ep 45: What Nobody Told Me About The Year After The Affair
Everyone talks about the moment the affair comes out.
Nobody talks about what happens next.
In this episode, I'm going inside the year that broke me far more than the affair itself - the year I spent trying to repair, trying to make it right, and completely disappearing in the process.
Because here's what I know now that I didn't know then: telling the truth was not the lowest point. The lowest point was the twelve months that followed, when I gave him everything - every answer, every conversation, every piece of my nervous system - because I had decided, in the moment I saw his devastation, that I owed him all of me.
I thought absorbing his pain was the same as taking accountability.
It wasn't, it was self-abandonment but it just looked different. And it was more painful than anything that had come before it.
In this episode, I share what I wish someone had told me: there is a difference between listening to how you've hurt someone, and using their pain to punish yourself. And if you don't know that line exists, you will cross it again and again without ever knowing you're doing it.
If you're in the repair phase right now - trying to hold it all together, trying to make it right, shrinking yourself around his moods - this episode is for you.
In this episode, we explore:
Why the year after the affair broke me more than the affair itself
The unconscious decision I made the moment I saw his devastation, and how it cost me everything
Why I thought absorbing his pain was the same as accountability (and why it wasn't)
The difference between being answerable for what you did, and using someone's hurt to punish yourself
Why those two-hour crying sessions on the sofa were re-traumatising us both, and what we actually needed instead
How self-abandonment continued (and amplified) in the repair phase, and I didn’t have a clue
Why the shame of the affair made me believe I had no right to need anything at all
The sneaky thing about self-abandonment: it doesn't announce itself. It just feels like being a good person.
The one question to ask yourself if you're in the repair phase right now
If this episode landed
If you recognised yourself in the shrinking. In answering every question at whatever cost to yourself. In the part of you that believes you have to earn your way back to being allowed to need something. I see you, and I know how hard this is to navigate alone.
The reason I built The Sanctuary is because when I was in the midst of the aftermath, I longed for a safe place to go where I wouldn’t be judged, and I could heal with other women who understood the pain I was in.
The Sanctuary is my private, ongoing community for women in the aftermath of an affair. Join today and have immediate access to the sisterhood.
You don't have to keep doing this alone.
