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I’m Andrea Giles and you’re listening to the Heal From Infidelity podcast, The Impact of Infidelity.

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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 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.

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I recently was with a group of colleagues and one of them said that infidelity has to be one of the most devastating things you can do to someone else. And I have lots of thoughts about that. And that’s what I want to address today, okay? Infidelity, some people define it as death by a thousand paper cuts, lots of wounds inflicted over time as more details come to the surface.

Some that are already unhappily married use infidelity as a reason to leave when the reasons they had before didn’t seem valid enough. For most people, infidelity cuts deep. And today I want to talk to you about why that is. There are two main things to look for and I will use examples of both for each. So by nature, we want to trust that the person we are with is good, trustworthy, and has our best interest at heart.

So when we find out that they were deceitful intentionally, that they did things that they know we would not be okay with, and even that would deeply hurt us, it is easy to be highly impacted by their choices. At a primal level, we are tribal. We like to move through the world with others. So to be cut off from your tribe feels like death. Even if we can logically know that that is not the case,

At a deep primal level, we can sense a threat. I personally think that this is part of why so many of my clients could smell. They can like smell that there’s something off in their marriage because we’re deeply wired to look out for our tribe, to protect it, to keep it safe. So we can often spot when something is off. So from that standpoint, a threat to your tribe, your union, primally can feel

Like death, like it’s very threatening. That is real according to like how we are wired. But it goes deeper than this. I personally can speak here about my own experience about the next point I’m going to make. Infidelity can touch on our deepest, most fragile wounds. Ouch, right? How can it be that the person we want to know and love us the most can hurt us the most, right?

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For me personally, because of my lack of a strong, loving male, from my early years of childhood, I grew up thinking that other people had loving dads, but not me. In my childlike attempt to make logical sense of my world, I made it mean that I must just be slightly less lovable, or a lot less lovable. Isn’t that so sad? Even as I prepared this episode, I was sad thinking about little me, moving around in the world thinking I was less.

But when infidelity occurred, it hit hard on that tender hurt part of me that hadn’t quite healed. And it added a new wound, right? If this is sounding depressing, please hang with me, okay? I’m going somewhere good. For now, just reflect on what I am saying and what is true for you and your experience. Just pay attention to what’s coming up for you as I talk. Okay, how can we possibly move on from this? Heal.

let alone salvage our relationship. There are some things I want you to consider. First of all, the impact something has on our life is directly related to the meaning we attach to it, okay? Not just the event itself. There’s the event and then there’s the meaning we attach to it. One is by the natural shock and hurt.

that comes when things happen that we did not expect, especially if they dramatically change our day-to-day life, something that we feel a lot, right? This can be illness, job loss, moving, caretaking of a loved one, children with hard struggles, and we can add in here, infidelity. Those things can instantly change the way we view the world, really shake up our sense of equilibrium. How many of you have had experiences where

You learn something, you hear something, just like that, things look different to you. Things can never go back. I think we all have had times in our life like that where we thought things were one way and then we learned that they’re not. We get news, we get information, something like that. I think sometimes one of those things can be like if any of us have had like child loss or a close friend that has lost a child or

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You know, when you hear about things like that and then you want to just go scoop up your kids, right? Like things that shift and change your sense of things, your sense of safety even, and you want to go home and hug your kids, right? I think we all have things like that that shake things up so much that we can’t ever go back, right? So there’s the initial shock to our sense of safety, our kind of view, worldview.

And then there are all of the things that we attach to it, all of the meaning we attach to it. Often, our egos are very bruised. We’re embarrassed. We wonder what people would think if they knew. We feel ashamed that our spouses would cheat. We feel shame for staying and shame for leaving. Jealousy and envy come to play. We feel self-doubt.

Our egos are there trying to protect us, but can often lead us down a path of a whole lot of unnecessary suffering. So last week I met with my Noah 90 alumni group and one of them shared something profound. She asked me if I’d heard the story of the two arrows and I had not. And she shared a little bit of it in that call. And then after that I followed up and went and studied it. Okay. So.

This is a Buddhist tradition about the two arrows. Basically, it goes like this. The Buddha once asked a student, if a person is struck by an arrow, is it painful? The student replied, it is. The Buddha then asked, if the person is struck by a second arrow, is that even more painful? The student replied again, it is. The Buddha then explained, in life,

We cannot always control the first arrow. However, the second arrow is our reaction to the first. And with the second arrow comes the possibility of choice. Isn’t that profound? the possibility of choice. Now, we didn’t choose that first arrow, right? But we can sure choose the second. And we can really pay attention to the impact of it, right? We can’t control.

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all the things that happen outside of us, but we can change the patterns that we have that send the second arrow straight to us and cause so much additional pain, right? Okay. So a few points I want to make about these two different arrows so you can recognize them are these, okay? Usually the second arrow is aimed inward.

We take shots at ourselves. We blame ourselves. We’re hanging out in so much shame. We’re feeling small. Or we go back and forth between fury and blame at them, back to blame at ourselves. It can become quite a vicious cycle. My beautiful friends, in my experience as an infidelity coach, I see a pattern. I see lots of patterns, but I want to point one out here. I talk to lots of different people all the time. I hear stories all the time.

Most of the time, this is a pattern that I see choosing to step out of the marriage comes from unhealed wounds. Men who still feel like a boy inside who want to be loved and seen, who wants to be the rescuer so they can feel good enough, who have not healed wounds from how they were treated as kids or early rejections that they didn’t know how to process. Yes, we are 100 % players in the dynamics of our marriage. Okay. For sure we are.

but their choices most likely had nothing to do with you. But you, my friend, now, today, have so much power to change everything for the betterment of both of you, whether you stay or go. By showing up now in strength and courage and driving things forward rather than shrinking in with that second arrow, okay? I myself,

think that my first husband never felt like he was enough. I think that there was a lot of pressure to perform according to the world’s terms, like to be successful. And he was, he had an Oxford degree. had two different masters degrees, a law degree from a top 10 law school, all the jobs.

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All the education, right? And it was never enough. remember when we were married, he was always chasing the next thing. What if I did this thing? What if I got this degree? What if I got this job? It was never enough. I felt a lot of pressure to take really good care of the home. I cook home cooked meals daily. I tried to keep my kids looking good and well taken care of. I tried to take good care of myself and to

take care of my body and things like that. And I always felt like if I took care of things well enough that he would feel better. I went to lots of therapy even to try to make myself better because I felt like I must not be good enough because I just didn’t feel like he liked me very much. Like it was just kind of a bummer. I didn’t feel like he liked me or being home with my kids, our kids.

And as time has gone by, I can see that no one could have been enough. I wasn’t and no one could, because it was an emptiness that was inside him that no one could fill. There was a lot of pain there that was unhealed. And rather than seeking healing, he blamed me and others for his issues. And in the end,

He sought out things that would mask the pain and numb the pain rather than seeking healing. It’s really tragic actually, right? The choices that are made, my friends, are not about you. They’re about our egos. They’re about trying to give temporary hits, temporary feelings that we just long for.

and also lacking the skills of knowing how to create that in your current marriage. Now, our egos will tell us personally that it’s all about us. Our egos will tell us that either we’re to blame or they’re to blame and there’s no other alternative. And so we go back and forth between that. Okay.

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We’ll often feel so much pressure to do things right, to handle the infidelity properly, right? Whatever that means, to tell the right people, to not tell the wrong people, to honor ourselves. What does that mean? Does it mean I have to leave? Does it mean I have to try to stay? Right? How confusing can that all be? So let’s circle back to what I started this episode with, impact. How can you minimize the impact?

One huge thing is to use the infidelity for you rather than against you. That may sound totally cliche, but hear me out, okay? For me, being able to really, really see the areas that were still tender in myself or even showing myself that some things that I did not know were there at all helped me to see what needs loving healing.

Yes, there are some new wounds, but the infidelity forced me like nothing else could to really look and see myself, to really see, to really see where I’m selling myself short, to really see what I make it mean and why. Why do I make it mean that? To evaluate what is true, what is not true, and to ultimately do what I thought was best.

which in my first marriage was leaving the marriage, not because of the infidelity, my friends, but because of his unwillingness to be honest with me. It wasn’t because I found out about things and then decided to leave. That was not it at all. Actually, I was willing and he was not. Okay. He just was not willing to be honest. So

Here’s my suggestion for you. Use that powerful mind of yours to focus on the first arrow. There are lots of feelings there to process. There’s hurt there to process, right? There’s enough there to work through without adding additional pain. How do you know if you are flinging that second arrow at yourself? It will almost always leave you feeling less than not good enough, small, weak, inferior.

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None of those things are true. You, just by being yourself as you are, are already good enough. Able, capable, more capable than you can possibly know, worthy of good things, worthy of the best things. When you see your brain start to tell you a story of not good enough, just bring attention to it. Notice that you are hurting yourself with that second arrow and you don’t have to, it is optional. Remind yourself of what is true.

of your capacity to heal, your capacity to have what you want, his capacity to heal if he chooses it. This does not have to be the end of your relationship unless you want it to be. Of course, unless it’s chosen for you. And even then you can heal and you can have something even better. Okay, you can have something even better. It can be the ending that starts a beautiful beginning. Now a point I want to make.

is this. You do not owe anybody anything. You do not owe your partner trying to stay. For some of you, you won’t want to. Some of you will feel obligated to stay, but you really want to leave. I am just giving you permission over the air right now that if you don’t want to stay, if there are already lots of damaging things, lots of hurt,

and you just don’t want to, that you want to heal outside of this, if you feel it’s in your best interest to heal outside of this and to let him heal outside of the relationship, you are allowed to do that with no kind of owing anything, no obligation, no explanation. Okay? For some of you where you can still feel that there’s a lot of good, that there’s a lot to fight for,

This is a place to start. You can start by recognizing the story that you have attached to his infidelity and the impact that it is still making on you. And that goes for all of you, whether you stay or not. Okay. You can heal. You can heal. You will get to a time where several days will go by and you won’t even think about it. You’ll get to a time where you can think about it.

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and it will feel neutral. I know this is true because I have experienced it and I have clients who have experienced it. I know that this is a reality for a lot of people. Okay. Notice the story you’re telling yourself about his infidelity. You’re very likely adding pain on that is optional and will slow your healing. You don’t have to. Okay.

You can lessen the impact. You can slow it down. Have so much compassion for yourself. Like, of course, my brain’s trying to protect me. Of course, my ego is freaking out, right? And you can have love for all of that. And you can still decide to do something different. OK? All right. So much love to all of you. And I will see you next time. All right. Bye bye.

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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 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.