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 and I have an interesting topic. I, as I go about my life, I always am looking for things to talk about. And I honestly don’t know where I heard this, but I heard it and I immediately wrote it down. I thought, I’m gonna do a podcast about this. So after betrayal, many people expect the pain to pass quickly. But what actually happens for most people is they enter in what I’m going to call emotional winter. Everything feels cold and gray and frozen, your joy disappears, your thoughts feel heavy, and you start wondering if this is just how life will feel like forever. Winter isn’t wrong. It’s actually a natural season. But the problem is when we get stuck there. And I was stuck there for years and maybe decades. And I know many of you are too. So that’s why I want to talk about what is emotional winter. So it could look like sadness that feels constant. You wake up already exhausted emotionally, you have rumination loops, your brain replays the affair over and over and over again. Everything feels gray. Things that once brought joy don’t anymore. You feel isolated. You withdraw from friends or your social circles. You have low energy and numbness. You feel sorry for yourself. Not in a judgmental way, just noticing that you’re kind of having your own pity party. You have hopeless thoughts. My life is ruined, I’ll never trust anyone again. I wasted my whole life. In emotional winter, it feels like nothing will ever grow or get better again. So, why this happens, especially after betrayal? First of all, you have experienced betrayal trauma. And so your nervous system becomes very dysregulated. There is a lot of grief after betrayal, and your loss of identity is real. You’re like, who am I? What just happened? Your whole world has changed. Your brain is just trying to protect you. Your brain believes that something life-threatening happened. Remember, our lower brain doesn’t know are we getting chased by a bear or did we just find out our spouse had an affair? They both feel extremely dangerous. So your brain will shut things down to survive. That’s why everything feels frozen. When you experience trauma, we go into fight, flight, or freeze. And many people after betrayal get stuck in the freeze position, the freeze mode. So it’s very normal. So some signs to look for that you’re stuck in emotional winter. Are you still checking your partner’s phone constantly? Are you thinking about the affair all day? Are you feeling triggered about everything? Are you avoiding making decisions? Are you feeling like life is on pause? Are you comparing yourself to the affair partner? Constant anxiety when your phone goes off, waiting for your spouse to fix how you feel. Your life becomes centered around the betrayal instead of centered around you or the rest of your life. So in my own life, I feel like I lived this way for a very long time. And I would call myself, I was in functional freeze. And I know I’ve talked about this before. And so it wasn’t like I was in bed with the covers pulled over my eyes. I was still taking care of my kids and volunteering and doing laundry and taking care of our house. I just felt very stuck and emotionally frozen. I didn’t have a lot of feelings. And I think for me, what started getting me out of this phase was first my brother passed away suddenly. So the grief of my brother dying was so I had no space for any more pain in my heart, in my body. And I think that grief helped start moving me into spring. But ultimately in 2018, when my spouse had another affair, and that affair, I decided to get divorced. And I filed for divorce, even though I didn’t want a divorce. And so I was started feeling myself thinking something has to change. And clearly it’s not my spouse. It’s gonna have to be me. And so I felt myself starting to become unfrozen. And I decided I think I need to get a job outside of my own home. And so I got a job. And then I started talking to other women, not about my spouse or my marriage, just about life. And they started giving me suggestions and they started introducing me to podcasts and books, and I started listening, and I started realizing that I was completely shut down. I started thinking new thoughts and I started this awakening inside of me. And I realized in that moment, like I didn’t have to stay stuck here. And I started freeing myself from this emotionally frozen state that I was in. And the consequences of this were I had years of unnecessary suffering, right? The amount of suffering. And I believed it was just me that had been suffering, but it was really affecting my children. And I see that now, right? Of course, it affected my marriage. I was completely disconnected from myself as well as my spouse, which didn’t help anything, right? But and then it was just a very toxic environment I was living in. But everything looked great, right? Everything looked like everything was great. And I was very emotionally dependent on my spouse’s behavior. And so I gave him control over all my emotions. If he was nice to me, then I felt good. If he was mean to me, then I felt terrible. I believed all the things he thought I was insufficient in, that I didn’t do well. I just would believe them. I didn’t trust myself. I had no idea who I was. And I had just realized I’d been surviving my life. I wasn’t living my life, I was surviving it. And many people think time alone will bring spring, but time doesn’t change your emotional season. You have to have the right tools. So whenever I hear people say like time will heal, it will not. You have to have the tools, you have to start being intentional. And so what helped me was I began, well, I didn’t really realize, I didn’t understand betrayal trauma until after I got divorced. So, and I didn’t understand my nervous system. That really changed everything for me in my healing. And that happened after I got divorced. So for me, it just helped becoming more aware and thinking new thoughts and learning to love myself. That’s really what shifted for me. I started going inward and focused on loving me instead of hating me because I hated me. And I thought my spouse’s behavior was my fault. I believed that. And that really breaks my heart because I know a lot of you believe that too. And it’s simply not true. And so for me, beginning to love myself again, because I didn’t always hate myself. I always liked myself. In high school, I liked myself. I wasn’t one of the kids that struggled in high school. In college, I liked myself. Up until really I started having kids, and my husband started having affairs, was when the hatred for myself happened. And so that really started getting me out of emotional winter and getting me into spring. And then finding coaching. And then after I got divorced, realizing I had a completely dysregulated nervous system and I had experienced betrayal trauma and I got support and all these things really helped me get into, I’m gonna say, emotional spring. Spring begins the moment you decide you want to feel different. So I think that moment for me started in 2018 and then progressed. And in 2022, when I got divorced, I went even more into healing. And now I think I’m living my best life. And I’m maybe I’m in summer. And I just I like to think about it that way. And do I ever have moments of winter? Absolutely, right? I’m human. I have really hard things that happen sometimes with my kids or just in life that are just sad. But the good news is with that, is I don’t stay stuck there. I might have a moment, a day, an hour, a thought that gets me in emotional winter, but I’m never staying stuck there again. I’ll never go back to that place because I know how to regulate my nervous system. I understand that I’m lovable, that I don’t give other people the power over my emotions. I own them myself. And so that’s really powerful when you can learn that and you learn the tools. And that’s what I teach in my coaching. That’s what I help other people do because it’s helped me in my life get out of this emotional winter and into spring and summer and living my best life, which is what I want for you. Some things that emotional spring might look like are not thinking about the affair every hour. Do I ever think about my spouse having an affair? Absolutely. But the thing is, I don’t, it’s not like a dagger to my heart anymore. It’s like, oh, that’s so sad for him. Like so sad for those girls, too, right? That that he would do that. And so disappointing. So I just have like I don’t take any of it personally, and I just kind of feel bad for it. And it’s really disappointing. And but it’s not mine to own. And I had nothing to do with that. But I don’t like dwell on it. Of course, I have a thought about it, right? I do a podcast about this, so I do think about it. Feeling emotionally stable again. I for sure am able now to feel my emotions. Before I just shut them all off, but now I can be sad and happy all in the same day. And I can feel it and name what I’m feeling, and I can be curious about my emotions, and I can laugh again. I find my kids are super funny. And so we can laugh and joke about happy things and sad things. I’ve learned to trust myself again. I trust myself that I will know what’s best for me and my kids and my life. And even in my business, like I trust me to just know. And I know I trust myself to help my clients. I have full confidence that I am going to do my best. And if if I don’t do my best, then I’ll figure out a way to make it better or to make repair if I mess up. So I just have a lot more trust in who I am and what I want. I feel hopeful about my future, whereas before I think I dreaded it. I don’t know. I don’t think I ever thought about my future. I really struggled there. One moment when I started thinking about my future was when we in my marriage, we decided to buy a beach house. And that felt very exciting to me. It’s like I allowed myself to like have that dream. Now I don’t have that dream anymore with that particular beach house, but I always think, like, you know what, I could get a beach house again someday, maybe if I wanted to. And so now I can think about my future. And it feels exciting. It doesn’t feel like scary or I just I do have thoughts about my future. Whereas before I didn’t making decisions from strength instead of fear, one thing I’ve learned is that I’m really a good decision maker. I can make decisions quickly and I just I don’t look back on my decisions. I’m just like, okay, that’s what I decided. Now sometimes my decisions don’t always pan out the way I think they will. But going through what I have gone through has really made me a better decision maker and a confident decision maker. So I think all these things, even though they were really hard for me to get here, they have really blessed my life. Spring doesn’t mean the betrayal never happens. So don’t think, oh, I’m feeling, you know, I’ve moved out of emotional winter into spring. Of course, the betrayal always is a fact, right? It’s not a thought, it’s a fact. I’m gonna say the betrayal is a fact. Um, we could, you know, the type and all the other parts of it are maybe negotiable and maybe we’ll never know, but it doesn’t have to control your life anymore. And that’s the beautiful part about being in spring. So if you feel like you’re living an emotional winter right now, I want you to know something very important. Winter is a season, not a life sentence. You can move through it. And I really want you to. I hope you do. If you want help, I can help you. I can help you as your coach, help you navigate how to get out of the emotional winter that you feel stuck in. Because I have the tools that I’ve created in my program that I teach you. I teach you the tools that have helped me and that have helped many other clients so they can navigate this as well. It will help you move from this stuckness that you feel into more lightheartedness and more peace and calm. Betrayal put many of you into emotional winter. And my job is to help you find your way back to spring. And I hope you do. Thanks so much for listening and 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 1N and take the free quiz. It’s a simple step you can take today toward creating your own happily even after.
