1: Consider This

When your world has been shaken by betrayal, it’s natural to want to turn back the clock to a time when life felt stable, familiar, and safe. In this first episode of After The Affair, I take you back to those early days of discovery, when confusion, heartbreak, and disbelief cloud your every thought.

But what if you could begin making sense of it all not by pretending it didn’t happen, but by understanding how your thoughts are shaping your emotions and actions?

This episode offers a powerful shift in perspective that lays the groundwork for healing. If you’ve been betrayed and feel like you're barely hanging on, this is where your healing starts.

Key Takeaways

• Learn why your emotional pain isn’t “wrong”, but a valid response to your thoughts and experiences.

• Discover how unmet expectations may have shaped your perception of the relationship.

• Understand the real power behind your emotions and how they drive your actions.

• Explore the concept of emotional fuel and how higher-quality thoughts can lead to healthier behaviours.

• Find out why reacting to pain can prolong suffering, and how self-awareness becomes your superpower in recovery.

💬 Reflection question:

Have you ever caught yourself reacting from a place of pain and then regretted it later? I’d love to hear your story.

Connect with Luke:

• Website: www.lifecoachluke.com

• Instagram: @mylifecoachluke

• Email: luke@lifecoachluke.com

Join the After the Affair community: www.facebook.com/groups/aftertheaffaircommunity

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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.

Welcome to the Journey of Infidelity Healing

Let's go. And welcome to The After The Affair podcast episode one. I honestly didn't think this day would come.

I have been thinking about doing a podcast for a number of years now, and I just never really knew what direction it would take. Although I honestly never thought that infidelity healing would be the thing that drew me to finally sit here in front of the microphone pressing record and doing all the things that I need to do to get you to be able to listen to this today. That is what happened, and it's another great example of how life just has a habit of throwing things your way.

Now you can run from them, you can hide from them, you can shut them in a box, or you can take full advantage of every opportunity. Because behind every potential disaster, behind everything that may appear to have gone wrong in your life, there is always something good that can be taken from it. As a betrayed spouse myself I know what it feels like to be in that moment shortly after discovery in the weeks and months that follow and all you really want to be able to do is turn back the clock.

You just want to be able to go back to a place in time when none of this had happened. Before those moments of suspicion, before you began trying to track your partner's every move, before the times when you perhaps even considered confronting your partner on the topic. When you did, you were just faced with what can only be referred to as denial.

Or maybe you were offered a promise that nothing was going on, and you were simply misreading the situation. Of course, if you're like me, that's something I wanted to believe. I loved my wife, and I loved her for many years.

So when I saw these things happening, or I believed that these things were happening, but I couldn't securely evidence them, it was really difficult. I started to question myself. I started to feel paranoid.

I didn't know. I didn't know where to look. I didn't know what to think.

I didn't know what the future looked like anymore. I'd spent a good chunk of the previous eight years feeling pretty confident about what the next eight years were going to look like. I'd done the thing that many of us do.

I got married. We had children. We bought a house.

I mean, life wasn't perfect, of course. But it was okay. In fact, it was probably better than okay.

At least my perception of it was. And I think that's an interesting point. My perception.

Understanding Relationships and the Path to Infidelity Healing

Now, of course, in any relationship, there are at least two people. And the interesting thing about relationships, although maybe this wasn't apparent to me in my earlier years, is that it's only you as the individual who actually experiences the relationship. Because your partner, well, they only experience their version of the relationship.

So you might be asking, well, what do you mean by that? Well, what is a relationship? I used to think it was a separate entity. A little bit like a joint bank account. A joint bank account whereby you both deposit your trust and your love and all the things that are important to you.

The things that you value. You know, in terms of what a good relationship looks like for you. And you both make these deposits, and over time, this joint bank account of love and connection and trust and honesty.

It builds and grows, getting bigger and bigger. And it's almost like the bigger the account gets, the stronger your relationship is. And if either partner increases or decreases the amount of deposits they make relative to the other, then it highlights some kind of imbalance.

And when that imbalance appears, at least one of the people involved is going to start to question the commitment and the truth behind the love their partner claims to have. It's as though both people have to contribute equally for the relationship to be sustainable. They both have to experience the same thing for the relationship to be sustainable.

Perhaps they think they should love each other equally. You know, sometimes we can talk about how much we love somebody, and you can say: Well, I love you this much. And okay, this might be a slightly more childlike approach, but I don't think it's that unusual in adult relationships either.

I've heard people say that they will withhold feelings of love and trust towards the other person based on what they think they think about you and how they feel about you. So let's burst that bubble. I'd said earlier that that's how I used to see relationships.

Like this third entity. This thing separate to the individuals almost whereby it's greater than the sum of its parts. I'll repeat the question.

What are relationships? In their simplest form, they are nothing more than the thoughts that we have about other people. Wel,l how do I know that? Well, I know it because, for a start, not everybody feels the same way about every other person. Why is that? Well, surely if you can think of somebody you have loved and cherished, would it be true to say that every other person felt the same way? For example, you and I might both know the same famous person.

We both have an opinion about the same celebrity, musician, sports athlete, or movie star. We both have thoughts about them. We may both have feelings about them that differ.

One of us may have feelings of adoration or inspiration, whereas the other may feel distaste, disgust, or even hatred. The person that we're thinking about, though, is the same person, and how is that possible? Well, it's because we have different thoughts about them. Okay, let's acknowledge that we all feel differently about different people, and we feel differently because of the thoughts that we have about them.

Why do we have different thoughts? Well, it's because we have different expectations. Something that I find attractive might be different from something that you find attractive. Something that I find distasteful might be different from something that you find distasteful.

And then when people come into our lives, well, what do we do? We assess them based on our own value criteria, and then, depending on the criteria they meet, we categorise them into the appropriate relationship status. Anything from acquaintance to friend to casual romantic interest, up to the point where I must marry this person. And this is all fine.

It's a good way to make a judgment. It's good to know how to assess who deserves your attention, let's say. Okay, before I go any further, a quick caveat.

What I've just said might sound very formal. I'm not suggesting that people stand there with a clipboard and a checklist, scoring each new person we meet before allocating them a particular status. In reality, it's a far more natural and fluid process.

You could consider it instinctual, but an assessment is still being carried out nonetheless. In a relationship, though, this categorisation is also the cause for many problems because you now have a set of criteria, a set of values, or a set of expectations that other people should comply with. Your partner in this case, and in the early days of a relationship, they appear to tick all of those boxes, no problem, or at least the vast majority of them.

But humans aren't a hundred percent consistent, in fact, not even close, and they don't always display everything up front, particularly at the beginning of a relationship. Even if the attributes and values they have align with you well, they may not always carry them out perfectly. So, what starts to happen is that your partners begin to fall short of your expectations, and as a result, you feel a certain way.

They haven't met my expectations, so I'm annoyed, I'm frustrated, I'm disappointed, I'm angry, I'm sad. And yet they haven't actually done anything wrong; they're just being them, but because they didn't meet your expectations, you're now feeling crappy about it. And this brings me on to talking about feelings, which is something I'll discuss more in future episodes, but for now, feelings are something that we experience.

It's a vibration in our body, and they're caused by the thoughts that we have. There are many example,s some of which we've discussed already today. For example, thinking nice things about people gives us feelings of love and adoration, and vice versa.

Having something where a person doesn't meet our expectations can lead to feelings of distaste, anger, frustration, and a whole array of negative emotions. With that all in mind, how does this help you now? Well, you've now discovered that your partner is perhaps not who you thought they were. They've portrayed an agreement that you two had made, whether that's in terms of vows in a marriage or just a commitment that you had made to each other over the course of your relationship; however, that's been established.

But now you're in a situation where you are frustrated and upset and angry and resentful, bitter, disappointed. You're scared of what happens next. And of course, what I say next might be hard to hear, and I completely understand why.

It's a difficult concept to get your head around because what you may have realised by now is that everything I'm saying is suggesting that the way you're feeling is because of the way you're thinking. But I want to make it very clear that this doesn't make it your fault. It doesn't make it wrong.

It doesn't mean that you shouldn't feel the way you're feeling. In fact, right now, the emotions that you're feeling are probably very, very appropriate for the situation. And okay, you'd prefer not to be in that place of negative emotion, but we are.

We're here, and I'm here with you, and I've been there. So what do you do? We're going to explore techniques of how to process emotion over the course of the next few episodes, but for now, the first thing I suggest you do is to just acknowledge that it's okay to feel the way you do. And it's okay to feel like crap.

There are no rules about how you should feel. There's no right or wrong. However, I do have one word of warning.

There is something that you shouldn't do with your emotions, and that's react to them. You shouldn't allow your emotions to cause you to do something that you wouldn't otherwise do. So, okay, what do I mean by that? Well, you shouldn't lash out.

You shouldn't be scaring your children. You shouldn't drive recklessly and put yourself or others at risk. You shouldn't drink to excess or take drugs.

You shouldn't go and get into fights just to relieve some frustration. I know how tempting it was to pay a visit to the affair partner and I mean I think a lot of these things sound like common sense and I think it's perfectly acceptable to want to go and you know lash out and you're probably going to want to expel some energy in an appropriate method. Just do it in a relaxing and or productive way, not an anger-fuelled, destructive way.

Your Emotions, Your Power: Regaining Control After Betrayal

The most important thing to acknowledge here is that if you're feeling the way you do because of what you're thinking about the situation then that means that you have control and okay you might not be able to change your feeling in the moment but just having the knowledge that it is within your power and not within your partner's power to change how you're feeling. The reason that this is so important is that your feelings are responsible for everything that you do. They drive your actions literally.

Think of it a little bit like imagining a race car. Race cars are highly tuned, and they respond best with high-octane race fuel. Still, if you were to put a low-quality, low-grade fuel in there, then they're not going to make the same amount of horsepower. Then they're not going to be able to go as quickly, and they're not going to be able to accelerate as fast, and they're not going to be able to make the same lap times. However, if they use race fuel with a much higher octane and better quality, they can produce far more power and speed, and as a result, they'll be far more productive.

So think of your feelings a little bit like fuel. The better quality feelings you have, the better things you can achieve. So let me try to give you an example.

Let's consider that you are the person who has been betrayed, and you are trying to do what you can to rebuild the relationship. Part of that process is you're asking questions. You know you want to know more about the affair, about how it began, and about why she started to look elsewhere.

And you've been asking lots of questions, and you are absolutely entitled to those questions if you want to rebuild the marriage. In fac,t I'd consider it essential if you want to rebuild the relationship and your partner also wants to rebuild the relationship. Then, both allowing you to ask those questions and have your partner answer them is a very important point.

Anyway, let's assume that that's been happening and you've been asking repeatedly for a period of time, and your partner turns around and says Don't you trust me? Of course, given the circumstances, it's quite likely that you probably don't trust your partner quite as much as you did, and it could be a very jarring comment. You might think, How dare you assess whether I trust you or not? Who the hell are you to judge me? You're lucky I haven't smashed this place up, and no, I don't trust you, given the circumstances. You feel enraged and even more betrayed.

You then pick up the wedding photo that was on the side, and you literally throw it on the floor, stamp on it, and then you storm out without saying a word. So what's just happened? You thought, you felt, and you acted, and that's the key point. You acted from your feeling and you felt the way you did because of what you thought and your thoughts are within your control and like I mentioned before there's no expectation to be able to just change those in the moment but just knowing that you have that as an option that that's something that you can work toward and that is something that is in your power and not your partner's is an absolute superpower and it is one of the main things that helped me get through my process and it's also one of the main things that helps many of the people I work with get through theirs.

So that's all I have for you today. Thank you ever so much for listening and joining me on my first episode in the After The Affair podcast. I hope it's been useful, and please follow and look forward to my future episodes.

In addition to my podcast, there is also more content and some free downloads available at my website, which is LifeCoachLuke.com, and you can also follow me on social media on Facebook and Instagram, both at MyLifeCoachLuke. I look forward to speaking with you next time.