I’m Andrea Giles, and you’re listening to the Heal from Infidelity podcast,
episode number 149: The Three Phases of Recovery.

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 back to another episode. Today, we are going to
be talking all about recovery, three different phases of recovery. I have
referenced in the past a book that I really love. It is called Infidelity:
A Survivor Guide. The author is Don David Lusterman, and he is a therapist,
a doctor, he had a PhD, that did a lot of work around infidelity, one of
the leading experts particular to infidelity. And I really have learned a
lot from him, use a lot of his things, or have studied a lot of his things.
And in his book, Infidelity: A Survival Guide, he talks about the three
phases of recovery, and we’re going to go through those today. Okay, so
before I detail each of these things, I want to just say that it is not
necessarily always in chronological order. In fact, often, these things
kind of interweave with each other, these three different phases.

You can begin with one, and then be navigating the third one, hopping into
the second one. It’s not chronological because people, we’re not quite
chronological, right? We are messy, we are human, we make progress in one
way, and then we digress in another. That’s kind of human nature. And so
keep in mind that this is not, but in general, this is kind of the way it
looks for a lot of couples, for a lot of people, and so you’ll recognize a
lot of things in here as it relates to you. Okay, so the first phase of
recovery is restoring trust. And what this means is it’s going to take some
time to fully trust your partner, but out the gate, one of the biggest
pieces that needs to be really hashed out, really looked at is do I have
enough information now to move forward with? Do I have all the important
pieces that I need to have, right?

So for example, if your spouse has said that you know everything, that you
have the details, and then you happen to be going through a credit card
bill and see a charge that was in some other place than where your spouse
said they were at that time, and then you go ask them and you find out that
there’s more, you cannot really start building until it’s all out, until
all the things, at least the main points, the main, where were you? How
long did it last? All of those things. We’re never going to know every
single detail, nor should we. That can be really painful and harmful, to
know every single detail of every active intimacy, all of that, but knowing
how many people. Was it one? Was it many? What was the nature of the
relationship? How close were you? All of those things.

So when I say restoring trust in this phase one, the trust was so broken
that it is going to take time. It’s going to take time, and it’s a lot more
nuanced than just flipping a switch, and okay, I trust you again. It’s more
in everyday exchanges of he is where he says he’s going to be. He got home
when he said he’s going to get home. The facts line up with what I’m being
told, right? These kinds of things. And so with this, in part of this stage
one, phase one of restoring trust, it is when these things come up where you
might see a discrepancy in something. And let’s say that you saw that credit
card bill, and it was at a time where he said that he was in one place. He
said that he was on a business trip in Idaho, and the credit card bill is
in Washington D.C. Okay?

This is just an example. So in your mind, you might feel an instant little
panic of going, oh. And then what part of restoring trust is going back to
what you already know and going, okay, do I already have the information?
Do I already know? Yes, I already know, because he told me, that on that
trip where he said he was in Idaho, he actually went to D.C. and met her. I
already know this. And learning how to regulate yourself a little bit so
that even though it feels uncomfortable and it is a reminder, it is
definitely a reminder, you can kind of have a chat with yourself first to
kind of bring yourself down from any kind of panic, any kind of anger or
rage that might come up in the reminder so that when you do go and try to
talk about this or just say, I was reminded today.

It just stings. I just was reminded that this was happening and I feel
ready to talk about it in a calm way. And then you can go and say, “I saw
this today. I was reminded. It stung,” just to share, just to say, “It
really bothers me and I’m sad that I have to have these reminders.” And
part of restoring trust is how the other person responds. So it’s how
people initiate a conversation, how the other person responds. So
appropriate response from the other person would be, I am going to put
myself in her shoes. I know she’s been badly hurt. I know that my lying
really hurt her. If I were in her shoes, I would see this as a reminder to
keep my guard up. If I were her, it would be really easy for me to step
back and get away. I’m going to put my guard up. I’m reminded that you did
this thing I want nothing to do with you.

And instead, she’s turning to him. She’s turning to him and saying this
stings and my instincts are to run, but instead I’m coming and talking to
you about it. And he can see that for himself, a place he tends to go is
getting kind of defensive and ugly at times when she makes these
discoveries because it puts him on the defensive feeling like shame, guilt,
all those things that none of us really like to feel. And so him
recognizing this is where I usually go and I need to not go there. I need
to not go there if I want to truly be there for her, and she’ll love and
support. He also can remind himself that he needs to find the words to let
her know that he understands how hard it must be for her when these
reminders come up. Empathy. I can imagine that that would be really jarring
to see that, to feel that. And also just the reminder that wherever this
conversation goes, I’m going to be up front. And any questions she asks,
I’m going to answer as accurately as I can.

Because each person was very intentional upfront about how they’re going to
be, how they’re going to respond, how they’re going to be with each other,
this is laying the groundwork for restored trust, of really taking
responsibility for the way that each person is going to communicate, talk to
each other, take a minute to be really intentional about your own way of
being, how you’re going to show up before even opening your mouth. And in
this example, because each of them had done their own homework, they were
able to get through this encounter pretty seamlessly.

They could see that they were making progress. They could see that this was
different than what had been there before, a different way of talking with
each other, a different way of approaching the situation, right? Both were
willing to be honest and show vulnerability, right? Because she knows that
sometimes he gets defensive, but she’s willing, instead of turning away and
putting up a wall, to turning to him and giving him a shot at being kind,
at being empathetic, at being understanding. In the book that I’m
referencing, one of the quotes in there is honesty is a necessary prelude
to trust. Trust is the prelude to intimacy. Okay, so if the goal is to get
back to intimacy, or at least to see if you even want that with each other,
and we’re going to get into that in a little bit, honesty is the prelude.
You cannot have trust without honesty first.

You cannot have trust without first being honest and really saying, “Yeah.
Yeah, this thing that happened today or driving by this thing and
remembering…” And here’s the reality for all of you. These things are
going to come up, sometimes years later, sometimes way down the road where
you’re minding your own business and there’s a reminder of how things were,
and you have to go, oh, okay, I’m not there anymore and how do I want to
handle this? So something happened yesterday that I will share. And it’s a
little bit different of a situation, but I have mentioned before that when
I first married my husband, I was not in a great headspace. I thought that
I had healed a lot, I had done a lot of work, but I really didn’t know what
to do with some of the beliefs. I didn’t know how to challenge my own
thinking.

I didn’t know how to kind of set down all of the things that had happened.
And it was when I found coaching and practiced the things that I was
learning and really putting together all of the content and things that I
have brought forward in my coaching program that I was able to really apply
them to me and really shift and change. But when we first got married, in
my mind, that had a lot of things that had not been healed or settled yet.
His deceased wife felt, in my mind, like the other woman. That’s how my
body recognized it. That’s how my body responded. So for example, if he was
late getting back from whatever, I made up a story in my mind often that he
was probably at the cemetery and just wishing he could be with her and
longing for her and just wanting her back.

There were just so many things that came up. Valentine’s Day was just
brutal for the first couple years because she passed away on that day, and
in my mind, he was with another woman. My mind made up a really strong
story about it, and I was, of course, in a lot of pain thinking of that. And
a lot of things had not been taken care of when we got married. Her stuff
was still not really gone through. There were a lot of things that were
very difficult to walk into. Yesterday, I ran into a sister-in-law, and I
ran into her and there were other family members there and one man that I
didn’t know. And she was introducing me to this man, and she said, “This is
Alex’s wife,” and then said Alex’s first wife’s name and not mine. And it
was a little bit jarring, and her son was standing there and kind of…
He’s like, “Mom, that’s not” so-and-so. I’m not going to say her name.
“That’s not her. This is Andrea.”

He was taken aback by it too. And it was a moment of reflection for me of
going, okay, in the years past, what would I have made that mean? And what
do I want to make it mean now? I want to make it mean absolutely nothing
other than that it was just an error. She knows my name. She knows who I
am, right? And this is kind of the work of going back to what is current.
Now, when these things come up that used to be really painful, or that
maybe are still painful, but you have more current information, you can look
at what’s going on now and really get a take on if this thing that is
really stinging today, like finding that credit card bill reminding you of
where he was, is this something to put my guard up about to push this
person away or to avoid this person or just put distance from this person,
or is this an opportunity to lean in and share and really see what happens
when you talk about it?

So in my case, again, different situation, but I called my husband on the
way home and told him about it, and we both kind of chuckled about it, just
like, man, she’s been gone for 10 years. We’ve been married for eight. And
we really just were able to just laugh about it. Like, gosh, it’s so
interesting what our brains do. And I just let it go. No reason to get hung
up on that. But in years past, it would’ve really bothered me. It would’ve
bothered me a lot. I know that in those early years, I probably would’ve
made it mean that she was more valuable or all kinds of things, and I just
don’t even want to give that any airtime whatsoever in my brain. One thing
that does come up, unfortunately, in this phase is when there is new
information revealed that you didn’t know. And it can feel like you’re
starting back at square one. It can feel like you’re starting over.

And in many cases, you are. In this stage, how each person responds is
really, really important. Does this revelation bring more clarity, more
closeness or more division? And often, the way that we respond to it is
where more division comes up. Now, I will say it is near impossible to
really start building trust until this kind of thing does not happen
anymore. I will say though that unfortunately, it’s very common that more
information is revealed, and you, my listeners, get to decide what you want
to make of it. I do think that there gets to be a point where if you are
being told left and right, up and down you know everything, there will be
no more surprises, and then there continue to be surprises, this is where
taking some real inventory of the situation and am I willing to continue to
put my heart at risk here is important.

So this piece of starting to rebuild trust is more geared towards when you
really have all the information. There might be tiny little details that
you’ll find out about, but not the big stuff, not how long it went on or
how many people, or the depths of it, or those things like that. It can be
done. It can be done where there could be some new things revealed, and then
now we can get to work. It totally can be done. It’s just a matter of if you
are seeing that this person is acting different, showing you different
things, and then you continue to find out more, it does make moving forward
with that person that much harder because it can be that much more
confusing, right? So for all intents and purposes, that piece that I just
said is more for people who all the big stuff is out of the way and you’re
really moving forward from it.

All right, phase two is reviewing the marriage. We can’t really start doing
this and having these discussions until there’s some kind of trust. If we
do not feel like our spouse is being honest with us at all, if we feel like
we are being manipulated or gaslit, those kind of things, this piece is not
going to go well because this piece requires both people’s A game, both
people to be mature, to be very adult, to be able to talk about hard things.
And if one person is still really in a childlike frame of mind or a really
reactive frame of mind, these conversations and reviewing the marriage are
not going to go great. Okay? Fair warning. So you want to be in a more
stable place where you have practiced being able to talk to yourself before
talking to them, like really getting your feet on the ground in the present
with what’s going on right now, today, and then going and having these
discussions.

So what to talk about in this stage in really learning to look at the
marriage, review the marriage, see what happened. First of all, there are
just some general guidelines of how to talk to each other. Okay, these are
some basic things, but some that many of us were never modeled and don’t
come naturally, so I’m just going to go through them. Listen attentively to
the content of what is being said. Listen attentively for the feelings that
may underlie the content. Look directly at the person. Be aware of what your
body is saying. If you shake your head no, your partner will feel it and
shut down or become defensive. Draw your partner out as completely as
possible, losing yourself and his or her feelings. Struggle not to answer
what is being said. Your job is to hear, not respond. Avoid comparing your
feelings to the other person’s.

If he says, “I have felt so burdened by work and I have never felt that you
cared,” be careful not to say, “Me too.” Stop after a few minutes to
paraphrase the other, and if possible, to describe in your own words what
you think the person might be feeling. The talker must work to find words
that are not inflammatory. Okay? So knowing words that are going to be more
neutral, saying words that are I words instead of you this and you that can
help things be a lot more neutral. Okay? Next, what to talk about. This is
a big one. Really, you got to talk about your early marriage. You need to
talk about your dating time. You need to talk about your early years, your
early partnership, remembering how you met, remembering why you got
together in the first places, some of the good experiences early on.

For many people, by the time an affair happens, they have forgotten all of
that. They can’t remember it. They can’t remember the good that it was
pleasant, that there are great things there. They can’t remember it.
They’re focused on the negative, maybe on the last several years that have
led to the infidelity, maybe some avoidance of each other, some unresolved
things. These are some of the issues that need to be looked at and talked
through. Okay? One of them, conflict resolution. A major cause of affairs is
the failure of a couple to learn good ways to solve problems. That’s a
direct quote from this book. Okay? And often the inability to talk honestly
about feelings and thoughts that might be considered shameful or
embarrassing makes it almost impossible to talk about problems. So in this
book, he talks about this therapist, a family therapist back in the day, he
is an old timer, named Lyman Nguyen, and he shares two ways that
communication happens a lot in families.

I think you’ll find that one of these is going to ring really true to you.
The first is called pseudo hostility. It’s the use of continual bickering
and turmoil to help keep a relationship together. It may seem a strange
idea, but some couples are so uncomfortable with deep feelings that they
stumble on strange solutions. This is how pseudo hostile couples have
learned to stay together. They express all feelings through fights about
things that are so unimportant that later it’s impossible even to remember
what they’re about. As long as couples maintain their pseudo hostile
behavior, they can never even begin to talk about the things that truly
bother them the most. So of course, nothing can change and no problems can
be solved.

Okay, the next is interesting. Pseudo mutuality, it’s another in which
families avoid intimacy. Pseudo mutuality, families go to remarkable
lengths to avoid conflict. On the surface, everything seems cheerful and
smooth. These wonderful families that you see on TV that portray like the
50s, wonderful, happy families, right? But under the surface, important
issues are constantly avoided. And unfortunately the same with the
pseudo-hostile families, the end result is the inability to solve problems.
You’re not solving anything, right? You’re adding more issues to it by the
very avoidance of dealing with these things head on. Okay? As you heard
those, which one do you find yourself more in? Did you stay more hostile
and not talk about the real issues or stay more friendly and kind and not
talk about the hard issues? So what to do? Guess what? Talk about the hard
issues, right? It can look like this. Each of you pulling out a pen and
paper. Things that bother me. How do I communicate about things? Right? You
can start there.

So for example, for him, things that bother me, she always seems more
interested in the kids than in me. She seems so disappointed in my career.
It makes me feel as if she doesn’t really respect me as a man. She spends
money in crazy ways. I’m always afraid we’ll go under. How do I communicate
about things, about the kids? I keep my mouth shut, but I boil inside.
Maybe that’s why I just disappear into the TV. About money, I shout and
scream and I make fun of her. I guess I can be very sarcastic. About my
career, I keep my mouth shut for the most part, but when she talks about
how great other guys are doing, I’ll probably end up picking a fight about
something entirely different later that day. So he doesn’t directly talk
about any of it.

His wife writes things that bother me. The only time he ever shows
affection is when he wants sex. I hate that. And then when we get into bed,
the last thing I want to do is have sex. I can’t understand. When we are
younger, it was so good together. He’s so crude with the kids. He makes fun
of them and puts them down all the time. Sometimes I feel like I’ve just
stayed in the marriage to try to protect them from his sarcasm. The third,
all he ever seems to think about is his job, how much he hates it, how
tired it makes him. How I communicate about sex, I do anything I can to
avoid it. When I do it, I kind of submit, but in a way that has to make him
mad to know that that’s all I’m doing. I’m not really there, just my body.

About the kids, I don’t say anything much to him, but behind his back, I
side with them. I know it makes him mad. But because I do it behind his
back, we never really talk about it. About his job, I make fun of his being
tired all the time, but really I’m so angry because he seems more devoted
to it than me. So isn’t that interesting? For her, it’s more that he seems
more devoted to the work than to her. To him, he thinks that she has an
issue with his job and doesn’t respect him. See, that’s they’re missing each
other. And what needs to happen is changing the rules of communication,
going back in your relationship and going, okay, where did things start to
go south? Where did we really start pulling away from each other rather
than to each other? And how can we change how we do that?

How can we change the way that we address things? And for some people, they
can go back to year five or year four of their marriage. Maybe there was a
kid or two there, maybe got out of grad school and into the career, and
there were different stressors there where both of your roles changed and
you started going and fulfilling those roles while not really taking care
of your role as partners, right? And being able to look at that is really,
really, really important, for each person to go, when did I start to feel
neglected by my spouse? When did I start to feel like he was pushing me
away? When did I feel like she was pushing me away? Right? When did I feel
like I needed to get away by spending money? This year five is when I
started to wonder if I should have even married this person at all. Right?
On and on. And each person is going to have their own version of this, but
talking about it is really, really important.

It’s really, really important to be able to talk about it and to be able to
hear it, and to… Even if it’s really uncomfortable, being able to hear it
so that you can examine it, and so you can decide what to do with this
information. Okay? Which takes me to phase three, a better marriage or a
better divorce. Not all couples are meant to stay. It is in this honest
communication that you can really see, are we still a match? Not all people
are meant to stay together. Even if you’re able to up your game and talk
more maturely with each other, not all people are a match. Sometimes in
this phase, one person might go, “I actually just really want to be alone.
I really don’t want all of the responsibility of being a spouse. I want to
just experiment with different things,” and the other person can recognize
that that is not going to work for them.

They might recognize that they have changed a great deal and no longer feel
as compatible as they used to be, and that both of them really want to be
in healthy relationships, but that they are not necessarily a great fit
anymore for different reasons. Some people feel that there’s been so much
damage done that they just want to start over, that they want to have a
fresh start with somebody new. And some people feel so much closer to each
other after going through these first two phases that they recognize that
they have something precious, that they want to protect, that there’s so
much good there, that there’s so much good that they deeply love each other
and that they want to build on that love.

Okay? So in this phase three, you’re really looking at your options from a
very mature place and looking at the things that matter to you and really
naming what you want and voicing them in a mature way. Okay? And you’re
acknowledging all of your options. You’re really looking at, what are the
options? What does it mean if I stay, what does it mean if I go? And
really, there can be a way of ending a marriage, even with children involved
that do the least amount of damage to your children. And you showing up as
the best versions of yourself is going to be able to help facilitate that.
It’s when both are being mature, both are being respectful and able to talk
about things. They can actually still remain a family. It just looks a
little bit different. You don’t live with each other anymore, but you can
still maintain being a family.

The statistics show that most people who divorce do remarry, and those
children become a part of what’s called a binuclear family. That’s the term
for it. It means that it’s still a family despite divorce, and that both
parents are still very much involved and that there are now other parents
involved as well that can hopefully be a really good influence, right? And
again, for many people, this work of getting better at communicating, being
better at being honest, really talking about all of it… How did we get
here? What have we avoided? What do we need to see in each other to feel
like this is a safe place for me to be, this is a good place for me to be,
this is a wise place for me to be? What are those things that you need to
see? And once we can really pinpoint those things, that’s where we can be
in our best position to make the kind of decision that we can really get
behind and feel solid in. Okay?

All right, that’s all for today. I want you to take a look at each of those
phases. Identify where you are. Maybe kind of rank where you’re at. How
honest are you being? How honest do you feel your spouse is being? What can
you lean into here? Right? As a reminder, my program goes in great depth in
all of these areas to help you grow your skill to be able to do these
things at a really high level. And these are skills that you are going to
take with you for the rest of your life. You’ll be much more skilled in
relationships. You’ll be much more emotionally mature once you go through my
program to be able to handle all kinds of things that are thrown your way in
a mature way. If you have not joined yet, please do. The doors are open.

You can go to my webpage, andreagiles.com, to the work with me tab, and
come on in. I’d love to have you. All right, take care, my beautiful
friends. I will see you next week. All right, 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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