Happily Even After with Life Coach Jen
Happily Even After shares weekly insights and tools to create more fulfilling relationships with yourself, your family and God. Jennifer is a certified life coach that was married for 26 years . She has 4 amazing children and 1 son in law. She doesn’t have it all figured out but she has lots of personal experience and has learned what to do and what not to do in relationships. I help women and men who have experienced betrayal in their marriage or have been divorced learn that their is happiness to be had even when your life doesn't go as planned.
Happily Even After with Life Coach Jen
177: The Seven Stages of Betrayal Healing Roadmap
After betrayal shatters your world, finding your way forward can feel impossible without a map. Where are you on your healing journey? Where do you want to go? And most importantly, how do you get there?
Drawing from both personal experience and professional expertise as a trauma-informed certified life coach, I've created the Betrayal Healing Roadmap – a comprehensive guide through the seven stages of betrayal recovery. Like a GPS for your healing journey, this roadmap helps you identify your current location so you can chart your course toward freedom and peace.
The journey begins with Discovery – that shocking moment when your world implodes and your nervous system goes into overdrive. Your body remembers every detail of this trauma as you cycle through fight, flight, and freeze responses. This quickly leads to the Questioning stage, where your brain desperately tries to make sense of what happened through investigation and rumination. While natural, becoming a "professional detective" ultimately keeps you stuck rather than moving forward.
The third stage introduces the toxic cycle of Blame and Shame, where the unfaithful partner often deflects their shame onto you, and you might absorb it as your own. Recognizing this pattern is crucial for breaking free. Then comes the Grief stage – mourning not a death, but the relationship you thought you had and the future you'd planned. Many try to skip grief, but feeling these emotions, including anger, is essential for healing.
At the Crossroads stage, you face the ultimate question: stay or go? This decision requires clarity that only comes after some healing has occurred. Rushing this choice often leads to decisions made from trauma rather than wisdom. Whether you stay or leave, the Rebuilding stage follows – creating either a new relationship foundation based on honesty and accountability or building your independent life with renewed confidence.
The journey culminates in what I call "Happily Even After" – the Freedom stage where you've reclaimed your joy and peace. Your life is no longer defined by betrayal but by what you've created afterward. You'll still experience occasional sadness or triggers, but you now have the tools to process them without getting derailed.
Ready to find your place on this map and begin moving forward? Take my free quiz at lifecoachjen.com to discover which stage you're in, then let's work together to create your happily even after.
Please follow me on instagram and facebook @happilyevenaftercoach and if you want to see what coaching is all about I offer a free 45 min. clarity call via zoom.
Email me: hello@lifecoachjen.com for any comments or questions.
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My website is www.lifecoachjen.com
Welcome to my podcast. Happily, even After. I'm life coach, jen, I'm passionate about helping people recover from betrayal. I rode the intense emotional roller coaster and felt stuck and traumatized for years. It's the reason I became a trauma-informed certified life coach who helps people like you navigate their post-betrayal world. I have the tools, processes and knowledge to help you not only heal from the betrayal but create a healthy future. Today we begin to help you live happily even after. Hey friends, welcome to today's podcast.
Speaker 1:I've been thinking a lot about this recently and so I decided to create a roadmap of betrayal and I'm calling it the Betrayal Healing Roadmap because, talking to many of you as well as in my own experience with betrayal, as well as in my own experience with betrayal, we don't really know where we're going if we don't know where we are. And so I always kind of think about like a GPS, like thank goodness we have GPS right, I don't really know how we got anywhere before GPS, but we did. We just knew how to get around and anyways. But now we need to know, like, where we are today in our healing or not healing. So then we know where our destination needs to be, where we want to go and what are the steps to get there? Because there are definitely important steps that, if you skip over, your healing will be not complete. And I always like to say we are healing, not healed, because it's true, right, even in my own life, even though I'm at the seventh stage of healing and I'll go over all the stages, I have seven of them that I created. But, yeah, sometimes I go back and I think why, why was this happening? Right, like so, of course, but the thing is I was able to gather the tools in each of these stages, so I'm easily able to recover. Right, I don't get stuck in the mud, as I like to say. Like some of us, we just get stuck where we are and we are unable to move. So I'm going to talk about the seven stages and you know, let you know what I think they are and then how to move through them, because that's our goal right In our healing from betrayal.
Speaker 1:So the first stage is discovery. I call it the shock stage. We have a moment that, if you've been betrayed, you probably remember details what you were wearing, where you were wearing, where you were, what smells were around, little bizarre things that your memory held on to that you can go back there in your mind and your body feels this shock. Right, that's the trauma of finding out your spouse has been having an affair. And so, in discovery whether your spouse tells you or you find a receipt you see a text message, you overhear a phone call, you walk into their office and get a really weird feeling and the secretary is overly friendly with your spouse. You have a friend say hey, I saw your husband last night at this bar or at this restaurant. What's going on? So, however, you found out it's very shocking.
Speaker 1:Right, we might have had a thought like something feels off in our marriage or something feels different, but usually, unless you've experienced betrayal before in this marriage, you don't go to oh, I bet my spouse is having an affair, right, and so we just get a vibe. But until we find out and it's very shocking your world feels shattered, you're confused and you feel like emotionally chaotic At least I did. It's like I felt like I just was a pile of pieces on the floor and how would I ever pick myself back up again? And your nervous system, which I talk a lot about, it's like that's what trauma is. It's like high alert, like every alarm in your body is going off and you want to calm down. And most of us we experience fight, flight or freeze. And many of us we experience fight, flight or freeze. And many of us several of those Like for me, I for sure would always fight Not physically fight, but like yell and scream and like fight for my marriage, like why would you do this? And then freeze, like I can't say anything. I want to just crawl in bed and put the covers over my eyes and over my head and never leave my bed. And so all of those emotions are valid, are real, and that's what happens when you are in the discovery stage and you need to give yourself a moment in this stage. Right, we don't want to stay stuck in there for too long because it's important to move through. So if you are in this stage, I'm so sorry.
Speaker 1:This, in my opinion, well, this is what starts you on this roadmap, right, the path to healing is finding out that you were betrayed. Then the next thing this goes quickly to the questioning stage, or investigation and rumination. So in this stage, you're asked why, how, when, who. You want to know all the answers. You ask all the questions and oftentimes your spouse will just give you little bits of pieces of what they feel that they want to tell you, because oftentimes they say, well, I didn't want to tell you because I didn't want to hurt your feelings, right, which I think is a load of crap. And I hate that reason because it's like you already knew by having the affair that you were going to hurt my feelings, and so that's unavoidable now, and so many of us have to piece our own timeline together and we're searching for truth and ruminating and going down these deep, dark rabbit holes and going to worst case scenario and thinking the worst of the worst and the unimaginable that they might have done with this other person.
Speaker 1:Your brain is trying to make sense of the trauma that it just experienced, and so it is trying to protect you. This is why we do this, because we just felt like we got attacked by a bear, but instead we got attacked by words telling us your spouse is unfaithful, he's been with another person, communicating, emotionally, connecting with, sleeping with, whatever it is, and that feels very dangerous to us. And so of course we question. But this stage, however important, right Chances are, unless your spouse does a full disclosure, you will never know all the details, and sometimes you might not need to know the details. What I always say is you know enough. Just the fact that you know your spouse had an affair is enough to work on your healing. But of course, our brain wants to know more details. I'm very I want to know all the details. What were they wearing? How much money did you spend on them? All those things, for whatever reason. My brain thinks that's very important and your brain might think that too, but it isn't as helpful as you think in your healing.
Speaker 1:And so give yourself lots of space and grace for this stage, but don't get stuck in it Like, don't become a professional detective, like. It ultimately will not serve you. And I know it feels like you need to hold on to all those receipts and pictures or whatever documentation that you have. I get it, I have been there. But ultimately, letting it go can be really freeing and really liberating. And I think, as long as you feel like you know and they know, you know and you're working on, if you are working on your marriage right, a lot of times we don't know at this point what we want to do. But to give yourself some peace, make sure you're not just spending all your time thinking about this, like tell your brain like wait, we're only going to think about this from the hours of 10 and 11 in the morning and then the rest of the day I've got to. I got to do stuff 10 and 11 in the morning and then the rest of the day I've got to do stuff. I can't spend my entire day thinking about this. Or at night, when you wake up at 3 am, you just have a pen and paper by your bed and write it down so you can get it out of your mind and onto a paper and go back to sleep, because sleep is your friend. You need to sleep, especially during this time in your life. Your body needs healing.
Speaker 1:The next stage, the third stage I call it the blame and shame stage, which causes a lot of turmoil. Cheated on you wants to blame you. They want to tell you all the reasons why. They had no other choice because you were too needy, we weren't having enough sex, you weren't creative enough, you didn't cook dinner on time. I don't like the way your body looks because you've given birth to my children and now I'm not attracted to it anymore. So, whatever the reason is, those are their reasons. It is not a reason to have an affair.
Speaker 1:And so you catch yourself in this stage. They want to blame you because they feel shame. And so then you go to shaming yourself. And so then you go to shaming yourself If I was better, if I could have been a nicer, if I wouldn't have been so needy. So we go into shame and then want to blame them Right. And so the ultimate thing, like when you're like what is wrong with me? There is nothing wrong with your spouse that had the affair. That's like higher level. Right now, right in stage three, we're not thinking this. But ultimately they made a choice they're either going to own it and take accountability or they're not. And then now you've got to decide what you want to do. But you need to get out of the blame-shame stage because this will keep you stuck in a cycle that is miserable, and oftentimes the spouse who had an affair hates the shame so much that they just hand it to you, and if you are the kind of person like me, we gladly take it. Oh, let me carry your shame for you, because, heaven forbid, you feel it. So I'm going to carry it for you, along with my own. And so just recognize, when you're in this, that, okay, it's going to feel heavy, it's going to feel chaotic, it's going to feel like you're just going back and forth. Who can we blame? Then we go to blaming the other woman or the other man. We go to blaming the parents, like if they didn't have such terrible childhood, they wouldn't have done this. We go to blaming their job. If they didn't, you know, have to go on all these work trips, they wouldn't have had an affair. So, like, right, pay attention. Who are you blaming? And that is just coming from some sort of shame inside of you that needs to be healed.
Speaker 1:The fourth stage is grief, or the loss stage. Now, the person that you're grieving isn't dead. Usually there are some people that discover their spouse had an affair after they died and that's like, in my mind, even harder to heal, but totally possible. But you're grieving. The thing is, you're grieving the marriage you thought you had. You're grieving the person you thought you married. You're grieving your life as you know it. You're grieving your life as you know it, and grief is heavy and you have to feel all those feelings in order to move through them.
Speaker 1:Most people do not like to feel grief, even when someone passed away. They just want to skip this part. You can't skip it. You have to feel your feelings. And I always envision grief as like a wave, like sometimes it's a huge wave that comes crashing down on you where you feel like you're stuck underwater, and then sometimes it's just this light wave that ebbs and flows and you know it's more manageable and it's okay that you feel sad. That's a valid emotion and you might feel sad for a while. But just give yourself permission to be sad. Stop judging yourself for feeling any type of feeling that you feel in this moment.
Speaker 1:And grief has a lot of anger in it. And for me, I felt like I was always taught like it's not good to be angry, that's, you know, contention isn't healthy, right, we need to be kind, we need to be peaceful. So I really suppressed my anger, but the amount of anger I had for my spouse was significant. And when, ultimately, when I allowed my body and myself to release that anger, I felt like I like lost a thousand pounds, right, I had been carrying that. It was so heavy inside of me and I finally realized like, no, this is valid, this is of course I'm angry. Of course he was having an affair and lying to me and gaslighting me and telling me I wasn't good enough and I was less than him for years, for 26 years, and so of course I had a lot of anger. And so just know, it's okay that you have anger. You've lost your trust in your spouse, so that's very disorienting to think like they're not my person anymore At least not right now Like I thought I could trust them and now can I want to feel safe.
Speaker 1:We had all this. You know the dreams, the hopes, retirement, like, all these plans for me, like to be a grandma None of my kids have kids yet, but eventually, like I wanted to, you know, be a grandma and a grandpa together with my spouse and take our kids on these fun trips and go to Disney and all the things. And I can still do that. But how I envisioned it was not just me doing that alone, it was with my former spouse. And so all these lost dreams we just have to make space for and know that you can recreate new dreams.
Speaker 1:But there's, you know, the denial, like did it really happen? And of course they're in denial right when someone has an affair, they don't really think ahead too much, so they're not really thinking, like, of the consequences. And so when the consequences catch up to them, it's like wait a second, like this isn't fair, like it's not okay that you stop talking to me or that my kids don't like me anymore, like that wasn't supposed to happen. But that's just the denial of it, the anger, the bargaining. Right. We somehow go into bargaining like I'll, you know, I'll forgive you if you stop having an affair, whatever, right, the depression.
Speaker 1:And the ultimate way you know is if you can come to acceptance, to get through grief, accept that this was the way of it, regardless if you stay married or get divorced, and just know grief is not a one and done. Like you don't go through grief and never feel it again, because that's not true. If you've ever known someone you've loved that has passed away, I have a brother that passed away now I think it's going to be almost 12 years ago and every now and again I just have a moment of grief. I miss him and it's not so heavy anymore. But of course and I still have moments of grief with my former husband it's like, oh, it's so sad, like really sad, like sad what he did. I feel bad, but not enough, that like I would want to have stayed married to him, but like it's just still really sad. Sometimes I have experiences with my kids. I'm like it really sucks that your parents are divorced. I'm so sorry.
Speaker 1:So now on to the fifth stage. In my opinion, it's the decision time. This is the crossroads stage and the biggest question that everyone wants to know, and they want to know this at discovery stage, but you're not ready for it. There is do I stay or do I go? And healing. In my opinion, to make a good decision, to make the best decision for you, some healing has to happen. So if you've just like you react from your trauma, meaning like say you flee right, you just run away from the problem, you can do that, but I promise it's going to come back and bite you a hundredfold in your future. You're going to either remarry, jump into a new marriage and marriage similar problems and have you know this path. I see this often. So some healing needs to happen before you make this decision. And there's no rush to make the decision. Even if your spouse is trying to rush you, you can give yourself some time.
Speaker 1:Deciding it quickly is not helpful, but also waiting years and years to make the decision is also unhelpful. You need clarity, you need self-reflection, you need support. This is well all stages. A coach or a therapist are helpful, but in my opinion, this stage well, maybe a few stages back, maybe the blame and shame stage, any of the beginning stages having someone that's a neutral party, helping you navigate how to feel your feelings, how to get out of the blame and shame trap, right, like giving you tools so you can move through this is so helpful.
Speaker 1:But in the stage of decision-making Not that you're asking someone hey, can you tell me the decision I should make? Should I stay married or get divorced? And if someone gives you an answer, what they think, don't listen to them. This is your life, your marriage. You need to decide for yourself. Don't listen to your brother, your sister, your mom, your best friend. You can hear what they have to say and take it into consideration, but you ultimately need to be the one to make the final decision, and so there isn't a right answer.
Speaker 1:I would say most people that discover their spouse has had an affair want to stay married, especially if they've been married for years and even if they are not married. Yet I just talked to a woman the other day and she's getting married in a few weeks and she still wants to get married. So the pull is strong. Love is a strong emotion. I don't think it should be the only emotion making our decisions, but most people do want to stay married. But ultimately that's not always the case and that's not always what happens in the situation. As you dig deep to see, do you want to stay, do you want to go? What is right for you? And I think you really need to focus on that there's lots of questions to ask yourself, lots of things to do to figure this out.
Speaker 1:And then the sixth stage is rebuilding the renewal stage, and really, regardless of whether you decide to stay married or get divorced, there's rebuilding. That needs to happen because if you choose to stay married, you have to basically knock down whatever your marriage was before and rebuild it, create a new foundation of honesty and trust and communication where both partners are committed to growth and the truth, and whatever that looks like for you. You need to really be like clear and focused. If we're going to save our marriage from the betrayal. What is our marriage going to look like now? We can't go in the past. We've got to stay in the present and go into the future and there's rebuilding that needs to happen. If you rebuild through getting divorced, that's a whole other thing, right, you get to create the life that you want and figure out what you want and what you need in your life. I think rebuilding happens through all these stages really because you're beginning to heal and rebuild yourself.
Speaker 1:And I always tell people focus on healing yourself more than you focus on what your spouse is doing or not doing, because as you heal, you're going to have so much more clarity and be able to see are they really trying to make repair? Are they really changing? Are they doing the work? Are they taking accountability, are they taking ownership for what they did? And oftentimes, when we're stuck in the beginning stages of healing, we just want to see what we want to see. We are like in fantasy land still Like, oh look, they were nice to me and they really weren't. They were manipulating you still and trying to make you think what they thought you wanted to think. This is rebuilding as you're when you're gaining your confidence and resilience and self-trust. You're learning tools, understanding your nervous system, learning how to manage your triggers and create emotional safety. This is when you can reclaim who you are and what your roles are and what you want them to be. So I think the rebuilding stage is such a beautiful stage and you get to really decide who you want to be and what you want your marriage to look like or what you want your divorce to look like.
Speaker 1:The last stage I call the happily even after or the freedom stage, because this is the goal, right? The goal is we want to feel peace, we want to feel freedom and we want to create our happily even after, because what we thought was our life is no longer that life is gone. So what are we creating? And for our future self, we want peace, we want freedom, we want joy, we want confidence in ourself as well as others. And in this moment, you can feel like your life isn't defined by what happened to you, but instead what you're creating and who you want to become. So I hope this was helpful.
Speaker 1:In my mind, I've just been thinking how do I get people to move through the stages, to move through their healing, and I think it's helpful to know. Okay, this is where I'm at and this is where I ultimately want to go, and I think everyone that has been betrayed. They want to find freedom, they want to find peace, they want to find joy again, and I just want to tell you that it's totally possible. And just because you get to your happily even after, doesn't mean that you're not going to feel sad sometimes, you're not going to feel irritated, mean that you're not going to feel sad sometimes, you're not going to feel irritated. You're, of course, going to feel negative emotion, but the thing is you have the tools now that you know how to do it. You know how to feel all your feelings. You know how to navigate when you start ruminating about something that happened 10 years ago, you know how to get through it quickly, easily, and it's not going to set you back as much as it did before. Anyways, I hope this was helpful.
Speaker 1:If you want help moving through these stages, I would love to help you. You can always sign up for a free call. You can go to my website and I have a free quiz that you can take that tells you what stage of betrayal you're in. So go, check out my website and take the free quiz and I will talk to you next week If you want to learn how to live happily even after. Sign up for my email at. Hello at lifecoachjen with one n dot com. Follow me on Instagram and Facebook at happily even after coach, let's work together to create your happily even after.