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I’m Andrea Giles, and you’re listening to the Heal from Infidelity podcast, episode number 200, “Keep Watering – What My Flowers Taught Me About Healing After Infidelity.”
Hello and welcome to the Heal from Infidelity podcast for 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. Can you believe it? Episode number 200. I had really fun ideas about things that we could do over here to celebrate this momentous occasion, 200 episodes in, and I decided I’m just going to talk to you about a personal thing that just has taught me some things regarding flowers and growth and not giving up. And that’s going to be my 200th episode today. Why? Because I think that you’ll enjoy this episode today. That’ll make you think about things in maybe a little bit of a lighter way than maybe we talk about sometimes, and it’s just kind of a fun story. So here we go. Welcome, welcome. I’m going to share with you something that happened. So at the beginning of the summer here in Montana, our planting season for flowers isn’t until about may because often we get snow in April or really, really cold temps in April.
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And so you kind of are in trouble if you go spend a bunch of money, plant your flowers and then have snow come, or a really cold frost. And so we don’t usually plant here until around May. So my husband and I took our little three-year-old to the nursery, had one of those huge, not a cart, but the flat bed things that you push around and we let our little girl pick out a ton of flowers, and it was the funnest thing ever just to watch her pick out the flowers, just to let her pick out the flowers. She loved it so much. She was just delighted and put so many, and to be fair, we were not paying attention to how much the ones were. We were just letting her be creative, and it was so dang cute to watch her. This girl has always loved flowers.
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We have pictures of her when she was really tiny sniffing flowers before she even knew how she would go right up and wrinkle her nose and just loves flowers. And so it was so fun to let her just be creative and let’s just say it added up quick to way more than what we thought we’re quite a bit of money in. And I ended putting a couple back even. But we brought them home. We planted them with her, got new soil. I let her help. She just loved it so much. It was really delightful. And I live in a little bit of a rural area. We live on five acres and there are deer everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. And there are so many things that we have planted that say that they’re deer proof. We have had a very hard time finding anything that the deer don’t eat.
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Daffodils are like it. We’ve had trouble finding anything that they don’t eat. So what we thought, we thought that we’d outsmart them and we planted all of our flowers up on our deck on the second floor. We planted them. They were so beautiful. So beautiful. Many, many pots. Many pots. So beautiful. I was just imagining the summer, watching all these flowers grow and bloom and being able to share that with my sweet little girl who helped pick them out and just was excited. It just brought me joy. We took really good care, watered, fertilized, all the things. And then we went to bed. And within, not the first night, but maybe three nights in when we had gone to bed, I woke up, went outside and saw that every flower had been eaten. Actually, there was one kind that I need to see what kind it is.
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They were not the prettiest though. Almost like 95% of the flowers had been eaten, gone down to little stems. They ate not just the flowers, but much of the stem. Oh my goodness. I didn’t cry, but I felt like crying. It was so sad to bring my little lady out and show her that the flowers were all gone, and even my husband was just really sad. We were really, really sad about it. Really. I felt defeated and sad. We’d go out and look at those, and there were all these beautiful pots where they were just brought so much joy for those few days to go sit outside and just enjoy the nice warm weather that we were getting. And imagine these just growing and growing over the summer and having all of them gone. There was one pot in particular that I loved. Oh my gosh, I just loved it.
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It had the most unique color of flowers. It had pink and purple and yellow, but different sizes and different patterns within the flowers. They’re very unique looking. And I put them right on the little coffee table thing so I could have it front and center and see when I’m sitting there on the little couch. And those were completely gone. All, every single one was just completely gone. And really, it felt like the life had been just sucked right out of these beautiful plants. And we all were really sad. I remember that first day I sat there just so sad. And my little girl, she is an empathetic little lady. She is very empathetic. She goes inside and then came wandering out and brought with her a blanket and water Mama, you need a blanket. You need water. She just was wanting to comfort her mama.
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And I wasn’t crying. I was just sitting there sad. I said, I’m really sad that the deer ate all my flowers. Just such a tenderhearted little girl. Just so sweet. But they were gone. They were gone. And I remember making some decisions and even talking to my group. I mentioned it to my group in our All-in retreat, which was amazing. I do a virtual retreat a few times a year with my people inside my group. It’s always incredible. In my All-in retreat, I had told them about that, and we were talking about little things that we can do that just bring us joy, things that we can choose to do that are in our control. And I remember telling them how I had really felt like I just had to deal with it. I just had to deal with, I already had spent all of this money on flowers, and so I thought, I’m just going to have to spend the summer this summer with these little nubs with no flowers, and I’ll just let ’em be and like, yeah, I’ll keep watering.
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I’ll keep watering them and just, I am not just going to sit here and let ’em completely die, but then the deer will just come back up and eat ’em anyway. And I remember telling my group that I missed so much having beautiful flowers every morning. It just brings me joy to go out there and sit there first thing in the morning. And so I said, part of me going all in on me is I’m going to go get some more flowers and just bite the bullet and buy more flowers. Well, right around that time, something very interesting happened. So we had taken very tender care of these little nubs and continued to water them. We didn’t let anything just die. We were not about to just let it die. And what happened is a couple days after I said that to the group, I went out one morning and there were a couple flowers that had bloomed, and I just kept watering.
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Every morning I went out again and I would just clean up anything that I could clean up, even if it felt totally pointless. I decided not to buy new flowers, but I didn’t rip them out. I just kept tending to them. Now, it’s only been a few weeks since I told my group I was going to go get more. Now, they are beautiful. They are beautiful. They are all in bloom. Everyone. Everyone is in bloom, and they’re not exactly how they first were. They’re not. My most favorite one is not nearly as lush right now as it was. And there’s some parts of it that were eaten down so far that there’s just tiny little green sprouting right above the soil. We might not get flowers from that part, but so much of it is so vibrant, and it’s even almost more satisfying because they were all eaten down to nothing.
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And to see how taking care of them and letting my little girl water and really just loving them back to health they have now everyone. And so I ended up making a little gait per se, so that the deer could not get back up on my deck at all. They can’t get to it now, and now they’re just getting more and more beautiful each day, and it’s just delightful. It’s just delightful. So what does this have to do with infidelity? This whole experience has made me think about healing, especially after something like betrayal. Betrayal can feel like all in one fell swoop. You are just cut to nothing, just cut down to nothing. Your trust is broken. Your trust in yourself is broken, and the things that you cared about the most in one fell swoop just got eaten up or gobbled up or broken right in that moment.
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You spent years planting something. You invested time and energy and love. You imagined how it would look, how it would feel, and then suddenly it’s just gone. It’s just gone. It’s very easy to look at that damage and think, I guess I just can’t have love like that. I guess I’m just not deserving of that. I guess that I am just flawed in some way for someone to not be loyal to me, or it could be knowing that it’s not really you, but also just feeling the grief and the loss. How could he do this? You might feel like, what’s the point of trying again? Now, I see this all the time that people come to me wanting to rush, to rip everything out and start over. Let’s rip out all the flowers, throw ’em in the trash where they belong, throw ’em in the trash.
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This doesn’t matter anymore. Sometimes it can mean running and jumping into a new relationship or like a revenge relationship. I’ll show them, or I’m just going to go have some fun. Others decide to just give up completely and say, kind of screw it. I’m not going to do this at all ever again. And they stop nurturing anything at all. But here’s what I want to offer you, okay? If you’re in these stages where it feels like everything’s just been ripped up, if you feel really distraught, if it feels really messy right now, I want you to keep watering, okay? Even when it looks like there’s nothing left, even when you’re not sure it will work, even when it feels completely hopeless, I want you to keep watering, okay? I want you to know that watering in the context that I’m talking about here does not look like staying in an abusive or really toxic situation.
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It doesn’t mean allowing yourself to be mistreated, okay? Not at all. It doesn’t mean ignoring red flags or avoiding decisions that you need to make. Not at all. Not at all, okay? In fact, I’ll say that with my flowers, actually, I had to remove some that I knew would not come back. Some had been pulled from their roots, and I didn’t see some of the roots that were exposed until it was too late and they were kind of dead, or just some that they just had had too much damage, that there were just dead holes there where it’s clear that they’re not coming back. And so I actually did go actually just recently and bought one more taller plant because the ones that were taller, they’re not going to grow real high this summer. They just don’t have enough time. So I went and bought one plant to give some height to one area, and I may go pop in a couple more that are already grown, just to give a little more depth.
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So it doesn’t mean that you just let things be how they are and call it good. It does mean making the decisions that you do need to make from a thoughtful, deliberate wise place. This thing that I used to think was working, it’s not working the way that we did things before. It’s not going to work here. So for me, the way that we are doing before of having all the plants up on the deck thinking we are being so smart, it’s not going to work. We have to do something different. The way that you were doing things before is also not going to work here, and you need to do something different, and it’s okay. What it does mean is tending to yourself, tending to yourself, and what matters to you. I kept watering those babies because I really love them, because I really care about them.
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I love my flowers. Even when you don’t see immediate results, it means nourishing your own nervous system, your healing your heart. I kept giving those flowers. They weren’t flowers. I kept giving those little nubbins water and sunshine and removing parts that were not doing well, taking them out, extracting them so that they weren’t sucking up nutrients. Your relationship is like that too, especially the one with you. There are parts of you that are begging you to help give them some love. There are parts that are energetically taking up so much of that sunlight and energy that are begging you to please let some sunlight in here. In relationships, sometimes we can know something in our body long before we cognitively are ready to accept it. We can know a decision we need to make. We can know something that we need to do or say and resist, resist, resist thinking that maybe if we resist long enough, it’ll go away.
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I’m here to tell you that’s not true. And instead of trying to resist it, you can go and go, okay, what actually needs to be done here so that I can grow into the person that can follow through with what I know. And for some of you, that’s going to be main leaning into the relationship in a much more vulnerable way than you ever have. And for some of you, it’s going to be leaving the relationship because you know that that is actually the way you’re going to grow the most, that it’s like crippling your growth to stay. Okay. Sometimes underneath what looks like devastation, the roots are still alive. Certainly the roots in you, my friends, my listeners, are still alive. I promise you, if you are listening to this episode, whether you were a betray, whether you really hurt somebody else, your roots are still very, very much alive and well.
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They’re very much alive and well. And I invite you to nurture those roots. You are not the sum of where you are now. You are this rich, rich, rich soil, rich roots. That’s who you really are. Again, whether you or the betrayer or the one that hurt somebody else, this is true for you two. And we get to decide how we’re going to nourish those roots. Are we going to nourish those roots with shame, with guilt, with flogging ourselves, with telling ourselves that we’re not good enough? What are we going to do? Or are we going to nourish those roots with kindness and grace and love? It is a choice. It’s a choice to keep investing and keep honoring and keep giving and nourishing, especially to a space that you can’t see yet. And sometimes if you keep nurturing, you’ll see regrowth in ways that you didn’t expect.
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I actually want to change that language. It’s not sometimes. It’s every time. Every time, every time you keep nurturing, you’re going to see regrowth in ways that you did not expect. Maybe the relationship does come back and it’s stronger than before, not because you forced it, but because you tended to it with patience and truth and love. Maybe you come back to yourself in a way that you never have before. You grow into a version of you. Who knows? You can handle hard things, who trust herself, who knows? She can still create beauty no matter what happened. Okay? I want you to know that the most important thing here with these flowers is that they didn’t come back because I micromanaged them, because I told them that they were wrong for getting snipped down or that I didn’t blame myself. I never did. Or my husband said, gosh, come on, Alex.
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That’s my husband’s name. Why didn’t you think of that? Why didn’t you think to put something up? I didn’t go there at all. They came back because I stayed present to what was currently happening. My flowers had been eaten down, and I kept watering, and my husband watered some too, but I definitely took more responsibility for it. Why? Because they really matter to me. I love those flowers. I love them. They bring me joy, so it makes sense that I am going to be the one really nurturing them. I didn’t force the outcome. They might not come back. And at some point, I might really just really see these are not coming back. Either they’re going to stop growing or they’re going to die, or I’ll see that nothing’s going to come of them. And in that case, I have a decision to make, right?
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I can pull ’em out and lovingly thank them for trying. Thank them for being there and go get new flowers. I could give up and just go the whole rest of the summer and fall with no flowers at all. Or I could just do what I could, and that’s what I did, is do what I could and gave them what I could. And I’m so grateful for that. I just love my flowers so much. So if you’re listening to this right now and you feel like everything has just been destroyed, whether it’s trust, your marriage, your sense of safety, your hope for the future, I want to ask you, where can you keep watering? Where can you tend to What matters, even if you don’t see the blooms yet? And one more thing, okay? Even if the exact flowers you planted don’t come back, you still grow.
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My flowers are still growing. It does look different than it did. There’s some reinvention going on, and like I said, I’m adding in some things to fill in some gaps. Okay? We get to do that too. We get to decide what is needed here, and we get to decide how we want to fill that gap, okay? No matter what, you become someone who knows how to nurture life again, no matter what, you get to nurture your own life, and no matter what, you will grow because your roots are still living. Your roots are still strong. You are still you at the core of who you are, even if it doesn’t feel like it right now. So keep going, keep nurturing what’s there. Be able to take and assess the things that you do need to see and make very real decisions about it, but look at where you are.
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Maybe assuming you can’t have certain things, assuming that all is lost, where are your assumptions and are you willing to challenge them? Okay. Thank you so much for being here with me. I want to invite those of you who have been really recognizing that you really want some support, that you want some support, that maybe you’re feeling better about things. Maybe you’re feeling a little bit better, but your soul is saying, you know what? There’s more. There’s help out there, and especially those of you who have found me and who are interested and who keep circling around, there is never a better time than now. I’m telling you, the program gets better and better and better. The people in the program, these are the best people out there, and we want to welcome you with open arms. We want you to have a place where you know that not only are you nurturing and loving and betting on you, but you’ve got a whole army of people that are also doing that with you and for you.
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You’ve got my coaching, and you’ve got my assistants coaching. You’ve got one-on-one coaching with her. You’ve got group coaching with me. You get to learn from each other. It is the most nurturing, powerful room, and I invite you to apply. The application is in the show notes. Please reach out, and I can’t wait to talk to you inside the group. Thank you for being here today, my beautiful friends. Thank you for celebrating episode 200 with me. For those of you who have been around for a long time, thank you for being here. I know that there are some of you who have listened to every episode. I love you. I am grateful to you. Thank you for being here. Go take really good care of yourself. I’ll see you next time.
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 dash infidelity slash. Again, it’s andrea giles.com/lies about dash infidelity slash I will see you next time.