7. Don’t Mention the ’F’ Word

Let’s talk about the thing most of us try to avoid: feelings. If you're healing after infidelity, emotions can feel overwhelming, unpredictable, or even unsafe. You might be resisting them, reacting to them, or numbing them away, but none of these paths lead to real peace.

In this episode of After the Affair, I uncover why understanding your emotions is the most powerful skill you can develop in your recovery. From recognising how feelings form to learning how to process them without fear, we’re tackling what many shy away from.

Key Takeaways

• Feelings fuel all your actions: Understanding them is essential for healing and regaining control.

• Most people resist, react, or avoid: Learn why none of these methods help you move forward.

• Emotions come from thoughts: You can choose how you feel by choosing how you think.

• Avoidance creates long-term pain: Facing your feelings is the only way to process and release them.

• Emotional awareness is a superpower: Master it, and you take your power back after betrayal.

💬 Reflection questions:

Have you noticed yourself pushing feelings away, reacting in anger, or burying pain under distraction? What would it look like to simply allow your emotions?

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. Episode 7 of the After The Affair podcast with myself Luke Shillings and today we're going to be talking about the F word. Nope, not that one.

Feelings and emotions. We're going to explore why they're so important and why you should really pay attention to them. And yes I'm talking to you guys.

I know that we get a hard rap. I know that it's considered that guys aren't in touch with their emotions. We don't have these conversations with each other and that may be true but it doesn't mean we don't have them.

It doesn't mean we don't experience them and feelings are the fuel for everything we do. So what are they? Well I would describe a feeling as a vibration in the body. It's nothing more than that.

It's not the same however as a sensation so let's just get that out of the way. A sensation is something like hunger or tiredness. Maybe you feel hot or cold, maybe even sick.

It's something that starts in your body and through either a chemical or electrical message is sent to the brain and then you will act accordingly like turn the heating up or put a blanket on or maybe take some medicine. Feelings come the other way. Feelings start in the brain.

They start from our thoughts and they do this without exception. It may sometimes feel or seem like we feel first but I promise you it's always following a thought. So why do feelings matter? Well they're the reason that we do or do not do things.

Everything that we do is because of how we think is going to make us feel. Every decision we make, every dream that we achieve or that fades away, every relationship that we nurture or ruin is based on how we want to feel. We avoid negative feelings with the intention of moving towards positive feelings.

We overindulge in things like food and sex, drugs, technology and even work. We become pleasure dopamine junkies always chasing the next high. In the short term this seems great but it's also important to acknowledge that as we do this we actually limit our potential just to avoid discomfort.

People are often unhappy because they believe that they shouldn't be unhappy. Of course happiness can't exist without unhappiness otherwise we'd have nothing to reference it against. The negative makes the positive possible.

So one can't exist without the other and it's purely the way that we look at the world that dictates how we feel and those feelings that are driven by our thoughts are optional. We do get to choose the thoughts that we have. As a coach I get to see firsthand how people in general deal with their emotions and they usually do one of the following three things.

The first is they resist. They try and push it away. They try and submerge it in some way and almost keep it underwater in the hope that it's never going to resurface.

Think of a beach ball. You know you might be able to stand in water that's maybe waist height and you have a beach ball between your hands and you can press it down and push it under the surface of the water and you can hold it there but it's trying to come back up and at some point you will run out of energy and the beach ball will win. It will resurface and your emotions are just the same.

It's not sustainable. The second thing is reacting and this is particularly common in the early days of discovering an affair. You know shortly after D-Day.

Reacting can look like yelling or slamming doors or blowing things out of proportion maybe even just freaking out but it never serves long term and it's usually just a release and nothing more. It still doesn't deal with the core problem. The third thing I see is people who avoid their emotions.

They indulge in other things and other activities in an attempt to not pay attention to the negative emotions that they're experiencing because of the things that have happened in their lives. For example the discovery of an affair or the ongoing emotional challenges that are faced when trying to heal from infidelity and instead turn to things like overeating, over drinking, over working. Maybe it sometimes shows up you know in over shopping or just spending in general.

Maybe they turn to social media and you're scrolling and consuming you know never-ending amounts of YouTube videos. Maybe you're distracting yourself with things like porn or Netflix. The point is it usually results in a net negative result.

For example if you overeat you eventually gain weight. If you overspend you struggle with financial issues and if you start watching porn it can form an addiction and these things are much harder to get away from. Okay so they're the three things that I see most common and clearly they're not useful.

They're not productive in moving forward. So what is it that we need to do? The key with all emotions is simply to allow them. There's just no way around a negative feeling.

Be curious and be willing to experience those vibrations honestly. They're not a big deal. Often the anticipation and the expectation of what it's going to be like is far worse than the reality.

Avoiding the emotion just creates a bigger fear around what it might actually be like. So you create an even bigger disconnect, a bigger divide and ultimately leaves you further away from where you need to be. Further away from where you're trying to go.

So what else can you do? Well you could try describing the situation. You could write it down. Maybe talk it out loud.

Tell somebody what it feels like. Tell a coach or a therapist. Talk to yourself in the mirror.

Try describing it to an extraterrestrial. Literally imagine saying something the lines of, this feeling that I'm experiencing right now is creating a tightness in my chest. It's right between my ribcage.

There's an emptiness in my stomach. It feels very low. It's deep.

There's a tension around my head and in particular the top and over the back and down the back of my neck. I can also feel this sort of cloudiness in my mind, you know behind my eyes. So these are just some of the ways that you can describe the physical vibrations that you're experiencing in your body.

And once you acknowledge those you can learn to become more comfortable experiencing them, even though they are uncomfortable. You just train your brain. You train your mind to become more comfortable being uncomfortable.

You might be thinking that sounds crazy. Why would I even want to do that? Well the answer is quite simple. You get to do two things with your emotions.

You can use them for you or you can use them against you. So learning how to recognise what emotions it is that you're experiencing and ultimately what things you are going to do when you're feeling that way, then you can learn to catch those in the moment before reacting to them, before resisting them and before avoiding them and instead allow them. Now it's worth pointing out that the brain is just trying to follow its pre-programmed evolutionary path.

It's following the motivational triad which is to seek pleasure, avoid pain and use the least amount of effort possible, the least amount of energy possible. Now of those three things avoiding pain or avoiding danger is the most important because you can only get so dead. So trying to avoid that is pretty useful to help try and keep you alive.

And of course when we lived in caves this was much more relevant. There really were dangers. You know it was a danger to be out on your own in the wild.

There were predators that could easily eat you and you maybe not be able to defend yourself. There was a risk of getting cold and freezing or maybe not being able to find food for periods of time. So paying attention to anything that caused alarm was an essential survival technique.

However fast-forward to present day and much of our environment has changed. Although our brains, because evolution is a bit steadier, haven't really moved at the same rate. So they're still looking for all of these danger signs, all of these warning signs and they're letting you know every single one of them to make sure that you keep safe, you keep alive.

But most of these warning signals that we get are just no longer relevant anymore. So instead I recommend that you become the watcher. Pay attention, zoom out, simply observe the emotions, acknowledge that they're there.

Eventually they will pass through. It may take seconds or minutes, maybe even hours, but there's no rush. There's no urgency to get rid.

The better you become at handling those negative emotions, the less impact they will have on you each time that they happen. And you can recognise them and just notice, ah there you are, I recognise you. Well you can come along for the ride but I'm not going to react and I'm not going to hide you in the cupboard and I'm not going to run away.

I'm just going to let you be there. And now that you are there, I'm just going to be actively curious. Just imagine approaching it like a child would, the way that they approach something new with a complete fascination.

I promise you that this last section, this how to feel your feelings and to process your feelings, is the skill of all skills. It's a superpower and the better you get at it, the more control you will have over your life. Okay so there's a key part to feelings that we've loosely talked about but not gone into much detail and that is what feelings ultimately do.

From what I see they do two main things. The first is they just give us the ability to experience the world. They are literally everything that we experience.

Just imagine a world where you couldn't experience desire, longing, the feeling of excitedness or being hopeful, maybe feeling proud or happy, you know, being astounded, amazed. Sometimes even the negative emotions like sadness and sorrow and grief, regret, you know, these are all ways that in which we can make sense of the environment around us. The thing that is probably more relevant to what we're talking about here today is that feelings drive our actions.

They are responsible for everything that we do and everything that we don't do. So for example, imagine that your partner has asked you to help them with a particular task but at the time you're feeling hate and maybe hostility, you're maybe agitated or annoyed, frustrated, something along those lines. How do you think you're going to act in that situation? Are you going to want to support your partner? Are you going to help them through it or are you going to maybe do it begrudgingly? Are you going to make snide comments or are you just going to point-blank refuse? How about if you felt content, compassionate, loving, caring, enthusiastic, how would that change how you would then choose to help your partner? If you were feeling those types of emotions, you'd perhaps be more likely to assist, maybe even encourage, help where you can, you know, pay attention to the person that you want to be and not the person that you're trying to be because of somebody else's actions.

If somebody does something that upsets us or hurts us or particularly something significant like they were unfaithful, then that's going to bring up emotions that are more likely to be less useful. But then you are not actually being the person that you want to be and you're allowing your partner's actions, their choice to be unfaithful, let's say, you're allowing those to dictate how you feel and by allowing them to dictate how you feel, you're also allowing them to dictate what you then do. So you've basically handed all of that power to them and, you know, I, as the betrayed spouse, I know what it feels like to have that power taken away from you when that trust is broken and all of a sudden you feel like you don't have any control in the situation.

So, of course, there's a great desire to try and regain some control by being stubborn and forthright and trying to, you know, make things difficult almost intentionally because they deserve to punish, they deserve to to suffer in some way to, you know, pay the price for what it is that they did to you. Hopefully now you'll have a better understanding of what feelings are, why they're important and how you can manage them in a way that maybe you haven't been doing before. Now, before we go, I want to ask you some questions.

First is to think of what emotion would you most like to feel about your partner? Then ask yourself what would you need to think to feel that emotion? And finally, how would you act towards your partner when you felt that emotion? By answering these three simple questions you are intentionally choosing to feel a certain way and it's giving you the power to be able to implement those into your relationships today. Those who make those intentional steps are the ones that make the most progress and avoid further damage in their relationships. They take responsibility for their own actions and seek help and support.

I work with men just like this all the time and make their future so much better than they previously imagined and truly help them rediscover themselves in the process. If that resonates with you and you want to finish off 2022 on purpose and really heal from infidelity, I currently have two one-to-one coaching slots available and it's the perfect time to get started. If you have any questions just contact me directly at lifecoachluke.com or through my social media channels Facebook, Instagram at mylifecoachluke.

I look forward to speaking to you next time. Have a great week. You've got this!