EP 63: Healing is Feeling: Learning How to Feel Again After Infidelity

Feeling anything after infidelity can feel impossible. 

As the unfaithful, you may believe you don’t deserve feelings—or that if you let yourself feel, you’ll drown in shame, grief, fear and more compounding failure. 

As the betrayed, your world has exploded into rage, panic, hypervigilance, and a kind of pain that feels like it will never stop. In today's episode, I'll do my best to slow all of that down and make room for both stories—without excusing harm and without minimizing anyone’s trauma.

I'll begin by naming a hard truth many unfaithful partners never say out loud: most of them have no idea what to do with their emotions after disclosure. They often believe they’ve lost the right to feel sad, scared, or confused because “I caused this.” So they shut down. Go numb, intellectualize, perform apologies, or rush into doing tasks and checklists—anything but actually feel the weight of what they’ve done and what’s been lost. 

I'll also unpack how this shutdown is rarely new; it’s usually a survival strategy learned in childhood in homes where big feelings weren’t safe, welcomed, or understood.

At the same time, the betrayed partner is often living in a body that feels hijacked by massive, relentless emotion. I'll discuss the difference between ordinary hurt and the PTSD/CPTSD many betrayed partners face: flashbacks, intrusive images, startle responses, spiraling thoughts, and a nervous system that never truly rests. Their feelings are valid and necessary—but without boundaries, that raw rage and pain can become a second layer of trauma in the relationship. I'll also walk you through why honoring the betrayed partner’s experience is essential and why creating limits around verbal explosions, threats, or self‑destruction is part of genuine care, not selfishness.

A key theme of the episode is this: your spouse, no matter how remorseful or supportive, cannot do enough work to heal you. Their repair efforts are important—they matter deeply—but they will never substitute for your own internal work. 

I'll help both parties:  to the betrayed who long for true transformation, transparency and changed behavior to finally feel okay again; and to the unfaithful who secretly hope that if they just do “all the right things,” they can avoid facing their own story, their own childhood wounds, and their own capacity for harm.

I'll also unpack a powerful and necessary reframe:  no one is coming to save you except the healed version of you. That doesn’t mean white‑knuckling alone or rejecting help; it means recognizing that no coach, therapist, pastor, podcast, or partner can feel your feelings for you. 

Healing requires massive personal courage: learning to sit with grief instead of outrunning it, to name shame instead of hiding behind defensiveness, and to allow anger and fear to move through the body instead of freezing into numbness or exploding onto everyone around you.

“Healing is feeling” isn’t just a catchy phrase—it’s an invitation: to stop outsourcing your healing, to stop waiting for someone else to fix what’s broken, and to start becoming the version of you who can hold the full truth of what happened and move toward a different future.  There is hope.  

To Healing, 

Sam