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I’m Andrea Giles, and you’re listening to the Heal from Infidelity podcast, episode number 202, “When to Let the Old Stories Go.”(00:13):
Hello, and welcome to the Heal from Infidelity podcast for 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.

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Hello everybody. Welcome back to another episode. This episode is going to be all about storytelling, the stories that we tell about ourselves, the stories we tell about our partners, our spouses, about the betrayal, others, what we can do with these stories, when to let them go, and the difference between keeping stories around to understand them better versus keeping them around to regurgitate pain. We’re going to break it all down today.

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Before I jump into today’s episode, I have a really important announcement. I am going to be teaching a free class on August 20th at 10:00 AM Mountain Time, all about how to stop ruminating and reclaim your peace. I know so many of you get stuck in the cycle of spinning, spinning, spinning, ruminating like you’re marinating in so many painful stories, and this class is going to be a deep dive into how to help yourself With that.

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I’m going to teach a very simple framework that is very easy to remember, that you can practice and practice and get really good at, and it’s going to help you immediately. So in the show notes, you’ll find the link to sign up for that. Again, it’s going to be free. Go get in it and I can’t wait to see you then.

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Alright, now let’s go ahead and jump into today’s episode. So all of us tell stories. We are meaning makers, things happen. We experience things, people tell us things, and we take it. We bring it inside, and then we tell a story about it. We see the world through the lens of stories. We are very, very good at it. Why do we do this? We all tell stories to make sense of the world around us. We want the structure that stories can tell.

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If we have chaos in our mind, if it feels like chaos, a story can feel like structure. If we can tell a story, it can seem like it’s protecting us. If I name it, maybe I can prevent it. If I name it by telling a story about it, maybe I can prevent it. Stories can sometimes make us feel less helpless. If I can explain it, I can control it. They can offer identity. This is who I became because of what happened. We try to tell stories and understand things as a way to get out of pain, but the thing that often happens is that the very stories that we are telling are creating more pain. Some stories are perpetuating pain, some stories are stalling us out and keeping us halted on our path of healing. Sometimes stories can be used as a lifeline. Sometimes understanding a story that we’re telling can be a lifeline to help us understand something, but over time that same story can become a leash that keeps us tethered from the places that we want to go and the growth that we want to experience.

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Okay, so now let’s jump into the difference between exploring stories and repeating stories. Exploring a story is rooted in curiosity, in reflection, in self-awareness, it moves, it evolves. There’s a genuine curiosity in it. We want to understand it. We want to know. We want to dig deeper. We might notice a thought that we have, and as you learn how to study your own mind, study your own thoughts, which is something that I teach my clients to do, you can kind of pull a thread of going, okay, this is the thought that I’m having. What’s the deeper meaning here? And then pulling on that, what’s the deeper meaning there? And for most people, there’s usually some kind of core wound or core story that you’re alone, that you’re not enough, that you will be abandoned, that kind of thing. And as we get better at exploring this, the goal is to be able to release it.

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But often what we do when we let a story stick around for too long, we’ve explored it. We know it. We know it like the back of our hand is that we find that we’re repeating it because there’s a way that we can blame others. There’s a way that we can have some kind of certainty or some kind of identity with that story that pretends to keep us safe. It might create some emotional reactivation in us that feels like protection that keeps us from deeper work, deeper vulnerability, and this loop is just regurgitating that pain rather than helping us to release it. The whole point of deep diving into our own stories, into our own pain is so that we can heal it, so we can release it, but sometimes that very work can create a loop like effect where we know the story well, we can jump to it anytime on demand and regurgitate it.

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And this episode is about when to challenge that and when to just decide that you’ve had enough and that you’re done telling that story. Okay, so for example, for those of you who have been betrayed, you may have a story such as this, he never loved me. I was always second best, or Why was I not enough for him to figure this out or to do the work, or I was such an idiot to give him another chance and stay or I’ll never be able to trust again. Or variations of that theme of I must not have been enough or it wouldn’t have happened. Now saying those things on repeat obviously is going to create a lot of pain. I want you to imagine a loop. It’s just going round and round like a hamster on a wheel round and round and round. It’s just creating this painful, painful loop that you keep punching yourself in the face with.

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Exploring can take you out of that loop. It can bust holes in that loop and move you in a different direction. I’m noticing that I still feel unchosen when he does X, Y, and z. When he’s on his phone, when he’s distracted, when he’s got a tone that feels not as soft as usual, we can ask questions like, I wonder why that moment still holds so much charge for me. We can look at moments, we can look at interactions, we can look at a location, things like that and go, why does that moment still hold so much charge for me? We can ask, I see how this story shaped me. What do I want to choose? Now? Repeating, ask questions like, how do I survive this? How do I survive this story? Exploring asks, how do I grow from this? How do I move? How do I take this and turn it into growth?

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Now, there are stories that we are telling about them that are affecting us. Now, some of these stories are, I want to say not right, wrong or indifferent, they’re just stories. Okay? There’s no judgment here. The biggest question that I have is when you are telling these stories, how does it feel in your body? Okay, I’ll give you an example. I remember one time sitting in a group therapy session with a betrayal trauma therapist, and she wrote on the board the addiction cycle in people, especially around sexual addiction, sexual behaviors, and she wrote it on the board and she wrote about what the people living with that person might experience might notice. I remember sitting there going, oh my gosh. It’s like she’s in my head. This is what I experienced and it was so validating to see it on a board. I’m not crazy.

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That experience that I had was very typical like textbook of somebody who’s in addictive behaviors and being married to that person, it was very validating. Okay, now that same story of let’s call it sexual addiction or he had sexual addictive tendencies, could create a very different emotional response in anybody. And there may be times within myself where I could feel shame of being married to somebody with those tendencies where I could be embarrassed, where I could feel like if I was enough, they would choose to stop. They would choose to get help. Okay, can you see how this goes? This is why you doing your own work around this is really, really important. It’s not the words themselves, it’s what are we doing with it? Where is it taking us? Is it keeping us in a painful loop or is it creating release or is it creating exploration?

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Some things that you might want to challenge or look at, just explore are they never really cared. They never really cared. They just used me. They never knew how to love. They were a narcissist. They just wanted a trophy wife. There’s all kinds of examples that we could use here, and the thing is, some of those things that you’re telling, there may be some truth to them. They may be completely false. The biggest question here is, is it helping you to grow or is it keeping you stuck? Is it keeping you tied up or is this story keeping you safe from growth that needs to happen? Is it false safety? Is you telling the story, keeping you from letting yourself be more visible to people, to talking more freely about your experience, to talking more freely about how you feel to allowing yourself to be compassionate and kind to yourself?

(11:39):
I want to be clear that letting go of the story about them doesn’t mean they didn’t hurt you. It means you don’t need their behavior to define your, it’s been an interesting past six months or so. For me, this year has been a real deep dive for me, a real deep dive. I have grown so much and done this work for many years now and had many changes, lots of growth, but this last year there’s been a whole other layer. I kind of feel like this healing work is like Shrek and where he talks about the onion layers and how he’s complicated. He has layers. I think healing is much this way. That certainly has been my experience that it’s like we can get those outer layers that are a little more obvious, a little more blinding to us, like cutting up an onion, but sometimes as we heal those layers and grow stronger, we’re able to go deeper.

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We’re able to go deeper inside to more hidden places, more shadow places, and that has been a lot of what my year has been. There have been some circumstances that have really pushed me to deeper growth. There have been some deep questions that I have had that have pushed me to deeper growth, and what this has brought up is some stories that I have held about my first marriage about him and ways that I have tried to protect him, ways that I have tried to put a positive light on things, and this year has been a year of releasing that and going deeper into some of the other things that I actually have needed to see, and it’s been interesting to peel that back and look at some painful truths there that have ultimately allowed me to let go even more. And you too, my listeners, have places that you being willing to peel back and look at these things will actually help you release the things that you think that you need to hold onto.

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Okay? You don’t need to keep holding onto these things to keep you safe. We need to explore them until we have found something that allows us to release something that allows us to set it down. We’ll get more into that in just a little bit, okay? I will say that the stories that are the stickiest, the stories that tend to hold on with the tightest grip are the ones that we tell about ourselves. Why? Because these are often the stories that were there long before the infidelity and the infidelity just reinforced the story. It just made it stick even more. For example, we can say things like, I always felt like I wasn’t quite enough. I always felt like I was blind and don’t see the obvious signs right in front of me that I’m just stupid. And when this happens, when infidelity occurs, it can just really touch on that and make it worse.

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I’ve talked before about a story from my childhood that I wasn’t worth protecting like other girls were. I wasn’t worth sticking around and loving and showing up for other dads and other girls that other girls had dads that stuck around and this was all subconscious. I didn’t even know it was there until within the last years of really seeing it. And for me, I know that some of it came to pass when, for example, when my second dad left when I was five and I never saw him again, and some things that happened after that, I carried those stories around and when the infidelity occurred, it made it feel all the more true, and a lot of my work has been really exploring that, examining that and facing the pain of those stories while also simultaneously exploring the origins and then deciding what I want to think about it.

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I get to decide, okay, what if the real story is I was always worth protecting, but I had people in my life that didn’t even know how to protect themselves, so how could they protect me? What if the real story is I ignored red flags because I was trying so hard to hold everything together for my family. I didn’t want my family to be under threat, and so I ignored it because I didn’t want my children to have to face the music of if some of these things were going on. What if the real story is I kept hoping because I loved deeply because I cared deeply about this person. I didn’t want to see this side of them because I cared about them and wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. What if the real story is I did the absolute best I could with what I knew?

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What if that’s the real story? What about the relationship? We could think it was all a lie. Nothing was real. We were never really connected. It was all fake. If this hadn’t happened, we’d still be happy. Okay? These are some common stories that we tell and some things that we can get to and hold that can shift, that are, there was love and there was harm. We had beautiful moments, and there were also warning signs and difficult moments we can hold. I wish it hadn’t happened and I’m growing because it did. We can hold both at the same time. Now, the most important part of this is how to know when it’s time to let go. Here’s a really important thing. Please listen. Please turn this up. You don’t need to let go of a story. The moment that it forms some stories need time, some stories, space, some stories need tenderness and love and care, but there is a time when the story has served its purpose and you can feel it.

(17:59):
You can feel that it only is ringing harm, not further understanding, not further curiosity, not further knowing. You can feel it and you can decide to let it go. Here are some signs you’re ready to let go. The story no longer brings new insights, just emotional fatigue. You catch yourself telling it on autopilot. It keeps you tethered to an identity. You have outgrown. You’re more curious about what’s ahead than what happened. You feel heavy when you tell it. Not empowered. It weighs you down. It does not feel empowering. You’re not saying it in a way like that was totally in the past as no power over me. I can say it without flinching, it still holds a power. Letting go doesn’t mean that the story didn’t matter. Letting go means that it doesn’t define you anymore. Okay? Now, what about letting go without full closure?

(19:02):
Many people wait for the full truth from somebody else, for an apology, for some kind of justice, for somebody to really acknowledge that they helped contribute to this story, and the problem is that some stories aren’t ever going to have perfect clarity or resolution, not within ourselves and not from others. There are some stories that we are telling ourselves that continuing to tell them to ourselves about ourselves. We think maybe we’ll come closer to some understanding and there comes a time where we understand enough and now there’s just a choice to let it go. Forgive it, let it go. Say, thank you. This was here to try to protect me. I’m good now. I don’t need it anymore. Sometimes we want further information, further words, actions from somebody else before we’re willing to let go of the story of what we’ve made their actions mean.

(19:59):
Sometimes that is never going to come. We don’t need a new ending to stop telling the story. You just need to want something bigger than your past. It does not mean that we are just moving forward and forgetting about what happened. It means that we’re no longer attaching ourselves to what we made it mean. A new story you might want to try, you might want to choose is I loved deeply and I still do. I showed up in ways that I’m proud of, and I promise you, you can find ample evidence of these stories. I walked through fire and came out more myself. I’m writing new chapters now and I get to choose the tone. I get to choose what the message is. These chapters you get to let your own story evolve. You get to let you evolve. Okay, so to wrap this up, I want you to spend some time reflecting on what story do I tell on repeat?

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Who does that story cast me as? Is that still who I want to be and what new story is asking to be written through me? You don’t have to go deeper into it to be done with it. You just have to be willing to walk forward without it. Alright, thank you so much for being here. As always, I love this time with you. I hope you found this useful. Leaving reviews has never been easier. Write down in the show notes. There’s just a link that you push. You can enter in whatever name you want as who you want to be displayed as the person leaving the review. You write in what you want to write and it will send it to wherever you listen to podcasts. I ask that you take the time to do that. It is so helpful to me. It’s so helpful to other listeners. Thank you so much and have a great day.

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