I’m Andrea Giles and you’re listening to the Heal from Infidelity podcast, episode number 249, When Two People Are Living in Different Realities.

Infidelity changes everything. Who you thought you were, what you thought your life was. From here, you can keep circling the pain or rebuild something real.

This is a space for men and women navigating infidelity. Whether you’ve been betrayed or your the one who broke trust. I’m Andrea Giles, master certified relationship coach. I know what’s possible on the other side.

When you’re willing to tell the truth all the way out, you’re in the right place. Let’s begin. Hello. Hello everybody. Welcome back.

I’m back. It’s been a minute. I was looking. And at the time of the release of this episode, it will be a solid two months since I last had a live episode go out, a new episode go out.

I did not intend for it to go that way. I could give you a whole rundown of all the reasons why I kind of disappeared for a while, but I’ll just say this. My own life has just needed all of my attention. I traveled for several weeks solo with my 4 year old and was able to participate in the birth of my oldest daughters, my oldest biological daughter’s son.

So I have a new grandson, uh, able to spend time with lots of my adult kids. But really there’s been a lot going on for me of needing my own deep attention, needing me to be very present with myself in my own life, looking at my own reality, looking at my relationships, looking closely at all the things that I have agreed to, like my business and how I run my business and myself. And I’ve just needed, needed to go inward for a while. But I am so ready to be back.

So, so excited to be here. And I, I hope you stick around for this whole episode. It’s going to be an important one. It’s going to be a potent one.

Stick around. Okay, so we’re going to be talking about what happens when two people in a relationship are living in completely different realities. This happens all the time. I have felt this way before and I’ve had people very recently reach out clients and ask me, what do I do when what I’m experiencing is totally different than what they’re experiencing.

Right. And what can happen, especially after infidelity, is one person can be thinking, oh, uh, look how much better we’re doing. Why are we still talking about this? And the other person is thinking, I’m barely holding this together.

Actually, one person can say, I had no idea that you are this unhappy. And the other person thinks, I’ve been telling you for years that I’m unhappy. One person genuinely experiences themselves as trying incredibly hard, and the other person experiences themselves as carrying the entire relationship. And here’s where things get complicated.

Both people may be telling the truth about their subjective experience. That doesn’t mean that facts don’t matter. It doesn’t mean that every interpretation is equally accurate. It doesn’t mean that harmful behavior isn’t harmful because somebody has an explanation for it.

But it does mean that two people can live through the same marriage, the same event, the same conversation, the same Tuesday afternoon, and experience completely different realities. And what I’ve also been thinking about is this. What do we do with that? Because I think most of us have been taught that when our realities conflict, somebody has to win.

And I want to offer a different way through this today. Okay. Um. All right. How many of you recognize this?

You have a conflict, and we immediately turn the conversation into a courtroom. Who remembers it correctly? I didn’t say that. You. Yes, you did.

This is what you said, right? Who started it? Who was worse? Who said exactly what? Whose reaction was justified?

Who has a better explanation? Who should be more hurt? Who owes whom an apology? And underneath all of this is this question, Whose reality are we going to agree is the real one?

But here’s the thing. I don’t think that’s actually the goal. I think healthy relationships have to develop the capacity to hold. This is how I experienced it, and this is how you experienced it without requiring, therefore, one of us has to surrender our experience entirely.

Just give it up as if it doesn’t matter, didn’t happen. Okay. That’s a really big deal, right? Because I can. I can validate your emotional reality without validating every conclusion you’ve

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drawn from it. I can say I understand why you felt abandoned without saying I abandoned you. I can say I understand why you were scared. It makes sense without saying, therefore, everything you did because you were scared was okay.

I can say I understand why you experienced me that way without saying, therefore, your interpretation of me is the truth. Okay. And this works in the other direction, too. I don’t get to say that wasn’t my intention, and therefore your experience doesn’t count.

Maybe I didn’t intend to hurt you, and maybe you were deeply hurt. Both things can exist. So what we’re trying to create isn’t one shared reality where everybody finally agrees about everything. Good luck with that. Right.

We’re trying to Become people who are grounded enough in ourselves that we can hear someone else’s reality without needing to erase theirs or abandon ours. I want to say that again. This is so important. This is the goal. We’re trying to become people who are grounded enough in ourselves that we can hear someone else’s reality without needing to erase theirs or abandon ours.

And this brings me to a dream that I had. Okay? I had this most potent dream a couple months ago. I want to give you a little background of, uh, why this dream was so potent.

Okay? When I was 15 years old, I lived in Oregon. I was in a theater class at school, and we had the opportunity to go see the Broadway version of Phantom of the Opera in Portland. We had $15 nosebleed section tickets.

And I got to go, and it totally blew me away. I loved it so, so much. So much. So I was so touched by the whole story, the whole thing, that I went and read every version a Phantom of the Opera that I could, Especially the original book.

I studied it. I wanted to understand all of it. I knew every song. I knew everything about it, okay?

And I have always loved this so much. I think I counted. I think I’ve seen it five times. I even went and saw it back in New York right before they took it off permanently.

It’s always touched me. It’s always just really touched my heart. Okay?

Now here’s what happened. I had this dream, and it was like I was being brought to watch Phantom of the Opera from a different view, okay? And I was watching Kristine and the Phantom, watching their exchanges in my dream. And I was being shown this underground world, that he was inviting her into his world.

His world is dark, okay? It’s isolated. It’s separated from everything happening above ground. And he desperately wants Kristine to come into that world with him.

But here’s the part that felt really important. It wasn’t only frightening to her. There was something very seductive about it. He wasn’t standing there saying, hey, Kristine, would you like to abandon everything you’ve ever known and come live underground in my darkness?

Doesn’t that sound great? Right? That’s not how it was presented. He was the angel of Music, this powerful musical genius, right?

That was gonna make her really powerful in her music, right? He sees something in her. He’s going to teach her. He’s going to develop her talent.

He’s going to help her become this incredible singer. He’s offering her something that she actually wants. And I think that this matters here because we don’t usually abandon ourselves because someone comes along and says, would you like to completely lose yourself in my reality? Doesn’t that sound fun? There’s usually something in the bargain that we want.

Love, connection, belonging, safety, approval, being chosen. Right? The promise of a beautiful future, maybe even the promise of becoming more of who we want to be. And sometimes the thing that initially feels like it’s helping us become more ourselves eventually requires us to become less ourselves in order to keep it.

That was a really important part of this dream for me. Okay. Because there’s beauty. There is beauty in the Phantom’s world.

There’s music, there’s connection, there’s longing. And his pain is real. His loneliness is real. His desire for Kristine is real.

And she can feel that she has compassion for him. She. She does. And there are reasons she’s drawn to him.

And yet. And yet, eventually, the price of fully joining him in his reality is that she has to leave hers. Her life, her relationships, the light, her future, herself. And in the dream, I understood something about myself. And

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And I believe it’s why I had this dream. It was to show me. Hahaha. Uh, Andrea, you sometimes do this.

You know, how to go underground with people, and I want to tell you a little bit more about that. Okay? I want to be careful here because I don’t mean to say that I’m just surrounded by people who are intentionally manipulating me or trying to drag me underground. That’s not it at all.

Okay. What I realized was actually a little more uncomfortable than that. I realized how easy I always have been manipulated with other people’s emotions, even. And especially when the other person isn’t in any way trying to manipulate me.

It’s not like they’re trying to trick me. Right. Something about me is. I have a very open heart.

I. I have an open heart. I feel people, uh. If someone I care about is hurting, I can feel it.

I feel it in strangers on the street, in children, in everyone. I can feel it. If they’re disappointed in me, I can feel it. If they’re scared, I dig in to understand why, to understand their experience.

This is part of. With the Phantom, I wanted to read every version because I wanted to understand him. I wasn’t saying, oh yeah, his actions are totally fine. Not at all. You can see how very manipulative.

Right? But understanding where he came from and how all of this developed. I’ve always just been interested in people’s stories, right? And I felt so much compassion for him.

Right. I can understand why when people are ashamed, there’s wounds underneath. It if they’re angry, I can often understand where the anger is coming from. Okay? And those are qualities I appreciate about myself.

I don’t want to stop being that person. I don’t want to harden myself so much that nobody else’s feelings can touch me. But what I’ve been seeing is that somewhere along the way, I learned to take an extra step. Please hear me on this.

If I can feel your pain, I must be responsible for it. I’m going to say it one more time. If I can feel your pain, I must be, uh, responsible for it. They are not the same thing.

Okay? I have carried this burden of if you’re disappointed in me, maybe I’m doing something wrong. If you’re hurt by my boundary, maybe my boundary’s cruel. If you feel rejected, maybe I need to move closer.

If you don’t like my decision, maybe I need to reconsider it. If you’re struggling, maybe my needs can wait. Okay? If you’re upset about the way I see something, maybe I need to keep explaining myself until you understand me.

And little by little, guess what happens. Go underground. Not necessarily because somebody dragged me there. Sometimes because I love them, sometimes because I understand them.

Sometimes because I can see exactly why they feel the way they do. I really can. And because I understand their emotional reality so well, I can slowly start making their reality more authoritative than my own. And this is the distinction I’ve been sitting with.

Empathy and responsibility are not the same thing. And I care about your experience is not the same thing, as your experience determines what I’m allowed to do. I’m going to say that whole thing again. Empathy and responsibility are not the same thing.

And I care about your experience is not the same thing, as your experience determines what I’m allowed to do. That is a very different way of loving someone.

Okay, so what do we do? I’ve been thinking a lot about this. What does it look like, practically, to stay connected to another person without abandoning ourselves? We do this in our partnerships, we do this at work, we do this with our children.

Okay, you might be hearing this and go, oh, m. My gosh. I actually do this all over the place. Yeah, yeah. I’m.

I’m raising my hand. I. I’ve seen it. I feel like I’m in this deep teaching of this right now and seeing areas where Even with my 4 year old, she’ll be upset about something and how I’ll feel like this anxiousness to try to fix it and be like, no, this is her experience.

Even at four, she is her own person with her own stories and her own fears. And I don’t have to jump in there with her. I don’t have to take it from her, I don’t have to carry it. I can be with her in her experience, right?

I can help co regulate with her, but I don’t take it from her or she never learns how to do it right. Okay, so what does this look like? To stay connected to another person without abandoning ourselves? How do I hear your reality?

How do I care about your reality? How do I even walk underground with you sometimes? Because that’s part of loving people without forgetting where the stairs are. Here are some things that I’ve been practicing and thinking about, okay? Number one, separate facts, interpretations,

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feelings and requests. Where it’s like we’re putting them in columns. Okay, here’s the facts, here’s the interpretations, here’s the feelings, here’s the request, okay? So this is one of the most useful things we can do when two realities collide, okay?

We can just get granular and literally pull out a paper and pen and write this stuff down. Okay? What actually happened, the facts, what actually happened, play by play, as if we’re going back and really seeing sentence by sentence, the reality of what happened. Okay? What am I making it mean?

What am I feeling about that meaning? And what am m I now asking for? Okay, let’s say that you send a text to your spouse, your partner. They don’t respond for six hours.

Okay? The fact is, you didn’t respond to my text for six hours. The interpretation might be, I don’t matter to you. The feeling might be I felt scared and unimportant.

And the request might be, would you be willing to let me know when you’re going to be unavailable? Just let me know so I don’t sit and wonder, okay? Those are four very different things, okay? And when we separate them, suddenly there’s room for both realities because your partner doesn’t have to agree.

Yeah, you’re right. You don’t matter to me. In order to care deeply that you felt like you don’t matter. Guys, we’re all walking around with our own crap, okay?

We’re all walking around with our own lifetime of experience that we that we are here with now. And it doesn’t just magically go away and to say that each of us has to be able to just manage all of that all by herself and not need anything from each other. It’s not going to work, okay? It’s not going to work.

Yes, we are responsible for ourselves. But to be in a real partnership, we have to be able to extend kindness to the other person, care for the other person, of what helps them to feel safe, even if it’s not something that we need or understand just because we care about them. But again, the distinction of not without abandoning you. Okay, you don’t have to shrink yourself.

You don’t have to lie. You don’t have to pretend. That’s not how I meant that. That’s not what I meant at all.

When I didn’t respond, this is what was actually happening. And yes, I absolutely can do that. I’m willing to do that. Why? Because I love you.

I care about you. Right. Okay. So this is how we stop turning every difference in reality into a fight over whose reality is true.

Doesn’t matter. It doesn’t actually matter. Okay.

Number two. Stop using someone else’s feelings as evidence about yourself. This one is huge. Okay. Someone’s emotional response to you is information.

It’s not automatically instruction. Okay. Someone can be angry with you, and your boundary can still be appropriate. Someone can be disappointed in you, and your answer can still be no.

Someone can feel rejected, and you still may need your space. Someone can feel misunderstood, and you may still disagree with their interpretation. Someone can believe you’re selfish, and you don’t have to immediately launch a campaign to prove that you’re not. Okay. What I believe is that we should get curious.

If someone I love is deeply hurt by something I’ve done, I want to look. Is there something here I need to own? Did I behave in a way that isn’t aligned with who I want to be? Is there something I need to repair?

Okay. That’s emotional maturity, but it’s very different from, you’re upset, therefore, I must have done something wrong. Okay. Uh. Uh, nope.

We just slow it down. We look at the possibility of, is there something here for me to look at? Okay. Or slowing it down, but it doesn’t automatically mean you did something wrong.

I know. For me, this has been a sore spot for me because I remember growing up, every time our parents needed to talk to us, I remember thinking that we are in trouble because we usually were for something. If there was a family meeting, if there was Andrea come to our room, I usually was in trouble. And so my nervous system has registered that, like, somebody being like, we need to talk as, you’re in trouble, you screwed up.

You did something wrong. Okay. Especially if, uh, the other person’s upset. This has been something that I’ve really had to slow down and Go.

Okay, that was little girl Andrea, and this is adult Andrea. They’re not the same thing.

All right, number three, practice saying, I believe you. Oh, you guys, please hear me on this one, okay? We’re not saying, you’re right. You’re right. Everything you said is just absolute truth.

We’re saying, I believe that this is your experience. Imagine being able to say to your partner, I believe

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that you experienced me that way. I don’t experience what happened exactly the same way, but I believe you, and I want to understand what it was like for you. That is intimacy. That is real intimacy where real safety can be built.

And then the other person needs to be able to offer that same dignity back. Because if only one person’s reality is allowed to exist in a relationship, it’s not intimacy. If one person’s feelings continually become the final authority, if one person’s interpretation continually determines what happened, if one person’s hurt means the other person has to surrender their knowing. We aren’t holding to realities anymore, okay?

One person is living underground with the other. We’re not doing that anymore. We’re not doing that anymore. We’re all hanging out above ground, chilling out in the sunshine, okay?

Not going underground anymore. All right?

Number four. Ask yourself, what do I know? All right, sometimes, you guys, sometimes it can be so intense, right? When you know, somebody’s really unhappy with you, or they’re so angry or hurt or whatever, and their emotions can be so intense that it’s.

It feels almost impossible not to get pulled into it. Okay? This is where practicing this again and again and again, coming back into yourself is crucial. Ask what do I know happened?

What do I know? I said, what am I willing to own? What am I not willing to own? What do I know about my intentions?

What do I know about the impact of my behavior? What is mine here? What isn’t mine? What feels true to me when I’m not frantically trying to get this other person to feel differently, okay?

That, my friends, is a very different question than how do I get this person to stop feeling this way about me? Because that question will send you underground so fast. Do you hear that? How do I get this person to stop feeling this way about me?

Uh, we, uh, don’t need to manage that, okay? We manage ourselves. We take responsibility for ourselves. We ask ourselves, what is true here?

What do I actually know? We’re not trying to change how somebody feels about us. We’re trying to be real with ourselves about what’s here, right? And what is true for me.

And then into number five. Step number five. Let people have their reality. Okay? All right.

You know what? I think this is probably the hardest one. Sometimes honoring your own reality means allowing another person to have an unflattering story about you. Ouch. Right?

Without chasing them underground to change it. You don’t have to correct every misunderstanding. You don’t have to convince everyone that your boundary is reasonable before you’re allowed to have it. You don’t have to make somebody agree that you were right to leave or say no, or speak up or change or rest or want something different, okay?

They are allowed to have their experience of you and you are allowed to have yours. Okay? There is enormous freedom in that. But I’m no longer trying to control your reality so that I can feel safe inside mine.

We’re not doing that anymore, okay? This is inside out. It’s worked backwards, okay? I understand this so well because I could see how I’ve done this, how I have thought.

If everybody around me is happy with me, then I can feel safe in my own body, in my own reality. Right? Man, that’s exhausting. It’s exhausting. Okay, we’re reversing this.

I want to feel safe within myself and bring my highest level of truth and compassion and discussion and empathy to this conversation to see what we can build together from the inside out. Right? That we’re bringing our strength to the other relationship. Right.

Okay, now there’s one more really important caveat, okay? I want to be really careful here because my reality can also become a weapon. This isn’t. Well, that’s just your reality and my reality.

I didn’t betray you. It’s not real, okay? No. Why? Because facts still matter.

Agreements matter, Behavior matters, integrity matters, impact matters. We don’t get to use my truth as a get out of accountability free card, okay? I don’t love some of the things that I see like on social media where it’s like, this is my truth, therefore I’m allowed to just say whatever I want, no accountability, whatever. If you don’t like it, just go away.

Mhm. That’s not a good way to have relationships,

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my friends, okay? Subjective realities actually in our human experience, live inside objective reality. All right? If I lied, I lied.

If I broke an agreement, I broke an agreement. If I behaved cruelly, calling it my reality doesn’t make the behavior disappear. And likewise, if you tell me that something I did hurt you, I don’t get to say. Well, in my reality, I didn’t hurt you, you were hurt.

Okay? That matters. So the Goal is that nobody can tell me anything because this is my truth. The goal is I can be grounded enough in myself that I can genuinely examine your experience without needing to either erase yours or abandon mine.

Isn’t that amazing? I can be grounded enough in myself that I can genuinely examine your experience without needing to erase yours or abandon mine. This is emotional maturity, and I think that’s actually what real intimacy requires. Okay. All right.

To wrap this up, I want to say this. Know where the stairs are? I thought about this dream so much. I woke up like, whoa.

It felt like a gift. It felt like a gift because this. This has always been such a meaningful story to me. And to be instructed in this powerful way, just like, what a gift.

I woke up with such gratitude. Right? And I’ve thought about it so much since then and tried to understand all the nuances in it. Okay. Kristine was invited to this underground world.

And maybe the lesson here is. Isn’t that we should never go underground with someone, because love does that sometimes. We sit with people in their grief. We enter their fear. We.

We sit there with them. Um, we listen to their shame. We try to understand wounds that aren’t ours. We learn the landscape of another person’s interior world.

Okay? Sometimes we even sit there in the dark with them, um, for a while. That’s love. That’s empathy. But we do have to remember where the stairs are.

We have to know how to come back to the surface. Because loving someone does not require living inside their reality. And understanding someone else’s pain does not require you to organize your entire life around preventing them from ever feeling it. We can’t do that. Okay?

We can’t do that. I can care deeply about what it’s like to be you. I can believe you when you tell me what you’re experiencing. I can look honestly at myself and own what is mine.

I can apologize. I can repair. I can change things that need changing. And I can still stay connected to myself.

Okay, maybe that’s the sentence here that I want you to take away. I can visit your reality without vacating my own.

And maybe there’s another piece here. Something can be beautiful and meaningful. Something can have given you things that you genuinely treasure. Something can have helped you become more of yourself for a while.

And you can eventually realize that continuing to participate in it in the same way requires you to become less of yourself. Both can be true. Okay? We don’t have to rewrite the beauty in order to acknowledge the cost.

They can both exist. We don’t have to make Someone, a villain in order to decide we can’t live underground. And perhaps one of the most loving things two people can eventually learn to say to each other is this. I see the world you’re living in.

I care about what it’s like there for you, and I’m not going to abandon myself in order to prove it, to join you there, to abandon what is true for me. Okay. All right.

That’s the episode I want to wrap up by letting you know what I’m up to. Okay. Uh, at the beginning of the summer, I shut down the group get your life back after infidelity that I’ve been running for the last four years. And I want you to know that there is something new coming that I’ve been working on.

It is a group, um, we’re starting in October. And this is born from this deep place that I’ve been invited in within myself of really excavating, of deeply understanding things, of deeply going through my own. My own stuff to really understand at a deep level so that I can then turn around and help you on your journey. Okay.

And personally and professionally, some of what I’ve been really diving into is what does it actually mean to come home to you, to truly, truly trust your own knowing, to trust who you are, to stop outsourcing your reality, to stop believing that being loving means disappearing. Okay. Or that we have to earn our value somehow by. By showing up perfectly for other people.

Okay. And some of the work that I’ve been immersed in lately, and

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that is part of what I’m putting together, is doing more of a deep dive into where each of you are at and helping you into the person that does not abandon yourself for anything or anyone. Okay?

So if this resonates, if you are listening to this and going, oh, my gosh, she’s perfectly describing me and my experience. I know what this is, but it feels so scary and so challenging. And I know that my inner world doesn’t quite match my outer world. And I feel that, uh, internal kind of sandpaper.

It’s so irritating and uncomfortable. Please make sure you’re on my email list. Okay. Go to Andrea Giles dot com.

There’s a button on there where you can just get on the email list. You get like a. A freebie sent to your email, and then you’re on the list. Okay? I’ll be telling you more soon.

I know this, that this will be, hands down the most potent work I’ve ever done. And if you are ready for serious work, like, if you’re like, I’m done with my own bull crap. Like, I’m done with my own stories. They’re not working for me.

They’re keeping me stuck. Right. If you know that you keep getting yourself in ruts that you yourself are, uh, like something has to give here. Okay. Hang with me.

Okay? Go get on that list. Pay attention. Some things are going to be coming out soon with invitations and we start in October.

Okay. So. All right, my beautiful listeners, it’s a joy to be back with you today. Take care and I will be back soon.

Foreign 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 https://andreagiles.com/lies-about-infidelity/ Again, it’s https://andreagiles.com/lies-about-infidelity/ I will see you next time.