I’m Andrea Giles, and you’re listening to the Heal from Infidelity podcast,
episode number 146, Mature Relationships. 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.

Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode. Right now at the beginning of
this episode, I have an exciting announcement. It’s something I’ve been
thinking about forever and it’s time. I am going to go back to weekly
podcasting. At the beginning of my podcast, I did podcast every week and
then I changed that up when I had my baby and took some time off. And when
I came back, I went to every other week and I’ve stayed there ever since.
And it’s time. It’s time to go every week. So from here on out for the next
while at least until I say otherwise, plan on a weekly podcast for me.
Every week, you can plan on that, put it in your calendars. Make sure to
subscribe. Then it’ll automatically notify you when a new episode is out.
All right. Let’s go ahead and dive into this week’s episode, all about
mature relationships.

I think you’re going to really like this one. I’m going to be teaching some
things that maybe you’ve never heard before, and I’d love to have you leave
with a new understanding of yourself, of where your relationship is at and
some next steps. So here we go. Okay. So there are three different stages
that our relationships go through, and the very first one is love without
knowledge. How many of you, when you first started dating somebody, they
were just everything. You were so excited. Let’s say your partner or
spouse, not just somebody. Let’s talk specifically about your partner or
spouse. You started dating, it started to get more and more serious. And
even though you might’ve seen some flaws, you just thought that they were
everything. You thought that they were everything. You saw many things in
them that you were attracted to that made you want to keep going in the
relationship.

And this is called love without knowledge because as much as we think that
we know the person that we are committing ourselves to, there’s so much
that you don’t know. There is so much. And often there’s a lot of stuff
that you don’t know because they don’t even know it themselves. They’re
unknown to themselves in some part, in some way. There are things that they
don’t know. For example, they may have trauma in their past, some really
hard things that is revealed later in the relationship. Let me give you an
example. This past weekend, my daughter was here visiting. She’s 23, she’s
finishing up college, and we are talking about different things. We were
talking about how we are coming up on the anniversary of the death of her
father. We were talking about all the things that she experienced as a kid.
And I said to this daughter that there’s going to be times in her life
where it will all be brought to the forefront, everything that she’s
experienced and that she’s going to have to deal with it.

That there’s going to be grief that’s going to come up. That there’s going
to be hard emotions that come up. And I told her that for me after she was
born, I had a lot come up for me. I explained to her that I went through my
life thinking that it wasn’t okay for me to talk about the parts that were
really hard and to put an optimistic face on about the things that were
good and just to shine it on, make it look okay, make it look good. And
after she was born, I had this beautiful, perfect little baby girl who I
loved so, so much, and some things happened that triggered this. My dad
made a comment to me about her. And basically what happened is it unleashed
a lot of grief about how I was never protected the way that my little girl
has been protected as a child. It just was not there for me.

And just as a little context, my dad died when I was two days old, and then
I had a stepdad from when I was two till I was five, and then another
stepdad who is still my dad and I love him, but it was hard. It was tricky.
And I was never the little girl that was just like daddy’s little girl
protected by their dad, really cherished. I’d never had that growing up. So
when I had this sweet girl and I loved her so much, a lot of grief opened up
for me that no one was there for me and the way that I just wanted to
fiercely protect her. So my point to my daughter was that sometimes we have
experiences that we don’t plan on that show us the things that we need to
see or the things that need to process.

So when you are in these beginning stages, dating people, getting to know
them, even in early marriage, there’s a lot you still don’t know about
them. And there’s a lot that they don’t know about themselves and they
can’t know. I cannot tell you how many of my clients have come to me, so
many and said, “My spouse had an affair. This is what happened. And he
remembered this and this and this happening as a child. And he never dealt
with it.” Sometimes it was a death, sometimes it was sexual abuse, all
kinds of things that they never dealt with. And they’re acting out as an
adult and doing things that they normally wouldn’t do, was something that
was coming from this unhealed part in them. And that’s the way that it came
out. And now they’re dealing with it and this is love without knowledge.

We love them, but we don’t know all the things. We don’t. There’s a lot we
don’t know because they can’t even tell us. It’s not a hiding a secrecy.
It’s more like they don’t even know. Our partners don’t know. We don’t know
each other. And you know what? There are parts that we hide from each
other. There are parts that we mask from each other. This is by design, not
to lie, but to protect. We don’t go into relationships fully ready to be
vulnerable and intimate in all the ways. We just don’t. So we keep things
surface level, “This person’s so amazing.” They’re so wonderful because
we’re seeing all the surface level things. We’re not seeing trauma. We’re
not seeing unhealed things. No, not yet. Those things come up later. Okay.

The next stage is knowledge without love. Knowledge without love. My person
that I’m training with right now, Terry Real, he calls this normal marital
hatred, normal marital hatred. This is normal. It’s normal. It’s something
that most everybody understands and has felt. It’s like, oh my gosh, I did
not know you. I did not know this about you. I really can’t stand this part
of you. I really don’t like this part of you. In fact, this part of you
really triggers me. It’s really hard to be around you because of how I feel
when this part of you is exposed. Knowledge without love, the love
disappears. It doesn’t mean that we don’t love this person anymore. It
doesn’t mean that we don’t still care about this person. It means that when
we are in that frame of mind, we can’t really deeply access that love
because we’re so like, oh my gosh, who is this person? I don’t even know
this person. I thought that they were this and this and this.

I’m going to give you another example. For many of my clients, when they
find out about the infidelity, there is this part of the shock, part of the
waking up. Part of the shock is, I did not know that this person was even
capable of this. I remember feeling that way. I remember thinking about my
first husband, what a terrible liar he was, and that he could never pull
off something like that because he could barely keep a birthday present
hidden from me. He’d get so excited about it and he would leak it and tell
me. And I remember thinking there’s no way he could ever pull off actually
cheating in some form, in any form because he’s just so bad at lying. What I
didn’t know is that there was a very masked part of him that was very good
at it. I had no idea. It had been there before we got married and I had no
idea.

So when those things were revealed to me, I was shocked, as I’m sure you
are as well. I was shocked. How can this person that I know in this way
also do these things that have caused so much pain? How can this be the
same person? How can this be the same person? And for sure, I experienced
that normal marital hatred of being so mad that this person brought so much
pain into my life and it was rough. It was painful, as I’m sure many of you
know. Many of you might be in this stage right now, this normal marital
hatred, this knowledge without love, the love that you once felt, it’s
pretty buried right now. It’s hard to access. It’s hard to feel because
there’s so much pain on top of it now.

Like I know a lot more now about this person than I did before, and it’s
not necessarily the things I want to know. It’s also one of those things
though, that once you see it, you cannot unsee it. There is no going back.
There’s no going back. People try. I can’t tell you how many of my clients
have come and said, “It happened years ago. I tried to just bury it and
move on. Didn’t work. Here I am. Please help me.” We have to deal with it.
It doesn’t just go away. Now, I do think that this stage is really, really
important and here’s why. Because I think that this knowledge piece is a way
to really know who we’re with, to really know what growth we need to step
into to be with this person.

For example, if we find out that our spouse really triggers us like crazy
with certain things that they do or don’t do, this holds up a mirror to
what is so triggering about this? Why? What is this? Why does it bother me
so much? And that could show us our own work. For example, I don’t like it
when he calls his mother. I don’t like it. It’s constant. I don’t like it.
It’s like every day. Why does he need to call his mother every day? This
can be something to explore, to go, why does this bother me so much?

And I’m not saying from a way of dismissing it, making it not matter. It’s
more showing you what you want. Well, I think the reason why is because he
acts different with her than he does with me. I feel like he puts on this
fake facade for her than he does with me, and I want to be with somebody
who’s more like the same wherever he is that I can count on that it makes
me not trust him as much. Okay. How am I going to communicate this? How am
I going to share this. That’s the growth. Instead of just taking it at face
value. I hate it when he talks to his mom every day. I hate it. It gives us
an opportunity to go deeper. It lets us see more.

Now, I am going to circle back a little bit to all of these, but I want to
name the third one. The third is knowledge with love or mature love.
Knowledge with love or mature love. Mature love is when you know who you’re
with. You know all of it, the good, bad, the ugly, you know the flaws, you
know the things that trigger you, you know the things that have happened,
you know the hurts that you have experienced at the hand of this person.
All the things where they came from, who they are, they’ve been exposed and
you love them and you choose to love them, and there’s a maturity in it.
Why?

For most of us, in early relationships, it’s very black and white, just
like a child’s brain is very black and white. It’s this naive trust. It’s
like trusting that my parents are the best parents, have the best parents
in the whole world, and then you grow up and go, interesting. I didn’t know
this and this and this. I didn’t know that my dad was cheating on my mom.
This is not me. Not me, not my experience. I’m just using this as an
example. I didn’t know that the whole time I was growing up, my dad was
cheating on my mom. These skeletons, these things that we find out about
later, I didn’t know that they actually really didn’t like each other and
that they shined it on pretty darn good. I didn’t know that The way that
they were able to say that they were so happy is by avoiding at all costs
and not really talking about anything. I didn’t know that.

As a child, we have this naive trust, this naive love, this naive belief in
the goodness of the people we’re around, which is a good thing. That keeps
us safe as children, but when we grow up, guess what keeps us safe? Seeing
things as they are. Growing our awareness, growing our maturity to be able
to hold it. To be able to hold, this is a very good person and they are
flawed. That’s the work that I’ve done in my adult life with some members of
my family that are close to me is going, “I love this person and this
person really hurt me, but I love this person and I can understand how this
person came to be the way that he is and I love him,” and this is going to
some of the hurts from how I grew up. Some of the situations that I was in
growing up.

There is growth and beauty in waking up to what is actually real. Waking up
to who our spouses are, to who we are inside this relationship, and I
maintain that there are not many things that offer the opportunity to wake
up like infidelity. Change does not happen without some crisis, without
something big. How many of us have been in stale relationships for a very
long time and known that there’s something that’s going to have to give
here? I don’t know. I don’t know what I’ll need to do, and then infidelity
occurs and it’s just this jolting wake up and if handled well, it is an
opportunity to hold this gigantic mirror to ourselves, to our spouse and
really see the things that we’ve been avoiding.

Who have I been in this relationship? Who am I being now? Who do I want to
be? Who has my partner been? What have I been blind to? What have I
intentionally not seen because I didn’t want to deal with it? Why?
Opportunities to see it all. There’s a serious growing up that happens.
There’s a serious coming out of innocence of this happens in other
relationships, not mine. The innocence of that into something more mature.
I know you don’t want it. I know that it has been painful, and I also know
that there is something really powerful in having the mature understanding
of a situation where you can see nuance, where you can see it is not as
simple as I’m making it be. It’s not as simple as what my girlfriend or my
sister is making it be. It’s far more complex. There’s a maturity in being
able to see that.

There’s a maturity in it, and when we can take that maturity and knowledge
and allow love in again, watch out. That’s where real strength comes in.
That’s where we can hold a lot of truths at the same time. This is where we
are able to see building trust not as an on-off switch, but as a broad
thing where there’s some things that we trust more than others, but that
there are areas that we can trust in today and areas that we want to see
more trust in. That’s where we can hold a lot and we can speak up more about
the things that we want because we’ve grown in our maturity to see it, to
understand it and to know what it is that we’re wanting. That takes a lot of
depth and a lot of maturity.

My friends, whether you’re staying or whether you’re going, this kind of
maturity is required to heal. If we walk away from something with a blanket
statement about how everything was all on them, about how I have no
responsibility here whatsoever and it’s all them and I just need to get
away immediately, it will resurface until you look at it. This is not to
say that it was ever your fault that they chose to be unfaithful. Never,
ever. What I am saying is that we are always helping to co-create
situations that we find ourselves in, and it may be that you kept your
mouth shut for far too long.

It may be that you turned away because it was too scary to look at. It may
be that you knew that he was pulling away and rather than going, “Hey, wake
up. What’s going on here?” You might’ve recoiled back. You may have turned
away as well. You two maybe turned pretty cold to each other. This is the
waking up. This is the seeing. It’s painful. It’s not easy. It’s hard to
look at. It’s never to go, “Of course he did this thing because I drove him
to it.” Never ever, ever, ever, ever. Got it? Never, ever.

So let’s go back over the three relationship stages. Shall we? Love without
knowledge. We just don’t know. We don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t
know what we don’t know about ourselves, about our partners, about the way
it works. We don’t know. We just don’t know, but we know we love this
person. Knowledge without love. Suddenly we have a whole bunch more
understanding of who we’re with and the love is just squashed. This is where
that normal marital hatred comes in. Normal. It’s normal. The last knowledge
with love or mature love. This is wisdom. This is where wisdom sits. This is
where your relationship has been tested and tried and you guys came through
and you are way stronger than you were before. You are way stronger. This
is wisdom.

Whether you’re staying or going, this last piece, this knowledge with love
or mature love, if you take the time to understand what happened, even if
you know that you need to leave, you’ll be far more primed to be wise in
your next relationship. You’ll see more. You’ll know more. You’ll take that
wisdom and go from being wounded to being really wise. Really wise, that’s
a pretty powerful place to be.

Before I go, I want you to know that the doors are open to my program. Get
your life back after infidelity. This is the work we do. You’ll have
support of other women who are doing the same work. You have my support.
You have amazing content to go through with videos that are done by me with
in-depth worksheets that I take you through to help you understand
everything that you’re experiencing to help you go back and go deep so that
you get this wisdom. You’re paying a painful price for something that you
didn’t do. I say, let’s take all of that pain and use it. Let’s use it,
shall we? You’re here anyway. You’re here listening to this podcast. You’re
here in this infidelity space. Let’s use this pain and turn it into gold.
We’re not going to just sit in it forever. No way.

That’s my mission inside my program and here talking with you, is to help
you not just heal from this, not help you just get past the pain, but to
become the wisest version of yourself where you’re not suffering anymore.
You are wise. You’ve taken these things and turned it into wisdom. I want
to help you do that. Come join. Come check out my program. Take a risk. Go
all in. Okay. Come join me.

All right, my friends. I will see you in a week. I’m excited to talk to you
more often again. If you have requests of things that you’d like to talk to
me about or that you’d like to hear from me, I invite you to go leave me a
message. Email me at andreagiles.com. It’ll go directly to me. I will see
the request. I’ll see what I can do. All right, my beautiful people take
care. I’ll see you next time. Bye-bye.

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
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it’s andreagiles.com/lies-about-infidelity/. I will see you next time.