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.

00:42
Today, talking about letting go. What do I mean by letting go? I get emails and messages through social media all the time asking me how to move forward. How do I stop rehashing the details? How do I look at him and not be disgusted? How do I put one foot in front of the other? How do I really let go and move forward with my life? First of all, I want to just acknowledge to you that this is hard.

Okay, it’s hard work. Unless you felt nothing for your spouse and don’t care about them at all, or if you were looking for a way out and this gave you an easy exit, infidelity can be mighty painful. Some say it’s one of the most painful things that we can experience. It can be so disorienting, a very deep wound. And the more meaning we attach to it, the more painful.

So for example, if we make it mean that the love that we thought we had is just not real and never has been, that’s really painful because we’re negating all of the good times too. So we don’t even have those to hold onto. If we think that if we would be better looking or whatever, better in bed, whatever the things are, then this wouldn’t have happened, we can add so much pain to our story by looking in the mirror and loathing ourselves and thinking that we should be better.

Okay, those are just some examples of how we attach meaning and make it more painful. But even without all of that, the work here that we’re talking about is not for wimps. Okay, this is a podcast you never wanted to have to listen to, right? Never a search you wanted to go searching for. But I will say, I’m really glad you’re here, and I want you to know that you will come out of this stronger and better for it. It is not going to get the best of you.

All right, let’s dive in. First, we’re going to look today at some ways that we hold on to things. And then we’re going to talk about why we may be holding on. Lastly, I’m going to cover how to actually let go and move forward.

03:08
First of all, what are some of the ways we hold on? One is by replaying every detail. This is probably the one I see most. It can feel involuntary, but often we make room for it. We imagine the scene or the scenes. We go by places you know they were and imagine them there and feel the pain of imagining them there.

We do this for a couple of reasons. One big one is because our brains are trying desperately to make sense of what happened. There’s this person we care about and love and viewed in one way and suddenly they look very different. We can’t reconcile it. There’s this dissonance in our brain. So we replay things in our mind again and again to try to put pieces together in a tidy box where it will all make sense, where we can see why it happened and settle our brains down to know that because we understand it all, it’s never going to happen again.

Another reason why is because it very well could be a PTSD response called re-experiencing. I’m going to share with you some specific symptoms of re-experiencing from the place of PTSD. This comes from an article by a doctor named Matthew Tool. He says symptoms of re-experiencing include frequently having upsetting thoughts or memories about a traumatic event, having recurrent nightmares, being physically responsive to reminders of the traumatic event, for example, feeling a surge in your heart rate or starting to sweat.

Having very strong feelings of distress when reminded of the traumatic event, having the sensation that the traumatic event is happening all over again, sometimes called a flashback. People with PTSD commonly have thoughts like these or experiences like that. They may wonder how could I have kept it from happening.

And some may have more flashbacks than re-experiencing things, but re-experiencing can also include consciously recalling your traumatic experience to somebody else. So it’s not just in your own mind. Sometimes re-experiencing means saying it over and over or even a few times to somebody else.

05:36
So with trauma, trauma becomes trauma when it is something that happens that we cannot process in the moment. We simply can’t, we’re too flooded, our brain is too flooded. And so some of the reasons why you may be having these things come back up might be because they are begging you to process them. Okay, and later in the podcast, I’m going to talk about that.

Another thing we often do in holding onto things is reminding our brains often about the infidelity itself, not necessarily all the sort of details, but of the infidelity. We can be enjoying ourselves even with our spouse and suddenly remember that this person hurt us. Our brain may point out how they are not safe, how they are untrustworthy, and this can kill a happy moment in no time flat. The mood can change. Everything can shift instantly.

Like, wait a minute, why am I laughing with this person? Why am I enjoying this with this person? They did this thing. Why do we do this? Because it pretends to keep us safe. If we replay it or think about it often, it’s like keeping up a fence of sorts or a gate. We don’t want to let them get too close or enjoy them too much because we may get hurt again. Gate closed, gate closed.

We might open the gate temporarily and then remember, my gosh, this person crushed me. This person betrayed me. Shut that gate. Or they might enjoy us too much and think that it all is forgotten and all is well and we’re just moving on and that’s over and done. That can feel very threatening.

The problem with this is that we end up hurting ourselves far more than we are hurting them. Okay, so as I’m giving you my example here, I want you to think about a time where you were upset about something and because you stayed upset about it, you took away from yourself what could have been a really good sweet time with somebody or even with yourself.

A while back, my husband and I were on a road trip alone for the first time in ages. And on this trip, he right away turned on this book on tape that he was listening to. And I didn’t know anything about the plot line. It was like mid book. I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t know what was going on. And he just was enjoying listening to his book.

And I’m like, okay, maybe he’s going to tell me what’s going on. Maybe he’ll turn it off and talk to me. And rather than speaking up and being like, hey, what’s going on in this book, or hey, can we listen to something we both want to listen to, I got madder and madder and madder and had this whole narrative about how he just doesn’t care.

Okay, I do this stuff too, you guys. Like I do. I have to practice the same stuff. And so finally, I talked to him about it and said, hey, I was really hoping that we could spend time together. I was really hoping that we could talk to each other and not just tune each other out. And there was some deeper understanding, but there was plenty of time wasted where I was just getting fuming mad.

So I ended up hurting me far more than hurting him or making him uncomfortable. Not that I want to do that, but you get my point hopefully.

Another thing that we may be holding onto that’s preventing us from letting go is the need to punish. We may feel like they need to be reminded every day how much they hurt us and that it ain’t over yet. That just because time has passed by, just because we’ve talked about it some, doesn’t mean that it’s over.

We may think that we need to remind them often to make sure it doesn’t happen again, to make sure that they learn their lesson. But does this work? Does this work? Let’s break it down.

Okay, so let’s say that we feel compelled to give a daily reminder of what happened. We are thinking that they need to know how bad they hurt us so they don’t do it again. We may feel adamant, maybe a little vengeful. What are we doing when we feel adamant or vengeful?

We’re throwing in little barbs. We’re making direct or indirect references. We’re asking questions that we’ve already asked 50 times. We’re mentioning the affair partner. We’re making sure that they see us cry or hurting. We may make little subtle threats about divorce. We may make sure that they know that we don’t trust them.

10:29
What does this create? What it creates is keeping the pain in the front of your mind at all times. Can you see that? When you’re doing those things, it is like not giving any room to experiencing anything else but the pain. We are hurting ourselves way more than we’re hurting them. We’re keeping it right in front of our eyes and bringing up all of those painful feelings in an attempt to protect us, but ultimately it’s actually doing the opposite. It’s hurting us.

Okay, so what do we do with this? As with all things, it is a choice. As with all things, it requires growth. It requires expansiveness in both mind and body. Both cognitively shifting thought and the ability to hold more in your body.

First, let’s talk about the cognitive side. Thought patterns are really a big deal here. If you are in a frame of mind that people are generally untrustworthy or that he is just untrustworthy or that others are just out to get you, no matter what happens, you will use your mind to find holes. Especially when you throw in past events, you could probably always find some past slight or hurt to go along with what is in front of you, and it will give you more evidence of how wrong the situation is.

So when you can notice this and shift your thinking to an openness of what is actually right in front of you, other emotions can come in. Curiosity, openness, love, kindness, et cetera.

This takes me to the second part of this, which is mindfulness. That’s kind of a buzzword right now, and I’m learning more about it myself. But what it really means is being present with what is right now, not clouding the present moment with past pains, not getting too far ahead of ourselves, sitting with what is and letting yourself expand in that.

It is hard to put into words something that is felt, but I want you to experience this. I know what it feels like in my body when I’m being mindful. It feels expansive. It feels open. It feels like love. It feels like peace. It feels like I’m bigger than just myself.

12:51
Several years ago, I worked with a coach who worked with me around some health issues. And one of the things that she had me practice was pretending like there was a bubble around me all the time. And she had me look, kind of close my eyes and look at myself and see what color that bubble was. For me, it’s yellow.

When I meditate, when I become mindful, when I practice being still, I can see that around me and I can see it glowing and I can see it expanding. And when I can do that, I don’t have as much need to prove anything, to be right about anything. I can just kind of let things be or bring up things as needed without having the huge emotional burst that often can come with when we are not letting go of things.

So for you, I recommend going and practicing this. There are so much good stuff out there. There are books, there are YouTube videos, there are apps. I happen to have a couple apps. One of them is called the Tapping Solution. Tapping is a way of practicing mindfulness and shifting patterns.

I recommend yoga. You can search for different kinds of yoga. One that’s really good is restorative yoga. I recommend a podcast called Insight Timer. It’s wonderful. You can find meditations on just about anything in that.

I suggest that you practice this. The pieces need to go together.

One more thing I want to say about this is that I highly, highly recommend also finding a practitioner that deals with the body side of things. As a life coach, I deal more with the cognitive side of things. There are good, good practitioners that work with the body.

There are people called energy workers. There are therapists that do something called EMDR. There are different somatic kinds of therapy, and they are wonderful. And they can really help release our body’s need to hold on to things that are no longer serving us.

15:15
So if you are constantly shrouded with intrusive thoughts, if you can’t seem to let go, it might just mean that you need a little extra help with this. You might just need a little extra help to help you release some of the things that your body and brain are saying are really, really important to hold on to. Go get some help.

Okay, lastly, letting go is a conscious act of faith. It is done very intentionally. It’s an act of faith because it means that you are trusting that whatever happens, you will land on solid ground. You are trusting the process and the natural progression of things.

This is no small feat and takes tremendous courage, but it is worth it. Notice, my friends, where you feel peace and do more of that.

One of the books that I opened up daily when I was going through divorce almost ten years ago is a book called The Language of Letting Go by Melody Beattie. It’s a one paragraph a day kind of book, so it’s super fast and easy. You just literally open it up to the day and read it. But it’s packed with a lot of wisdom that can just help you be really intentional with how you’re going to let go.

Here’s one snippet from it. Today, I will let things happen without worrying about the significance of each event. I will trust that this will bring about my growth faster than running around with a microscope. I will trust my lessons to reveal themselves in their own time.

It’s that beautiful. I love it. Notice what you are holding onto and ask, is this really helping me move forward? Is it keeping me stuck or pulling me backward? Either it’s nudging you forward or it’s keeping you stuck or pulling you back. It’s one of those things.

Okay, that’s what I have for you today. Practice letting go. Loosen your grip. Just loosen it just a little bit. You’re going to be okay.

17:32
You’re still safe. You know why? Because you always have you. You always have you. All right. Thank you, friends. Have a wonderful day. I’ll see you next time.

17:46
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.