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I’m Andrea Giles, and you’re listening to the Heal From Infidelity podcast, episode number 203, “A Painful Lesson in Avoiding Facing the Truth.”

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Hello and welcome to the Heal from Infidelity podcast where courageous women learn not only to heal from their spouse’s betrayal, but to become the boldest, truest, most decisive and confident versions of themselves ever. If you know there’s more for you than the life you’re currently living but don’t quite know how to get there, you are in the right place. Stick around to learn how to create a life that will knock your own socks off. Is it possible? It is, and I’m here to show you how I’m your host, Andrea Giles. Are you ready? Let’s dive in.

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Hi everybody. Welcome back. Welcome back to another episode. Before I dive in today, I want to remind you that on August 19th, I will be teaching a free class all about dopp, the ruminating pattern. I’m going to be teaching you three simple things that you can put into practice right away to help you stop ruminating and reclaim your piece. It’ll be at 10:00 AM on the 19th. You can register right in the show notes, and I have a special something for the people who attend lives, so make sure to be there. Block out your calendars, get registered and show up. Alright, let’s get into it. Okay, so I’m going to tell you a story today that is not my typical story, but it is a very real story and very, oh man, it was a really awful story of something that happened years ago that I was remembering the other day and drawing some parallels to the work that we do here.

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Thought, you know what? I’m going to share it. Okay, so I’m going to paint the scene. Okay, so years ago I had four children. The oldest at that time was about nine, maybe almost 10. I had four. I was pregnant with twins and one day, one morning I was getting my kids ready for church and I was combing my daughter’s hair, brushing her hair. She was six years old and I saw bugs in her hair and I was absolutely horrified. It is a very strange feeling to see bugs in your child’s hair. Any of you listening who have experienced this, I feel your pain. Anyway, they were bugs and I was so horrified and so did not want to deal with it at all. And so pregnant with twins and again, didn’t want to deal with it, that I loaded her up and I took her to an InstaCare clinic.

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It’s kind of like an emergency room for less serious things. For any of you who don’t know what that is, urgent care, they get you in right away. Well, sometimes they get you in right away. We had to wait for a while and they got a sin, and I was so truly horrified and so did not want it to be real that I was really, really hoping that that doctor would tell me that it was anything other than what it was. And of course, it ended up being lice, right? It was lice and I so did not want it to be lice, so did not want to deal with it. At the time I lived in Austin, Texas, and Texas is a great state, but it’s toasty a lot of the year. Again, I think I was about six months pregnant, maybe seven, maybe seven months pregnant because we moved to this town when I was six months pregnant.

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We moved there when I was six months pregnant, so it was like maybe seven months, maybe eight months even that I was that far pregnant. So I was pretty big at this point and I so didn’t want to deal with it. Anyway, the doctor said it was slice. My daughter was horrified. We had to go home and buy all the things or go to the pharmacy, buy all the things, and obviously didn’t go to church that day and ended up spending the afternoon treating this child’s hair, washing all of her bedding, looking over all of my kids, combing through, and I thought we were good, right? I thought we were good. And I’ll tell you what happened. Somehow something was missed. Who knows what, right? Who knows what. When you have that many kids, and I swear, living in Texas when it’s hot or warmer is a tricky thing.

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You don’t have the cold. That seems like it would help in this situation. Anyway, some time goes by and it pops up in some of my other kids here. There it is again. Do the same treatment. If I remember right, I treated all the kids. I was very careful, wash everything. And of course my husband at the time helped with this, but it was a lot of work and he worked a lot and treated them again. And this time I’m like, for sure, for sure. This time we’re good, we’re good. Time goes by again. And lo and behold, who gets it? I get it. I get it. I got lice when I was hugely pregnant, hugely pregnant, and I remember I lived by my mom for one year. I only lived there barely anytime at all, and had to move away shortly thereafter. But during that time, I lived by my mom and my mother had to come pick lice out of my hair while I sat on the ground massive with 12 pounds of baby in me.

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There were big babies for twins and cried and was so uncomfortable. And at the same time, my little boy who was only three, he got it and he got it worse than anyone. He got it worse than any of my other kids, to the point where we had to basically shave and bald. It was so bad. So we had several rounds of this, and ultimately this treatment that we’re doing, it’s not working because I was doing all the things, but I had to face that it wasn’t working. They were still sneaking by somehow that still it wasn’t working all the way. And so that’s when I got really serious about my research, and I read up on so many different treatments, so many things, and I found this one random treatment that required quite a bit of effort, but it was a different method. It was a different kind of method than what I was doing with really good reviews of its effectiveness.

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So I’m like, you know what? It’s clearly not working. What I’m doing. And what I had learned is that in Texas, there were super bugs that were really a lot harder to gi. And so yeah, I had to up the ante do something a little more harsh. So that’s exactly what I had to do, and had to do this whole other treatment on everybody and wash everything and do the treatment once a week to make sure that anything new was taken care of. It was a thing. It was a big thing. And at that point, finally, they all went away and we’ve never had it since. But why do I share this story on a podcast about infidelity? Unfortunately, for me, my avoidance of one seeing it, really seeing it going, yes, Andrea, you know what? This is like Andrea, you’re in denial. You’re in denial, and let’s stop being in denial. And you don’t need the doctor to tell you this. You can tell you this. You already know what this is, and you can start doing things now to help your family stop dealing with this. And even though I did try doing the treatments, it took me so much longer because of not facing that this is not going away until I finally couldn’t take it anymore and tried something different, and we all got it. Not every member, but almost every member of my family.

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How often do we do this in our relationships? How often do we see signs of a problem in our marriage, our health, our finances, and look away because we don’t want it to be true. I know that in my first marriage, I had hard, cold evidence of things that I did not want to see in front of me. Undeniable, undeniable evidence I knew. And yet what did I do? I still try to deny it. I still believed the excuses and thought, well, maybe it doesn’t sound right. That sounds super fishy, but maybe, maybe. And so I bought into it. So silly, right? But we all do it. Why? Because if we face it, we have to deal with it, right? But the problem is this, just like those buggers in my daughter’s hair, the longer we prolong facing things, the more it spreads in the form of resentment, in the form of eroding trust, in the form of deepened anxiety.

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And by the time we face it, the cleanup is way bigger and way harder than it would’ve been at the start. Okay? Now let’s talk about the toll of delayed seeing, putting it off, delayed facing one toll is an emotional toll. Our bodies let us know, our emotions can signal to us that there’s something off. Okay? How many of you listening recognize that you lived with a low level stress of knowing that something is off, you knew it, and you’re trying to convince yourself through your mind that everything’s fine. It’s all good, it’s fine. And your body’s like, nah, we know there’s something off here, right? So you’ve got this kind of low grade hum that’s there all the time. What about a relational toll? The longer we ignore, the more collateral damage there is. Now, I wanted to add something to this part. In my first marriage, I knew that there were things wrong.

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I knew there were, and I asked him to go to therapy with me, and we went to at least two. There might’ve been three, but at least two that I remember therapists, and one of them I remember he was highly renowned. He had a good reputation. And I remember one time him telling me after my first husband had left the appointment to go back to work, that he didn’t think it was going to work. And I said, why? He’s like, I don’t think you guys are going to make it. I said, why? He goes, because he doesn’t think you need help. He’s not buying into any of it. And what I learned from that, and I want to want to pass along to you, is that there is fault in both of us. There is fault in me and hope. And for a hail Mary here that the therapist would fix our relationship, that the therapist was going to swoop in name what was going on and fix it.

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What actually happened is that he got better at avoiding, and I also did my own form of avoiding, because I kind of placed the authority on this therapist that he would fix what was broken. At that point, even still, I was not fully ready to face it all, fully ready to face it, to see it, and to go, this does not work. And sadly, I remember where I lived and what was going on at that time, and so I can remember that it was quite a few years later that I finally decided to leave. And how much more damage, how much more damage happened during that time. Another toll is just the personal toll of losing trust in ourselves. When we keep pretending not to see, we lose credibility with ourselves. We lose self-respect even and start questioning ourselves and start questioning our own self-respect, our own self-trust, and ultimately, that can corrode over time, making it that much harder to build it when it’s time to face everything and start to build that back.

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Okay? Now, let’s talk for a minute about the power of facing truth and facing it fast, what it means to see something quickly. Let’s go through this. Name it, name it. Now I know how hard that is. I know how hard it is. I know how hard. Here’s my many examples, right, of knowing how very challenging it is to name things that are hard to see because then we have to deal with them, right? It is so challenging. It’s so challenging, but the quicker, it’s like ripping off that bandaid. The quicker that we just deal with it, the faster it means that we can do something about it right Next. Acknowledge the reality without minimizing. In my case with this daughter, it was, this is lice. Yes, I’m pregnant. I don’t want to deal with this at all, but I have to deal with it, and I better double down on my kids and on myself and all of us and make sure that we’re all in the clear and take decisive action.

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Decisive action. So it’s not enough to name it. It’s not enough to name it and acknowledge the reality without minimizing. If we don’t do something with it otherwise, we are just storing it in our body, putting all of that stress on our body, and that’s not shared to ourselves. There is so much freedom that comes when you stop wasting energy on avoidance and start using it on resolution. I want you to think about that. I spent resources, I spent money to go meet with this guy to tell me what I already knew. I already knew it. I already knew what it was. I already knew. I just didn’t want to deal with it. I wanted him to rescue me. I wanted him to fix it. Give me some magical something to make it go away. I had to go home and deal with it, and then I had to pay him money for that, for him to tell me something that I already knew.

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How often do we do this? How often do we think that other people know better than we do and defer our own authority? But if we would believe ourselves and trust ourselves, then we can do something about it. We can take decisive action quickly. The skill of quick seeing can prevent deeper damage and get you back to peace sooner. Isn’t that amazing? Amazing quick seeing, trusting ourselves to see something and to move quickly can prevent deeper damage and get you back to peace sooner. Sometimes there are situations where we see something super quickly and we know that we have to do something about it right away. Several years ago, I was in my house and I think it was about six years ago now, and my son came into the house screaming, mom, mom, mom, just screaming. And I remember running to the door, what?

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Levi’s really hurt. That’s one of my boys. Levi’s really hurt. And so I busted my butt and ran as fast as I could, dropped everything, ran as fast as I could to see what was wrong. And there was Levi, not good, not good. He had gotten into an accident on a motorbike and smashed up his face pretty bad, and I knew it. I knew it was a huge problem, and I knew that I needed to deal with it immediately. And so without missing a beat in this situation, I loaded him up in my car and some of my other kids came too, because they were so scared, and I took him straight to the emergency room and he had to have quite a few stitches, and he banged up his knee and he got a concussion, and it was scary. But in that situation, I knew that it needed immediate attention.

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So when I look at the situation with this daughter who had the lice and the situation with this other boy, what is the difference, right? One of them was physically very alarming. Physically, you can’t ignore it. The other was a little more hidden. The other one, you have to look a little bit closer. The other one, it’s not quite in your face as much. What I’m trying to say with this is that all of you listening have times where you have taken immediate action for something that was really, really important. So why don’t we do this around emotional things? I think much of the time, part of what it is, is that we think that prolonging it, it’ll just go away on its own by prolonging it. They will just go fix it by prolonging it. We don’t have to deal with it, and I’m telling you right now, the longer you prolong it, the bigger it becomes.

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It rarely goes away on its own. So some practical takeaways from today, if something feels off to you as you are navigating your own healing, whether it be you, the one that was unfaithful in some way, or the listener who was betrayed, if something feels off to you, go immediately and look around and try to understand what it is and why it feels off to you. Even if it feels really small or inconvenient to deal with, check your own internal dialogue for phrases like, maybe it’ll go away or We don’t have time for this, or I don’t have the energy for this. Check that, or This would be so embarrassing. Often we mute the things that would really threaten our social status, our financial status, our relational status, the things that have these big risks of our status that would have the potential to hurt our status.

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We just ignore a lot of the time. We’re afraid, right? Afraid, afraid. But I want you to ask yourself this question. It’s really important. If I deal with this today, how much future pain could I save? If I deal with this today, how much future pain could I save my friends? I invite you to build your muscle for facing uncomfortable truths. It gets easier with practice. It really does. I myself have gotten so much better at this over the years, even with my career, if I know I need to do something, even if it feels scary, I’m so much faster to just do it because I know that ultimately the payoff will be so good for just taking the leap and doing it. Okay, now, circling back to the life story, eventually everyone was life free, but it did take way longer, way more work ultimately than it needed to because I didn’t want to see it or deal with it in a way that was going to really get the job done.

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I want you to look at what is needing to be paid attention to now. What are you pretending not to see? Facing it will not be fun, but ultimately, it’s what will set you free. It’s ultimately where you can sleep at night and know that there are no proverbial bugs in your hair or anybody else’s hair that you are bug free. Okay? I know that’s a minor example compared to the things that you’re dealing with, but know that it is very similar in how we try to ignore the things that we need to face and how they wreak havoc on every part of our life. Okay? I also want you to know from my heart that this work facing it, it is one of the main pillars in my groups. It is something we cannot ignore. It’s not anything that we can tip toe around.

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Every client of mine in my group goes through a process of really seeing the truth. And the beautiful thing about it is that you have a community there of other people who will witness your truth, who will see it, who will hold you, who will love you, and will help you face it, not just me, but a whole community. It’s pretty amazing. If this sounds like the kind of support that you need to face the hard things in your life, please get your applications in right away, and we will welcome you with Loving Arms into the program. Alright, thank you, my friends. So wonderful as always, to be with you, and I’ll see you next time. Take care.

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Thank you for listening to the Heal from Infidelity podcast. If you would like to be kept in the know about upcoming free classes, new podcast episodes, and other ways of working with me, go subscribe to my weekly email. You can subscribe@andreagiles.com slash lies about infidelity slash. Again, it’s andrea giles.com/lies about infidelity slash I will see you next time.