ep 41: Why You Felt More Alive in the Affair Than You Have in Years (with Lauren Tobey)
You probably know what it feels like to live two lives at once.
The one that everyone can see - where you're capable, together, achieving, holding it all together.
And the one underneath, where you feel lonely, disconnected, asking yourself, is this it? Where you stopped being desired. Stopped being seen as anything other than the wife, the mother, the high-flying executive, the one that doesn’t need anything.
And then the affair happened. And even though this feels terrifying to say out loud, you felt more alive than you had in years.
In this episode of The Deeper Love Podcast, I'm joined by trauma-informed coach Lauren Tobey for a conversation about who you actually are underneath the mask of the high achieving good girl you've worn your whole life.
After ten years of marriage, an executive career, and a life that looked enviable from the outside, she found herself numb, divorced, and disconnected. Through her own inward journey she realised there was someone much more real and true that had been hiding underneath all the achievement. And from there she could experience love and connection in a whole new way.
Together, we explore:
Why so many high-achieving women feel numb on the inside while looking impressive from the outside
What the affair was actually doing for your nervous system
How childhood patterns of mirroring and keeping-the-peace taught you to abandon yourself long before your marriage
Why marriages slowly become transactional, and how that quietly sets the stage for everything else
Why talk therapy alone often can't shift what's frozen in the body
The myth of the finish line of healing, and why selling it is doing real harm to women
What becomes possible when you stop running from yourself and start walking towards her
This is a conversation about the woman underneath the mask, and the long, non-linear work of meeting her.
If this resonated
If something in this episode landed, if you recognised the mask, the numbness, the sense of having quietly disappeared from your own life, this is the work I hold space for inside The Sanctuary.
The Sanctuary is my ongoing, gentle space for women in the aftermath of their own betrayal who are tired of holding everything together on their own. It exists for the woman who is doing 'all the right things' but still feels tight, disconnected, and alone inside. For the woman who needs somewhere her body can finally exhale.
Inside The Sanctuary, you're not asked to explain yourself, justify what happened, or earn your place by being forgiven. You are held where you are, while learning how to stay connected to yourself, regulate your nervous system, and live with responsibility without self-abandonment.
You don't have to do this part alone anymore.
About Lauren Tobey
Lauren Tobey is a double-certified trauma specialist, NLP master practitioner, and the creator of the spiral framework, a body of work that helps women understand healing as a non-linear process of returning to themselves again and again.
Her own journey began in 2020 when, after a decade-long marriage, an adoption, and an executive role at a non-profit, she found herself in a complete identity rupture: divorced, dissociated, and unable to locate the woman beneath the high-achiever mask she had worn her whole life. A subsequent layoff a few years later confirmed what she'd begun to suspect: her sense of self had been quietly outsourced for as long as she could remember.
Lauren is the host of The Spiral Podcast and the author of Spiraling Into Control, a book that reframes 'spiralling' from a sign of breakdown into a natural rhythm of human evolution.
You can find Lauren at:
