Is it true, cos its hard to believe… your partner, the one you love, has been unfaithful?

Your world and everything you thought you knew has changed, due to a betrayal. You can’t ‘unknow’ what you now know. You feel the change, in a single moment, as the truth unravels within you. Anger, disbelief, denial, overwhelming emotional pain, hurt, loss and grief… all competing in a relentless struggle day and night, as you attempt to make sense of an unknown life.

So you question; who the person is that you fell in love with, what the relationship meant to either of you, what the future looks like now and more importantly who are you in it? When you’re no longer sure who you are, what you want, how to get it or even why you want it, you are experiencing a crisis of identity.

This crisis of identity is linked to the idea (or belief) that you have to BE someone or something in order to get love. When your self-image, the self-image that you worked so hard for years perfecting, is rejected for whatever reason, there is a momentary awakening, even if it doesn’t feel like it. It’s an opportunity to break free of the mask and become who you truly want to BE without TRYING to be someone, that is driven by a deep core belief; you’re not good enough, as you are.

WHEN DID YOU LEARN THAT?
In developmental psychology they have found that at a young enough age, children can only think in 1st person perspective. A child will think “everything that happens to me is because of me”. Or put another way everything that happens TO me is MY fault.

Because of this phenomenon most of us have experienced a childhood wounding we made an assumption about which has never been questioned. Something that at a deep core level you belief is your fault despite having learnt it with the limitations of a child’s 1st person perspective.
So as an adult, its likely your holding on to that assumption (unconsciously) and believing it to be true today. It might be: when I get an A+ on a test at School, mum and dad love me, but when I get a C- they aren’t so loving.
We make the assumption “I’m valuable when I do this, I’m not valuable when I do that.”

In the discovery of a partners betrayal when we belief we have perfected our self-image so much into being the perfect partner, wife, mother etc… we experience a traumatic shock, a crisis of identity not knowing what to BE and who we are. The person we thought we had to be, to get love, didn’t work. Left unchecked we make further assumptions that it was our fault and fall deeper into a belief that is already not serving us with behaviours and thinking that become impossible to manage.

• “If I don’t put others needs before my own, I won’t be loved”
• “If I don’t get a response to my text message, then I’m being rejected and worthless”
• “If my partner cheats on me, it was because of something I should have done…”

SO HOW TO CHANGE THAT BELIEF?
Like anything you need to practice and ‘exercise’ the new belief in order for it to become strong and start working for you. So you start with a daily practice and make a declaration to yourself. Make a commitment and say to yourself, from this point forward; “I decide I declare that I am worthy I am a human being and I am as worthy as anyone else”. We are all worthy. We are pieces of stars themselves, we are children of the universe, and if religiously minded, you are a child of God – what could be more valuable?

So make that decision. You may not feel it yet and that’s ok. The more you think it, the more you will make that decision, the stronger that pathway is going to get. We make the decision and make the declaration and we wait for our feelings to catch up and they do. They will catch up. Trust in the process!

And let me know how you go in the comments.