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 so glad you’re here. I was on a walk with my friend who had been taking a trip to Morocco, and she was telling us about how they have in Marrakesh, apparently, a lot of like real fake, like Louis Vuitton and Gucci bags. And so I was just interested. And her tour guide was just talking about like the real real or the real fake or the fake real, right? How you tell the difference when you’re looking at designer like handbags or things like that. And my brain at that moment thought, oh my gosh, I need to do a podcast about this because so often after betrayal, we have a vision of our marriage and our life. And the moment we find out the discovery happens, it’s like, was our entire life fake? I thought this man or woman that I was married to, is she real? What is going on here? And it causes lots of turmoil inside of us. And so I personally like designer things. I like nice things. I like the quality of it, but I’m going to kind of compare it to us as humans and our relationship and how we figure out what’s real and what’s fake and how that hurts us or helps us. So sometimes, I don’t know if you’ve been to New York or if you’ve ever traveled, like for sure in New York, it’s like they have these people that stand on the corner and they usually have like a suitcase or like a, I don’t know, a sheet with bags in it. And then they hide it when the police come and they try to get you to go. And because they’re trying to sell you uh some sort of designer handbag, but chances are it’s not real. And that is really, especially if you think it’s real and you spent a lot of money for it, it’s so disappointing when you find out, like, oh my gosh, I got taken advantage of. And that’s kind of how it feels sometimes with our marriage when our spouse has an affair. So you thought you were in something real, and then you find out parts of it weren’t. And that pain is unlike no other. And then our brain goes to wait a second, was any of it real? Was it all, you know, was there any truth to my entire, for me, 26-year marriage? And it is really unsettling. I think when we have something real, especially when we’re talking about like a luxury brand, if we’re going to compare that, it is high quality, right? There’s honesty in it, honesty of craftsmanship and honesty in ourselves, right? As far as humans. And this is what you think that you’re getting in your marriage. Most of us don’t even consider our spouse might be lying to us. At least I didn’t in my 20s. I was 25 when I got married and never even crossed my mind that my husband would lie to me. And so I think the things that we’re looking for in a real authentic relationship are truth, integrity, and alignment. And it doesn’t mean it’s perfect, right? No one’s perfect, but it’s honest. And that’s what I think is so important. And now I’m going to talk about the real fake, right? It looks real, right? It feels real and it passes for real until it doesn’t, until we realize, oh, like the Louis Vuitton, the LV, is just a little off center, or the zipper isn’t whatever the real Louis Vuitton is. Something’s a little different. Just like in a relationship, our spouse might be like, Oh, I love you so much. You’re the most important thing to me. And then you find out they’ve been lying to you. Or they show up sometimes and then they don’t show up other times. There’s lots of mixed signals or confusion. And I think this is where betrayal lives in the incongruence of what’s real and what’s not. I think the hardest betrayal isn’t the obvious fake, it’s the one that felt real. And that’s where that pain is because we look at our spouse and we look at our life and we think, wait, my experience was this was I was all in. I was being honest and true and vulnerable with you. And I thought you were doing that too. And it turns out you were not. The next one, the fake fake, right? I think it’s really easy to tell this immediately, usually, right? Uh, there’s really not a lot of confusion. People that are really disrespectful, they’re inconsistent, there’s red flags everywhere. I think, especially after divorce, for me, it’s very easy to spot a red flag and to spot someone that isn’t being genuine, that they’re lying, they’re saying one thing and they’re meaning another. I feel like I have an inner lie detector that I can tell even my clients. I have had my clients lie to me, and I’m thinking, you are not being honest here, especially the ones that were the betrayers. So that is something that I’ve had to learn and build because of learning to trust myself again. And I think it’s very important as someone that’s been betrayed to rebuild your self-trust. That is going to help you more than you will ever know. I think when you meet people like this, it’s a lot easier, right? To walk away from it. The hard one is the real fake, right? So our brain latched on to all the real parts of this person. And I think sometimes we might see the fake parts, but we maybe ignore them, we compensate for them, we convince ourselves they’re going to change. We confuse ourselves, right? I think oftentimes our brain is like trying to solve a puzzle, and we’re trying to figure out okay, what is real and what is not, and what’s not. Can we live with that? Can we, you know, just ignore that? But oftentimes we cannot when betrayal happens. I like the idea of remembering two things can be true at the same time. I like to think part of my marriage was real and part of it was a lie. Right? Holding space for both of those, I know that that can be true. That can help us accept this. Just it’s a reframe, right? It wasn’t all fake, but it also wasn’t fully real. And this can help our brain calm down so that we can heal and move on. I think oftentimes we get stuck because we are trying to prove it was either real or it was fake. And we want to be right. Humans, we like to be right. It’s hard when we’re wrong. We use it as a self-reflection. Like, how in the world did I choose this person that was utterly awful or that really did some really hurtful things that caused me so much pain? So we then make it about us and our insecurities. I think so often we replay every single memory. I know I got myself stuck in this. It’s like, I’m like, well, wait, what about our trip to Hawaii? It was this amazing family trip. Was he contacting his affair partner during that time? And if he was, and it just got really confusing and very painful. And I think often we just want to look for the why. Like, why did this happen? If we knew why, then we could validate how we’re feeling and validate our reality. And just knowing we may never know the why, and that’s okay. We can still heal. You don’t heal by figuring out if they were real, you heal by becoming real yourself. And I find that is so true. The more we focus on them and what they did or didn’t do, we’re just disempowering ourselves. And so we really have to turn inward. And how can we become more real and honest with ourselves? Even if that honesty means that we need to get divorced or we need to accept what they did and figure out how we can reconcile from this. Definitely we always need to go inward. We have to treat ourselves like we are the real luxury item. We are the real, real, right? We’re the real thing. We aren’t fake. Our worth was never counterfeit. So so much of us tie our worth to how our spouses treated us. But our worth is infinite and we are born worthy. And so we just have to remember that. And a lot of us forget that. You didn’t choose wrong because you’re broken, you just trusted them. You just thought that you believed them. You responded to what looked real, and it makes so much sense. You weren’t dumb, you were human. That’s what most of us do, right? As humans, we trust until we don’t trust. Remember, the question isn’t were they real? It’s am I living in alignment with what is real for me now? And I like this question because so much for me, I was out of alignment in my marriage for probably decades. I didn’t recognize that I was out of alignment because I was just always trying to be someone I don’t think I really was, so that my spouse could like me more, right? I’m like, I was always trying to uh bid for his attention because maybe if he could like who I was, then he wouldn’t have an affair. But that was not great logic, right? It didn’t really make sense, but that’s how my brain processed it. And so the more I tried to be who he wanted, the less I became of myself. And so for me, getting divorced helped me get back in alignment with who I am and who I want to be. So, some ways for you to start healing if you recognize, like, okay, I’m stuck with the real fake, or I want the real, real, is it possible for our marriage to become this? I think we have to stop trying to label our entire relationship. That’s just gonna cause us so much pain. So many people every day post, I wasted 36 years, I wasted 20 years. I hate that thought. And it is a thought, it’s not a fact. I just think it’s not serving you to think I wasted my life on this person because we have to also hold space for all the beautiful things we have done. I just will never choose to believe I wasted 26 years married to my former spouse. I just have to pick apart what was good about it, right? Of course, there was a lot of bad, and it’s not ignoring the bad, it’s just it’s reframing and retelling my story because there were a lot of beautiful things. I got to see the world, I got to have four beautiful kids, I lived and met amazing people. And so there was a lot of goodness, and that is what I can hold on to as real. It was real for me. And just remembering it’s not just all real or all fake. Oftentimes it’s both. And so holding space and recognizing that takes some work to do and some healing, but you can totally do that. And I think we have to learn regulating your nervous system, right? We have to regulate before we can evaluate. Because if we’re dysregulated when we’re thinking about this, no kidding, we’re gonna be stuck up here in anger and irritation, or we’re gonna be numb to all of it. And so we’re not gonna get the right signals. We’re gonna let our lower brain, our survival brain, try to tell us a lie and we’re gonna believe it. So that’s why we have to bring our CEO, part of our brain, online so we can be more regulated. And we got to figure out what regulates you. Every person is different. And then as we rebuild, we have to figure out okay, what is authentic to me? Who am I? Right? What am I feeling? What do I want? And what do I value? Because what we thought we wanted and valued at the beginning of our marriage is clearly different 20 years, 30 years later, 40 years later. And it can be different. And you have to decide, especially if you get divorced, what do you want now? So you aren’t attracting the same type of person. You’re able to spot the fake, right? And you really want to make sure you can spot the real fake. That’s important. We want a real, genuine person, and that does not mean they’re perfect, but they’re vulnerable. They’re willing to look at their flaws and they’re not sitting there blaming everything on you. I think that’s important to pay attention to. You can’t decide it when you’re confused. You have to be clear and have more clarity. And these are some tools that will help you get that clarity. And I think the goal isn’t to make your spouse become real. The goal is for you to live a real life. So the more real you can be, you will get more clear on can I repair this marriage or who do I want to marry if I am divorced? And what do I want to do? So if you are stuck in this, if you recognize this in you, reach out. I can totally help you. And you’re not alone. And it’s okay. You can figure this out. You aren’t broken, you aren’t a lost case. This is you’re just experiencing betrayal. Betrayal trauma is real, it’s painful, and we have to figure out what is going on with your brain so you can figure out what you want to do. Anyways, I hope you enjoyed this podcast. If you did, please share it, leave a review, 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.
