62. Should I stay after they cheated?

If your partner has cheated or behaved in a way that goes against your expectations of them in your relationship - it is bound to be extremely painful.

And we can often feel unsure about what to do next...

Whether we want to stay and give them another chance or choose to leave.

In this episode, I'm going to help you make sense of your mind and emotions and come to a decision that feels right for YOU.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Processing Emotions Meditation
• MYRMD group coaching programme - info and waitlist

Transcript

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Hey everyone! How’re you all doing? I’m feeling bitter sweet emotions right now - because it’s been the last week of my current round of group coaching. And so I feel really happy and proud because everyone’s been so supportive of each other and have come such a long way during the 12 weeks - but also it’s kind of sad, because you get used to coaching the same groups of people for 12 weeks and then it feels sad saying goodbye. And this round has been amazing, it really has. People in the group have made such huge strides in managing their relationship anxiety and managing their minds and emotions - and I’m so so proud of all of them!

And I’ll talk a little bit at the end about the next round, so if you’re curious about what it involves, stay tuned to the end and I’ll tell you all about it! But in today’s episode, I want to talk about a topic that’s come up a few times both in my group coaching programme and in my 1:1 sessions. And that’s the topic of staying after someone’s cheated - as in staying in your relationship. And it’s a very touchy subject, for many. Whenever I do an Instagram post about cheating or staying after someone’s cheated - I get a lot of backlash. I get a lot of people getting quite triggered and heated about the topic. So if this topic is a little triggering for you - don’t worry, you’re not alone. I just encourage you to bring an open mind to the subject and see what you get from this episode that serves you and your brain.

So let’s dive in!

I’ve noticed that people like to be very black and white about cheating. They say things like, ‘Once a cheater, always a cheater’. And the way we talk about people who have cheated is like they’re bad people - which again ties into the black and white, good vs bad kind of thinking. But like everything in the world - it’s a little, or a lot, more nuanced than that. Good and bad is totally subjective - and most of us would usually agree you can be a good person and behave in ways you don’t like and regret at times. 

And even that phrase ‘once a cheater, always a cheater’ is actually not a fact. It’s a belief. An optional belief. It’s an opinion. Are their humans on this planet who have cheated on their partners once and never again? Yes. Are their humans who have cheated once and then multiple more times. Yes. It’s not a one-size fits all thing. It’s a not a concrete fact we can assume is true all of the time. 

And a common thing I’ve seen with past clients is, their partner has cheated or done something that goes against their agreements in their relationship in some way - and they want to give them another chance and they want to try and work through it - but they feel like they’re not allowed. Because of this black and white discourse around cheating and how if someone cheats that must make them a bad person and it means you HAVE to break up with them. 

And so that’s the first part of this that’s important to recognise. You can choose to forgive and stay together after one of you has cheated. That is an option. You're a grown ass adult. You get to choose to stay and forgive or not to. You have permission. And that doesn’t mean you have to stay or that it’s the right choice for you and your unique situation, but denying yourself the option because of some very black and white, binary thinking is never going to be useful. 

So how can you navigate what to do after your partner has cheated? How can you work out the next steps to take? Well, in this episode - I’m going to offer 5 specific questions for you to think about if you’re trying to decide whether to stay or leave - that will help you not only make that decision but manage and take care of your own mind and emotions as you do. 

So number 1) Are you allowing yourself to fully feel the negative emotions without judging them or trying to get rid of them? This is really important, because naturally if your partner has cheated or done something that goes against your expectations of them in some way - you're going to feel a lot of negative emotion. Feeling hurt, betrayed, rejected, angry, confused - are all totally normal human emotions. And it’s so so important to be patient and understanding to yourself as you experience them. 

Because resisting them and trying to escape them or make them go away is actually going to intensify them and make them feel ten times worse. Think of it like pushing a beach ball underwater. The more we try to suppress our emotions, the more they burst back up to the surface when we least expect it. 

Now hear me when I say, this doesn’t mean you have to feel your emotions and act them out at the people around you. Feeling angry and resentful actually isn’t the same thing as reacting to anger and resentment. You can feel emotions in your body, the sensations of the emotions, and fully allow them to be there without acting on them at all. And learning to allow the sensations to exist in your body is actually how you take back control over how you show up. And I say this because sometimes my clients are afraid to let themselves feel angry. They think if they open up to the anger or the pain they’ll lose control and do things they later regret.

But I’m not talking about smashing plates or burning your partner’s clothes - I’m talking about sitting and allowing the sensations of your negative emotion to be there and making space for them. Giving them permission to be there without judging them or trying to make them go away. Maybe it’s a burning in your chest, or a heat in your face, or a pit in your stomach. Whatever it is - notice it. Get curious about how it feels. It’s just a sensation. And you don’t need to run from it or react to it, or act it out at other people. 

You can allow it and process it instead. And processing emotion is a technique that involves noticing where the sensations are in your body and sitting with them - getting curious about them - describing them to yourself. Not being in a hurry to escape them but actually being mentally willing for them to be there. And I actually teach you how to do this in my free processing emotions meditation - so I’ll put a link to that in the show notes. So definitely go and download it if you haven’t already! 

I also want to say it’s important you normalise and are supportive to yourself as you go through these emotions. We tend to be in a rush to escape feeling bad. As humans we’re terrible at it. And although we rationally know our life can’t be all rainbows and daisies and positive emotion - we still tend to resist the hell out of the moments in our life when negative emotion is happening and when things aren’t going to plan. And that resistance to what is - to the reality of the circumstance - also makes things so much worse. 

And in my group coaching programme one of the things we’ve talked about a lot is the 50/50 of human emotion - and how difficult times and difficult emotions are all part and parcel of being a human on this planet. And so if this is part of the deal we get as humans - if our life has to be a series of happy moments and difficult moments and challenges - how do you want to show up for yourself during this specific challenge? Consider - how do you want to support yourself and speak to yourself as you navigate this. Do you want to keep telling yourself you can’t handle it and that it’s not fair - or do you want to empower yourself to move forward? Do you want to remind yourself you’ve been through hard things before and you can face tough times again? Do you want to sit and be patient with yourself and hold space for yourself to feel exactly what you’re feeling? Think about how you’d respond to a friend facing grief or a similar situation - would you try and hurry them through their emotion? Or would you be supportive and hold space for them for as long as it takes?

Which leads me to question 2) Have you cleaned up your own thoughts about it and what you make it mean about you? A lot of the time, especially with cheating, what makes the situation so painful is what we make their behaviour and choices mean about us. And I call this dirty pain. So we have clean pain - which is the negative emotion created by thoughts we wouldn’t really want to change - for example, you likely want to feel disappointed and sad and hurt. That’s a pretty appropriate response to the situation. But we also have what I call dirty pain. Which is the emotional pain created by thoughts we would not choose on purpose.

Thoughts about what this means about us - that we weren’t attractive or good enough in some way. That we did something to cause this. Or something about our future. Maybe that because they did this - it means everyone will always cheat on you and you’ll never have a long term, lasting relationship. Dirty pain is the pain we create from our negative, limiting beliefs about ourselves or our futures. It’s like rubbing salt in the wound, it just creates so much unnecessary suffering. All from optional thoughts that are NOT facts.

So cleaning up those thoughts is important. And you clean them up by questioning them and by showing your brain alternative ways of thinking about it. For example - if your brain is telling you that them cheating means you weren’t a good enough partner and you didn’t make them happy enough - we need to challenge that interpretation. What makes someone ‘good enough’ for their partner to stay faithful? How do we achieve that or even judge that? Is everyone who’s ever been cheated on ‘not good enough’ in some way? Was Beyonce not good enough? Rihanna? Shakira? 

Was it their lack of enoughness that lead to their partners cheating? You’re probably screaming no of course not. But that’s the thing - you can rationally see that other people’s decisions to cheat is about THEIR own brain, and not their partner, when it comes to other people - but when it comes to yourself, you’re likely taking full responsibility for their choice. Just like you’re taking responsibility for ‘making them happy’.

But did you know - you don’t actually make your partner happy or unhappy? Satisfied or unsatisfied? Crazy, I know - but stay with me. Their emotions don’t come from you. They come from their own brain and it’s thoughts - which you do not create or have power over. Someone else could be with you and think thoughts that never lead them to cheat. Someone else could think thoughts that do. You do not control that either way. Your partner is there own person and they choose how they show up. So notice how you’re taking responsibility for their behaviour and instead get curious about the real reason for it - which is their own brain. What might they have been thinking that lead them to take that action? And notice how that thought was a totally optional one, that you did not choose for them.

What your brain may also be doing is using your partner cheating to prove all your own mean, insecure thoughts about yourself true. So if you already had mean thoughts about yourself that you’re ‘too much’ or ‘not enough’ in some way, or not attractive enough, or not fun enough or whatever - your brain is likely to now use their behaviour to prove these things true to yourself and say SEE! It’s true! You aren’t loveable! You aren’t a good partner!

Please, please please call your brain out on this and call bullsh*t on these thoughts. These are optional thoughts, optional interpretations and opinions, they aren’t facts. So write them down on a page in front of you and challenge each and every one of them. Write these questions and answer them - is that really true? How might it not be true? What else could be true? What might someone else say about this? What would someone who believed the opposite say? What is my brain not considering when it tells me this? What would be a more neutral or slightly more compassionate way to think about myself here?

Then the next question to consider is - do they understand why they did what they did? And are they willing to own that, reflect on it, and learn from it? Your decision to stay with someone who has cheated is yours and yours alone - but if cheating isn’t a behaviour we want in the relationship and it’s a boundary violation of ours - we want to ensure that our partner really understands that and is on the same page with what they want out of a relationship too. 

And we have to accept the reality of them - not the version of them we wish was the reality. And if the reality you have is someone who doesn’t seem remorseful, doesn’t seem willing or able to understand their brain or behaviour, and doesn’t seem interested in changing - that’s a very different set of circumstances to someone who is really remorseful and ready to do the work to address their own behaviour. We can’t really be all that shocked when someone who openly doesn’t share our values or morals behaves in ways that go against them. And that’s different from someone who does share them making a mistake or doing something that goes against their own morals and values that they really regret.

It really all comes down to do you want the same things. Is the person in front of you someone who wants the same kind of relationship you do and are they capable of having that kind of relationship? Now of course - you can’t be sure if you give them another chance that they won’t do it again, which I’ll talk about a little more in a moment - but you can be honest with yourself about whether you personally think the person in front of you seems ready and able to grow from this and whether you believe your wants for your relationship are a match. 

So often I see client staying in relationships - even though the other person is not a match for what they’re looking for, they don’t share the same values or want the same things - but they stay out of fear of leaving.

Which leads me to the 4th question - Do you like your reasons for staying in the relationship? There is no right or wrong decision - there is no board of directors we can go to to get a concrete definitive answer on whether you should stay or leave. YOU just get to decide. And the best way to decide is to look at your reasons for each option and seeing if you like those reasons.

For example - staying because you believe they’re sorry and that they’re willing and able to change and grow from this and you want to work on this together - is very different to staying because you don’t believe anyone else could love you or that there’s any other decent partners out there.

One feels abundant and empowering, the other feels like scarcity and fear. So write out the thoughts in your brain, get them onto a page in front of you. And consider that - what are my reasons for leaving and what are my reasons for staying. And if you notice any limiting beliefs or scarcity thoughts in there - challenge them. Is that really true? Why are you believing that? If you weren’t believing that you couldn’t find another great relationship - would you still choose to stay? If you knew you could go and create another amazing relationship with someone else and that it would all work out if you left, then would you still choose to stay and work on this with this person?

And I was coaching on this in one of my groups this week - the idea that there really is no right or wrong decisions - just different adventures. My recent episode on decision making is a good one which dives into this - so go listen to that if you haven’t already! And I talk there about how whichever path you take will have both negative and positive emotion waiting for you. If you stay there will be some positive and some negative, and if you leave there will be some positive and some negative. Neither path is right or wrong - they just offer different kinds of adventures. 

And it’s important that whichever decision you make - that you have your own back whatever the outcome. Which leads me to question 5) Are you willing to stay, even if this happens again? And I know - that question might seem terrifying. You’re probably thinking, Rebecca - I don’t want this to ever happen again! That’s why I don’t know what to do, because I don’t know if it will or not!

But that’s exactly the problem with trying to base this decision on something you have no control over or whether it’s going to happen. But the truth is - you have no idea if they’re going to cheat again. Even those of us in relationships with partners who haven’t cheated, we don’t know if they might one day. We have no idea at all! Because we’re not psychic. We can’t predict or control how another human is going to act.

So in order to stay, you have to be willing to accept that you have no control over whether they cheat again or not - AND make the choice to stay knowing that IF it happens again, you can be okay. That you can totally handle the negative emotion that would come up if it did happen again AND manage your thoughts around what you make their behaviour mean about you.

Which is why it likely feels so scary now. Because if right now you’re making them cheating mean you weren’t good enough or attractive enough and your resisting the hell out of your emotions - that’s exactly what your brain assumes you’ll do next time round. So of course you don’t have much faith in yourself to be able to handle it IF it happens again. 

But this is where you get to step in and be the one in charge. You get to decide ahead of time - IF this happens again - how do I want to think and feel about it? What would I choose on purpose to make it mean about me? How would I consciously want to show up to handle? How would I consciously want to speak to myself? How would I consciously want to support myself through my negative emotions? Because while you can’t control IF they choose to cheat again, you can control how you respond to that circumstance and what you make it mean about you and your future happiness. And that’s what we call self-certainty. In uncertain situations where we have no idea what’s going to happen - we can rely on self certainty and lean on that. The self certainty of knowing we can 1) handle the sensations of any negative emotion and 2) decide what we make the circumstances in our lives, and other people’s behaviour, mean about us.

And you have to be willing to have your own back regardless.Most people will take someone back but then feel incredibly anxious for months and months on end because they’re telling themselves IF their partner chooses to cheats again, it means they were stupid to have taken them back and they’ve been a fool. They believe they have to feel embarrassed and shamed of their decision to take them back IF it happens again.

But that is actually totally optional. You don’t have to shame and judge yourself about this decision based on how they choose to use their free will. And I’m going to repeat that because it’s really important. You don’t have to shame and judge yourself about this decision based on how they choose to use their free will. 

You can make this decision for reasons you like today, and commit to that being the best decision for you in this moment - and then they could go and cheat again - and you could STILL believe you made the right call. Because in that moment, you did the best you could with the information you had, and you showed up as the person you wanted to be. You made a decision that felt aligned and good to you. And then - if they did cheat again - you’d get to just make a new decision - based on this new information you’d then have. 

Beating yourself up and shaming yourself is always 100% optional guys. Always. And you don’t ever have to judge and shame yourself for not being able to predict or control the behaviour of another human being. 

So - I know this was a heavy episode, on a heavy topic. But I want to remind you that whatever is going on for you right now - being compassionate towards yourself and curious about the thoughts in your own brain is always powerful. Calling your brain out on mean, unhelpful or limiting beliefs is how you can make your decisions from a more empowered place and feel good about that, regardless of what happens next!

And as I said right at the beginning, allow yourself to feel all of the negative emotion. Nothing has gone wrong. You're a human being on this planet - which means hard and difficult situations are part of the deal. Be loving and supportive to yourself as you navigate this. Be compassionate to your brain. And be willing to allow and make space for the sensations of your emotions instead of trying to hurry them away or escape them. I promise you - you’ll suffer so much less when you do.

Okay guys - that’s all I’ve got for you this week! The next round of my group coaching programme - Master Your Relationship Mind Drama - is going to be opening its doors the first week of January. And this is where you’ll be able to learn all about the tools and concepts I discuss on this podcast but on a much deeper level - AND learn how to actually apply them to your own unique situations and your own unique brain. It’s an amazing programme and such a supportive place to learn and grow - surrounded by people with similar brains to yours doing the exact same work.

So in order to make sure you don’t miss out, you’re going to want to go and get yourself on the waitlist. So I’m going to drop the link with all the details and FAQs included, and also the link for the waitlist in the information section of this episode. So definitely go and check that out! And make 2024 the year you finally master your relationship mind drama.

And finally, can I ask you to do something for me? Could you go ahead and give the podcast a little rating on whatever platform you’re listening from? This is how I can keep reaching more people and spreading the word of this work. 

Okay guys - have an amazing weekend, and I’ll speak to you all next week - bye!