I’m Andrea Giles, and you’re listening to the Heal from Infidelity podcast,
episode number 189 “Unbecoming Who I Never Was – Releasing Old Stories and
Reclaiming What’s True.”

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.

(00:52):

Hello everybody. Welcome back to another episode. Thank you so much for
being with me today. Before we dive into today’s episode, I want to make
sure that the mamas that are listening know about a class that I’m hosting
next week. When this comes out, it’s going to be the following week. It was
just in my heart to do something for the mamas out there, and so I decided
to go ahead and do it. It’s going to be a free class all about reclaiming
yourself when you’re dealing with betrayal while being a mama. I know that
struggle. Well, I know the pain and I know the push and pull of trying to
take care of a broken heart while also trying to take care of yourself and
knowing that you need you and the difficulty that can come in that space.
And so I decided to put together a free class.

(01:50):

It’s going to be a couple of days after Mother’s Day timely, right? And
it’s going to be a deep dive into coming back to who you are, not just your
role as a mom, not just who you think you should be as a mom, but we’re
going to talk about lots of different aspects of mothering, of the
pressures that we put on ourselves with a new look at it in a way that
leaves you feeling refreshed, seen, connected to others. And I want to make
sure you know that this is not going to be one that I’m going to be using
later as something that you can purchase later or get later. I am keeping
it pretty intimate, meaning that if you are not registered for it, you’ll
not be able to watch it. If you can’t attend register anyway, because
you’ll get the replay, but I will not be promoting it after the class is
over.

(02:48):

So if you want to be in it, if you want to watch the replay, if you can’t
come live, you have to register. Okay? And the

link to register

, by the way, is in the bio, so you’ll be able to do that there. All right,
here we go. Okay. I decided to record an episode today about unbecoming.
I’m going to tell you a little bit why, but really this comes from a place
that I am in that feels a little unfamiliar to me, feels a little bit
uncomfortable to me, feels a little bit like, what is this? And I don’t
love this, but it feels important. So we’re going in and it is about
stepping back and unbecoming parts of me that no longer work, that no
longer fit. Like most of you, for most of my life, I have very much
oriented myself towards who I am becoming.

(03:49):

I’m becoming better. I’m becoming stronger. I’m becoming more healed, more
capable, more expansive, becoming who I thought I was supposed to be.
There’s been something in me lately that has been really, really loud,
that’s asking me to slow everything down. Everything, everything,
everything, everything. Every corner of my life has been shouting and asking
to slow down. And it’s not in a, you need to work less or you need to not
do as much. It’s not that. It’s more around the drive that I usually feel
and the pressure that I put on myself to get better, to keep growing, to
keep striving. All of that has been replaced with something that feels way
more important, important enough that I decided to bring it to you today.
And it is this piece of unbecoming, of stripping down to a place that is
just me taking away the layers, taking away the identities, taking away the
stories, taking away the parts that I thought were mine that actually
weren’t mine at all parts shaped by early experiences that I couldn’t make
sense of as a child, knowing that back then when adults didn’t or couldn’t
help me understand what was happening, I did what a lot of kids do.

(05:23):

I made it about me. If they’re upset, it must be me. If they’re distant, if
they’re critical, it must be me. That belief got wired in so deep for me,
so deep, it shaped how I saw myself. It shaped how I’ve hustled for love
and for worth, and even how I interpreted the actions of others later in
life, especially in my intimate relationships. For those of you healing from
infidelity, you may know this very well, whether they are the one who
betrayed or the one who was betrayed. Chances are you are familiar with
this pattern, this pattern of maybe needing to push and strive and be
better and prove and get validation. Because if you don’t, you’re turning
it inward and saying, was that not enough? What’s wrong with me? How did I
miss this? So you keep striving to be better. Both sides, both the person
who was unfaithful and the person who was betrayed, both sides are often
rooted in old stories, old systems inherited patterns that were never
really ours to begin with.

(06:42):

They never were even ours. They weren’t even ours. And we carry ’em around.
So today I’m inviting you to join me in this very real time place that I’m
in. I’m in it. It’s this season of not pushing forward with full speed.
It’s really about deeply sitting with what is allowing what isn’t true,
what never was true to fall away. As I mentioned in an episode recently
about my daughter’s wedding and grief, there’s continued to be some grief.
There’s continued to be so many moments of clarity in really understanding
where some of the things that I have carried around came from at a much
deeper level than I ever have. It’s been pretty profound actually, to
understand what never was mine. And I’m guessing that there’s a lot there
for you that you’re carrying around that you don’t need to anymore, that
you can sit down, that you really think are you, and they’re actually not.

(07:54):

And the more that we un become the false layers, the more space we create
for what’s real and alive to emerge. And the more that we open up to that,
guess what happens from that space, we get to decide who we want to become.
Not because we have to, not to prove anything, not to show how worthy we
are, but because we want to. It can be things that we want to get better at
just because we want to, not because we need it to feel good about
ourselves. Alright? Part one, I want to talk about the myth of becoming. I
have this memory from early childhood. I remember feeling down. I remember
I think I was seven years old and I was feeling sad and down, and I was
trying to understand why I felt sad, why I felt down. Actually, I think I
was a little bit older.

(08:58):

I think I was eight anyway, and I remember taking out at that time my book
of scripture and having this idea that I was going to open it up and I
would see what was wrong with me. And the irony in it is what I pointed to.
I opened it up and pointed to a scripture that was about needing to repent
and that I needed to repent and that I was doing wrong. And a call to
repentance in this scripture. I was eight. I was a pretty good kid, but I
really took it to heart and I really thought confirmed it’s me. I already
felt like it was me. And then I read that and read it that way. Now I could
read it any number of ways. I took it personally. And what that says about
me is that even at that age, I made it about me.

(10:00):

I made it about me. If there is a problem, it was my fault. Oh, what a
burden to carry so young. And we’re going to talk a little bit more about
that in a little bit. But this myth of becoming, how many of you feel like
you need to be better? How many of you feel like you have to strive to be
better for your clients, for your family, for your relationship? Now, when
infidelity occurs, often it amplifies all of this. For those of you who did
the betraying, you may feel this much more intensely. And there are things
here to understand about yourself. There are behaviors that you need to
understand so you don’t repeat them. But a lot of the healing work here is
not about who you are becoming. It’s about the parts of you that never were
you that you’re acting out from.

(10:55):

Okay? It’s about unlearning the beliefs that made you think that you needed
to go get validation in the ways that you did, or that you couldn’t speak
up in the way that you wanted to in your relationship. For those of you who
were betrayed, you may be striving to become healed in a way that is white
knuckling. I have to do this in a punishing kind of nasty, mean way towards
yourself as if there’s something wrong with you. Isn’t that sad? There’s
nothing wrong with you. There is nothing wrong with you. You are a human
having a human experience. And how many of you listening are judging
yourself for it and think that if you just worked a little bit harder, you’d
be a little more healed? And so you’re beating yourself over the head with
that. You may think that you need to be more desirable, more forgiving,
more perfect.

(11:50):

I want to offer today in this that what if a lot, a lot, a lot. What if
most of healing is not about becoming anything. It’s about unlearning the
belief that you were not enough to begin with. It’s just about unlearning,
stripping it down. Now, I’m going to speak from my own experience here. Oh
my goodness. Sometimes there are people who genuinely are unkind, that are
cruel, that have personality disorders, things like that, that are not very
safe people to be involved with, especially if they have no intention of
healing. But so much of the time, the things that we do to each other as
humans is us simply acting out is us just acting out parts of us that needs
some love, that needs some unlearning. Some unbecoming, and I was not going
to share this, but I’m going to share. A few days ago, my husband made a
comment to me about how sometimes when I’m really, really tired, I can be
kind, grumpy.

(13:11):

And that sometimes when it’s getting close to that time of the month that I
can be, he used the word mean, okay? And I sat and listened. I asked for
examples because I wanted to hear what he had to say, okay? And then I said
to him, Alex, if you think that’s mean, you should hear what goes on in my
own head sometimes when I’m in that kind of a mood. And he kind of chuckled.
He thought it was kind of funny the way I said it, but in reality, sometimes
when my own internal meter is off, when I am in the space of striving of
needing to be better, what happens is that amplifies so loudly in my brain
that I’m doing it wrong, that I need to be better, that I need to be all
the things. And so sometimes I will project that on other people, and I
think that’s what my husband was talking about for some reason, for me, not
all the time, but sometimes hormones can sometimes make everything feel
like it’s burning up in a heap of flames.

(14:19):

So anyway, but that pressure of I need to do better, I need to do better,
that he was kind of feeling from me. I’m like, you should live inside here
for a minute and hear what that sounds like. And that comes from that old
wounding, the old stories of that we should be something other than what we
are. And so what I want you to hear me on today, what if it’s not about
becoming anything other than who you are and setting down everything that’s
not actually you? Okay? Now, this next part, where it came from in the
first place, where did this come from in the first place? Most of us learned
this in our childhood. Most of us pick up on things that we carry around. I
was recently listening to a training, as I often do for people such as
myself. It was specific to coaches and therapists, it was trauma related,
and the person teaching this class said something that the way he said it
was so succinct and so powerful, and even though I’ve heard variations of
this before, it really struck me, I want to share it with you here.

(15:37):

He said that when children experience trauma in childhood, if they do not
have an adult to help them process it or to help them navigate it every
single time, 100% of the time, they will turn it inward and turn it on
themselves 100% of the time. Wow. Wow. And why did this strike me so much?
Because it made a lot of sense about myself, about my clients, about the
things that I see my clients continue to struggle with, continue to go back
to and for myself. I’ve shared plenty about myself here, but I’ll give just
a little context here that my dad died. I was two days old. My mom
remarried when I was two. They divorced when I was five. He left. I never
saw him again. My mom remarried again when I was almost seven, and it was
also very, very rough for many, many years.

(16:44):

It was very rough, and I could sit here and catalog all of the hard
experiences. I’m not going to do that. I will say that there was not the
opportunity to talk about any of it with anyone. Never. As a child, we
didn’t talk about it. And when we tried to, we were made to feel wrong for
it. Very explicitly told things that were not great about us wanting
information or us asking questions. We were literally made to feel wrong in
actual words that we were wrong for even wanting to talk about things. And
so I can see how little Andrea turned that inward and said, you are a
problem. And so you need to be better. And at a young age, there was this
striving attitude in me that I just needed to be better, and the caregivers
in my life could not or did not help me understand their behavior.

(17:50):

And now I’m getting close to 50, right? I’m turning 48 in a couple months.
I have love and kindness for all of the adults that were in my life. I also
understand that so much of it was not me. None of it was me. It was their
unhealed stuff. It was their wounding, it was their own stuff that they
hadn’t dealt with. But the very sad thing is that when children experience
painful, confusing, or neglectful behavior from caregivers, they always make
it about themselves. They turn it inward infidelity for the one who
betrayed. Often they’re acting out because deep down they feel unworthy,
unseen, or unlovable. And old wounds are playing out through self-sabotage
or through avoidance of really looking at the things that they need to look
at to heal. And they’re looking for this cheap fix thinking it’s going to
fix it when ultimately it creates more problems for them.

(19:01):

For those that are betrayed. Before you even found out about it, you
probably knew something. You probably had an inkling that there was
something up and you shut it down, you minimized yourself, and then the
thing happened and you likely in some way have internalized it as proof that
you’re not enough, not lovable. And these old wounds resurfaced. If I was
good enough, they wouldn’t have done this. And on and on and on. I want you
to know this doesn’t mean anything about who you actually are. It doesn’t
mean anything. It doesn’t mean you’re broken. Heavens. No, you’re not
broken. It doesn’t mean you’re too far gone, none of that. It means that
you learn survival strategies that at that time kept you safe, but they no
longer are serving you. Now, why did they keep you safe then? Because it’s
a biological need to be able to trust the big people in your life.

(20:06):

It’s a biological need. Okay? So if adults in your life when your children
were acting in untrustworthy ways, we did not have the vocabulary around
it, but it biologically was important for us to have somebody that was in
charge. And so rather than questioning the big people in our life, we
questioned ourselves and made ourselves wrong. And often those that had a
little more of a fighting spirit that fought back, that challenged, that
tested that eventually internalize things even deeper and a of your
becoming is coming back to that fighting self in you. It’s not becoming
anybody different than what you are. It’s unlearning and unbecoming the
things that were never yours.

(21:03):

It just means that you learned some behaviors that helped you to survive,
and you don’t need them anymore. Alright, so what does the unbecoming
process look like? Here’s what it looks like for me right now. It’s looking
at the knee jerk patterns, and it’s so wild to watch myself where I
automatically make myself wrong or responsible. Wow. Wow. I do it a lot.
It’s really interesting. It’s about catching the impulse to earn love or
safety by pleasing, performing, or overgiving. It’s about starting to trust
myself more than the projections of other people. It’s about believing
myself. It’s about going, I hear you, Andrea. I believe you. You’re right.
You are right. It’s about not needing to do anything to prove anything to
anyone. This one has been an interesting one for me. Uncomfortable.
Uncomfortable. I have worked hard for many, many years at keeping things
together, at building a business, at taking really good care of the people
in my life, and I just am in this energy of slowing down, of resting, of
not filling things up too full.

(22:42):

Which is ironic because the last month has been so intense. Actually, the
last two months have been so intense with so much of life happening. But
what I’ve noticed is that I’m wanting more time to just be with myself with
nothing that I have to do. It’s looking like listening more. It’s looking
like yesterday telling my husband that rather than hanging out with some of
the adult kids that had come over that I really needed me and sitting in my
room with my journal and my pen and journaling for an hour and just pouring
out what was inside it’s looking like, rather than when I was lifting
really heavy weights, taking leisurely walks. It’s looking out my window as
springtime emerges here in Montana and soaking it in and delighting in it,
and absolutely delighting in it in the new leaves every day. A little bit
more coming up the grass, turning green, the tree behind my bathroom
window, that’s a crab apple tree that is stunning right now with bright
pink blossoms and just soaking it in, present with what is, rather than
needing to hustle to get anywhere, putting out into the world content that
feels absolutely accurate and true to where I am, rather than trying to
hustle for what I think people want from me.

(24:31):

That feels good. It feels nourishing and a little bit different. I’m
curious for you, if you were not trying to hustle anywhere, if you were not
trying to get to a destination, what would you want to do? What would you
want to set down? What stories and identities are you possibly carrying
around that never were yours? What if you didn’t actually need to do
anything to accomplish anything, to achieve anything to prove that you’re
any more valuable than you already are? Then what would you choose to do?
How would you choose to spend your time?

(25:21):

Now, I understand that we have life responsibilities, right? I am showing
up, doing my calls, doing my work, showing up for my family, but I’m
talking about the hustle to try to create more of what and for why and what
if we instead focused on what is it that I am burdening myself with that I
don’t particularly want to carry anymore? Is it okay for me to unbe become
these parts that just don’t fit anymore? I don’t need them anymore. I don’t
need them anymore because I’ve got me now. Now to be just honest and frank
with you, I’m in it, right? I don’t have this all figured out, but I am in
the space. I know that I’m in the space of the in-between, and there’s
something really, really beautiful about it. There’s something beautiful
about not quite knowing exactly what’s next for me, that it’s not this eye
on the prize destination that I am focused on.

(26:39):

I have been in the past. It’s more that everything, every corner of my life
right now feels cracked open to really remove what no longer fits. It’s
really uncomfortable and it’s really beautiful. Even at this moment
recording this episode, my house is in between right now. We’re moving rooms
around. I’m moving my office to a different room so my little girl can be in
the room right next to me. I don’t have my normal podcast set up right now,
so I’m recording from my bedroom on my AirPods, looking out the window as
the river goes on by. I put so much pressure on thinking that things need
to go a certain way, that it should look a certain way, that we should be a
certain way, that we should heal a certain way, that we should parent a
certain way. All the things I invite you today to tap into what might need
to be unbe become.

(27:51):

I just made up a word. What childhood survival stories are you carrying
that no longer fit? How much of your journey has been about proving your
worth, proving your value, versus allowing yourself to release what was
never yours? My listeners, if I can tell you this, even though I’m in it, I
can tell you something from the depths of my soul, this work that I’m doing
right now, this is the real work. This is it. Their real work is not about
rushing to get to an outcome. It really isn’t. I used to think that it was
that if I could just hurry and do the work to get the outcome that I
wanted, that that was the work. It’s not, and it never was, and it never
will be. The real work is about creating space within yourself,
expansiveness in yourself to just be who you are and to remove and shed the
pieces that aren’t creating space for what is true and whole to reveal
itself and for you to know what next steps to take from this place, not
from anything outside of that.

(29:16):

This is the work. I’ve done a lot of healing. I’ve done a lot of work to be
able to teach and to coach and do the things that I do to be here on this
podcast, and there’s something really beautiful about this space that I’m
in because I know that it’s taking me much deeper than I’ve ever gone. And
what I can tell you is that if you are listening and one of my clients, you
know this about me, I bring all of this depth, all of it to my clients
inside my group. I bring it all. I help my clients get into those deep
spaces too. It’s never, I’m so far above or so far ahead of you that I’m
untouchable. It’s more I lead myself through the places that feel
important, and then I turn back and offer my hand to help those that are
coming to.

(30:21):

If you know that you want support, as you unbe become the things that are
not you, I invite you to apply for my program, get Your Life Back after
Infidelity. It is a sacred, powerful, powerful place of the deepest work.
And as things go, it’s like we can get to certain points and then it’s time
to shed more. It’s time to reclaim more, and it’s time to really get to
this work. I’m in a deep layer of it right now, and I know that many of you
are also in a space where you are trying to decide what’s next for you, and
I will bring you all of the support that you need between me and my team.
We’ve got you, and between all the other amazing women who are in the
group, we’ve got you. Alright, so good to be with you today as always,
sending you all the love, all the support on your journey, your journey’s
important, right? Where you’re at is exactly where you’re meant to be.
You’re not behind. You’re right where you’re meant to be. Lean in, listen
to what’s there. Don’t be in a rush to get anywhere. This too shall pass.
You’re going to be okay. There are important things at play here. Alright,
much love to you, and I’ll see you next time.

(31:56):

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

3 Biggest Lies About Infidelity

. Again, it’s

3 Biggest Lies About Infidelity

. I will see you next time.