(00:00):

I’m Andrea Giles and you’re listening to the Heal From Infidelity podcast,
episode number 193, Relational Bypassing – The Hidden Ways We Bypass Real
Healing.

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.

(00:51):

Hello everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Heal from Infidelity.
Today we are going to talk about an important thing that we need to see in
ourselves and others. It’s a pattern that we all can do easily at times.
It’s the way that we try to avoid our pain. It’s the way that we try to help
others move through things quickly so that we don’t have to feel
uncomfortable. We’re going to dive into all of that today. Before we do, I
want to let you know that my brand new Telegram channel is out. It is called
Heal on the Go. I’m having such a great time with this little channel.
Basically, you download the app Telegram for free, whether through whatever
phone device, whatever you have, and then once you are in, you download the
channel, which is Heal on the Go, and I drop audios at least a couple times
a week.

(01:46):

Audios that are going to help you move through things quickly, get help in
real time, help you when you’re doing your day, your life, make shifts right
now. It’s meant to help you quickly, to help you take action quickly, to
feel something different quickly, to shine a different light on something
right now, to shift something in you so that you can take different actions
right away. So this is in the show notes. It is only $97 a month. I’ve never
offered anything like this. This is a great way to go deeper into my work at
a very affordable price point, but get big impact from this. Go ahead and
get it. It’s in the show notes. You can cancel anytime. Go get it. Alright,
so now let’s go ahead and jump into our content today. Okay, so this piece
of relational bypassing the cost to it is it’s killing your intimacy,
killing it.

(02:45):

Even when we’re trying to do the right thing. Even if we’re trying to say
that we’re connecting, maybe we’re sitting and listening to our partners, we
say that we’re sitting and listening, but we are doing this thing that is
actually having the opposite effect and we may not understand why. Okay, so
that is why I wanted to jump into this today to make sure that we understand
why. Alright? What this is, so today we are going to dive deeply into how
this kind of emotional relational bypassing does not create intimacy. How it
actually creates the opposite. Fixing without hearing is a form of
relational bypassing, and it does not create intimacy. It creates
disconnection. We’re going to talk about why we do this, why we rush to fix
instead of feel, why it feels helpful, but it actually delays our healing.
How this shows up after infidelity for both partners and what it really
means to relate from emotional maturity.

(03:54):

Alright, here we go. What is emotional bypassing? We hear a lot about
spiritual bypassing, at least I’ve talked about it. I have an episode a
while back that’s called spiritual bypassing. This is using spiritual terms,
spiritual words, spiritual truths, even to avoid emotional reality. Okay?
That’s back aways, but this is another version of bypassing that shows up in
relationships. It’s this relational bypassing, we’re trying to get around
the emotion by trying to smooth over or solve rather than sitting in
emotion. Here are some things that it can look like. Offering solutions
instead of presence, dismissing pain with good intentions, rushing to
apologize just to make the feelings go away saying, let’s just move on. When
someone hasn’t even felt safe enough to share how deeply they’ve been hurt,
okay? It’s not that these are always bad things, the problem is timing. When
we bypass emotion, we are missing the opportunity for actual real
connection.

(05:08):

Alright, so what is relational bypassing? Relational bypassing. It’s trying
to restore peace or closeness in the relationship without moving through the
emotional reality. That’s in the way, and I’ll have you know that this term,
I kind of made it up relational bypassing. Maybe if you did a Google search,
you’d find all kinds of information out there about it, but it kind of came
from my own head. So I am teaching you this from my own experience, from my
experience with the many, many clients that I work with, and maybe you’ve
never heard of this before. There are lots of things that we do that look
this way that might be worded in different ways out there in the
relationship world, but this is something that I named because of what I
experience all the time in my coaching practice, even in my own life. So
what it is, is it’s trying to restore peace or closeness in the relationship
without moving through the emotional reality.

(06:17):

That’s in the way. It’s when we want to connect, we want connection, but we
shortcut the process. We want intimacy, but we avoid the path that builds
it. This shows up after infidelity when someone says, can we just start
over? But the pain has not been witnessed. Or when someone wants to jump to
logistics, therapy plans, future vacations, buying things, maybe a vow
renewal, anything but the very painful, hard emotional truth, can we just
move on? Can we move forward? Another layer is what I call emotional short
cutting. This is the internal pressure to get over it already. Come on, come
on, let’s go. Skip to the end. Tie it up with a bow. You might be doing this
to yourself. This is what we do when we are telling ourselves that we should
be past this right now, that we should be further along.

(07:14):

I want you to hear this. How many of you think that you should be somewhere
further along where you are punishing yourself for being where you are,
thinking that there’s something wrong with you when maybe in reality it’s
not that you should be anywhere, that you are not, it’s that you haven’t
fully allowed yourself to be where you are. Maybe you are trying to rush
through this part. Maybe you’re trying to put on a brave face for your
spouse so that things can get back to some kind of status quo and you feel
the intensity of the uncertainty too, and so you’re trying to rush through
to a place where you feel loving again, where you feel trusting again, where
you feel like giving it a go again, but you really aren’t there yet and then
you’re making yourself wrong for it. Rather than carving out space for you
to feel what you’re feeling.

(08:12):

Maybe you are genuinely trying to share with your spouse things that are
bothering you and you are feeling this pressure from them that you should
hurry, that you should be further along. Maybe they’re saying words to you
like, I’m sorry that was hard for you. Okay, what’s for dinner? And you’re
not feeling the deep empathy, you’re not feeling the real connection, you’re
not feeling the, I want to understand this, I want to hear this. I want to
know your inner world. I want to hear it. Even if I can’t fix it, I want to
be with you in it. And so what we can do is try to rush this along. We might
hear words like You’re crying. Oh my gosh, come on. When are you going to
stop crying about this? Okay, you can hear. Can we just move forward? Can we
just be positive?

(09:05):

I’m just a really positive person. Let’s just be positive and put a shiny
happy light on this and move on. We shortcut because we want relief, we want
relief, we want to stop hurting, and this goes both ways. For those of you
listening who know that you deeply impacted your partner by betraying, by
hurting, of course you want to hurry up and get out. It feels terrible to
know that you’ve hurt somebody, especially when you know that you’ve hurt
somebody deeply. It hurts. It hurts really, really bad, right? It hurts
terribly and so logically it makes sense that you’re going to want to get on
with it. Let’s go. Come on. I said I’m sorry I cut off contact. I’m not
doing it anymore. I will never do it again. I love you. Come on, what’s the
problem? Please? Right, because it hurts so bad.

(09:55):

The problem though is that by trying to shortcut emotions, whether your own
or your partners, you are delaying your own healing and what we resist stays
stuck. What we feel can move what we resist, stay stuck, and what we feel
can move short. Cutting might save time in the conversation, but it costs
time in healing. Alright? How do these patterns work together? Relational
bypassing is what emotional short cutting looks like in a relationship. One
happens inside and the other between people. So relational bypassing is in a
relationship, okay? You’re in a relationship and you’re bypassing something
else that somebody else is telling you and kind of trying to jump to the
other side of it where things can feel better and we can just get on with
it. I remember in my first marriage, and to be fair, I’ve probably done this
in my second marriage too, but I remember doing this a lot in my first
marriage where, and going back even further, I remember doing this as a kid
where I would have something that really hurt me, some kind of treatment of
somebody else that was mean, that was very dismissive in my first marriage.

(11:24):

There’s a lot of dishonesty. There was a lot of meanness and shortness and
defensiveness that were used to keep me off the scent of what was really
happening. And it was so uncomfortable for me that I remember trying so many
times to extend an olive branch and calling it forgiveness and calling it me
being really forgiving and me really wanting to get back into a place of
kindness and peace with each other. I remember growing up going and trying
to smooth things over for things that I was taking more responsibility for
than what were mine. I was so hurt and tired of maybe being stonewalled or
ignored that I would go and try to reach out to try to smooth things over
and that would just skip right over the part where the other person might
feel the discomfort of me having a natural reaction to their behavior.

(12:28):

Me sitting in that discomfort of disconnection to honor myself to say, I’m
not okay just jumping into fixing this that feels untrue to me and being
willing to sit in that. And in my first marriage, I would do the same thing
where I would extend a loving text or a loving email if he was away at work
and just offer forgiveness or let’s move past this. I know what a good
person you are, let’s just go. And I can see now how that was my sincere
attempt at the time of trying to get back to a place that felt better for me
and my nervous system, but that did not honor me in the long run. I’m
guessing that many of you listening are feeling the truth in this. It’s
painful, isn’t it? I’m guessing that there are some of you listening who
know that you really hurt somebody that you love and that you care about and
that you would give anything to have a redo and you can’t, and you want to
just move past this so bad.

(13:37):

You want to just get on with life so bad and in sometimes trying to rush
things along, what you’re doing is avoiding really seeing yourself, really
avoiding all the feelings that you need to process, the things that you have
to look at deeper within yourself of how was I capable of this? Like what
happened? Where did I override my own sense of what’s right or wrong? My own
integrity? What was I seeking that I was so willing to do this thing that I
swore I would never do? And taking a real look at that. Why do I need her or
him to suddenly feel better and to feel better quick because the pain of
sitting in this is intolerable. I see you, I feel you, I believe you. I’m
sure that that’s very, very painful. I believe you. But what’s actually
going to help you is sitting in this as long as you have to facing it,
feeling it, processing it, allowing it.

(14:42):

Alright, so both of these things, these relational bypassing and emotional
shortcutting are both avoidance strategies. I want to circle back and talk a
little bit more about emotional short cutting. It is just this piece about
trying to hurry up and get to a different place so that we don’t have to
feel something in relationships. We do it with each other and this emotional
shortcutting we are doing to ourselves. Sometimes we just don’t want to feel
the things that we need to feel. We don’t want to see the things that we
really need to see and so we’ll do anything to get around it. Both are
shortcuts, both are avoidance strategies and both keep us from the raw real
moments where trust is rebuilt, not by what we do, not even by what we say,
but how we stay, how we stay with it, how we stay with somebody else’s pain,
how we stay with our own pain.

(15:48):

We cannot build intimacy through avoidance. We build it through presence.
Alright? How does this show up after infidelity, after betrayal, these
patterns can become even more intense. These are things that we’ve been
doing for a long time. Nothing new here, but it can become more intense for
the betrayer. There’s often guilt and shame and an urgency to repair. They
want to jump to fixing. I said, I’m sorry, what else do you want? I said,
I’m sorry, but that can be a form of bypassing a way to soothe their
discomfort without truly being with the pain they caused. Because by being
with the pain they caused, they have to be with their own discomfort in that
and really seeing themselves for the betrayed the pain can be so
overwhelming that the only way to feel powerful again is to control the
narrative. Demanding answers, repeated confessions, certainty.

(16:43):

But that too can be a bypass. It may feel like justice, but it just keeps
both people trapped in a loop. We’re in that loop trying to get to a
different spot at the end of that loop, and we’re just hanging out in the
same loop. And what we’re really looking for is I want to feel better and
maybe you’ll hold something that will make me feel better. Now, one little
caveat here. If your gut instincts, if your intuition is telling you that
there are big gaping holes in the story or that you are not being told
everything, that there might still be things going on with this other
person. This is different honoring that is different than what I’m talking
about today. Today I’m talking about, I’m just trying to make sense. I’m
trying to feel better, and so I’m going to ask these questions again and
again and again and hope that this time maybe it’ll land differently and I
can close this loop.

(17:39):

So in closing this loop, either there’s stuff that you don’t know that they
really aren’t telling you or there’s stuff that you do know, but that
there’s pain that has to be felt in closing that loop. There’s a kind of
surrendering to it, okay? Both of these, the trying to hurry and fix and the
kind of form of punishing, kind of trying to make them feel the pain
artificially sometimes are shortcuts and they skip the real work, which is
grieving, witnessing, rebuilding. So when does expression become emotional
control? This is kind of tender to talk about, but this is when emotional
expression crosses the line into emotional control. Sometimes what looks
like honesty, venting, repeating, pleading is actually an attempt to get
someone else to feel something for us or say something we want to hear so we
feel better. It’s not always conscious, but here’s what it can sound like.

(18:45):

Just admit you never loved me. Just admit that you don’t really care about
me. Just admit that you think she’s prettier than I am. Say you did it to
hurt me. Say you did it to get back at me for this thing that you’re mad at
me about. That’s how it felt. Tell me it’s because I wasn’t enough, and the
hope is if you say it the way I believe it, maybe I’ll finally be okay. This
is a lie. It’s not true. Forcing someone else into your version of the story
does not bring peace. It brings performance and it brings more
disconnection. Now, if you’re the one who did the betraying, you might say
things that are not actually true, that you know are not quite right just to
calm the storm. Yes, it was all my fault. Yes, this had nothing to do with
you.

(19:32):

You did everything perfectly. Why is this a bypass? Because you are not
actually taking the time to slow down and understand what actually was going
on for you. What was the relationship like? Where did you feel like you
couldn’t speak? Where did you just choose not to? And where did you blame
your partner for that? Okay, we have to get to this deeper stuff. They might
agree and say, yes, I never loved you enough when it’s far deeper than that,
just to kind of hopefully close that loop and get out of pain, but it’s not
based on truth. Yes, I’m just so broken. You’re perfect. I’m just broken,
right? These are not going to get to the bottom of things, okay? What it
looks like is taking responsibility. If it’s not grounded in truth, it’s not
healing. It’s a shortcut. We want to take responsibility.

(20:29):

We have to take responsibility, but it has to come from a real place where
we’re telling the truth. Even justified pain can become manipulative if it
pressures someone to betray their truth in order to make us feel okay.
Alright? The real question here is, can I sit with my pain without making it
your job to rescue me from it? Can I express what’s real without controlling
what comes back? Can I hear your truth without demanding that it match mine?
That my friends is emotional maturity and that is where real healing can
begin. Alright, so to wrap this up, we’re going to talk about what real
emotional presence looks like. Emotional presence is choosing to stay with
not around, not above, not below, not ahead of the emotional moment. It’s
saying this makes sense. That makes sense to me that you feel this. It means
I don’t fully understand it yet, but I really want to.

(21:37):

It means I’m here and I’m not going anywhere. I am here and I’m not going
anywhere. It means that you’re listening without fixing. I’m not quite
understanding it, but I really want to. I care about you. I care about your
experience. I want to understand it means witnessing without rushing. It
means offering space, not pressure to get somewhere. This is how we rebuild
safety. One present moment at a time. If you’ve been stuck in these
patterns, emotional shortcoming, relational bypassing, or emotional control,
there is another way. There’s another way, okay? First, you’re going to tell
the truth. First of all, to yourself, this can be so painful and it’s so
necessary. Tell the truth to yourself. Slow down your urge to fix or
perform. Slow it down. Sit with the discomfort. Next, ask, what’s actually
happening in me right now? Is this me trying to get around this?

(22:42):

Is this me trying to bypass? Is this me trying to control so I can feel
better and practice this? Asking your partner, for those of you who are with
somebody still, do you need a witness or a helper right now, and this is a
way that we can take this into any relationship where learning how to
witness learning how to sit with somebody can be the greatest gift that we
give them. It can be the greatest gift that actually creates safety rather
than offering help that often leaves the person feeling confused or feeling
like it wasn’t quite enough or feeling like they weren’t really heard. I
hope you can hear me on this even as I’m recording this. I’m remembering
times where I’ve done this, where I’ve tried to hurry to get to a solution
rather than listening to somebody and going, I wonder how that person felt.

(23:37):

We all need to be heard. Alright, so to wrap this up, fixing without hearing
is a form of emotional, relational, bypassing. It doesn’t build intimacy. It
builds walls. Here’s your invitation today. If you were betrayed, are you
trying to control the story in order to feel safer, even if it costs you
truth, if you are the one who betrayed? Are you trying to earn redemption
through performance instead of staying present with what is real? I promise
you that you growing into the person who can stay with what is real is what
will create a trustworthy person, first and foremost within yourself that
you can trust. This is where you’ll respect yourself Again, this is where
others will start trusting you and respecting you. Again, what would shift
if you chose truth over comfort? What would shift if you gave up control and
chose connection? You don’t need the right words. You just need to stay.
That’s where healing happens, and that’s where real intimacy begins. All
right, thank you so much for being here today, and I’ll see you on another
episode. Take care.

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
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slash. Again, it’s andrea giles.com/lies about dash infidelity slash I will
see you next time.