(00:04) 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 that possible? It is, and I’m here to show
you how.

I’m your host Andrea Giles. Are you ready? Let’s dive in.

(00:42) So confession, I recorded this episode earlier and when I went
to send it to my producer, it was gone, vanished. So this is take two
and it is not at my home. Once again, I had to record on the road. I
apologize in advance if my sound is not great, but we got to do what we
got to do sometimes, right? Okay, let’s just dive in. This is a really
important episode. It’s one that I have had requests about. It’s one
that I’ve given a lot of thought to and I want to do it justice. Okay.

What are intrusive thoughts? If you were here listening, my guess is,
you know what they are already, right? You’ve experienced them. You
probably know how consuming they can be so quickly, right? The
definition of intrusive thoughts are uncontrollable, unwanted thoughts
that we feel unable to resist. They can be very unsettling. The more you
try to push them from your mind, the louder they get. Intrusive thoughts
often create worry or shame.

Okay. Worry because sometimes when we have a thought, if we believe the
thought, it might create worry about whatever it is that we’re thinking
about, right? Like if we have a thought, a memory of something, for
example, we might take that memory and worry that something bad might
happen again, that we might not be able to trust that our partner is
still involved in things that we don’t want them to be. Or it can create
shame. Sometimes we can feel shame when we feel like we’ve already dealt
with something, already come through something, and there it is again,
that we’re obsessing about it and what’s wrong with me and am I ever
going to actually get over this? What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with
me? Right?

Intrusive thoughts are common for people with PTSD, people who have
experienced life threatening events or extremely stressful events such
as infidelity. Okay. You might describe an intrusive thought as
something that pops into your head that you just can’t seem to shake. It
can take you into a deeply emotionally painful place fast, right? Zero
to 10. So fast. You can be going about your day, minding your own
business, have a thought pop in your head, and it sometimes feels like
it just takes you down without your permission. Right?

(03:07) Dr. Carrie Ann Williams, who is a lecturer in psychiatry at
Harvard Medical School says, any life stressor, if big enough, can
increase your risk of having intrusive thoughts. I included that here
because I just want to point out that infidelity is, in my humble
opinion, one of the life stressors that is, it’s big. It’s a big one. It
undermines so much of our belief of who we are, what our place is, who
our family is, who our partner is. It just blows that all open and can
create so much uncertainty, right? So much fear, so much doubt. So yes,
it does increase your risk of intrusive thoughts.

Now here’s something interesting. Intrusive thoughts are often a way of
coping with an unresolved deeper issue and I’m gonna give you an example
of this as we go forward, okay? They can be a coping mechanism, a way of
coping. Intrusive thoughts are often a way of dealing with pain or
trauma, but as you probably can imagine, not sustainable. Today we’re
going to look at why that is and what we can do about it. I’m sure that
you are listening going, something has to give with some of these
thoughts. Like I can’t keep doing it. I can’t keep going down this path.
I’m either going to destroy myself or I’m going to destroy what’s left
of my relationship, right? For sure, it impacts your relationship, but
most of all, it impacts you. And we’re gonna look into that.

All right, so let’s start first with what’s likely causing these
intrusive thoughts, okay? In past episodes, you’ve heard me talk about
the upstairs brain and the basement brain. The upstairs brain, if you
imagine a beautiful home, it has windows you can see out, you can get a
view, you can see what else is out there besides just your four walls,
right? You can see beyond. The basement brain, I’m thinking of a dark
basement with no windows. It’s just kind of cave-like, right? This is
that reptile brain where you’re concerned about having enough food and
not dying, where you’re very much in survival mode. You’re very much
just kind of hunkering down and making sure that you are safe, right?
Upstairs brain can see the bigger picture.

So let me give you an example. Let’s say that you are on a trail and you
hear a rattle. You hear the sound of a rattle and your basement brain,
which is really important, right? We’re not knocking that basement
brain. Like this is the part of our brain that keeps us alive, right?
It’s very, very important. But that lower brain hears that and you’re in
just immediately. Your heart starts pounding. You start feeling scared.
You start worrying that maybe there’s a rattlesnake right there. Maybe
you should run, right? Your higher brain, that upstairs brain can calm
down and go, okay, give it a second. Let’s just see what we’re dealing
with here. I’m not in immediate danger. There’s nothing attacking me,
right? Let’s just see what this is. And then on further investigation,
it’s not a rattle. It’s just some leaves that are blowing in the wind
that kind of tricked you into thinking that it was a rattle. And so you
carry on your way. Yes, you have to get your heart rate down, maybe take
a deep breath. Gosh, that was scary, but I’m fine. Okay. It’s like a
jump scare, right? Got to get ourselves back regulated. I’m not in
danger. I’m fine, right? And then we can respond accordingly.

Now after infidelity, we often feel threatened much, much of the time.
Any random thing can set us off. It can be a certain car driving down
the road, a song, a smell, anything, like anything can be triggering.
Different words, right? Words that you hear that remind you of the
affair. Maybe it reminds you of words that you saw in a text message or
words that you know that they spoke to each other. And then you hear it
in a movie and it reminds you of that and there you go, right? Sometimes
we’re really just doing our thing, living our life, and a thought will
just pop into our head and we can have that immediate fight or flight
response to it.

The reason why this is, my friends, is because for most people,
infidelity is pretty dang traumatizing. The person we counted on most
hurt us the deepest. For many, they didn’t see it coming. It just kind
of blindsided them. For some, they saw the signs, they felt in their gut
like there were things that were off, but they dismissed them because it
was too hard to look at at the moment, right? Too big, too scary to go,
what am I actually dealing with? Either way, learning of the infidelity
is a great cause of pain for every single person I have ever talked to
in my coaching practice of five years.

Some of you may be trying to stay in your marriages and find intrusive
thoughts to be getting in the way. You might be sharing an intimate
moment, for example, and be reminded of the intimate moments that they
shared. And just like that, you go from being into each other to wanting
to get 20 miles away. Like don’t touch me. You revolt me, right? Just
like that. It can happen so fast. Or some of you might be seeing a more
objective view of the situation, which I will say is really required to
release the infidelities hold on you. So you might be spending more time
in the upstairs brain looking around, seeing the bigger picture, and you
might suddenly remember a particularly painful lie that he told you to
cover the infidelity. And just like that, you’re back down in the
basement. Your mind starts racing. You start hunkering down and you are
raging mad all over again, right?

All right. What the heck to do with all of this? What do we do? Let’s
go. Okay. I’m going to break this down into a couple of steps. One,
you’ve got to slow the thought down. You’ve got to slow it down, okay?
It’s probably fast. It probably feels super intense, really urgent,
really important. We got to slow it down, slow down the intensity. This
involves breathing, reminding yourself that there might be more to the
story, reminding yourself that you’re not in current danger, right? The
second, journaling, talking it out, moving your body, doing something to
slow it down, okay? Part of it is just saying to yourself, this is just
a thought and it’s not to dismiss the significance of it, but to go,
this is a thought that I’m having. It’s a thought. I can decide what to
do with this thought. I can decide what I want to feel from this
thought. I can decide where I want it to take me. But for right now, I’m
just remembering this is a thought. You can even call it, this is an
intrusive thought. It feels very, very intrusive. Even that little bit
of awareness of going, this is an intrusive thought, will slow it down.
It will loosen its grip a little bit. It’ll be a little bit less
intense, okay?

The second thing is when you have settled yourself down some, it’s time
to do some digging. I mentioned earlier that it is, for most of us, some
kind of coping mechanism. There’s something that we’re using it as a way
to kind of mask other things that need to be dealt with. And when we
have settled ourselves down some, it’s time to dig, okay?

I’m going to give you a couple of examples here. One is just like a
medical example. So I want you to imagine that you have a wound and most
of the time it’s fine and you can keep it kind of bandaged up and you
can wear normal clothes and go about your life doing your normal
activity. And every once in a while you feel this sharp shooting pain.
It’s really, really intense and you go to that wound and go, that’s
right. And instead of getting to why that sharp shooting pain is
happening, you medicate, you cover it up with balms and lotions that
numb it, you cover it back up even more and you carry on, okay? You go
about, it might feel better for a while, but it keeps, you keep having
this reoccurring sharp shooting pain. It’s the same thing with intrusive
thoughts, okay? Until that person slows down enough to look at what is
causing that sharp shooting pain in the first place, they will likely
keep experiencing those pains. Even if they’re not that frequent, they
will probably still experience them.

Now, let me give you an example about infidelity, okay? Let’s say that
you decided to stay in the marriage. You know that there’s a lot of
good. You know that it’s worth fighting for. You’re months out and
overall you’re feeling a lot better. But one day, seemingly out of the
blue, you’re reminded he did some pretty awful things. You remember one
thing in particular where you were in a pretty vulnerable spot and not
only was he not there for you, but he showed up for the affair partner.
Your brain attaches to this thought and suddenly your mood has
completely shifted. You’re mad at him without outwardly having had
anything happen between the two of you. Nothing has been discussed. You
haven’t even seen him and you’re at a 10, okay?

I want you to use your own most recent experience of having an intrusive
thought and practice the exercise I’m about to share with you, okay? So
first, as with that example above, you need to get yourself to a
grounded place. Remind yourself, I’m not currently in danger, okay? I’m
not currently in danger. This is an intrusive thought. I’m going to
breathe. I’m going to slow it down. I’m going to slow it down so I can
really look at this, okay?

When you feel more calm, this is when there’s a couple really good
questions to ask yourself. It won’t work when you’re feeling really
highly activated. It won’t work, okay? Wait till you feel a little bit
more calm. The first question is this. Is this intrusive thought kind of
like that sharp shooting pain showing me something that still needs to
be processed, an emotion? Is there something that I need to allow myself
to feel? Maybe it’s regret. Maybe it’s grief. Maybe it’s just sadness or
anger or loss. Is there something that I’m avoiding? Is there a feeling
I’m avoiding that I need to just give myself permission to feel? Why am
I afraid to feel that emotion?

Question number two. Is this an invitation to look deeper at something
that needs to be addressed so I can actually feel more safe here? Now
this can go one of two ways, okay? Oftentimes this is an invitation to
learn how to comfort ourselves. Sometimes it’s an invitation to learn
how to soothe ourselves, to learn how to trust ourselves at a deeper
level. It is knowing how to navigate thought processes that derail us.
Like when we can see patterns of intrusive thoughts, this is where we
might look and go, okay, this is something that I need to learn how to
manage. I need to learn that every time my thoughts go this way, this is
where it takes me and it’s not useful, okay? It can be something that we
can do on our own.

Now in the example above, this is the rest of that story, okay? It could
be that you are getting closer and closer in your relationship and your
brain wants to remind you that you could get hurt again, okay? So you’re
starting to feel safe. You’re starting to breathe a little bit easier.
You’re starting to stay in that upstairs part of the house a little bit
more. And this is the basement brain going, don’t get too comfortable.
Don’t get too close. Remember this. Remember that he did this, okay? So
you can ask your spouse. If you want to do this, you can take the
situation, the reminder of what happened where you were feeling really
vulnerable and they didn’t show up for you, but they’re there for the
other person. And you can ask them and say, do you understand what that
was like for me? And they can never fully understand, but I want to tell
you. I want to tell you what that was like for me. I want to tell you
what that felt like for me, for me to be in this situation and have you
show up in this way. I need to know what you would do differently.
Please tell me, if you had a redo, what would you do differently? And
just knowing that, you’ll learn if they get it. You’ll learn if this is
a person that is safe to continue in a relationship with. Now it might
not go perfectly. The person might get a little bit defensive because it
might feel out of the blue. But in the end, what matters is how do you
repair? How do you come together? Does he just blow you off and say, I
can’t believe you’re bringing that up again? Or does he try to help you,
right? Does he really get it? What you’re looking for is, if I continue
to let my guard down here, will he protect my heart? Is this a wise
place for me to let my guard down? These are all really good things to
know when you’re moving forward, right?

Okay. So first I suggest checking in with yourself after you’re calm and
just seeing, is there something that needs to process here? Is there
something that I can answer for myself? Is there something that I need
to know or some kind of validation that I can give to myself, right?
You’re looking deeper at that. Second, it’s totally fine to bring in
your partner, for those of you where this applies, and co-regulate,
okay? Co-regulation is one of the past episodes that I did. It’s where
we learn how to help each other be calm by settling our own nervous
systems, okay? By using our own safety within ourselves to help each
other. And this is a great way to heal.

Now, I know that sounds simple, but it’s not easy. It’s not easy. It
requires some muscle. It requires growth. It requires pushing yourself
to dig deep, to go, okay, what’s the lesson here? What am I avoiding?
What do I need to learn to do? What’s the skill? What’s the skill here,
okay? Intrusive thoughts are not something that just are meant to stick
around forever that you can’t do a dang thing about. That is not what
they are. It’s a signal that there’s something to heal. It’s a signal
that there’s something to look at. It’s a signal that there’s something
that needs to be brought to the upstairs of the house to be addressed.

So I invite you to look at your intrusive thoughts and dig deeper and
look at what needs to be addressed. And first of all, though, growing
your capacity to self soothe when the intrusive thoughts come, learning
how to bring yourself down, okay?

All right. That is what I have for you today. I appreciate you being
here and I know that this is a topic that affects probably all of you
and I hope that you find this useful. All right, thank you so much. Take
care and I’ll see you next time.

(19:10) 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 at andriagiles.com forward slash lies
dash about dash infidelity forward slash. Again, it’s andriagiles.com
forward slash lies dash about dash infidelity forward slash.

I will see you next time.