202: You Can Stop Drinking Emotional Poison And Begin To Heal

What if the stories you sip all day are what keep you hurting? A simple image—villagers walking for hours to collect water that still makes them sick—becomes a powerful guide for life after betrayal. We explore how many of us fetch emotional “water” from the nearest source: rumination, self-blame, revenge fantasies, and doomscrolling that confirm our worst fears. It feels like control. It feels familiar. But like contaminated water, it quietly weakens you.

We draw a clear line between clean pain and dirty pain. Clean pain is the honest grief of naming what died: a marriage, a trusted version of your partner, a future you planned. It hurts, but it heals. Dirty pain is the optional layer piled on top: replaying the story, judging yourself, waiting for someone else to change so you can finally feel okay. Both are intense; only one leads to peace. With real-world examples from humanitarian work in East Africa and years of coaching clients through betrayal, we show how to stop drinking emotional poison and start drawing from a deeper well.

You’ll learn practical tools to reclaim agency: how to set firm, self-respecting boundaries; how to audit social media and online advice that inflames anxiety; how to feel your feelings without spiraling; and how to shift thoughts from global self-attack to grounded truth. We also talk about spiritual resources as living water—practices and communities that steady your nervous system, clarify values, and help you begin again with integrity. Healing doesn’t mean the pain vanishes overnight. It means you stop poisoning yourself while you heal.

Ready to trade survival for peace? Press play, then share one boundary you’ll set this week. If this helped, subscribe, leave a review, and send the episode to someone who needs clean water today.

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Email me: hello@lifecoachjen.com for any comments or questions.

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Transcript

Africa Story Sparks A Metaphor

Contaminated Emotional Water

Clean Pain Versus Dirty Pain

Choosing Clean Water And Tools

Beware Unhealthy Online Sources

The Well Is Beneath Your Feet

Spiritual Living Water

Invitation To Heal And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Welcome to Happily Even After Betrayal with Life Coach Jen. This podcast is where we talk about betrayal and divorce and what it actually looks like to live through those experiences while still being a parent, a grandparent, a partner, or just a human trying to keep it all together. If your heart feels shattered, your nervous system feels dysregulated, and your future feels unclear, you're in the right place. Here we focus on understanding what happened so you can rebuild your identity, restore your confidence, and find peace. So you can create your happily even after one episode at a time. Hey friends, welcome to today's podcast. So I have a friend and her family, they have a nonprofit in Kenya. And she wrote an email to our neighborhood. And I was like, it was like one of those emails that you get, and you're like, oh my gosh. And for whatever reason, my mind went to it just connected it with betrayal and divorce. And I myself, in 2021, 22, Christmas of 2021, I was still married and we took our family to Uganda, Africa on a family humanitarian experience. It was amazing. And we helped people there get clean water. We painted, we helped a school get ready because if you remember, it was still during COVID a little bit. They had shut down all their schools. So they were trying to get them back up and ready. We taught some hygiene classes like the importance of washing your hands and so we don't spread COVID. And so I have experienced going to Uganda. And then also, we also did actually go to Kenya and go on a safari and met with these different tribes. It was, it was really amazing. It was such a beautiful way to spend our Christmas with our family. We bought goats for some single women. Their husbands had died, so that they can, you know, feed their family. And so, anyways, and I think I've done an episode on this, but so I feel, you know, connected and I can totally get the concept because it was amazing, these people, how hard they work and also how happy they are. So I am going to share some of the email and some of my analogies with you. This morning I received an email from a friend who runs a nonprofit in Kenya. She and her family helped bring clean water to villages where people don't have easy access to it. She shared that many villagers wake up around 4 a.m. every single day and make up to five trips just to collect water. Each trip can take up to an hour. The water they collect is often contaminated, but they do it anyway, over and over again, because survival requires it. And what struck me the most wasn't just how hard it is, it was that despite all of it, many of them are still grateful, still hopeful, still moving forward. That image stayed with me and it made me think about you and me. And so true. Like I remember the people in Africa were so happy. And I'm like, you have nothing, and you are so happy compared to us here in the United States. We have so much, and we are plagued with depression, with anxiety. And I don't want to compare us because we have different life, different circumstances. But when I started thinking about this, I just thought of this metaphor. So many of us are drinking contaminated water emotionally. This is emotionally we're doing this, especially after betrayal. And how we do this is we replay the story over and over again. And most of us don't even know the whole story. So we make it up, and it's really, really bad and dark and heavy. We live in self-judgment. If we could have been different, then they wouldn't have done this. Or we judge them, our spouse who had the affair. So we get stuck in this judgment. We stay stuck in anger, shame, self-pity, or resentment. And I'm not saying, of course, these are all normal emotions, but when you get stuck in it, that's when it becomes a problem. That's when we're contaminating our soul and filling it with dirty water. We wait for someone else to change so we can finally feel better. I meet clients like this all the time. When I talk to them, I offer a free call. So all sorts of people call me and talk to me. And sometimes that's the only moment in those 30 minutes that I'll ever meet with them because maybe they're not ready to change, but I ask them how they're doing, and all they tell me about is what their spouse isn't doing. And that will keep you stuck because remember, we don't have control what they're doing. We only have control over ourselves. I want to be very clear. All these emotions are normal. So don't judge yourself for feeling this way. And they make sense. They are your human response to something that shattered your sense of safety and trust. And the problem is most of us do not feel them. We're just resisting them, we're avoiding them, we're reacting to them. So the problem is when we stay stuck in these emotions, when we keep drinking the same emotional water day after day, the thoughts, the loops, the resentment, that slowly drains us instead of searching for something cleaner, healthier, and more life-giving. A concept I teach to my clients, and that has been really impactful for me when I found coaching was learning about clean pain versus dirty pain. And so I want to talk to you and explain to you what I mean by that. Clean pain is the pain that comes from telling the truth when you've experienced betrayal. It's the grief, right? There is so much grief after betrayal and divorce that you have to feel it. It's like someone died. The version of your spouse that you thought you knew died. So, yes, you have to grieve it. Your marriage died. You have to grieve it. That is clean pain. The heartbreak, sitting with the reality as it is instead of how you wish it were, right? Reality versus expectations. I talked about that last week. Clean pain hurts, but it heals. You will heal when you feel all the sadness, all the disappointment, all the betrayal, all those feelings, you will heal. And it's important to feel them. We have to feel to heal. Remember that. Dirty pain is optional pain. It's replaying the story on a loop. It's self-blame, blaming yourself for your spouse having an affair. It's staying stuck in resentment. There's so many marriages that have a lot of resentment. That is not your spouse's job to fix. That is your job. I read a quote the other day. It was like resentment is the canary in the coal mine. If you don't understand that, look it up. Okay, but it is true. And that is your job to heal that, not your spouse's revenge fantasies. Now I get like every now and again, it is, it's like, oh, it might feel good. I hear people like, I'm gonna go cheat on my spouse now, since they had an affair on me. I promise that, first of all, if that isn't in your value system and that feels out of alignment to you, that is going to make your pain a million times worse. And it will do nothing to help fix your marriage or even help you in any capacity. That will, you're just hurting yourself more. You probably will maybe hurt your spouse, but it it revenge, in my opinion, the best revenge is to heal. And it's okay you have fantasies, just don't get stuck on those. Waiting for someone else to finally become who you need them to be so you can feel okay. Waiting for that, you'll be waiting forever. And it just isn't gonna work. That's going to keep you stuck in dirty pain. Dirty pain keeps you surviving instead of living. Both pains feel awful. Clean pain and dirty pain both feel bad, but only one leads to peace. And after betrayal, many of us default to dirty pain because it feels familiar, it feels like control, it feels safer than letting go. But just like contaminated water, it slowly makes us sick. And that is so true. If you can in moments feel the clean pain and notice when you get stuck in I'm not good enough, I did something wrong. Those are all dirty pain thoughts, and they are not helpful. So, how can you choose clean water, right? Healing begins with you. Healing doesn't start when your spouse changes. Healing starts when you decide to choose clean water for yourself or clean pain for yourself. That might look like new thoughts, right? What are you thinking instead? Right? Because you are good enough. It wasn't about your enoughness. That's not why they had the affair. So stop thinking that. It's only hurting you and it's not helping you. You didn't do anything wrong. They're the ones that made a really poor choice, and now you're having to deal with it. So you need to create boundaries, right? Maybe you need better boundaries. You need tools to help you feel all these emotions. You need new support, possibly. Or simply admitting, I don't want to live like this anymore. Like if you're sick of yourself, right? If you're sick of your pity party, then maybe you're ready to move on and start drinking clean water. Start healing and feeling your healthy emotions. You are not powerless, you are not stuck, and you do not have to keep surviving on emotional scraps. Choosing clean water doesn't mean the pain disappears overnight. It means you stop poisoning yourself while you heal. And I see so many people poisoning themselves, hoping to poison their spouse, but it's really hurting you. And I don't want you to do that. So in East Africa, in Kenya, many parts of the world where water is scarce, survival forces people to walk for hours to collect contaminated water again and again, leading to chronic illness, stunned growth, and even premature death. And in our own lives, the need for emotional and mental or spiritual survival can drive us to collect contaminated water from the wrong sources, things that numb, things that distract us or pull us further from truth and peace. I have so many clients that send me Facebook posts that they, you know, they're like, this, you know, is the perfect example of my wife or my husband. And but it's like, who is behind that Instagram page or that Facebook page, right? I think we have to really pay attention to what we're bringing in on our feed. And I get people when they start Googling divorce or betrayal, they start getting inundated, right? But we need to make sure that we are connecting with, in my opinion, real humans like myself, but people that we actually respect or that we feel connected to. I think that's important. Just not some random person that's putting out quotes. We don't even know their value system. We don't even know their angle, right? So I just am always leery about some of these Facebook pages. And I'm like, why are we listening to them? Why are we filling our head with all this negativity? Why aren't we focused on something that helps build us more than like builds a case for why our spouse's emotional affair is so painful for us? I think that's important to pay attention to. Yet, like six feet under where their villages were was clean water. They just didn't have the tools to access it. That's why tools for healing are so important and getting the right tools, getting the tools that resonate with you, so important. And here they had it really close to them all along. They just didn't have the tools. And once the tools are brought to them, I mean, the excitement, the fact that they have just gained so much time, so much, you know, they're gonna get healthier, right? All this clean water was below them the whole time. Spiritually, we've been given the same gift. And I believe as Christians, we have direct access to living water through Jesus Christ, through keeping covenants, repentance, and beginning again. These blessings aren't distant, they're not reserved for someday. They are placed literally at our feet. With joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation. Isaiah 12.3. And as the Savior reminds us in John 4.14, but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst. So I just want to invite you, you deserve more than survival. You deserve peace, you deserve clarity, you deserve a life that feels good again. If you're ready to stop drinking contaminated emotional water and start finding something cleaner for your life, I would love to help you. Healing is possible, joy is available, and cleaner water is closer than you think. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. Thanks for listening. Leave me a review so other people can find me and have a beautiful day, and I'll talk to you next week. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Happily Even After Betrayal. If you want to understand what stage of betrayal you're in, head to my website at lifecoachgen.com. That's Jen with one N, and take the free quiz. It's a simple step you can take today toward creating your own happily even after.