ep 60: What Does Healing After Your Affair Actually Look Like?

What does healing really look like after an affair?

Not the fantasy of “being fully healed”, not the obsession with timelines, and not the pressure to return to who you were before everything blew apart, but the reality we don’t talk about enough.

In this episode, I’m looking at some of the ideas we have about what healing is supposed to look like after you’ve been the one who cheated.

Maybe you think being healed means you’ll eventually stop feeling guilty about what you did, forget your affair partner, know exactly what you want from your marriage, trust yourself completely, or somehow get back to the woman you were before all of this happened.

I don’t think healing works like that.

For me, healing is much more about who you’re becoming and what happens when real life happens.

Because suffering isn’t proof that you’re taking responsibility. Shame can’t transform you. And you can have an incredibly intellectual understanding of your patterns and still find yourself repeating them when you’re triggered, scared, lonely or disconnected from yourself.

Healing happens in those moments.

It’s noticing yourself starting to disappear in a relationship and doing something differently.

It’s feeling guilt without immediately deciding that its presence means you’re a terrible person.

It’s recognising when an old pattern is showing up before you’re six months down the road wondering how the hell you got there again.

It’s slowly beginning to trust yourself because you’re actually learning how to stay connected to yourself.

I also talk about something I think is REALLY important after an affair: what happens to the parts of you that came alive within it.

Maybe you felt more sexual. More playful. More desired. More free. More alive.

Those parts of you didn’t belong to your affair partner.

They belong to YOU.

Part of this work can be learning how to bring those parts of yourself home, without needing the affair, the secrecy or another person to access them.

So if you’re wondering how you’ll know when you’re actually healing, this episode is for you.

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We talk about:

• Why “being fully healed” is a myth and what healing can actually look like

• The difference between guilt, shame and taking responsibility

• Why understanding your patterns doesn’t necessarily mean you know how to change them

• What happens to the parts of you that came alive during the affair

• Rebuilding self-trust through the small choices you make in everyday life

If you’ve spent years being responsible, capable, accommodating, easygoing or the woman who keeps everything together, while slowly losing touch with your own needs and wants along the way, I think there’ll be a lot in this episode for you.

Ready to go deeper with your healing?

If you can understand so much about why you cheated but still find yourself wondering how the hell do I actually move forward from here?, this is the work we do inside The Healed Heart™.

The Healed Heart is my six-month intimate group programme for women healing after their own affair.

Six months gives us the time to work with what actually comes up in your life while we’re together.

The guilt and shame that can still hit you out of nowhere. The old patterns you understand but still find yourself falling into. Your relationships, your boundaries, your needs, the parts of yourself you may have lost along the way, and what it looks like to begin trusting yourself again.

Because I don’t want you to spend the rest of your life looking backwards at the woman who cheated.

The goal isn’t to get you back to the woman you were before the affair.

It’s to help you become a woman who doesn’t abandon herself in the same ways anymore.

That’s how self-trust gets rebuilt.

The next round of The Healed Heart™ begins Tuesday 13th October.

❤️‍🩹 Find out more about The Healed Heart™: https://www.alexcroxford.com/healed-heart

If you read through the page and think this might be what I need, you can book a Discovery Call with me from there and we’ll talk about where you are, what you need support with and whether The Healed Heart feels like the right next step for you.

Instagram: @iamalexcroxfordWebsite: www.alexcroxford.com