Welcome to my podcast. Happily, even After. I’m life coach, jen, I’m passionate about helping people recover from betrayal. I rode the intense emotional roller coaster and felt stuck and traumatized for years. It’s the reason I became a trauma-informed certified life coach who helps people like you navigate their post-betrayal world. I have the tools, processes and knowledge to help you not only heal from the betrayal but create a healthy future. Today we begin to help you live happily even after. Hey friends, welcome to today’s podcast. I’m excited to be with you today.
So I feel like I, amazingly, have read a lot of books lately. And the Commodity of Connection. I actually did read that book. That was last week, but this week I listened to it. So sometimes I say I read it, but I really listened to it. So just be kind to me, but I have been.
It’s been a goal of mine to listen or read more books and I’ve been doing it. I’m so proud of myself. So this book that I read it was called what Happened to you Conversations on Trauma, resilience and Healing, a book with Oprah Winfrey and Dr Bruce D Perry. I would highly recommend it if this is a topic that is of interest to you. It really is to me. I find trauma very fascinating. I know that might sound weird to someone, but it helps make sense of things that haven’t made sense to me, and so I love the phrase what happened to you, because many of us say what’s wrong with you? Right, when someone acts up, a child acts up or someone does something that we consider even my former spouse, who had an affair I could be like what’s wrong with you, why did you do that? Instead of asking the question what happened to you? What happened to them? It just is a lot more compassionate, right, and it really is true because probably something did in their younger years to get them to where they are now. I was just thinking about times recently that I’ve been triggered or something, and it’s a really bizarre thing, but I’m going to share it.
So Meghan Markle if you guys have seen her Netflix show on this lifestyle show and people, the reason I started watching it because I saw this negative, like kind of making fun of her and these negative things about it, and so I was like hey to my daughter, like let’s watch this show, and there’s a lot of like I can agree to some of it. Some of it’s like really you’re cooking spaghetti in a white linen pair of pants and no apron, right. That feels dangerous and like unrealistic right. So there’s some funny things, but I in that moment watching that, I just got so triggered because, in my opinion now I’m not going to say, but that is who my former spouse expected me to be and those are my thoughts. So I’m not going to say, because obviously, meghan Markle wasn’t around when we were married, but that’s how I felt, so much that that was the ideal, that that is the wife he wanted was someone that was creating harvest baskets for their neighbors and bringing them to him and, you know, making every meal by scratch and making homemade candles, and some of the things she does may be extreme, and I actually really love entertaining. I think I really throw a good party and I do those things well.
However, it just was never. I never felt that it was good enough or I maybe needed too much help or whatever, and so, and like, cooking dinner is a big trigger for me and I’ve really been aware of it because I’m like, oh, this is something I want to heal from and I want to be able to make a meal and not sit there in complete panic that I’ve missed an ingredient, or I have missed an ingredient and for the next 20 years my husband’s going to make fun of me for it and tell everyone that I know about it and feel embarrassed. Or that you know I’m going to buy the wrong brand at the grocery store. That’s not as healthy. Or why did I buy non-organic milk? And so those are extremes.
I’m not saying that he was necessarily that way, but also, yes, he was that way, very critical of me, that he had an idea of the perfect wife and I never. I was not that. And of course I tried so hard I always tried. I really thought, okay, if I can fix this, if I can master this, if I can do this right, then he will stop having an affair. So I correlated the two. They were not connected and it wasn’t even true, but that’s why I really resonated, I think, like what happened to me. So it can give me some compassion. Of course I’m that way, of course I felt that way, but I don’t have to be that way forever. I can change. And so I’ve taken a break, like I’m so grateful for my daughter she does all the cooking and grocery shopping because I just needed to take a break from that mental game and just sit with myself about that. So that’s one example that I have experienced that I’m really trying to work on.
So I’m going to just share some quotes of Dr Perry and then talk about them, okay. So Dr Perry explains that seemingly senseless or confusing behavior makes more sense once you look at what is behind the behavior. Why did they do that? What would make them act that way? Something happened that influenced how their brain works.
When was the last time you struggled to understand behavior from someone in your life? And I think this question is so good because so often I know from my experience it’s like I knew something was going on, like I felt it, like something. I called them my spidey senses, like something. I felt something and I was just always trying to grasp and trying to figure it out. What, what was it? And bizarrely, my brain didn’t go oh, he’s having an affair now. Sometimes it did, but usually I’m like I would be like, okay, what have I done? I would go to me. What have I done wrong? My husband’s acting this way because probably something I did which is so interesting, right, that says something about me, right? And but then I would feel these feelings, try to make sense of them and really struggle. Yet it was really something that they were doing, right? So I just think it’s interesting to ask yourself these questions what were your reactions to the behavior? Right, when you found out? How did you react? That’s good information, right? Did you get really angry? Did you run away? Did you freeze up and not say anything? Did you pretend it wasn’t happening? Right? Were you in denial? Like there isn’t a right or wrong way, it’s just. Our reaction is usually a reason. You know something that’s happened to us. It’s how we have adapted in our life.
Did you get frustrated, annoyed or angry because the behavior made life harder for you, or did you consider asking yourself what was behind the behavior? Right, for me, I took all his affairs to mean something about me, even though I knew, probably, things in his childhood were problematic. Right, I didn’t know that could be a reason for someone to have an affair. Now I know it was never about me. Patterns, abandonment, need for validation were the reasons that he was doing this. Right, and so look at whatever you’re experiencing now and consider, ask yourself those questions. But really, what happened to you and then, what happened to me, to take it so personally. Right, like, what was it about me? I think I’m still working on that. Maybe I’m very loyal and trusting of someone and can’t possibly imagine. It’s really hard for my brain to imagine someone doing something like have an affair, right? Well, he said he loved me. He said you know, we got married and we married each other forever, right, like. It just was hard for my brain. I couldn’t. I couldn’t accept it. Okay.
The next quote from Dr Perry says all experience is processed from the bottom up. Meaning to get to the top smart part of our brain, which I like to call the CEO part of our brain, we have to go through the lower, primitive part. That’s not the smart part, okay. So our thoughts, they start in our primitive brain and move to the CEO, our smart part of our brain, okay, our prefrontal cortex. This sequential processing means that the most primitive reacting part of the brain is the first part to interpret and act on the information coming in from our senses. So what this means is, before we even have a thought or a feeling about what has just happened, we react. Okay.
So I just want to remind you I’ve said this before you can’t think your way out of betrayal. We react like we don’t even know that we’re doing it, like our body just will react and our trauma response is usually fight, flight or freeze, and different situations cause us to do different things. For me, I’ve experienced when I’ve wanted to fly, like leave, like literally jump out of a car and and or fight Okay, I’m going to fight for our marriage and for sure I went into freeze as well. The bottom line our brain is organized to act and feel before we think. How does our knowledge of this way of processing information help us to better understand the responses of those close to us or even ourselves?
So learning this fact how our body works like right, it’s scientific right, this is how our body works helped me really have compassion for myself, because I’ve done some things in my life that I’m not very proud of. Like I’m like wait, that’s not who I am. I’ve slapped a woman at the airport one time and it was the other woman I mortified right. For years and years I felt so much shame and embarrassment for doing that. Years I felt so much shame and embarrassment for doing that Like I thought I’m not someone that hits anyone and yet I did this right and I held it over myself and I felt so awful. And it’s very interesting because about 20 years since that happened I have been able to repair with that person and she said to me I deserve that more than you know and I am so sorry for what I did to you, and we repaired For me. I was so grateful because I just never got to say sorry to her because in my mind she was the enemy, she was the other woman, she was encroaching on my life and my marriage. Yet you know, her story is different, right, but I just think we sometimes do things we’re not proud of. That’s one thing I wasn’t proud of, but it makes sense. Of course my body was reacting before my mind could even get there and make sense of what was going on. How is it possible that I showed up at the airport to pick my husband up from a trip and so did she right? That felt very threatening to me and that was what my body responded and did.
Another time I found a receipt in the car and it had a person’s name on it that I knew and I immediately knew that my spouse was having an affair from that one receipt. Spouse was having an affair from that one receipt and fortunately and fortunately, we were in the car driving to the airport with my children and their friends there was probably eight teenagers in my car Because, I don’t know, I wanted to jump out of the car. So bad, like a moving car, that feels really like crazy, right, but my body, it was all that. I had to hold myself down for the hour ride to the airport to stay in that car. I wanted out of that car so bad, I just wanted to scream. And I had to sit there in silence and just my body going nuts, because I knew of course I couldn’t do that to my kids, of course I wasn’t wanting to like die, right, like I didn’t want to die, but I felt in that moment that I just needed to get out of that car.
And that was my body reacting to what I had just experienced, without thinking right. I was, of course, able to sit in my chair and think, and then the worst part was I had to get on an airplane and fly home which is like a three-hour flight and sit on an airplane and be silent because I couldn’t say anything. But a few days later, my body, I ended up throwing something and putting a hole in the wall. It wasn’t that big, but like it was an outer body experience. So if you’ve ever had this outer body experience, I want you to understand. It’s okay, right, like you aren’t crazy. This was your body reacting to something so shocking as your spouse having an affair. That that’s just how it reacted. Now, of course, worse things can happen, right. So we do have to. There is a point we have to recognize like okay, this is what I want to do and this is what I need to do. Just like me wanting, feeling like I wanted to jump out of the car. I didn’t jump out of the car, I was able to get a hold of myself and sit there and go on the airplane, right. So that’s why I just love this book. It really helps explain.
He gives a story in there about like a Vietnam veteran that every 4th of July he just like goes crazy and he just it’s like an outer body experience he was describing and he would like lay on the ground and think he was getting shot at. And it’s just because that’s what his body remembered, right, that’s what his body from being in war. It makes perfect sense what happened to him, right, and he was making it mean that he was crazy and something is wrong with me. And luckily he was able to get help and realize like, oh, this is why, even after 20, 30 years from being home from the war, why the Fourth of July is such a terrible experience for me. And now he learned coping skills and tools and things like that. Which is what I love about coaching is teaching people. Okay, these are tools that you can use when this happens, so you don’t have to necessarily go to the airport and slap someone right Like you have the tools.
You are aware of your nervous system. Like, for me, understanding my nervous system changed my life because I thought, oh my gosh, something’s terribly wrong with me. Like I hit someone, I wanted to jump out of a car, like what is going on? Like I must be crazy. No, that was my nervous system doing its job, protecting me and reacting. So once you know that, it just makes your life and your experience make more sense and you can just have lots more compassion and you can learn how to build your zone of resilience, build your nervous system to make it stronger so you don’t get triggered as much. So it’s such a beautiful thing. Okay, number three, dr Perry writes.
So often when we ask what happened, we find a history of developmental trauma. Most people with developmental adversity are chronically dysregulated. So that’s what I was. My nervous system was completely dysregulated and I think I was dysregulated for years. I didn’t even understand my nervous system.
I remember going talking to the doctor like, oh, I think I have anxiety, right, so getting, okay, let me give you a pill and get you on anxiety. They didn’t ask me maybe why I had anxiety and I probably don’t even know if I would have correlated like, oh, my husband’s having an affair and that’s probably why I have anxiety. But I thought, oh, I’m an anxious person, I’m just have all this anxiety. I need to fix it. Well, I hated taking those pills. They didn’t make me feel better, but I took them for a little while and then I stopped taking them and years later, now that I’m divorced, I’m like, oh, I’m not an anxious person, actually Like, yeah, of course everyone has anxiety sometimes, but in general I am not. I don’t have anxiety. It was because of what was going on in my life at that moment. Of course I had anxiety, of course I felt that way, one of the maladaptive ways that people will seek balance is through risky behaviors such as substance misuse or abuse, sexual promiscuity or eating disorders.
Now, luckily, that wasn’t my experience, but I have so much more compassion when I find out someone uses alcohol. I have several clients that they tend to like, okay, drink, right, and they’re aware they’re drinking too much. Yet they know it’s not ideal, but they’re in so much pain and they’re just trying to cope with what their reality is. So it makes perfect sense. Right, they don’t want to feel those feelings, right. They’re just trying to make sense of what’s going on in their life. Right, and I don’t think I would say I had an eating disorder. However, I definitely. Food was my buffer, food was my nemesis. I think I would use food to feel better, to feel. Feel if I could just get the pit in my stomach to go away. Maybe if I eat more and for sure sugar, right, like it’s not, like I was eating carrots and celery, I was eating cookies or ice cream. That would make me feel better. So I wasn’t necessarily have an actual eating disorder, but I definitely used food.
Okay, the most powerful form of reward is relational, without connection to people who care for you, spend time with you and support you. It is almost impossible to step away from an unhealthy form of reward and regulation. Connectedness counters the pull of addictive behaviors. So I love this about this book is that we need connection, and I already talked about that last week. The importance of connection, the importance of finding your tribe, the importance of your children feeling connected to you. If they can come to you and share their feelings without you going crazy or getting mad or angry. If they can be honest to you, if they can come to you and share their feelings without you you know going crazy or getting mad or angry, if they can be honest with you. That’s what’s important that relationship with them. So I just want you to imagine, like, how is this going on in your life or the lives of others around you? Are people using alcohol or marijuana to numb their pain from betrayal? I’m guessing yes, right. If it’s not you, maybe it’s your kids, right? Or your spouse? So there’s a lot of numbing going on and it just makes sense.
For me, I think I was more like scrolling social media or binge watching Netflix, or eating sugar, which I talked about before, and there could be a million other things that you could be doing. How can we help promote positive, healthy ways to self-regulate and prevent future harmful behaviors in ourselves or those we care about? Okay, learning about your nervous system that, in my opinion, is a life changer and I can totally teach you. And if you don’t want me to teach you, find resources on the internet, on Instagram, on podcasts. Understand your unique nervous system. It will totally help you figure out. Okay, what do you need when you feel dysregulated? What do you need to regulate yourself? Some of mine are. I have a heated blanket that I like, love so much. It’s like a lap, just a personal size heating blanket, and I’ll curl up on my bed for 20 minutes and I’m really warm and cozy and it just helps calm me down if I’m upset or dysregulated.
I like doing puzzles. I think for me, my life felt like a lot of missing pieces were in my life. I had a lot of missing puzzle pieces and for me, doing puzzles is very calming and it really helps regulate me. Walking with friends, listening to my healing playlist I have a playlist of songs that really calms my nervous system down Getting or giving a hug, listening to podcasts, creating something I love to create and make things, writing my thoughts on paper. So these are just ideas. You’re going to have different ideas, different things that are going to help you.
The last one I’m going to talk about is Dr Perry shares wisdom from his friend and colleague, dr Ed Tronick, who teaches us the power of rupture and repair. Think about some conditions necessary for repair to occur. How can the concept of rupture and repair align with how we interact with others in our families or in our lives? I love the concept of repair and I do it often. I think that has been a beautiful healing thing for me and for my kids is to repair with them, because I’ve caused them a lot of pain and, of course, unintentionally, I caused them pain. I never realized how much pain I caused them. But the beautiful part is they’re able to come to me and say Mom, you said this or you did this and this is how I felt. And I can just sit with them and validate them and have a conversation with them. I’m not there to say, well, did you know that your father was having an affair at the time? And this is what I was feeling. And of course you know, sorry, right, like that’s not repair, it’s just sitting with them and allowing them to feel anything that they felt, and then, if they want more, like, hey, mom, what was going on for you, what was happening, then I can tell them, but usually they just want me to hear them.
Okay, so, take moments at, maybe like family dinner or just different moments in your life, and you can find time to repair and, I think, practicing doing it often. It’s important. Pay attention to how you feel as a parent. You’re the example, right? Hear what your child or spouse or other person has to say. Right, I talked about that. Validate them.
If you believe like, if you’re like, yeah, I messed up, like I wish I would have been different. Allow your kids to call you out, like I’ve really tried to create a safe space in my home. My kids call me out all the time and I can call them out too, and sometimes we get, you know, don’t agree with each other, and that’s okay, but we always end it with love like something. It’s not ending in a negative. I’m always trying to like how would love look like here? This is the way to have close, connected relationships and those relationships are going to teach you so much.
So, of course, what happened to you, what happened to your kids, have so much compassion for things that have happened to other people Wow, wonder what happened to the guy at the grocery store. That’s like yelling at me or being rude. Just if you can keep that in the back of your mind when you have a negative experience and go to oh wonder what happened to them. It just brings you back to lots of compassion. So I think this book I loved the book, obviously, but it really gave me a different perspective and it taught me lots of different lessons and tools that I really want to implement in my own life and hopefully you’ll want to implement them in yours.
I think the main thing is learning about your nervous system and having compassion when you do things that are out of the ordinary for you, and it makes sense, of course, why, especially when you’ve experienced betrayal, we do lots of things that we think I can’t believe I did that. So thanks so much for listening. If you like this podcast, share it with your family and friends and I will talk to you next week. If you want to learn how to live happily even after, sign up for my email at hello at lifecoachjenwith1ncom. Follow me on Instagram and Facebook at Happily Even After. Coach, let’s work together to create your happily even after.
