Episode Two: Your Feelings Aren't the Problem

After infidelity or betrayal, emotions can feel unbearable. The anger, fear, shame, panic, and sadness often seem like obstacles to healing—but what if they're actually the path forward?

In this episode, licensed marriage and family therapist and author Miriam Bellamy explores why your emotions aren't the problem. Drawing on Bowen Family Systems Theory and the remarkable story of Peru's ancient Q'eswachaka bridge, she introduces a different way of understanding feelings: not as something to suppress or escape, but as a source of wisdom that can help untangle the automatic patterns keeping you stuck. 

You'll learn:

• Why healing after infidelity begins with understanding your emotions rather than controlling them.
• The difference between feelings and the stories we tell about our feelings.
• How learning the language of your emotions can help you rebuild trust—first in yourself, and eventually in your relationship.

Whether you're recovering from infidelity, another form of betrayal, or simply feeling disconnected in your relationship, this episode offers a hopeful first step toward becoming more grounded, more honest, and more fully yourself. 

Transcript

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Hey, good morning, and welcome to the second episode of Bridgecraft, The Art of Human Connection. I am Miriam Bellmy. I am a therapist, I'm a writer, and I'm a seeker with nearly 30 years devoted to understanding relationships. Grounded in what's known as Bowen family systems theory, I've been exploring this ancient bridge in Peru, the last of its kind. It's a grass bridge, 100 feet across and 100 feet up above the Apurimac River in a district called Kewe in central Peru. It's a bridge that the Incas cut down and rebuild every year and have been doing for over 500 years. In fact, I just got back a couple of days ago from my second trip down there to experience this very physically dangerous, emotional, political, and economic, as I learned this time, and spiritual process. How we rebuild trust after relationship disaster is very similar. It's physically demanding. It is emotional, even political and economic and spiritual, in my opinion. The parallels between what we go through, what couples go through, and the different stages of this bridge building, this whole process of this bridge building are uncanny. As you might think they would be when it comes to building bridges. Because that's what you're doing. You're figuring out how to rebuild that bridge between you. If it can be rebuilt. So if you have found your way to me into this podcast and possibly the worst has happened in your relationship, infidelity shatters trust, but not just trust. It can shatter your sense of worth, your self-respect or your self-esteem, your sense of reality, your identity, maybe even your family. But a recent listener actually reminded me that infidelity is not the only kind of betrayal and broken trust that happens in a marriage. It's not the only thing that breaks trust. I had a dear friend maybe 15 or 20 years ago who found out his wife was $60,000 in credit card debt. He had no idea. And this wasn't the first time that it happened. They were nearing retirement, and yeah. But there's another kind of betrayal that many couples live inside of without having words for it. It's not a single event. It's more like this slow erosion. It's a relationship pattern where you kind of feed off of one another, not with some kind of maliciousness, but with a kind of reflexiveness. Is this sounding familiar? What was once sacred in the relationship begins to fade. People start walking on eggshells, not saying what they really feel, what they really think. And over time, trust is eroded. The relationship's capacity for honesty fades. And I'm going to say that again. I want you to hear that. The relationship's capacity, not his, not yours, not hers, the relationship's capacity for honesty fades. Can't handle the honesty. And a deep loneliness sets in. If that's you, if you're feeling that kind of loss of openness and honesty and respect, you are also welcome here. The principles here in this podcast and in my book still apply. But for those of you living in the aftermath of infidelity, this pattern occurs with a very painful, very real intensity. An intensity where it can feel as if your life depends on it. Depends on the demand for answers now. The reassurance that your life means something, that it wasn't all for nothing, or where the intensity makes you feel like your life depends on running. The distancing, the avoiding of answering questions, or the avoidance of full answers, perhaps the deeper truths. The feeling that if you don't run or distance or minimize the damage, that you won't survive it. The deep need for the two of you to move on from this, to move, quote, forward. Or else your marriage won't survive it. You can feel utterly choked by it, like you can't even breathe. One chasing, the other in retreat, each feeling like your lives depend on it, like your marriage depends on it. And neither of you feeling like you have a choice. Both of you exhausted, angry, scared, and desperately sad. But I want to invite you to pause like we did in the first episode and think about something here. Both of these reactions, this feeling that you won't survive unless you either pursue or hide, are responses to a kind of electrical circuit between you, with a life of its own. Something that goes around and around with a feeling that you have no control over it. You know what I'm talking about? Those moments when, despite all of your resolutions, all of your work, you find yourself in the same old spiral, the same argument, going over the same things. One of you unable to control your chasing, the other unable to control the running. And the power source of this automatic, reflexive circuit. It's emotion. Emotion. And that's what we're going to talk about today: emotion. Feelings. We'll talk much more about this electrical circuit a few podcasts from now. How automatic it is, how predictable, how patterned, how human. But for now, the power source. Feelings. And how they can be a resource. But before we go too deeply into this, feelings post-infidelity are usually beyond what anyone can handle without help. Your rage, your terror, your panic attacks that arrive on the daily, on the hourly, your suicidal feelings, your homicidal nightmares. Terror at the thought of being found out, of being shamed publicly, or of losing your family, your regret and your sorrow. The intensity in the first days and weeks and sometimes years is disabling. Getting direct help for this is not only okay, it's essential. Getting real solutions to sleep. And there are real solutions out there now for the sleep, for the intensity of your agony. There is something called neurofeedback, kind of biofeedback for the brain, to help the brain find its center again. I unapologetically recommend the kind of neuro that we do here in our clinic. I'll never forget one of the first couples I worked with after having introduced neuro into my practice. She was a physician and pretty skeptical, but she was also desperate. She was having a dozen or more panic attacks every day, every day. She started the neuro and it went down to one to two every couple of weeks. Pretty dramatic shift for her. And like many of my clients, wondered why don't more people know about this. Please don't hear this as a sales pitch. I want you to know about this as a resource. If you don't work with us on that, we'll help you find someone who you can work with on that. There's not just neuro, though, there's medication. I have a dear friend who was really skeptical of antidepressants, but she discovered this genetic testing that you can do to discover which antidepressant or medication might work best for you. She got on the right antidepressant for her and changed her life. There's EMDR, if you haven't heard of that, is there is EMDR specifically for infidelity that I've seen help. I've also seen clients who do breath work and meditation to great effect. Getting out in nature regularly, from the conventional to the unconventional. There is real help out there for this emotional intensity, so get the help you need for the intense emotions. This is what my family and I actually affectionately call calling in the troops. There is no shame in it whatsoever. Please let me encourage you, find what works for you to calm the emotions, to soothe your soul, and to find what does it effectively. And don't stop until you do. Once you have a sense of your sanity, a sense that there is real help for you, not that it's solved, not that you won't have intense moments that still take over, but more that once you have some reprieve, then this very different work with feelings that we're about to talk about can really grow some legs. Potentially the most important aspect of infidelity itself and the source of all tension in a relationship, productive tension and not so productive tension, but also possibly the most important aspect of growth and healing in the aftermath is feelings. It's your feelings. And knowing how to work with them, learning how to think about them will be an important foundation for all you do moving forward. Because just like you can't force trust, you also can't force your feelings. And part of trusting again involves your feelings. Dramatically so. Trust is a thinking and feeling phenomenon. And your feelings have to be thought about, identified, understood, and eventually a kind of alignment between your thoughts, your feelings, your values, your body, and your decisions and your communication has to come together in order to get to trust. Trust of oneself first and foremost, and we'll get to that in the next podcast. And hopefully, eventually, trust of each other. But it starts with trusting yourself and learning how to trust your feelings again. Because that trust has taken a hit. So in this episode, I'm going to invite you to begin to think about feelings differently than perhaps you ever have. And once again, our bridge, our bridge of Keshwa Chaka becomes the teacher. So last June on my first trip down to Kiwi, weaving the Koya grass quite poorly, I will add, with the kind and gracious descendants of the Incas who I stayed with, sitting on the side of the road just above the ravine of the Upurimac River, I was roasting. All shade was more than welcome, and thankfully there was plenty. The initial weaving had begun the day before, and the next phase of the work was happening, the braiding. What had only been handfuls of koya grass earlier in the day were now transformed, gathered and twisted into giant ropes sturdy enough for the next step. In the middle of the road, men were bent over three ropes that were more than 100 feet long, taking three of these and braiding them into a giant cable. I want you to imagine braiding a woman's hair, only each of the three strands weighs a ton and is 100 feet long. It takes an entire crew to do it. And from where I stood, the braiding looked chaotic. A half dozen men up the road worked the heavy ropes in one direction while another half dozen further down were keeping these rope ends from tangling. These men at the ends of the ropes looked like they were playing a game of twister, jumping over and under each other in an intricate looking dance. But they weren't getting tangled with each other. Nor were they allowing the ropes to tangle. I call them the untanglers. And without these untanglers, the braiding upstream would have quickly snarled and stalled. And standing there, I thought of you. And this braiding and the intense feelings tangling together inside you and between you until nothing makes sense. Your spouse gets angry and you get scared. Your fear has you avoiding conversations, which makes your spouse even angrier. And around and around you go, each of you reacting and things then spiraling. But if we let the bridge be our guide, then we consider the chaos of the braiding and the importance of the untanglers. Without them, the process would have snarled to a stop. And your relationship, when your feelings and your spouse's feelings get tangled together too tightly and you find yourself lost in a kind of automatic circuit of emotions, the energy getting hotter and hotter, the relationship becoming more and more tangled. Before you know it, you're saying things you didn't mean to say. Yelling at them, punching a wall. Like the braided cables, the Inca people, you need your own personal untanglers to provide reliable relief. Get some clarity, hope. Both inside yourself and between you. And these relationship untanglers do exist, and you can learn to use them to help you when you need it most. Untanglers and relationships can take the form of a good therapist, a level-headed friend, a wise mentor, especially those who don't take sides. Those are gifts, they're pretty rare. But man, do they help untangle you? But there are other untanglers you perhaps have never thought of. Untanglers that live inside you. Ironically, these internal untanglers are the very things often tangling you up. Your feelings. This may be a new idea, and it can feel strange or even unfair to imagine that your painful feelings could also be your guide. That there is an intelligence to them, that they are a form of intelligence just like your intellect, and tapped into with insight, with some self-compassion, with some grace, your feelings can actually become remarkably transformative and helpful. Have you heard of Chris Voss? He wrote a book called Never Split the Difference. It's one of my top three books of all time. But one of his comments is: emotions are a necessary element to our decision making that we ignore at our own peril. And then someone whose work has influenced me pretty deeply is Carla McLaren. She wrote a book called The Language of Emotions. And she says, Everything we've been taught about emotions is often wrong. Dead wrong. So I'd like to read a couple of paragraphs from my upcoming book, uh, from chapter three. So here we go. Feelings are ancient. They rise from the same deep wiring that has kept humans alive for thousands of generations, sparking invention, adaptation, creativity, and perhaps most of all, relationship. Your feeling systems are older and bigger than you. They come baked into your body and your very identity. You can't peel them away, and you wouldn't want to if you could. The truth is simple. There's no way around your feelings. And painful as they are, that's actually good news. They evolved for a reason. They aren't here to sabotage you. They're here to demand your attention, your respect, your curiosity, and eventually your wise and well-informed decisions. They ask you to slow down, to notice what matters, and to tend to whatever that is. They won't rest until you do, until they've helped you find the life-giving, peace-producing solutions you legitimately need in your life. So for today to start, what I don't mean when I talk about feelings are your reactions, your knee-jerk reactions, your reflexes. Essentially, your feelings without awareness. And also, what I do not mean about feelings are your thoughts about your feelings. So when I talk about feelings, I don't mean things like I feel insecure, or I feel like he doesn't care, or I feel abandoned. These aren't feelings. None of these are feelings. Anger is a feeling. Annoyance, frustration, disgust, or hatred, jealousy, sadness, fear, worry, panic, happiness, contentment, joy. The other statements are thoughts or interpretations about your feelings. And these thoughts or interpretations of your feelings usually tangle you up with your spouse. Whereas feelings usually untangle you. So think about it. If you say to your partner, I feel abandoned, there is a kind of vagueness about that. And there is an automatic pressure that gets created. If you're the one listening to that message, you may feel a pressure to make your spouse stop feeling that way and not feel abandoned by you. So what do you do about that? You play nice. You want them to feel not abandoned, and you certainly don't want them to feel like it was you who abandoned them. And you feel what about their statement? Is there anger? Is there anxiety? But you can't express those things now because they might feel abandoned by you for it. Saying I feel abandoned is a pretty loaded way of saying I feel sad or I feel scared, or I feel angry, or I feel all of these. When you say I feel abandoned, something often shows up in your partner, something you don't really want to show up in your partner, a sense of obligation. Obligation says I have to fix this. But that's not the same as accountability. Accountability says I want to understand, I want to respond. Obligation says I have to make them feel better. I have to not say what I really think and feel so that I can keep the peace. And you feel the difference there? No. So imagine you say instead, I feel sad. Now I want you to bear with me here. I'm not offering some kind of simplistic solutions where all you have to do is say, I'm sad instead of I feel abandoned, and there's some kind of magic there. I'm inviting you to pause and consider a different way of thinking about how you're communicating, right? So if you say I'm sad instead of I feel abandoned, there might be more space there. Your partner might ask in response, what are you sad about? They might not. Either way, your sadness wants you to continue communicating about it. That intelligence coming forward, that sadness coming forward is an intelligence and it wants something from you. It wants you to speak about it, it wants you to pay attention to it. It wants you to know that it's yours. It's your sadness, it's not your spouse's sadness. They are not responsible for your sadness. That's a different mindset. And if you know how to work with your sadness, and this is key here, you can begin to talk about your sadness without getting more entangled with each other. And in fact, in a way that untangles you. But you must first know, one, that you're sad. We're just using sadness as an example here. And two, what your sadness is telling you about you. Again, your sadness is yours. It comes forward for you to reflect and take action. Your sadness is your response to something. Did your spouse do something that made you feel a certain way? Sure. But that doesn't make you any less responsible for your feelings, your response, they are yours. And there is profound freedom in that. So you can say, I'm sad. I'm struggling to let go of something because that's the language of sadness. Carla McLaren teaches that sadness asks, what must be released? Two questions, and both are important with the sadness. So if you're feeling sad, you ask yourself these two questions. What must be released and what must be rejuvenated? So in infidelity, what do most people often struggle to let go of? It might be the old relationship. The relationship as is. The old patterns and attachments and expectations and games and inauthenticities. Can you feel that difference between saying I feel abandoned and I feel sad, I'm struggling to let go of X. With sadness, if you can tune into what it is asking of you, you can identify what it wants you to let go of. So here's how this might go. You pause long enough to know you're feeling a sadness. You take a minute to feel it. You might take a minute to sense where you feel it in your body. Then you ask yourself and your body, what does it want me to let go of? You can ask yourself, does it want me to let go of trying to force this to work? Take a minute there, take some breaths. What old contracts are you holding on to that your sadness wants you to let go of? So, can you begin to see how your feelings, when tapped into with pause and reflection, can untangle your insides? And by contrast, how saying things like, I feel abandoned or I feel insecure is one step removed from the actual feelings you're having. How tapping into the feeling itself seems to erase the dilemmas of abandonment or insecurity. Now that's advanced work. But as you do it, it just happens automatically. I've seen people wrestle with this idea of abandonment for entire lifetimes. Same with insecurity. When for each of these issues, at the root are feelings. Feelings that have an intelligence for you, that offer you paths through, untangling paths through. And when people tune into these feelings, things like abandonment or insecurity just seem to fade. So learning the language of your feelings is learning the language of I. Now, some of you may have heard of something called the I statement. That's not what I'm talking about. That's actually the bastardized idea from the original. In other words, people don't know the father of the original idea, and that was Murray Bowen. So the point I'm making here, just to be clear, when you begin to work with your feelings, you begin to learn the language of your feelings, you're learning the language of self, of being responsible for yourself. So the original idea was the I position, and that is I feel sad and I'm responsible for my sadness. And that changes everything in the way that you communicate, in the way that you can untangle from your spouse, and untangle even from within. Learning the language of your emotions and taking responsibility for your emotions is learning the language of the I position. So feelings get a bad rap, but it's not the feelings themselves, although they do hurt. It's what we do with them, the conclusions we attach to them almost instantly without even realizing it. Your feelings have their own language, one you can learn. And learning it and putting what you learn into practice will untangle you from your spouse and untangle your feelings from your spouse's feelings reliably. There is extraordinary freedom in that, in owning your feelings. In the book, I talk about a couple I call Tim and Carrie, a real couple who are dealing with, in particular, anger, shame, and fear. And what we explore in the book in depth is Carrie's anger. It's an emotion when a person has been betrayed that can go underground too quickly. The desire to get to peace, the fear of losing your partner, or overwhelming. And so the temptation to stuff anger becomes significant. But anger is a profoundly effective untangler. Anger says a boundary has been crossed and it asks, what must be restored? I love Carla McLaren's metaphor of you sort of having your own castle walls, and your anger is the sentries, the guards that keep you protected, that keep you and your self-respect and your self-esteem intact, your very sense of self. Also in the book, we explore Tim's shame. Again, going to and drawing upon the work of Carla McLaren. She talks about shame as an emotion that signals to you that you have harmed someone else. It's not something to get rid of. It means, if you're feeling shame, that you're a human being and that you have gone against what you believe to be important. And so we explore how Carrie works through her anger and how Tim works through his shame in the book. And we also begin to explore fear as well. There is so much more about your feelings that I want you to know about. As I said, I've written about it in the book. Carla McLaren's book is an absolute gem, and I recommend it. My book will be available soon, hopefully in the next couple of weeks. Thank you for being with me today. Until next time, Bridge Builders.