Welcome to Happily Even After Betrayal with Life Coach Jen. This podcast is where we talk about betrayal and divorce and what it actually looks like to live through those experiences while still being a parent, a grandparent, a partner, or just a human trying to keep it all together. If your heart feels shattered, your nervous system feels dysregulated, and your future feels unclear, you’re in the right place. Here we focus on understanding what happened so you can rebuild your identity, restore your confidence, and find peace. So you can create your happily even after one episode at a time. Hey friends, welcome to today’s podcast. I’m gonna talk about the double betrayal, the affair, and then the abandonment that you might feel after you’ve experienced betrayal. And sometimes that just means emotionally, right? They may not actually walk out and leave you, but you feel very abandoned or discarded. And it’s a common emotion that a lot of my clients have had as well as I’ve experienced. And so I just wanted to talk about it. It’s a pain that it feels like you’re being replaced. When your spouse has an affair and then they decide they want a divorce, there is this deep, gut-wrenching feeling that comes up for so many people. They think I’ve been discarded, I’ve been abandoned, I didn’t matter. And if you felt that, I want you to know you’re not crazy. That feeling makes so much sense, but it’s also not the full truth. So, first of all, why this feels so painful? First of all, it’s a very painful thought, right? We think that it’s a fact, not a thought, but I want you to know it’s a thought. This isn’t just a breakup, right? It’s layered because it’s a betrayal. You didn’t just lose your relationship, you lost your sense of reality, right? How you thought your world was going and what your future was has now completely changed. And accepting reality is one of the hardest things we get to do in this life, in my opinion. You lose trust, you then feel like you were just thrown away, like they didn’t even care about you. This hits like a very primal part of us. And I think that’s why it’s so painful. We are wired for connection and safety, and our connection to our spouse and our safe that we feel with our spouse is completely obliterated. It’s gone. When someone we built a life with chooses someone else and leaves, our nervous system reads that as very dangerous. We most of us, we have a trauma response that we go into fight, which is anger or rage. How could you do this to me? Flight, which is a sense of urgency to fix it. This is me. I want to fix it. We want to chase or prove our worth, right? We’re we’re gonna do better. We’re gonna give you the list of all the things we’re going to change about ourselves because surely the affair was my fault because I wasn’t meeting a need of yours or something like that. Freeze, we often do this. We become numb, stuck, can’t move forward. That also happened to me and happens to many of you. Fawn is another one. What can I do to get you back? And I think a lot of us do that. I’ll do anything. Just tell me, just give me the list and I’ll do it. Just know that this isn’t weakness. This is your body trying to survive something that feels like emotional death. And it really does feel like a death. And it is hard for your mind to process this. So, why do we feel discarded and abandoned? This feeling comes from your story, your brain creates to make sense of what happened. So, we all have a story about our life, about our marriage, about our spouse. And sometimes our stories are more painful than others. We think thoughts like they chose them over me. I was replaceable. Our whole life meant nothing to them. Right? We get in these absolutes. Of course, your brain goes there because it’s trying to protect you by making meaning out of chaos. But here’s the shift that I want you to try to make if you can. Being left does not equal being unworthy. The more you can understand that you are worthy and lovable no matter what your spouse does or doesn’t do, that will help you so much in your healing. Someone choosing differently does not define your value. You are valuable. Your spouse just didn’t see it. And it wasn’t about you, anyways. It was about them and what they were insufficient in. What this actually says. So think about what is true and what is your story, what is fact and story. I think the more you can recognize the stories you tell. I talked to someone earlier today, and he had a very painful story about his wife making fun of him, like before they were married. So for 50 plus years, he’s been thinking this thought. And that was a painful story. And it wasn’t even true. It was just he made it up and he added a lot of layers of meaning. And I just want you to know we can change our story. What if this isn’t about you being discarded, but about being unwilling or unable to show up in a healthy, honest relationship? Right. I think so often, in order to stay married to my spouse, I would have had to become someone that I wasn’t. And I recognize that now he wanted me to be different. He didn’t like who I was. And I’m like, wait a second, but I like who I am. And if you don’t like who I am, okay. And to be honest, I didn’t really like who he was becoming. I don’t want to be with someone that lies and has affairs. That’s not who I want to be with. I want to be with someone who’s honest and genuine and thoughtful and sincere, not who he was becoming. So we have to really reconcile that in our brains. Affairs are often about avoidance, not replacement, which is so true. They avoid what’s going on for them and they think, oh, remember limerence. I’m just gonna go get that shiny object over there, and they’re gonna make me feel better. They didn’t upgrade. You didn’t get downgraded. So don’t think of it like that. That’s just a lie your brain is trying to tell you to keep you safe. They chose the path that required the least emotional responsibility. This says more about their capacity than your worth, right? It was easy with the other person because they didn’t have, hey, can you pick the kids up? Can you help me with dinner? How are we gonna pay for our kids’ college tuition? Those are real life issues that they didn’t have in the affair. Healthy people don’t betray and discard. Disregulated, avoidant, and emotionally immature people do. And I say that without judgment, but with clarity. It’s true. Like if you’re an emotionally healthy human being, you’re not walking away from your kids. You’re not walking away from your decades-long marriage. It’s just not what you’re doing. So, how can you be more empowered? Because that’s the whole goal of me wanting you to heal is so you can be more empowered and not the victim of feeling discarded or abandoned. Empowerment doesn’t come from pretending it didn’t hurt, it comes from telling yourself a more honest and useful story. And it’s so true, right? Like sometimes we think, well, do we just we just have to ignore and pretend it didn’t hurt us? No. We have to really accept it and feel those feelings. We have to separate the facts from the story. The fact is they had an affair and left. But your story is telling you like you’re disposable. You weren’t worth staying for. That’s you made that up. We need to become more regulated in our nervous system because you can’t think your way out of abandonment when your nervous system is in panic, right? It’s just gonna, it’s not gonna work. We have to feel our way, we have to feel our feelings. We have to decide who are we outside of being chosen by them. And that that’s a really deep question because so often we say, Well, they’re our husband, we are so-and-so’s spouse. We create that identity for ourselves, and then now it’s like, oh, who are we without our kids, our spouse? And the thing is, there’s lots of things you are. You have to just figure that out and what that is. And you don’t need to prove your worth to someone who couldn’t already see it. And I saw myself doing this so often. It’s like, well, if they just could see me in a different light, or if I could just lose 10 pounds, then they would like me, then they would want to stay married to me, or 20 pounds, if I could just maybe dress differently, or maybe do my hair differently, or maybe wake up at a better time, or go to bed at a different time, right? Like we just can do all this with our minds, we just drive ourselves crazy thinking of this. If we could have been different in some way, if we could have longer legs, or right, uh so many things. If we could have made more money, then maybe they would have liked us. It’s just not true. It’s just a lie. So, what else could be true? What if you weren’t discarded, but you were redirected, right? What if, what if it was a redirection? What if you needed to get out of that marriage or you needed to become something? What if you had just lost yourself in your marriage and this is a wake-up call and you’re like, oh my gosh, I want to be, you know, you rebuild this amazing better marriage, which I think is totally possible. I’ve totally seen it in other people’s marriages. What if this is the moment your life starts to become really honest? What if you were just kind of like just surviving or just living your life, just not very intentionally? And this is the moment you can be more intentional. What if the relationship ending is what allows you to come back to yourself? I feel this so much. I feel like I found myself again after my divorce. I had become a version of myself that I didn’t even recognize that I remember from when I was in high school and college. I’m like, no, this is who I was always meant to be. And marrying my spouse and dealing with years of betrayal trauma just made me hard and exhausted all the time. I was always exhausted. And now I just don’t feel that way anymore. If you feel discarded or abandoned right now, I want you to hear this clearly. You were not thrown away. You were hurt by someone who didn’t have the capacity to love you in the way you deserved. And your job now is to not get them back or to prove your worth, it’s to come home to yourself, is to actually believe that you are worthy, you are lovable, and you will be okay. If you need help doing any of this, I would love to help you. I love helping my clients find themselves again and figure this out and recognize that they aren’t abandoned only if they abandon themselves, right? Their spouse was doing it for reasons we will probably never know. And it’s so disappointing. Of course it is. No kidding it is. But you can heal and figure out who you are and what you want and begin living the life that you’ve always wanted to live. Anyways, I hope you enjoyed this podcast and it was helpful. Have a beautiful day, and I will talk to you next week. Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of Happily Even After Betrayal. If you want to understand what stage of betrayal you’re in, head to my website at lifecoachgen.com. That’s Jen with one N, and take the free quiz. It’s a simple step you can take today toward creating your own happily even after.
