79. Betrayal Unpacked: Two Ways to Heal

When infidelity strikes, it’s like stepping into a fog so thick you can’t see the path forward. The emotional chaos, the identity crisis, the endless “what now?”. It’s a lot. And no two people navigate it the same way. In this episode, I unpack two distinct approaches to healing after betrayal, helping you discover which path best supports your emotional recovery.

You’ll hear the real-life stories of two clients, Daniel and Claire, each facing similar pain but healing in very different ways. Whether you're overwhelmed by every detail or paralysed by the bigger picture, this episode offers practical, compassionate insight to help you take the next right step.

Key Takeaways:

• There is no one right way to heal from betrayal.

• Breaking big problems into smaller pieces can reduce overwhelm.

• Emotional capacity is like a muscle; it can grow over time.

• Focusing on non-affair-related goals can build resilience.

• The journey to recovery includes both logic and emotion.

💬 Reflection Questions:

Have you tried breaking things down or shifting focus entirely? Which approach feels more natural to you right now?

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 everybody and welcome back to the After The Affair podcast. I'm your host Luke Shillings and today you're listening to episode number 79. Today I want to look at two ways in which people can often handle and deal with processing the negative emotion and emotional trauma that comes with infidelity.

Because here's the thing everyone figures this out in their own way. What works for one person might not work for another. It's all about finding what clicks for you and helps you to start feeling a bit more like yourself again.

Imagine you're walking through a forest so thick with fog you can barely see your hand in front of your face. That's a lot like how it feels after someone cheated on you. You're trying to find your way out but it's so hard to know which way to go.

Today I want to talk about finding a path that starts leading you back to feeling okay. As many of you will know in addition to hosting this podcast I'm a infidelity recovery coach and I see many different variations of how people heal and move through the experience of betrayal and there is no right path. I've discussed this before on previous episodes of the podcast.

What I can say is there are some common overall themes that are fairly consistent and they seem to get split into two main categories. The consequence of betrayal and multifaceted nature of all of the things that it affects in your life can be quite considerable. For example you might not be able to focus on work anymore.

Perhaps there's financial implications. How are the kids going to deal with it? You're struggling with intrusive thoughts and not sleeping properly. You've started to face a bit of an identity crisis.

You don't know who you are anymore. You've got co-parenting challenges. There's legal and custody issues.

Perhaps there's cultural expectations which you are fearful you may be judged against. You're uncertain about future relationships. You are fearful of privacy.

You know other people and the wider public learning about your situation. Also you have these ideas of what you thought the future was going to look like and now they don't. So as you can see very quickly, and I've just run a few off the top of my head there, there are so many things that build up this what I would call almost a bubble that contains all of the individual elements that impact the recovery from betrayal itself.

The problem with this is when we try and work with individual elements of that, they trigger the overall thing. It's like a chain reaction. So we might pay some attention just on, for example, the legal and custody issues.

But when we do that, that brings up elements of the co-parenting which then brings up the relationship with the kids, which then brings up the finances, which then brings up the what will my parents think and so on and so on and so on. There's this big chain reaction. So the emotional impact of every little thing is equal to all of them added together with interest, which can be really quite challenging to deal with.

So with that in mind, let's talk about these two different approaches. I'm just going to keep them simple. We'll just call it approach one and approach two.

So the first one being it's like you're caught in this giant knotted ball of emotions, anger, sadness and a whole lot of confusion. Everything about the affair seems bigger and more intense, making it hard to see anything clearly. Imagine trying to sort this mess out bit by bit.

It's like untangling a giant knot. You find the end of one thread and you start following it. You try to loosen the tangle without making it worse.

But this is made even more difficult when you are on the inside of the bubble and you don't even know where the outside is. It's like you don't know which string it is that you're trying to pull on, which bit you're trying to follow, which thread you're trying to follow. This was true for a client of mine recently.

We'll call him Daniel, where all of these thoughts were flying around in his head and it was complete chaos. He couldn't see the wood for the trees literally and couldn't find his way out. So we took the approach of starting to separate each of these things out, almost like getting each individual element, a little bit like that list of elements I gave earlier, and started to put them in a neat little row in his mind.

We were able to separate one from the other so each one didn't mean everything about the affair. It was just about that specific problem and it didn't create that chain reaction. And he was in a position where he was able to do that without becoming emotionally dysregulated and we could focus just on one thing at a time.

And then what we noticed was that as we started working through these individual elements. There's various techniques and tools and bits of thought work and mindset shifts that that helped him move through these things, as he started to work through sort of one, two, three, four of these things. All of a sudden many of the other ones started to dissipate on their own because a lot of the structure in terms of the thought work and how he was seeing it began to impact his overall view of the affair and made it less painful, less emotionally challenging, which meant that he was in a position where he could make more intentional and defined decisions going forward. However this doesn't work for everybody because for some people there really is this chain reaction. Any single element can be absolutely overwhelming because it just sets off this spontaneous combustion almost like, of all the different elements of the affair and everything that we associate with it.

So sometimes trying to use this very logical, practical, pop everything in its nice neat little box method, which might work for some people, I think I probably include myself in that category, I know and I recognise that does not work for everybody. It can still be too overwhelming, especially very early on after discovery of betrayal. So in that case we need to approach it from a different perspective.

So let's consider approach two. I have another client, we'll call her Claire, and she had a very similar situation to Daniel. The circumstances were actually remarkably similar.

Claire was also quite logically minded. She considered herself emotionally stable. She'd been through some very challenging times in her life up until this point and always found that although she felt deeply, she really did feel emotion on a very deep level, she was quite good at managing it and was actually felt quite proud as a result of that.

So in some sense it seemed like she was very similar to Daniel in that context as well, in terms of the methodical, logical, practical solutions would be what would suit her best and I think that's what she thought too, because that's how she'd always dealt with things in the past. However, healing from her husband's betrayal was overwhelming. Now everybody has a capacity.

I like to describe it as having a cup. We have this cup where we can fill it full of negative emotion. Let's say we are dealing with anger.

So we can handle a certain amount of anger and it's a bit like water filling the cup and we can handle as much as that cup can hold. So it's capacity. But the moment that the content exceeds its capacity it starts to overflow.

The water fills and it pours over the edge and at that point we become emotionally dysregulated and that can often be a fight, flight or freeze response. Now of course most people aren't aware that this emotional cup even exists, let alone what kind of capacity it has. And other people might be seen as just better at handling difficult situations, getting less stressed out, not getting as angry or just not as reactive as other people.

It's like there's something inherently different about that person. But that's not necessarily true. Yes there are certain circumstances which have led them to experience life very differently to you, but they may have also had this cup which has grown over time.

And this is the key point. Just because you have a current capacity for negative emotion doesn't mean that that has to be the permanent capacity for that emotion. This is something that you can build and grow over time quite effectively simply by doing it on purpose, by recognising that this is what we're doing.

I think a life where discomfort doesn't exist, well actually it would be pretty awful. It sounds wonderful, it sounds almost utopian. But the word utopia itself, when we look at its origin, comes from the Greek meaning of not and place.

It's not a place, it doesn't exist. And a slight sidetrack here, but when we think about happiness, well what is happiness? Well my understanding, my definition, my explanation for happiness is when our expectations are met. And all discomfort comes from when our expectations are not met.

So if we believe in this utopian world, or anything whereby we should feel happy all the time, or we should experience happiness all the time, well actually we're destined to live in permanent discomfort because that will never be fulfilled on any sustainable period of time. Anyway, sorry, I sidetracked a little bit there. Let's bring it back.

So we've got Claire, and she has all of the same, or at least very similar, problems that Daniel was facing. And they're contained within this larger affair bubble, if you like. There's this overall thing, and within it are all of these little individual elements that I spoke about earlier.

The difference is that every time we try and approach one of these individual things, it causes Claire's nervous system to become dysregulated, and she becomes very quickly overwhelmed with emotion. At this point her logical, practical brain that she's relied on all of this time is basically useless. It cannot function because the emotions are so powerful, they're so overwhelming.

And even when we try and approach different elements of the affair separately, they all create this chain reaction, this explosion, which causes this dysregulation and leaves her in a state where she doesn't feel like she can move forward. So what's an alternative approach? Well, we have everything that's going on that's associated with the affair. That's this bubble.

But then if we turn and look the other way, we also have every other element of our lives, of which is vast by the way. Often when we're in a situation where we've experienced some traumatic event or some particular thing that's caused us lots of discomfort, it's very hard to see anything but that thing. So all of our time is consumed about it, all of our thoughts are consumed about it, every conversation is about it, you know.

We're seeking professional support, we're on social media forums and we're reading books and listening to podcasts and like everything we consume is about affairs, it's about infidelity, it's about healing. So what are the other things that we could pay attention to just to, you know, temporarily but intentionally put the affair bubble to one side? Well, there are things like career goals and development, there's personal health and well-being and just how you're looking after yourself, there's your own personal financial management. Maybe you could educate yourself, you could learn, you could take on new hobbies or interests, you can build new social connections or deepen existing ones, you could volunteer, give back, you could make some changes around the home, some different tasks and decorating projects and just general home improvements that you've been meaning to do for a long time.

You could focus on travel, adventure, you could explore a journey into mindfulness and spiritual growth, you can become more experimental with your personal style, your self-expression and maybe you could change things environmentally, you could set sustainability goals, you could try and achieve some lifelong objectives, maybe you want to be a public speaker or improve your communication skills. The list goes on and on and on and everything's going to be, everyone is going to be different for every individual, of course, but each one of these things that I've just listed all have their own obstacles, their own challenges to overcome. So instead what we do is we focus on those things, so we focus on everything outside of the affair bubble and we start picking something and then working towards it.

We break it down into its elements, its individual steps, its individual obstacles and we approach and move through those each one by one and much in the same way that after Daniel had gone through steps one, two, three and four, he then started to have this almost compounding effect whereby the remaining problems started to become much easier to overcome. Well the same happens here too. As we start to work through these additional objectives, these additional goals, these additional challenges in our life which don't bring up that same level of that trigger, that emotional dysregulation, then we start to build the skills and tools and concepts and ideas and resilience and everything that's needed to overcome these additional challenges which we can then, without even realising, start to use that growth to compound and apply to that of the affair but a little bit further down the line once we've built up that muscle because it's something that we've just not had to flex before.

So with Claire that's exactly what we did. We focused on additional goals and how she could achieve those. Now before you go thinking but I can't just put the affair to one side Luke, you know I can't just forget it, I can't just switch that off, you know you're right, of course you can't and nor would I expect you to.

So instead we focus on building up that emotional resilience, that emotional strength, being able to handle the discomfort that comes with being triggered and having to experience the intrusive thoughts and all of the emotional challenges that you are facing and this is quite clearly instead of trying to solve those individual elements, we're not trying to change them, we're not trying to amend them, we're not trying to fix them, we're not trying to pretend they're not there, we're just accepting them for what they are in that moment and we're dealing with the emotions, the feelings that come up as a result of them because as we build that again, building that muscle, building that strength, building that emotional resilience, as we do that then even the most terrible of things are things that we can begin to take in our stride. They're still unpleasant, they're still undesirable, they're still unwanted but we can handle them and we have our own back, we have become stronger and we're doing this through this slightly almost a backdoor approach, it's like you know, we're kind of like not trying to solve the problem of the affair, we're focussing on trying to solve other things, focussing our energy in other places, we're doing it intentionally but that is in and of itself building up that strength, that resilience, that proof, that evidence that you can do hard things and you can overcome obstacles. So eventually what happens is you're able to overcome the really hard obstacles in a way that you perhaps weren't capable of doing to begin with because it was just too challenging.

So what have we done today? Well we've looked at these two main approaches. Approach one is to take the affair as the whole, break it down into its individual components and work on those one by one. Whereas approach two is to not try and solve the affair problems but instead try and focus our energy on other things in the world, other things that we can change in our lives and use that as the area where we start to build up that resilience, that emotional muscle which we can then later turn back to to dealing with the affair.

But what we'll also realise is as we've built up that strength in other areas we're now in a position where some of the affair problems actually just don't seem quite as big and quite as bad because of everything that we've done up till this point. I hope that makes sense. Now of course like I said to begin with there is no right path and you might find that you shift from approach one to approach two during the process or vice versa.

You might start with approach two while you're feeling very highly dysregulated particularly in the shock phase, the very early stages of discovering an affair and then as you're able to get a bit of emotional regulation, you're able to handle your emotions in a way that you don't feel like they're controlling you, you feel like you have control of them, then you can shift to approach one and start to break down the individual elements of the affair and work through those one by one. I hope that makes sense. Anyway I just wanted to share that with you today because I say it is something that I see that pops up quite often and I think there's a lot of pressure that people put on themselves because they think they should be further along in the journey now.

They think that well if it's worked for one person why won't it work for me and it's simply because there is no one right way. It's always a combination of things which is exactly what I help people try and discover in themselves. If you'd like to find out more about what working together might look like then visit my website it's lifecoachluke.com book a discovery call we can have a free 30-minute chat to better understand your situation and if it looks like a good fit then we can explore what working together looks like.

I know firsthand what being paralysed by betrayal feels like and I don't believe that it's anything that anybody should have to deal with any longer than they need to. This is something I help people work through all the time and I would love to be part of your journey too so please if you're feeling compelled to do so let's talk lifecoachluke.com and I'll talk to you all next week.