8. Choosing to Stay

Choosing to stay in a relationship after infidelity can feel like the hardest and loneliest road. Whether you're plagued by intrusive thoughts, wrestling with old beliefs, or trying to rebuild trust amidst ongoing doubt, you're not alone. Many people feel caught in the tug-of-war between the past and a hopeful future.

In this episode of After the Affair, I respond to real listener questions from men who chose to stay after betrayal. We cover how to handle emotional triggers, separate facts from assumptions, deal with feelings of inadequacy, and reclaim your own narrative, no matter your circumstances. This conversation is raw, relatable, and packed with insight for anyone navigating infidelity healing.

Key Takeaways

• Triggers don’t have to trap you: Learn how to rewire your response and move beyond intrusive thoughts.

• You’re not a prisoner of your mind: Reframe recurring thoughts and create new beliefs that support your growth.

• Facts vs. fiction: Identify which thoughts are true, and which are painful assumptions holding you back.

• Inadequacy is not your fault: Stop using your differences against yourself in the healing process.

• Staying is a choice, not a failure: Rebuild trust with clarity, self-responsibility, and emotional honesty.

💬 Reflection questions:

Have you chosen to stay and found yourself stuck in the same mental loops? What helps you move forward when doubt creeps in?

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. Welcome to episode number eight of the After The Affair podcast with myself Luke Shillings. I'm always amazed at how quickly time goes as you get older and I'm not that old but each year just seems to go quicker than the previous year and we're now heading towards the end of 2022.

We've got the holiday seasons approaching. We've been through infidelity there are many things that the holidays can bring up which can be quite uncomfortable to experience. Often you feel like you're being judged and that you have failed or you're undeserving of the joy that's associated with the holidays and this can happen to either the betrayed or the unfaithful spouse.

It often feels like you have to put an act on for those people around you and this is especially relevant if you're the betrayed and you're learning to trust again. The last thing you want to do is give off misleading signals that suggest that you are further along in your healing process than you really are all because you're pretending that things are okay for the sake of saving face in front of family and friends. More often than not, and I hear this from both sides, is that people just want it to be over as quickly as possible and they believe that those once happy times for the holidays just aren't available to them anymore.

Well I have some good news. These are some of the things that I'm going to be discussing with my coach friend Jen Frey here this coming Sunday November the 13th 12 noon Central Time or 6 p.m. here in the UK. We're holding a free online guided workshop.

It is available for anybody to join who has been through infidelity and obviously I will put the link in the show notes or you can just visit lifecoachluke.com forward slash holidays and register. Now there will be a replay showed afterwards but you'll still need to register to have access to that replay so please even if you can't make the live call get yourself registered let's help you through these holidays. Okay so now on with today's topic.

So with all this in mind I've been having some conversations on one of the social media groups that I'm involved with. A group where men choose to stay after infidelity. Within the group there are often questions that come up and many people weigh in with their responses and I thought it'd be a great idea to take some of those questions that have been you know put specifically to me and actually look at talking about them on the podcast.

This way not only the guys that have asked the questions get a response but any of you listening and I know there are many female listeners can also benefit from the information that I talk about. So let's get straight into it. For the sake of anonymity I'll be using pseudonyms for each of the people who have asked the questions and the first question is from Paul.

Paul has a question around triggers but also intrusive thoughts and he's wondering is it possible that this concept of being a prisoner within my own mind even after years can ever come to an end? So I think there's a couple of things going on here Paul. Let's look at triggers and their associated intrusive thoughts first. Well for everybody listening what are triggers? They are probably best described as an automatic response that reminds you of some past event or past trauma and it can often create feelings of sadness, anxiety sometimes anger, fear and it can cause quite an unpleasant experience for the individual.

Almost anything can cause a trigger. Our triggers ultimately come in through our senses. It's things that we literally experience so it could be something that has a familiar smell or a particular word or set of words, maybe particular people or physical locations or maybe even some object you carry that has some tied memory to.

When they appear there's a deeper belief or thought pattern that's associated with that thing which gets brought back into the conscious mind. It's delivered without permission and that's really what an intrusive thought is. It's an unpleasant unrequested thought that you have to deal with.

Now this may seem unrelated but for the most of my adult life I had never concerned myself with bees and wasps. I knew that they could sting and I knew that it would probably hurt but they just didn't bother me. I didn't mind if they landed on the picnic table or you know were flying around a little bit and of course I'd probably waft them off if one landed on me but other than that it wasn't a major concern.

Then when my daughter was about a year old she was stung on the side of the head and I actually saw it happen and I saw the wasp, I think it was, fly off and my daughter immediately started crying and from that point onwards every time I saw a bee or a wasp I had this real visceral response, this almost fear I must get away or I must try and remove or extinguish you know the source of this this worry of these bees that or wasps that were flying around and even the sound of a buzzing fly you know that would automatically prick my ears up and I would immediately become you know tense and slightly anxious and I think it was even an occasion where I was reading a kid's storybook and it had this you know fluffy little bumblebee you know which normally would have never you know brought anything other than nice cute little thoughts to my mind but it actually I remember it sort of making me feel quite uncomfortable at the time. Of course I soon realised that hang on I managed to go for what 33 years of my life and this had never been a concern never been a worry and I've had this one incident and now all of a sudden my entire response is being triggered really quickly just by the sight or sound of some potential threat which actually statistically is very very unlikely to happen or to reoccur or even if it did it's still not the end of the world there was no anaphylaxis shark or anything like that and of course over time I was able to retell myself that that you know actually there's nothing to worry about it's just an overreaction I can just remain calm it is uncomfortable but I can deal with it and now to be honest they don't bother me anymore again and that was all from some isolated incident. Now a great example and an analogy if you like that I sometimes use with my clients to understand a little bit about what's going on here is that the analogy of the vinyl record.

A vinyl record has grooves cut into it and when you put that vinyl record on the record player it continually plays or replays the same song and you just move the needle back to the start and it replays them again and again and again and our beliefs and our memories can be very similar to this particularly the deep set ones or the ones that we don't question they just get replayed in our mind and all it needs is for somebody you know hypothetically to switch the record player on which in this case might be the trigger and in my case it might be the buzzing of a just an innocent housefly flying past my ear and that memory gets replayed again. You see with a vinyl record technically you could sand it down you could make it smooth again and then you could cut new grooves into it and those new grooves can be anything you want and you can literally change the songs you can literally change the things that you hear as a result of cutting those new grooves and you can do exactly the same with your mind you can question the beliefs you have you can listen to them you can erase them if that's best and you can choose to put new ones in their place and if you do that repeatedly then you will start to follow the patterns that you had intended to choose for yourself so when it comes to being trapped in your own mind I think this is a pretty good way of reframing the situation just knowing that you're not in fact a victim to yourself which is what it can feel like it feels like you're being held prisoner by yourself you really do have an option to manage these intrusive thoughts you can apply things like meditation or specific kinds of visualisation techniques in fact one of my own clients often reminds me of you know remember this too shall pass but beyond that of course seeking out some professional support having a conversation with somebody like myself a coach or perhaps a therapist and you can really begin to reorganise the thoughts in your mind remove the ones that don't serve you anymore that maybe did at a time but are no longer relevant and really put back in place the ones that are going to help you move forward whatever your situation is okay so the next question is from Carl Carl says that he's two and a half years into his discovery of the affair and his current struggle is really trying to decide which is worse the sexual acts that happened just the one time or the deceit and the lies that she spent time telling her affair partner about during the period running up to this sexual act so I think Carl first thing to do is really look at the circumstances what do we know for sure this can be really important because our brains have a habit of quite happily filling in all the blanks and making connections that probably aren't there exaggerating things so just be certain that the information you are dealing with is correct as far as your own mind is concerned now I just want to caveat that I'm not suggesting you go out and dig for more information that's really not the purpose of this what I mean is of the information that you do have that you believe you have how much of it is true how much of it is factually true is it something that you have been told is it something that you've witnessed something that you've read or directly seen with your own two eyes or is it your brain making certain connections between things and filling in the gap if that is the case then those are the areas which you can turn your attention to because actually some of those beliefs that you have might not be true or there might not be quite the way that you thought they were and if the details that you have are true then and you could prove them in a court of law then ask yourself are these things still happening now are these thoughts that I'm having still relevant for everything that's happened since D-Day or was this all just before that now of course everybody's situation is going to be different your situation is going to be different I don't know all the details but the reason I bring this up much like the answer to the previous question is that we tend to replay the same thoughts we would play those same experiences and it's very hard to detach ourselves from that at least especially if we don't do it intentionally and of course it might be something that happened you know a year ago two years ago 20 years ago and just because that same message and that same belief has been replayed it's like it's happening now and sometimes you just need to step outside of it and say oh actually hang on okay yes I do have evidence to support that my partner was unfaithful and maybe she said some things that you know weren't favourable to me or maybe she lied and there could be a huge range of reasons as to why that might have been but since they've chosen to reconcile and stay together and try and make this work actually that isn't as true anymore and assuming that it's not then you really do get to reshift and just focus on what you have now rather than what happened in the past we have this tendency to want to either seek something better in the future or run away from something negative in the past and of course what that does is it keeps us away from the place that we really need to be and that is the present that's the here and the now because that's all we really get to experience I know I've mentioned this before in the podcast but the only thing we get to do and deal with is literally what's going on this very minute so focussing on the past to predict the future it's just not a long-term successful strategy now there was something else that you said in your question Carl and I haven't read the whole thing out but one of the things you said was that you once had or we once had a ride-or-die commitment now when you have a thought like that what we tend to do is try and seek evidence for that thought we try and seek evidence to support that thought to prove that it's true so if you're thinking we once had a ride-or-die commitment then everything you see now will be why you don't currently have a ride-or-die commitment and this could be down to every little detail it could be tiny behavioural things from your partner maybe things that she says or does maybe something your intimacy has changed or the way that you communicate with each other maybe even little acts or gestures that once happened you're now seeing them as evidence as to why that's not the same anymore and that's partly what your brain is doing it's trained to try and seek out all the things to prove the thoughts that you're having of course if you were to change that round and flip that thought on its head and actually say we've always had a ride-or-die commitment then your brain might start seeking things that would prove that you still do have that and at the end of the day it's ultimately only your commitment that really matters because you can't control what she does anyway as you've got plenty of evidence for but you can control how you think and you can control what you do and what you want so seek things that benefit you not those that push you further back now if that thought itself isn't believable to you then don't try it on just because I've suggested it but is there a way that you could think about it differently is there another thought that you could put in place there and then seek evidence for that that might put you on a slightly more positive trajectory let's say in terms of rebuilding and regaining that trust within your relationship I hope things work out okay so the next question is from Graham and Graham says that it's a year since D-Day and what made it so much worse for me was the added insecurities and feelings of inadequacy because I'm paralysed and in a wheelchair okay so this might not be a question per se but I think it's really useful to highlight because we all have this feeling on some level this ability to think that we're not good enough in some way I'm too fat I'm too slow I'm too stupid I'm too tall I stutter I leave too long a pause every time I talk I'm not intelligent enough I'm not funny enough I have a physical disability and I know it doesn't matter what it is there's always something that we're able to compare ourselves to with other people and then make that mean that we're not worthy that we're not as good in some way and therefore that's the reason that my partner was unfaithful that's the reason that they decided to look elsewhere and try and fulfil that thing that I don't or cannot offer look we are all 100% worthy we're all different we're all unique and comparison really is the thief of joy and when you focus on the things that make you unique and special and different to others and use them against yourself then it's going to be very hard for your partner to see all the amazing wonderful things that you have because there's so much focus around the thing that you feel you're falling short of if your partner really does have a problem with whatever it is about you as an individual then that's on them not on you and it's not your job to change or try and necessarily fix that particular thing just in the hope that it will solve the problem which of course it won't it's perfectly normal to want to try and justify and to better understand why it is that our partners were unfaithful to try and get a reason so that you know maybe you can do something about it to prevent a similar kind of thing happening again in the future and therefore when we can't find that thing within our partner there isn't a specific reason or they've not been able to provide a very definitive reason as to why they were unfaithful then it's only natural to look inwards and try and think well okay if in that case it's probably me I must be the problem I must be the cause of this maybe it's because I'm overweight or because I'm unattractive or because I'm not funny or because I'm in a wheelchair that's the reason and then we just use it against ourselves which doesn't serve us and it doesn't help the relationship so I'd like to finish with this one thing and which is related and that is that when a partner is unfaithful it's their choice it's their choice that's it you are not responsible for it even if you've been the worst husband or wife imaginable you maybe have been unfaithful yourself or you've lied and cheated and been deceitful and you know maybe you don't do all the chores around the house or you aren't the best parent you haven't been pulling your weight you've been unemployed you name it whatever judgement that you have on yourself or whatever judgement they may have on you it's still their responsibility it's still their choice to be unfaithful they always have the option of just actually ending the relationship or talking about it trying to work things out just doing something else it's always a decision now I just want to add one small caveat one term and condition let's say and that is because it's their responsibility because it's their choice doesn't mean that you get to you know be a really bad husband or wife on purpose it doesn't justify your reasons for behaviour either it works both ways and of course if you want to rebuild your relationship and maybe you haven't you know quite been the person that you wanted to be perhaps you've not been acting in line with your own values when it comes to your role within relationship then yes work on it make those changes do it for you because if you do everybody benefits anyway okay so well that's been a lot of fun and definitely something that I would like to do again and I hope it's something that you found useful I just like to add one quick reminder about this Sunday's free guided workshop that I'm running remember it's the 13th of November 12 p.m. Central Time 6 p.m. UK time it's online you can sign up now and that will give you access to the live event but also access to the replay after the event to register simply visit lifecoachluke.com forward slash holidays or click the link in the description if you do that today you've still got four more days to register if you're listening to this after then I'm sorry but you can always check my website for upcoming and future free events and any other free resources that I may have available including my free first steps guide that you can download from the website also if there's anything you've heard either in today's podcast or any of the previous episodes that you would like to discuss further like to ask more then please reach out and let's book a call let's have a chat and see if there's anything I can do to help as always it's been fantastic talking to you all I can't wait to speak to you all again next week and take care goodbye.