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. So today, as you’re listening to it, it is March 9th, which would have been my former spouse’s and I 30-year anniversary. And I say that because, first of all, anniversaries I think are hard, especially after betrayal. And for me, how I’ve reconciled my anniversary. And just to note, like I am sad that my marriage ended the way it did, but I am not sad that I am divorced. I was sad at the time and I was really scared. But looking back, it’s almost been four years and I’m very grateful. And I’ve done a lot of work to get to this place. But for me, I’ve labeled my anniversary as my family versary because I feel like the moment I chose to marry my spouse is the moment that then I began to create my family. And my family consists of myself and my kids and their spouses or future spouses and my future grandchildren. And that is the moment and what I like to think about on this day. So it’s a happy day for me now. It’s not necessarily sad. However, today I’m going to talk about suffering after betrayal and divorce. There is so much suffering happening in our world for many reasons, but I’m going to focus obviously on betrayal. And I’m going to share a personal thing that I found recently when I was digging through my stuff. But just remember, you get to decide and reframe your anniversary or any painful dates that you have in any way that you want. You can redefine them. You can, I have a couple I’m working with, and they’re going to renew their marriage vows and, you know, rebuild. They’re rebuilding their marriage. And that can be a beautiful thing. So you get to choose whatever you want to do. And there are, of course, painful dates and painful moments, but you get to be in charge of that. And you can choose whatever you need to do to make you feel more empowered around a date. So I wrote a lot of journals. I wrote a lot. That was part of my healing. And this journal entry was written in 2018. And at the time I was getting divorced. My spouse was having an affair. And I’m sharing this with you because I want you to hear my pain. And then I’ll tell you a little bit about what happened. So this was about eight years ago that I wrote this. I’ve got to write my feelings. Otherwise, I may go crazy. My heart feels like it’s shattering in tiny pieces. At times I can’t breathe. You are at our beach house with her. I’m dying. You are introducing her to your hometown and to your mom. It’s killing me. I want to hate you, but all I can think of is how much I love you. How much I don’t want a divorce. How much I want her to go away. And we can get back to our life again. How much I wish things could be different. You finally put her name in your phone. That must mean something since you were trying to say it meant something not to have her name in your phone. You tell her you love her, you tell me you love me. Why can’t I hate you? I feel like you are destroying our life, our family, our future. Three months is all you have been with her, and you’re giving up everything for her. Why? I can’t understand. I’m trying to just be your friend. That’s so hard. I’m so hurt. I don’t know how to get through the pain. It’s unbearable at times. I feel sick to my stomach constantly. Why is this happening? Why can’t you just let her go? Come back to me and your family. We love you. We want you. We need you. I hate you. I hate you. I hate you. I have so much anger and hurt inside me. You are destroying your life along with mine and the kids. I wish you were dead. It would be so much easier. Now that letter, I read it a few days ago and it was rough. And it’s like 10 pages long, and that was one and a half pages. But I just want you to know I feel your pain. I have been where you have been right now, and you’re suffering. And I totally know that it’s possible to heal because I don’t feel that pain anymore. I don’t feel like I’m suffering anymore. And so I just want you to know it’s possible. I wanted to read that. I knew that was going to be hard to read because those feelings take me back eight years ago. And I think I remember feeling that way. But just know you don’t have to be stuck in suffering forever. So in between reality and expectations is suffering. So I want you to think about this. Okay. If you need to draw something and write everything that you’re suffering about, I want you to know it’s in between the reality of your life and what your expectations were. And I’m going to read you some examples that I thought of. When you discover the betrayal, you expected your spouse to be honest and faithful. And the reality was they were not. You suffer from all the thoughts and feelings that causes, right? Your reality is different than what you expected. You expected to live in a safe and stable environment. Your reality is your spouse wants a divorce to be with their affair partner. You expected to be a stay-at-home mom, and your reality is you are getting divorced and now need to get a job. You expected if your spouse ever cheated on you, it would be an easy decision to leave your marriage. The reality is you still love them and want to give them another chance. And there are so many more that we could name. Not all of these applied to me, but I just was going off of my clients, as well as yes, some of them for sure applied to me. But consider like what is your reality today? And what were you expecting to happen? And in between that, no, there’s a lot of suffering. And I’m not saying it’s wrong to suffer. I just want you to acknowledge this is why you are suffering. And I’m going to help you be able to move through that. So remember, the pain isn’t just what happened, it’s the collision between what should have been and what is. And our brain really struggles with reconciling this. If you’ve ever heard of Viktor Frankel, he was a man who was in concentration camps during World War II, right? Nazi Germany. And he’s written some books and he has a lot of famous quotes. And I just love his quotes because the thing is, he was in a really horrific place. And yet he has such a beautiful outlook on life and pain and suffering. If anyone has suffered, it was Viktor Frankl. In some ways, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice. And I think for sure putting meaning to your pain. For me, putting meaning to my pain is helping people, other people, not only myself, but other people heal from betrayal and other people find meaning to their life. That has been such a blessing in my life. Doing this podcast has been able to give me a voice, which I lost in my marriage, and giving me a voice to heal and to make my suffering important and matter. When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. And this is what true healing looks like. We, of course, want our spouse to change. We want them to be different. We want them to stop having an affair. We want them to be honest with us. But when that doesn’t happen, now what are you gonna do? How are you going to heal your heart, regardless of what they’re doing or not doing? And that is where your power lies. And that is where you will change your life forever. Everything can be taken from a man, but one thing, the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. And I love this because regardless of your circumstance, and I know you think it is your wife or your husband, if they would be different, you could feel better. Probably. But reality is sometimes our circumstances are just our circumstances. And what are we gonna think about them and how are we gonna feel about them? And I’m not trying to have you say, like, oh, let’s just be happy about everything. No, we need to feel all the pain, but then what? Are we gonna stay stuck in that pain or are we gonna move forward and do something else and choose something else? And I want you to choose something else and find happiness and beauty. There is so much of it in life, and so many of us get just stuck in the pain, and that’s a miserable place to be stuck in. But just know you didn’t choose the betrayal, of course you didn’t. You do choose how you relate to reality now. So acknowledge, like you didn’t choose for this to happen, but now what? What are you choosing today? And I know this is hard, this is not easy stuff, this takes a lot. I mean, the letter that I read you that was eight years ago, right? And so it it takes time and a lot of work, but it is totally possible. Meaning doesn’t justify the pain, it helps you survive it, right? Um you’re not saying like, oh, I I’m so glad that I felt all this pain. No, but when you put meaning to it, when you can understand it, it helps you move through it and get through it. So when you’ve experienced betrayal, you know it’s called betrayal trauma. It’s a very traumatic thing. And instead of shaming yourself for feeling any of these things, I just want you to understand them, right? Of course, like your whole identity collapses, right? I’m married to so-and-so. This is who my spouse is, right? Everything collapses and changes. It’s important to acknowledge that. Reality is very confusing. And you probably have a lot of anxiety, depression, PTSD symptoms, right? That’s trauma. So just understanding that that’s normal is going to help you move through it. Things that are gonna happen to you physically, possibly, is a cortisol overload, a lot of stress and anxiety in your body, in your nervous system. You’re gonna have trouble sleeping. A lot of times we disassociate and we want to either, you know, ignore the reality of what we do by disassociating, or we go into fight or flight. That is our nervous system. Your body is responding normally to something abnormal, right? So it’s doing its job to help protect you. And so just knowing that, right? I did not know that for years. I thought, what’s wrong with me? Why am I acting like this? I’m acting like a crazy person. I was not crazy. My body was just trying to protect me. So often in these moments, and I think in marriages in general, we have what I call a manual, right? A manual of how we need to be as a spouse and how our spouse needs to be. We have manuals for our next door neighbors, we have a manual for our mother-in-laws, we have a manual for our kids. But oftentimes, first of all, we have no control. Remember, I talked about control. We don’t have control over what they do or don’t do. So it can be really frustrating. And it’s not going to serve you well. Our suffering increases when we demand reality follow our manual, right? When we demand that our kids pick up their clothes and clean their room every day, like or make their bed, right? We’re gonna just create more suffering and and issues for ourselves because we want them to act a certain way. And it’s going to disconnect us from our kids if we are demanding and controlling, right? It’s it’s an unhelpful way. So the more you can recognize your manuals in your life and who you have them for, that is going to help free you and help you let go of them. My suffering wasn’t just that he cheated, it was that he wasn’t following the manual I had for a husband, right? Husbands are honest, husbands are loyal, husbands want nothing more than to tell the truth. Or they, of course, who wants to get divorced, right? They, when I married my husband, I thought it was forever, not for just 26 years, right? I wanted to be married forever. So this is where my manual came into play, and it was painful to let go of that. Remember, when you accept reality, it doesn’t mean that you approve of what’s going on. It’s just you have to accept it in order to move through it. Acceptance is choosing peace over constant emotional pain. The more you resist accepting your reality, the more pain you will feel, guaranteed. And sometimes we just can’t get there. So it we just have to accept, okay, we’re gonna, we’re willing to feel more pain, and maybe we need to feel it. I don’t know. When your spouse wants a divorce and you don’t, this is so hard, right? I at that time in 2018, I filed for divorce, not wanting a divorce at all. And I fought like hell to keep my marriage. And the truth is, I didn’t get divorced, right? We reconciled, supposedly. I reconciled. I was like, oh, we can work on our marriage. We can, you know, all the things that I didn’t do that he said, you know, the long list of all the things, you know, in his manual that I needed to be a better wife. I for sure I took every one of those and thought I could fix it. But guess what? Guess who never changed? He didn’t. And so ultimately when we got divorced, I was ready to be done. I was over it. I’m like, I am done. I do not deserve to be treated like this. And so it is hard. Remember, there it it’s of course you’re going to feel grief and fear and anger and desperation. And just acknowledge, like, okay, many of you that I work with, many of you are getting divorced or have been divorced, and there’s a struggle because it’s not what you wanted. But ultimately it is what happened. And so then now what? Just remember, it’s not helpful to beg, to make threats, to make fear-based decisions, right? That’s just going to hurt more than help. If you can focus on if you’re getting divorced, how to have a more emotional regulation, how to create routines in your life. Get information. I always tell people it’s okay, call an attorney, know what your rights are. And knowledge is power. That’s going to help you calm down. Because if you’re listening to your spouse, especially if they’re trying to control you with money or threaten you with the kids, that can feel very scary. So get your own information. Don’t rely on them to tell you what is or isn’t okay in divorce. Get a support system. So important. Self-care is important. Don’t think of it. This is going to help you survive. It is not a luxury. It is not selfish to take care of yourself. And I’m not telling you in, I mean, massages, facials, all those things are great, but I’m just talking about eating, getting sleep, taking a nap if you need it, snuggling up on the couch and just crying. You know, whatever you need for self-care is important. Texting a friend, watching something just to take your mind off and give you some relief, right? Don’t judge yourself. That’s important to give yourself some self-care. You cannot force someone to stay, but you can protect yourself in a divorce. So standing up for yourself, what you want and desire matters. The last thing I want to help you understand in your suffering is practice reframing your story. Okay. This restores your agency because you’re now reframing what your next chapter is going to be. We each have a choice, even if we didn’t want the divorce and we didn’t want our spouse to lie and cheat, we can choose who are we going to be now in this situation that we didn’t expect and it is our reality, right? So we have lots of different things going on, right? We didn’t want, of course, our spouse to lie and have an affair, but now that they did, now what? Who are we going to be? How are we going to help ourselves? How are we going to become something else? What are we going to learn so we don’t go out after we’re divorced and marry someone just like our spouse? It happens all the time. We have to pay attention. We have to learn these things so we don’t repeat this. Remember to have acceptance for your story and for yourself. You can rebuild your confidence. You need to learn how to trust yourself and practice reframing your story in little moments, in little areas, right? We don’t reframe our story all at the same time. We just have to practice and feel like, okay, can I believe that? This season might not be what you wanted, but it can still become meaningful. And I believe that because I’ve seen it in my own life. I had so much fear around getting divorced that I stayed in a very unhealthy, dysfunctional marriage and created a lot of pain for myself and a lot of suffering. And I can’t go back and change what was because I don’t have a, you know, magic time machine and I can’t do that. So I just have to make peace with it. But now, what do I want to be? Who do I want to be? And what does my future look like? That’s what I have control over. And I don’t have to suffer anymore. I don’t have to take those painful stories and still create problems in my life with them. So, in closing, I just want to acknowledge those of you that are in active suffering, that there is hope. It is possible to stop suffering. And you can do that the more you lean into your reality. And it just because you’re in the suffering moment of this, it doesn’t mean you failed. Of course, this is normal. Suffering is normal, but it doesn’t have to be long lasting and forever. Healing is totally possible. There’s not a timeline on healing. I know we wish it could go faster than it does, but sometimes it does. It can go slow and then fast. But you have to have the right support. You need to have outside help helping. You. This is not something you can do on your own. It will take much longer and probably won’t be as effective because you don’t have the right tools. You need the right tools. You need the right person helping you get through this. And I personally believe having a betrayal coach is the best person because I’ve been there before. I know exactly where you are now and how to get you out of it. But you have to be willing to listen and practice and try new things and see what tools work for you and what don’t. And that can be really empowering. Pay attention. Where am I resisting reality and what is that costing me? Take a notebook right now, unless you’re driving, but maybe later on tonight, and write that down. Where are you resisting reality? And what is that costing you? Because I guarantee it’s costing you something. Anyways, I hope this podcast was helpful. Have a beautiful day. And if you liked this, please leave me a review so other people can find this and they can get help for betrayal and healing as well. Have a beautiful day. 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.
