, process and overcome unwanted feelings and wanted emotions. Of course it starts just by exploring, being curious, being really fascinated by what our bodies are offering us, what they are telling us and how we can really listen to that and try and act more in alignment with it rather than against it. When we go against our gut feelings, our intuition, our sort of instinctive first idea of how we should handle a specific situation, often that can cause that inner tension, it causes that inner friction, sorry, that inner conflict where we are not communicating with the different parts of ourselves.

This can lead to a lack of self-trust and a reinforcement of the low self-worth or judgement that we've been making on ourselves or perceiving other people to make on us over the course of our lives. When I think back to my own situation where this really became true for me, I think I recognised this as an opportunity. Somebody asked me the other day what were the key shifts in my mind in terms of how, why I overcame infidelity and obviously there was the elements I've just spoken about, there were these tools, these tips, these ideas and I laid them out in that, that's actually the order that I sort of worked through.

Maybe obviously there was overlap of course but and I think it's a pretty good order, you know, you start exploring your own mind first through the, through the concept of you know journaling or thought downloading and then you can take that to a trusted person, whether that be somebody that you already know, a friend, a family member or whether it is a professional, to start getting that interaction with another human being. So you separate yourself from your thinking a little bit further and this allows you to be able to look at that whole situation more objectively. One of the reasons that, one of the reasons I'm able to help people is because I'm not tied up with the emotion that they are experiencing in that moment.

The emotion leads to quite black and white thinking. It can also become quite blinkered in thinking. We can only see one option or if lucky maybe two options but usually the second option is not doing the first option and of course that's a very very simple way of looking at life.

I was having a conversation with a friend yesterday and we were talking about how many possible things there are that we can focus our attention on at any given point in time and it's almost infinite. There are so many things that we can pay attention to. There are so many things in any given moment that we could choose to do but we don't and every time we don't it's because we're focussing on something else.

Now that thing that we're focussing on it's a bit like having a spotlight. Just imagine for a minute that you're in, you're trapped in a darkened room and all you have is a torch and you're up against the wall and you shine your light at the wall and it's all just wall. All you can see is the area that the spotlight or the torch in this case is highlighting.

Everything around it is still in complete darkness and you'll be moving the torch around frantically close to the wall and all you're finding is more wall which is scary because you're trapped in this dark room and you don't know how to get out and you start feeling all of the emotion. But let's say for example you just decided to take some steps backwards, move away from the wall. Then naturally what happens is as the torch becomes further away from the wall the area in which it lights up expands.

Initially you have this very narrow spotlight focused on a very small area and then as you move further away the light spreads to a wider radius allowing you to see more at any given point and then what you actually notice is as you start to then move the torch around having this much bigger area of focus there's a door in the corner of the room and that door is the way out. But had you remained in that narrow blinkered spotlight mindset then you may or may not have found the door. You may have gone in the opposite direction and spent ages and then been in that discomfort for a lot longer and no one's saying that you might never find way out but the route is much more complicated as a result.

So if we can use that to sort of take a step backwards start to try and get a wider viewpoint on what it is that we're experiencing then it gives us way more options in terms of how to solve that problem, how to move forward and sometimes just to lessen the fear that we have around the problem. You know if you imagine what you might think if you're trapped in a dark room and you can't find a way out versus being trapped in a dark room with a torch that lights up 25% of the room at any given point and is quite easy then to find the door it puts you in a very different place in terms of how you're going to feel emotionally. All this said I don't want to rule out the utility of the spotlight.

Both the spotlight and the floodlight let's call it have their purpose. When we are struggling and we are focussing on a very narrow thing then that is the moment it's worth zooming out and trying to cover a wider area with our light so that we can see more, we take more information in, we can make better decisions, we make more clearer judgments and we can focus on what it is we want. Once we have spotted the thing that we think is going to move us forward then we can start to zoom back in and we can draw the spotlight back to that to give our attention to that.

If we then become stuck again repeat the process. We zoom back out, we have a look at the wider picture and then we make an assessment and then we focus on that. So there's this constant dynamic of moving in and out of zoom almost or in and out of focus or in and out of brightness in the context of the spotlight that really helps us better understand the situation as we're facing it.

So how has all of this helped me? How have I actually applied this in my day-to-day life or in my work and my business? Okay so I can think of an example specifically at the beginning of this year when I had the opportunity to start delivering some workshops to a group of not necessarily my direct target audience, a slight slightly adjacent shall we say, but in doing so I felt intense anxiety. The fear of being judged, the fear of being ridiculed, the fear of me standing there in front of these people and them calling me out and making it seem like I didn't know what I was talking about and I was just winging it. All of these really unhelpful very disempowering thoughts that I was having about the situation regardless of whether they were true or not they felt true, they felt real.

I found it very uncomfortable to deal with. However with everything that I've shared so far my process was as I've described. I started by just getting a few things out of my head, just getting some stuff down on paper, putting it into my journal and just writing out what it was that really bothered me, what I thought was the worst that could happen, what it was I was actually afraid of and even if those things did happen what would be the consequences and why was that a problem and just really being curious and asking myself those questions and just trying to separate the the words that I was telling myself from the meaning that I was letting them impart upon me shall we say.

Then once I'd explored that a little bit I had conversations. I had conversations with a couple of my friends. I voiced my concerns and my worries and there wasn't really any specific advice offered.

It was more just a case of there being an ear to listen to and I was able to vocalise my concerns and in some respects make them real. Therefore I couldn't just hide away from them anymore. It kind of brought them into focus, into the real world and that can sometimes be quite frightening but in doing so it kind of gives us a kick.

It's like okay well that's it, it's there now. I get to either stand here and do nothing with it or run away from it or I can embrace it and move forward. Of course I was already in a place where I recognised that my thinking created my feelings so I was very aware that it was my thinking, my interpretation of what I thought might happen, my catastrophising, my belief that it would all go wrong that really led to me feeling this fear of anxiety and maybe there was something deeper beyond that as well but certainly on the surface level that was very clear and then it came to the actual feeling of anxiety itself.

What that actually felt like for me. It was very tightening. I remember feeling almost like there was a hand around my throat like I was being throttled or maybe not throttled maybe more just restricted like there was just a grip and I felt like I couldn't move and then there was quite a sort of almost like a pounding racing type feeling in my chest and my heart would intensify.

Of course this is natural, it's the natural human response. The sympathetic nervous system kicks in and you know increases your heart rate, it shuts off blood to certain areas and increases blood flow to your muscles which can that's often what leads to the feeling of your stomach feeling you know like butterflies in your stomach and that sort of fear that's often that almost like flight type response where the body is just trying to prepare to get out of there, just trying to get away from the situation so therefore other parts of your body suffer as a consequence but actually just sitting with that, just exploring it, just describing it, just acknowledging it, just letting it be there and really realising that as uncomfortable as it was it couldn't actually hurt me, it couldn't actually do anything, it wasn't like a physical thing that could come and grab hold of me and force me to do something I didn't want to do and when it came to the day that I delivered the first workshop I still felt a lot of that anxiety and my brain was coming up with all kinds of wonderful excuses and reasons and ideas and I know I've definitely spoken about this somewhere so I apologise if I've spoken about it here on the podcast specifically but I was driving and my brain was coming up with all these ideas like I should maybe maybe if I just pretended that I didn't turn off at the right junction on the motorway and maybe I got two junctions too far down and by that point realised that I was too far away it was too hard to get back I'd be late and therefore I'd have to ring and say that I got lost and maybe we should reschedule or I was thinking maybe I could pull down in pull over in the in the lay-by and actually deflate my own tyre just so that I could pretend that I've got a flat tyre so that I don't have to wait for I don't even know what clearly not thinking this through but these ideas were coming up in my mind or maybe I was just thinking sometimes you know I have not feeling very well oh yeah that's right I'm not well oh yeah my head's really starting to hurt I'm starting to feel a bit sick oh yeah perhaps you know especially with you know Covid only been a couple of years ago and all of the you know the worries about I wouldn't I wouldn't want to make anybody else ill so yeah I know I'll ring them and tell them that I'm gonna I'm gonna go home I'm maybe gonna let's let's do it leave it for another time all these things were coming out my mind and it was kind of hilarious because as I was feeling all of those things and I was listening to my brain I knew I'd already known in advance that I was going to experience or I was it was likely that I would experience discomfort like that and it's likely that I would experience thoughts trying to convince me to do something that I had previously committed to do and now was trying to get away from well when I think about what it felt like I've already partially described the feelings that I was experiencing it was almost entertaining to see my brain working so hard to try and keep me safe just because it didn't want to experience those things and of course what ended up happening is that I allowed those feelings to be there I listened to myself I kind of answered the questions that my brain was offering me and just I suppose treated it a little bit like another person like it was someone who was just looking out for me so I just offered them reassurance and I was sort of just doing that in my own mind I was telling myself and it's probably even parts where I was actually talking out loud in the car if I'm honest but it was that having that that dialogue to be able to comfort myself in that moment and know that you know the worst that could happen was a negative feeling I've been through all the scenarios what would be the worst happen that could happen on that day well I could stand there and everyone would laugh at me or I could stand there and people just fall asleep or somebody might literally call me out for something these were all the things that were sort of coming up in my mind or or maybe the workshop wouldn't go very well and I wouldn't be asked back to do any more all these things that I was sort of potentially worrying about I was I was really bringing them to the forefront to focus on them and asking that question it's not well is that true what evidence have I got to support that and of course nearly all cases there is zero that doesn't make the feeling just go away but at least gives me that confidence that I can handle what's coming up regardless of my expectations so how did it go well it went well you know I stood there I delivered the material I still felt nervous even at the beginning but I started to ease into it as I was going through it and I ended up going back every six weeks for the remainder of the year to deliver these workshops and that has then it's you know opened some opportunities in some other areas that I had not previously considered coming into the beginning of this year so had I have let my emotions control me rather than me taking control of my emotions but not in a way where I was trying to dismiss them I wasn't trying to avoid them I wasn't trying to you know react to them I wasn't trying to resist them I was trying to let them be there and acknowledge them for what they were in doing so I was able to do the hard thing which then led to a delayed gratification there was a reward that came beyond it might not have been immediate there was still that discomfort but it was worth it it was worth it it was worth it and the thing is even if the outcome hadn't been as good as I'd hoped even if some of those worst-case scenarios had come true well in the same way that I prepared for the anxiety that I was likely to experience on the journey to the deliver the workshop I was also prepared for what I might feel like should those worst things happen should those worst-case scenarios happen I was equipped it's the equivalent of building up that muscle I'd been to the mental gym let's say and built up that resilience to know that I can handle hard things even when they don't go the way that I hope in short the lessons that I learned through healing from infidelity have helped me in a wide array of areas in my life and this is obviously one example I'm thinking of here but there have been many many others I encourage you to think of this as I've shared before when we go through a difficult situation whatever is your reason is for being here listening to me today whatever that reason whatever drew us together this is an opportunity for you to modify not just this one area of your life but all areas of your life when you do the work and you pay attention to the things that are going to block you in some way and you can take that be empowered by it go through it be strong come out the other side in a way that you probably never imagined I've rambled a little bit today maybe not quite as slick as my normal podcasts but it's more important that I get the message across it's more important that I help you rather than worrying about the discomfort I might feel if I don't make my podcast quite to the standards that I expect because I've already prepared myself for the discomfort and I hope you will too okay it's been an absolute pleasure as always if you need any help if you're looking for any support then I'm here you can contact me directly at lifecoachluke.com sorry luke at lifecoachluke.com and you can visit the website which is lifecoachluke.com I'm also accessible on social media if you're not already a member of the weekly mailing list then I highly suggest that you subscribe to that you can access that simply by visiting lifecoachluke.com forward slash subscribe okay perfect I'll see you next week.