I’m Andrea Giles, and you’re listening to the Heal from Infidelity podcast,
episode number 162, What Healing Really Looks Like.

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. Thank you for being here
with me today. I am going to just jump right into today’s episode. It’s
based off of some thoughts that I’ve been having today. Sometimes I plan
well in advance what I’m going to record. Sometimes I have guests on and
plan on that, and sometimes there’s things that are on my mind that I just
decide that I’m going to talk about this right now. And this is one of those
instances. This morning I woke up really, really sad and I’ll tell you why.
Because I had a dream last night where I found out that my husband was
cheating on me. And in the dream there was a lot of deception, a lot of
lying, and I was really, really sad and I felt so much shame. I felt so
small. I felt like it must be my fault. There must be things that I’m not
doing well enough or he would never do this.

And I woke up from this dream really relieved that it was a dream. I’ll
tell you that. I was really relieved. I know many of you feel like it’s the
worst nightmare ever. And as you know, because of the things that I talk
about, I have experienced this in real life, right, but this dream felt
very real. And when I woke up, I was very happy that it was a dream, but it
did kind of mess with my head in the morning a little bit. I remembered it
brought me back to those feelings and the sadness and the anger and the
hurt, the deep, deep hurt. And as the day has progressed, I’ve been
thinking about it. It’s evening now and I’ve got my little girl in bed and
I’m recording this after she’s down, and it’s been on my mind.

And what I’ve been thinking about is healing and our expectations of
healing and what it actually looks like. One of the things that I’ve been
thinking about is how sometimes we have expectations that when we heal, the
pain will be gone and that we won’t have to think about it anymore, that
it’ll just be gone. And I want to share with you a quick little story that
hopefully will shed some light on the way that I view healing. A while back,
I was a single mom and I was hiking in the mountains and I saw my very
athletic sister-in-law very easily jump from one big boulder to another up
in a mountain. We were way up high, and I thought I can do that. And I
jumped and I slipped and I fell and I landed with my ankle sideways and I
broke the top of my foot and badly sprained my ankle. It was really bad.

By the time I got down the mountain, it was hugely swollen and black and
blue, and I was in a different state. I wasn’t even home and it was my
right foot, and I was a single mom that had no drivers in my home. I was
the only driver and I broke my right foot. It was a rough time, it was a
difficult time. And I remember going to physical therapy because I sprained
it so bad and he gave me all kinds of different exercises to do to
re-strengthen my ankle. And I remember him telling me that my ankle would
never actually be the same again, and that there would be different times
and different weather that would affect my ankle and that I would kind of
have to just take good care of it, wear good shoes, take good care of that
ankle.

Now, fast-forward about nine years later, there are shoes that I will never
be able to wear. There are shoes that I try to wear, that I used to wear
that I can’t anymore. It hurts. Almost immediately that ankle starts kind
of throbbing a little bit. It’s never terrible. It’s just kind of an ache.
And I know I’m not willing to put more pressure on that ankle that needs
support from me. So I don’t wear certain shoes anymore. I cannot wear high
heels, for example. There’s just not enough support. So what does this have
to do with healing? That dream, it took me back. It took me back to dark
times, right, dark times in my life where I was hurting terribly, where my
heart was broken. And you know how dreams are. They seem very, very real,
right? I consider myself as having healed, that I rarely feel the pain or
even really think about infidelity, and yet I had a dream about it
seemingly out of nowhere. I really don’t know where it came from.

Here’s what I’ve come to make it mean throughout this day as I’ve thought
about it. I think that there are things that our subconscious learns to be
afraid of. Our subconscious can remember things that harm us. Our
subconscious is there to effortlessly without us thinking, right,
subconsciously, automatically to protect us, to warn us of danger, to keep
us safe. And so when we deal with really difficult things, our subconscious
is going to hold onto some of that and it’s revealed in certain ways. For
example, some of you have subconscious thoughts about yourselves that are
not very kind. And when we deal with things like infidelity, it can amplify
it in a big, big way. And if we don’t know this is happening, it’s going to
run the show. That’s going to be the new subconscious message. It’s going
to be louder.

And these subconscious ways of viewing ourselves than viewing the world
will run the show. They will run the show, and the work that I do is
helping my clients pull those out at the root and really see them and
really tell the truth about them. So back to this morning, I woke up sad. My
husband was next to me. I told him about my dream and he came and curled
over by me and held me. And I wasn’t crying, but I was just sad. I was just
sad thinking about it. And as the day progressed, what I really was feeling
is that I have the tools now that I did not have before. I did not have
them. I didn’t know how to pull myself out. I didn’t know when triggers hit
what to do with them. So you could say that it felt triggering to me this
morning. Right.

And what I did is I talked to him even though it was just a dream, right,
but I let him in on it. I let him in on it. And then I brought myself back
to what is true today. What is real now in my life. What’s real now is I
have a husband who I adore and who adores me, and we are faithful to each
other. What is true now is that I have grown immensely from the difficult
times in my life and that I’ve learned so many skills, so many different
things to help myself. I know how to support myself and I know what not to
do. So kind of like my ankle, that will always probably be a bit touchy. I
know what shoes not to wear, right? I don’t have to judge the heels. I
don’t have to judge my ankle. I just know we’re not a match anymore.
Bummer, right?

But I know that it does not support me in the best way and that I would be
signing up for suffering, for hurting, physically hurting if I wear them.
It’s much the same with healing. We learn how to support ourselves. What we
are doing that is increasing our suffering, increasing our pain. What
situations are we putting ourselves in that we know we’re just piling it on?
What thought processes are we engaging in that are piling it on, that are
making it worse? What ways are we fighting with our spouse, looking for
answers that are not going to come to us that way?

They’re not going to come from us being aggressive, from us being coercive
in some ways. Sometimes we can try to get some control back by being really
aggressive and angry and trying to get some control of the situation. This
backfires and we can learn that and we can learn different ways so that
when we have these things come up, when we have real triggers, when we have
real memories, when we have real things that are in our face reminding us
that we know what to do with it, that we don’t have to stay in it, that we
don’t have to suffer any longer than we need to.

The other thing I wanted to mention is again, how I in that dream was
feeling so small, so embarrassed, so ashamed, so small, just so small, like
surely I must not have cut it. Surely despite my best efforts, I must not
have been enough and that feeling, that horrible feeling that I have
definitely felt plenty in my life, that horrible feeling. I’ve been thinking
about that too, and I want you to hear me when I say this. No one, no one
can make another person be unfaithful. No one can make them be unfaithful.
We are mighty. We are powerful, but we’re not that powerful. We can’t make
anybody. So I don’t care if you can go back and you can look at areas where
maybe you were dismissive or maybe mean at times or not affectionate enough
or whatever it may be. Those things may be true.

There may be healing that you listening have needed to engage in, and this
is a wake-up call to say your house is on fire and these are things that
need to be fixed. Okay, this may be true. You know what else is true? You
didn’t make them do it, and there’s nothing you could have done or said
that would make somebody else go override their own integrity and engage in
things that hurt you and that ultimately hurt them. No one can make them. We
can always look at our side and go, yeah, I pulled back at this time. I kept
myself busy because I felt kind of uncomfortable around him for various
reasons, so I’d kept myself busy. We can find all kinds of things that we
regret. We can tell the truth and I recommend we do, that we really dive
into this stuff and face it head on.

But what I don’t recommend is staying there in a place where you feel
small, in a place where you feel like if you were better, it wouldn’t have
happened, in a place where you feel like other people are better than you,
whose spouses aren’t unfaithful. These are the things that create so much
suffering in us that just are not true. They’re just not true. They’re
lies. Our brains are trying so hard to make sense of this thing that is
nonsensical and it comes up with all kinds of horrible stories to fill in
the gaps. They are stories. They’re just stories. I invite you to challenge
those stories, challenge them. Fight for yourself here. Stand up for
yourself against your own brain. Not in an aggressive way, but in a kind, I
hear you, I know you’re trying to protect me, but this story’s not helping.
I’ll take it from here. I’ll take it from here.

What healing actually looks like is when we have these moments that we can
bring ourselves back to center, bring ourselves back to what is true. It
does not mean that these moments will never rear their head. It does not
mean that we will not have moments of sadness that it happened. It does not
mean that we will not have moments where we remember how horrible it felt,
even if it’s brought to us in a subconscious way, like in my dream. What it
does mean is that when these moments happen that are going to be far and few
between as you heal, what is going to happen is that you will have grown the
ability to put things back in a perspective that is supportive of you. This
doesn’t mean propping ourselves up to the point where we are blind to
ourselves, where we self-deceive.

This means that we know what our weaknesses are. We have taken them on. We
know what we struggle with. We want to respect ourselves, and we have the
courage to grow, to become wiser, stronger, more vulnerable, all of those
things. And when these kinds of things come up, when we feel kick down a
little bit, when we have moments that are painful, we are able to bring
ourselves back to what is true and to a perspective that has room for us to
be good, for us to feel good, for us to see ourselves with a warm, caring
self-respecting light. That’s what healing looks like. That’s what it means
to heal. Holding yourself in warm regard, holding yourself with kindness.
That when we have those messages come back and rear their head, that we
handle it with love, with kindness, with generosity.

Where are you on this journey? Where are you now? Do you still feel the way
that I felt when I woke up every day? Do you still shrink when you think
about it all thinking surely if I was better? My dear, dear listeners, if
this is you, please come work with me. Please come work with me. You will
not leave my program with the same, I almost just swore because sometimes
there just are not better words, but I’m going to keep it clean. You will
not leave with the same rotten, I’ll leave it there, thoughts about
yourself. Untrue, unfair, unkind. You will leave with the more generous view
of who you are and you’ll be able to put this whole thing in a perspective
that allows you to heal. It will be something that happened. It will not be
the whole of your life, the defining thing in your life.

All right, my beautiful friend, so good to be here with you always. And I
will talk to you again next week. 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 email. You can subscribe at
andreagiles.com/lies-about-infidelity/. Again, it’s
andreagiles.com/lies-about- infidelity/. I will see you next time.