Friends. Isn't it fascinating how relationships bring us immense joy but also profound heartache? There are dance of emotions yet how often do we truly, deeply, consciously invest in the relationship we have with ourselves and loved ones? That investment, that time and that energy is the most powerful gift in you could ever bestow upon yourself and those you love.
As life didn't give us a manual on handling emotions and communication challenges, we also weren't taught the art of building romantic ties or how to deeply love and value ourselves. But I'm here to share more life affirming, relationship enhancing wisdom with you all. And now you can also find this transformational content pouring onto YouTube and Instagram. Dive into the show Notes to connect with all the magic. Here's for growth, love and endless learning. Hi and welcome.
This is Nicola Beer and in this episode I'm going to be discussing how to handle triggers after an affair Moving beyond emotional Turmoil Infidelity can be one of the most devastating experiences in a relationship, leaving emotional scars that feel impossible to heal. When someone you love betrays your trust, it can spark a whirlwind of intense emotions, anger, sadness, humiliation, fear and an overwhelming sense of loss.
Whether you're a man or woman experiencing the pain of betrayal, you might find yourself struggling with emotional triggers, moments where memories or events flood you with overwhelming feelings or sometimes images. It's easy to get caught up in managing these triggers by avoiding places or things where you can be triggered. However, solely focusing on managing or avoiding triggers often isn't the most effective way to heal.
Instead, the key lies in addressing the underlying emotional pain that may have been awakened by the affair. This emotional pain may or may not predate the affair. It could be linked to childhood relationships and experiences, previous betrayals, patterns of abandonment, fear of abandonment, and patterns of broken trust. It could also be directly tied to the cheating itself.
Regardless of its origin, the focus must be on releasing the emotional pain and dealing with the perceptions and beliefs around it. In this episode, we're going to explore why focusing on triggers isn't enough and how to process and release the emotional pain that lies beneath them. I will also provide practical tips to help you begin your journey of healing, helping you move beyond just coping with triggers.
Discovering that your partner has been unfaithful can feel like the ground beneath you has been ripped away. The emotions that follow rage, shame, despair can all be consuming. Many people find themselves trapped in a cycle of obsessive thoughts, replaying scenarios, or imagining what happened during the affair.
This is especially true if the cheetah has not shared the information fully with you, or you had to find out the information in bits over a period of time and you didn't get the full extent of the infidelity until much later. Both triggers, and even small reminders like a text message alert, a romantic scene on TV or a song, can send you spiraling back into the raw pain of betrayal. And so can conversations on needs, trust and sex send you into a realm of unease.
However, while these triggers might feel like the primary issue, they're often a reflection of something much deeper. The emotional pain that you're experiencing might not be limited to the betrayal alone. It could be tied to long standing wounds, such as not having your emotional needs met as a child, where a parent is critical, preoccupied with work or an addictive pattern, or emotionally unavailable or unable to deal with your emotions.
And as a child, then there's being cheated on in previous relationships, or having your trust broken in previous relationships. And because cheating challenges your self esteem and sense of identity, it can reawaken so many other times where you felt not good enough, or where you were perhaps neglected, or felt neglected or unappreciated. It's really rare for infidelity not to trigger previous pain.
Understanding that the affair might have simply reignited previous emotional pain is a crucial realisation in the healing process. To better understand why focusing on the triggers is not enough, we can turn to Dr. Gabor mate's loaded gun metaphor. He explains that a trigger is like a tiny mechanism on a loaded gun, a small part that sets off a much larger, more dangerous reaction.
The real issue is not the trigger itself, but the ammunition that's inside the gun, the emotional pain and the unresolved wounds that we carry. When an event like your partner's infidelity sets off a trigger, it's merely igniting this deeper emotional ammunition that needs to be explored. The source of this pain could be childhood experiences, feelings of inadequacy or or rejection from previous relationships. Or it could be directly linked to the betrayal itself.
The key point is that the trigger is not the problem. The emotional pain, the unhealed wounds, are what need attention. As Eckhart Tolle aptly advises, be at least as interested in your own reactions as in the people and situations that evoke those reactions. This approach encourages us to look inward and inquire about the deeper wounds that are resurfacing when we are triggered by betrayal.
Instead of just managing the triggers, we need to get curious about the pain itself, its origins, its intensity, and how to process it. Emotional pain after an affair has many dimensions. Sometimes the intense reaction to infidelity is deeply connected to unresolved childhood experiences. For example, being bullied at school, picked on for how you look or what you wore, or some other things that can lead to a sense that you're not good enough.
Painful rejection, humiliation and the affair can reawaken experiences like that. Or growing up in a household where perhaps your parents weren't good at dealing with emotions, they were busy all the time, and you again felt not good enough, perhaps neglected or not seen for who you are.
Sometimes parents can be so focused on making sure that we're really good at school and comparing us to our siblings or wanting the best for us, pushing us maybe to do different activities and things that we can feel that we're only loved if we do certain things, if we achieve certain things. And these hidden messages can really affect self esteem.
And infidelity really can challenge, if not tear apart someone's sense of identity, their sense of self worth because they were promised that they would love them, be faithful to them and only have intimate relations with them, only share loving messages or sexting messages with them. And then obviously being cheated on changes that and it can be a shock to the system.
Infidelity can really reopen those wounds, really can trigger any times you felt not good enough, not wanted, unlovable can come to the surface. And then there's also previous romantic relationships, being rejected for a school promise, being cheated on in a previous relationship, a previous relationship ending, and then you finding out that your partner has moved on really quickly doesn't even need to be cheating. So all of these things can be reawakened.
Any negative words said to you in previous relationships can also come to the surface. Or any relationship, whether it's a friendship or an argument with a family member. Hurtful words that other people have said about you in the heat of an argument can also resurface. And that's also why it can also just be to do with the pre the current relationship, the present relationship.
If you've had lots of arguments where negative things have been said, it can reawaken and help you to remember all of those horrible things that you've said to each other. Perhaps it can leave you to question your relationship and there may be other forms of trust broken in the relationship which can then reignite the unsafeness in in your relationship.
For example, times when you've been lied to about a partner smoking or spending something so it can re really resurface and you can question do I even know this person? Am I safe. And that's what our nervous system is always doing. Our nervous system is always scanning for are we safe? And when you've had an experience where you've been cheated on, of course you don't feel safe.
And then after that you can be consistently looking for signs that you might not be able to trust your partner, you might not be safe in the relationship, you might not be secure in the relationship. And the problem with this is that we become so hyper vigilant, we're just looking for evidence that we're not safe or looking for signs to check are we safe? And this is a natural response and it can just be so turned up.
After you find out that your partner's cheated, it can literally just take over your everyday thinking and then your attention is drawn to negative things. And then this of course affects your, your mind and your body. People feel absolutely drained. They feel scared that they've lost who they are. They think, who am I now? Acting like this, this isn't me. And they can be really scared that they're never going to be like themselves again.
And of course that's a real fear, of course, that many people have. And you can, you absolutely can. But you need to heal the emotional pain. And often it's not just the emotional pain in the current relationship we need to look back and also to look at what do you believe about why the affair happened? What do you believe about yourself for staying? What do you believe about yourself for this happening?
Because our beliefs are and the negative thoughts that we have affect our feelings, affect our behavior, affect our experience of life. So all of these need to be examined. So if you're struggling to trust again, struggling to let go, you're not alone. You may really want to let go. You may think, I really want to stop thinking about it, but your mind that's trying to protect you keeps going back there and you just feel stuck in a loop. You can't really move forward.
Regardless of where the pain comes from. The goal is to release it and deal with the perceptions and beliefs that surround it. When someone cheats it, it can confirm fears that you weren't worthy of love, or that you're always be abandoned or that you're not good enough, as I've mentioned, and those perceptions need to be examined. As often our perceptions aren't true and yet they can have such a power over our experience of life.
In healing, one of the first steps I explore is the feelings, then beliefs, and then fears. Once the cheater and the person cheated on are clear on these, moving past the affair becomes possible if a person doesn't look at their thoughts and their thinking and their behaviour and hope that with time everything's going to be better. They tend to get stuck because all time does is pass. It's only actions within time that help people to heal.
So the next time you're triggered or think about the cheating, stop and ask yourself, what am I believing to be true? What am I making this situation mean about me? What am I perceiving is true? For example, one lady I worked with recently said that the cheating and her deciding to stay with her husband meant that she was a fool, she was too trusting, too weak, that she was unwanted, that she was unloved, that she was not good enough sexually.
All of these negative thoughts about herself made the discovery and healing process far more difficult. When in actual fact, the cheating didn't mean any of these things because it wasn't about her. It was about her husband and his low self esteem and what was going on in his life at the time. So it's important to examine what fears you have about the presentation and the future, what beliefs you have about yourself, what judgments you're making about yourself. So let's look at the fears now.
So some of the most common fears of people I work with is fear of being alone if it doesn't work out and if they break up. Fear that if they take them back that they're going to do it again. Fear that they don't love themselves if they agree to make it work. Fear that they can never enjoy sex again fully because they'll be thinking about the other person or comparing their body to the other person. Fear that they'll never get over it.
Fear that it's changed them forever into an insecure person that they don't recognize. Fear that they can't trust anyone ever again. Fear that they'll feel stuck and trapped like they do now for a long time or forever. Fear that if they leave the marriage that their children will be harmed. Fear of making a wrong decision in staying or leaving, where they fear that they're going to regret staying or they fear that they regret leaving.
And so they're constantly in that stuck phase of what will they regret more? And in my breakthrough process, both with the person that has cheated and the person that's been cheated on, we explore these beliefs, these emotions, these fears, and we go through them one by one, looking at are they true, are they helpful? What can you learn from them? Because once you do that, once you start to unravel and start to process things bit by bit.
Then the healing will come and you'll feel free and you'll feel better and you'll be able to move past it. What keeps people stuck is because it's just so many negative thoughts, so many negative beliefs, so many fears, so many different emotions like anger, sadness, fear, guilt, shame, regret, betrayal, abandoned, loneliness. And you can't process all of them at once. They need to be broken down. And part of the journey is acceptance of these different feelings.
And the thing that we don't often realize that it's damaging to ourselves if we don't feel, because the escapism patterns, the addictive patterns, the trying not to feel can cause a lot more pain, anger, shame, sadness, and normal responses to infidelity. But rather than focusing solely on the event that triggered it, okay, you picked up your phone, or I hate this hotel, or focusing on these triggers, this isn't going to help you enough.
It's so important to acknowledge and accept the feelings, process them and move them on. Dr. Gabor Mate emphasizes that the issue is not whether you show your emotion or not, but whether you can experience it and know that you are experiencing it. In other words, it's not enough to just feel angry or hurt. You must consciously engage with those emotions to understand them. Okay, I'm feeling angry because I'm thinking this and I'm feeling this and I'm making it mean this.
And allow them to exist without suppressing them. This might mean sitting with your anger without immediately acting on it, or allowing yourself to cry without pushing the sadness away. By fully feeling the emotion, you allow it to move through you, rather than getting stuck in a loop of avoidance or repression. Pain, as difficult as it is, serves a purpose. It guides us towards much needed healing.
A powerful quote from the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying reminds us, whatever you do, don't run away from your pain. Accept your pain and remain vulnerable. Pain, when embraced and understood, transforms and heals, but when avoided, it only grows stronger. It's that what you resist persists. After an affair, it's easy to fall into the mindset of being a victim, focusing on what your partner did to you and blaming them for all the emotional turmoil that you're experiencing.
And while this perspective is understandable, it keeps you stuck. While going to a friend or a therapist who validates your emotions tells you you have every right to feel that way, that yes, they're to blame for all of your pain that you're going through. It's good to have that validation. But we must go beyond this to grow. If we stay there, then we're not going to emerge from the experience. We're going to stay stuck in the experience.
For example, Fiona came to me because her therapist kept agreeing with her how awful her husband was and how she had every right to feel angry, worried low, and perceive it as a sign that he didn't love her and didn't care for her and didn't respect her, and that she had every right to do whatever she wanted to do to her husband in terms of ignoring him or taking space from him or saying how hurt she was to him, criticizing him.
And this was helpful at first, but it made her feel worse and more alienated from her husband. He had cheated because of his own unresolved insecurities and other things that were happening in his life, and it left her feeling trapped, like she would suffer with this for a long time because she was constantly in this victim mode, which again is understandable. However, if we continuously stay in the mindset of I feel this way because you did this, then we give away our power.
Healing requires reclaiming your emotional power, which means letting go of the idea that your wholeness depends on someone else's actions. You cannot control what happened, but you can control how you engage with your emotions and perceptions moving forward. It's not your fault that this has happened, but it's your responsibility to heal, to learn, and to grow from it. Ask yourself, what beliefs do I hold about this situation? What am I telling myself to be true?
Am I telling myself that I'm not worthy of love because my partner cheated? Am I telling myself that I'm always going to be on edge or never going to trust again because of what's happened to me? Am I assuming that all relationships are doomed to fail? That all men or all women cheat? That you can never have? That true love doesn't exist? These perceptions, often formed in childhood or past relationships, may not be accurate.
By questioning these beliefs and shifting your perspective, you can begin to release the emotional weight that they carry. So now what I'm going to do is share with you some practical tips for handling your emotions as Dealing with emotional pain after infidelity requires more than intellectual understanding. It calls for a compassionate and practical approach. So here are some steps to help you navigate this challenging emotional terrain. First, acknowledge and feel the emotion.
Rather than running from your emotions or minimizing them, allow yourself to fully feel them. Whether it's anger, sadness, or fear, give these emotions space. Ask yourself, where are you feeling them in your body and Sit with them without judgment. Observe them always. Practice self compassion. Be gentle with yourself during this process. Remind yourself that it's okay to feel this way and that healing takes time. Speak to yourself kindly as you would to a really good friend.
Being kind to yourself as you navigate the pain will help you heal a lot faster. And then get curious about the emotion rather than focusing on the triggers. Asking yourself, what is the emotion? Telling me, what message does it have for me? Is the anger covering up, for example, deep sadness or deep fears, Fear that you're going to be hurt again, fear that you're not good enough, all those other fears that I mentioned? Does this pain relate to past experiences of abandonment or rejection?
Or is this just related to the current event? Use this as an opportunity for self inquiry and growth. And then there's releasing the blame, letting go of blaming your partner or yourself. Blame only keeps you stuck in the role of the victim, and blaming yourself is going to make it so much difficult because you need to help yourself to heal. And if you're attacking yourself, blaming yourself, putting yourself down, how can you trust yourself to guide you to healing?
And again, it keeps you stuck. And it also lowers your self esteem. Whereas now is the time where we really need to be building your self esteem and you may want to seek professional support if you're really struggling and you're not feeling that you're moving forward in a positive way. Dealing with infidelity obviously can be overwhelming.
And sometimes guidance can really help you to process your emotions and to find tools in the relationship to become closer, to feel safer, to feel more secure, to communicate, especially around triggers in a much better way. So handling emotional triggers after infidelity is not about avoiding the triggers or blaming your partner for causing them and getting stuck there. It's about looking inward, understanding the deeper emotional pain that's been awakened, and taking the steps to release it.
The pain that you're experiencing, as we discussed, can be from childhood, from previous relationships, or directly from the affair itself. But no matter its origin, the path to healing is through acknowledging, accepting, and then releasing the pain. And healing doesn't mean excusing your partner's actions or pretending that the affair didn't hurt. It means learning to sit with your pain, allowing it to teach you, and ultimately freeing yourself from its grip.
As you begin to work through the deeper emotional wounds that have been triggered, you will find that the power of the trigger diminishes, the emotional charge softens, and you can begin to handle triggers easily. And also the different triggers will lessen and while the road to healing might be difficult, remember that you have the strength within you to navigate it.
By being curious about your pain, compassionate towards yourself, and open to healing, you will regain the emotional resilience that you need to move forward. And if you're struggling right now to create calmness in your life, if you're struggling, is your relationship worth saving or not? If you're going back and forward with this, if you're putting a lot of pressure on yourself, which I know so many people do, to make the decision, shall I stay or shall I leave?
When they're in this huge amount of emotional pain, then my Affair Recovery Pack on my website can help you. It has a tool to create calmness, a meditation that helps you just be at peace in the unknown, which is so hard. It's one of the hardest things, isn't it, in life, being in that unknown? Am I going to be in this relationship or I not? Am I safe? Am I not? Have I changed forever? Have I not? And it really does help to.
To just have some tools to help calm you and to also reflect on your relationship. So it guides you through reflect. I've also found since I created that pack for people that have been betrayed, that the cheaters really love it as well. They find it really helpful to understand and to review the relationship and to get calmness themselves. So you both might find that really useful.
So just go to nicolabeer.com and click on the gifts page and you can also find my Affair Recovery Masterclass, which is a video that talks through how to heal, how to help your partner heal after you've cheated, and then how to move forward as a couple were the steps that are needed, which is often about creating safety, meeting each other's emotional needs, supporting each other through the difficult times, communicating in a really effective, empathetic, compassionate way, and moving forward
with communication. A lot of people find that they get stuck in their communication, maybe in the blame game or maybe going over and over the past, which of course is natural at the beginning of a fair recovery. However, if it continues again and again, it often shows that that person is stuck in their emotional pain.
If you're needing to repeat and you're going over and over the images or the texts or the past, what's happened, it's showing you that, okay, there's some work that needs to be done there to help you let go of it. So the video can guide you on that. If you've enjoyed this show, if you found anything helpful or useful, I'd be so grateful for a rating or review on Apple, Spotify, YouTube. It really helps the show to stay more visible.
And of course, if you have any questions or you'd like to make any suggestions for podcast episodes, please do email [email protected] from my heart to yours. Wishing you an amazing week ahead and until next time, take amazing care of yourself and each other. Dear listeners, today I celebrate you. You are among the few who actively nurture their love journey. It's an act of courage, an act of self love and if today's episode resonated with you, be a beacon for others.
Subscribe, rate and review. Let's spread this love and wisdom far and wide. Craving more? Discover the free [email protected] youm can also find the links to helpful gifts in the show Notes. Do also join our Relationship and Wellness Facebook group. It's a haven where we uplift, support and journey together towards richer, deeper love stories. Remember, you have the power to craft the love story you deserve. Thank you for being with me today and until next time, keep shining and.
Loving with all your heart.