S1:E15: Honor the Pain of Cheating & Betrayal

Today's episode is your guide to navigate through the pain of being cheated on. I share my first trauma story I published about this topic and how I was able to heal through this heartbreaking betrayal within the trauma writing process.

Transcript

Intro:
Welcome to Mental Breakthrough, a memoir podcast about owning our most vulnerable stories so we can live a life of authenticity.

I’m Maryann Samreth, the woman behind the pen name, Sincerely Miss Mary. Together, I take you through my healing journey as I share stories of moving through pain to get to the other side where the light shines again.

In this season, I carry you moment to moment, starting with a tumultuous breakup, then multiple breakdowns, and eventually a breakthrough.

I share stories of how my gift of writing guided me through the darkest moments of my life, leading me to reconnect with my Cambodian ancestors and break the cycle of generational trauma.

There is power in storytelling and sharing our vulnerabilities with the world. It opens doors to cultivate deeper connections with others on the same journey so we can heal as a collective.

By sharing my truths, I pave the way for others to feel safe sharing theirs. We all have a story to tell. Stories that can be someone’s silver lining. Stories of hope.

Episode Intro:

In this episode, I share my first trauma story I ever wrote…it was about cheating and betrayal. 

But before I get into my story I want to talk about cheating and betrayal and the psychological effects it has on our subconscious minds. 

When we are cheated on by a partner, we immediately believe we did something to cause this…especially if you carry traits of codependency and people-pleasing…it’s very hard to not shame yourself from experiencing an act of betrayal. 

It’s easy to attach our identity to our partner..especially if we were with them for a long time..in my case..it was 5 years.

As Yena Yu, a CPTSD Trauma Recovery coach, says in episode 13, “Relationships can be so triggering at times because it reveals our past pains and traumas.”

If you experienced a horrific rejection in your childhood: abandonment, bullying, or abuse…you don’t have the tools to realize that you don’t deserve to be treated that way.

You believe you did something bad when in reality when you have these experiences as a child. You are truly a victim.

You don’t have tools to advocate for yourself or set boundaries from an experience where someone was supposed to take care of you. So we internalize rejection in childhood as being a reflection on us, instead of the person that caused us trauma.

These beliefs carry with us subconsciously throughout our adulthood and become engrained in our identity and are then triggered when we experience a relationship betrayal.

Your mind will get triggered, your body will get triggered, and your identity compromised. When your identity is compromised you begin to feel insecure in who you are, your value, and your worth because that old narrative from a rejection you faced in your past is coming up. It’s normal.

But we must educate ourselves on the stories we tell ourselves, so we don’t give anyone permission to dictate our sense of self.

So please remember these 3 things when healing from cheating and betrayal. 

1. Betrayal has nothing to do with you and everything to do with their unwillingness to look within. An act of betrayal is a temporary dopamine hit for those who refuse to heal. It is a reflection on them, not you. 

2. The shame and embarrassment you feel are not yours to carry. It’s theirs. We only carry this shame because the one who hurt us is unable to. 

3. Cheating and betrayal is trauma. Meaning you can move past the pain, but the triggers will stay like scars. Remember, emotional triggers do not dictate your character. You just simply feel your emotions and let them pass. 

This story I’m sharing in this episode was written from the wound. I was yet healed from my ex and all of the trauma he caused me, which I talk in detail in episode 1.
 
The beginning of this essay was journaling the truths of my experiences. I was trying to figure out if he cheated on me or not because he began dating a girl so quickly where I couldn’t question it.

And several months later, I got confirmation that I was right when I discovered their one-year anniversary was 2 weeks after we broke up…and at that time me and my ex had still lived together.

To start a relationship while you still live with your ex and tell her you love her the day, she moves out is telling to how sociopathic and narcissistic he was.

Healthy people don’t behave that way after a breakup…but vengeance was his motive because he could no longer control me so he had to fuel his ego by looking for a new supply…in narcissistic terms…because we are not seen as humans..we are seen as objects to maintain his fragile ego.

 While writing my trauma essay, I began to validate my pain of the way he treated me. Until this point which was February of last year, I had denied his actions as abusive.

Abuse is such a powerful word because you have to admit to yourself that you let someone take your power away…for so long..I couldn’t use that word..because I didn’t want to admit that..but once I said it..I began to heal the deepest wounds he had cut.

Emotional validation was what I felt when I began to just be honest about how much it hurt to see him move on so quickly like I didn’t matter.

Once I wrote those words on my computer…I started to feel better and that’s when I realized the first step to healing from cheating is to be truthful with how much it sucks..and what better way to experience this truth but to write it down and have it be your first published essay on Thought Catalog..which was always a dream of mine.

Honoring your pain is the first step of healing. It’s the first thing I worked on in therapy.

I was giving myself permission to feel all of my negative emotions and then witness lead to the other side where you get through it and see the light of hope for a healing future.

You have to move through the pain, in order to move forward. There are no shortcuts to healing. You have to feel all of the pain which is what makes you resilient. 

I hope you enjoy this trauma story, I hope you can see the fluidity of my emotions as I walk you through my truths.

Episode 15

I am not one hundred percent certain my ex cheated on me, but I am pretty damn confident he was capable of it. With all the evidence laid out on social media, the move to her neighborhood, the meeting of the families, the weddings, the vacations, and the rapid escalation of a relationship within months… how could I not question the potential of an overlap? The only answer I could think of for him moving on so quickly from ending our half a decade together was infidelity.

I began my shameful scramble of looking for answers by doing what women do best when we’re determined: social media stalking. I was looking for answers anywhere I could (even in the most irrational places that went beyond Instagram and Facebook). I stalked Venmo, LinkedIn, Goodreads, and even Poshmark. I went into a social spiral until I finally asked myself…What exactly am I looking for? And why?

I realized that while I was looking for answers to his lies, I had been lying to myself about why I needed them. I was looking for evidence of betrayal so I could have permission to feel betrayed. The way I felt infidelity was like a thousand daggers repeatedly stabbing my gut. Those thousand daggers repeatedly stabbed at my intuition until I was ready to wake up to reality. A thousand daggers repeatedly stabbed at my reality until I accepted the pain that came with betrayal.

I eventually stopped digging for answers because I knew what I truly needed was to honor my pain. Whether he cheated on me or not, moving on so quickly to another woman from a life we built together over many years hurt like hell. So I honored that suffering. Seeing that he brought her to a wedding where she met his entire family made me feel humiliated. So I honored that shame. Seeing him cook her vegan Pad Thai for her birthday, learning how to use a vegetable spiralizer when he didn’t know how to use a toothbrush made me furious. So I honored that rage.

Sometimes, when we can’t validate our own stomach-churning emotions we seek external validation in the most ridiculous ways just to feel around the pain. I promise you that feeling your pain, as dark and twisted it may be, is the only way out of that pain. What comes after is a place of acceptance.

Even in a place of acceptance, we may never get all the answers, the closure, or the ending we were hoping for. But that doesn’t mean you are not allowed to feel your betrayal, your pain, or your heartbreak.

I give you full permission to feel all of it, every single excruciating ounce of it.

I know you can get through it. I know you can learn from it. And I know you can grow from it, with more self-compassion, self-worth, and self-love. I know you can reach the peace you deserve. I know it took me time to get there but I have faith that you will reach it too.

When you honor your pain, you honor yourself. It’s a step towards healing.

I know how difficult it can be to see someone you once loved to move on to someone else. It’s normal to feel insecure, invalidated, and diminished..but know that’s not true.

Your value is intrinsic. It’s not tied outside of you. Someone’s action of betrayal is a reflection of them..Don’t you dare let them take away the goodness that is in your heart.

Now I know how hard it is to constantly compare yourself to your ex’s new partner. I did so many times. I creeped on her Instagram so many times to a point where I started to feel like I was having a crush on her.

Remember everyone is a mirror and what my therapist told me is that I eventually will get to a place where I see myself in my ex’s new girlfriend…and I can tell you, she was absolutely right.

When we obsessively creep on our ex’s new partner on social media, our psyche is basically seeing ourselves in that person…it’s like watching a horror story where you know how it ends.

They show you all the parts you maybe still shame about yourself…like how you were once co-dependent, dismissed red flags, and put your partner’s needs before your own.

When you can recognize that your partner’s ex is an old version of yourself, you can have compassion for that person for not knowing what they don’t know about your partner..just like how blind you once were. It’s all part of the healing journey and it leads to self-forgiveness..because to truly be free from the traumas of abuse, cheating, and betrayal, is to forgive yourself.

Your identity, your worth, your value can only be defined by you…forgive yourself for once allowing someone to take that power away…You know who you are now..You’re amazing..and I promise you..one day you find yourself creeping on your ex’s new partner again, and this is what you’ll say…

I look at you
And I see me
An old me
Grasping onto a false sense of security
In the form of a man
Who filled my heart with empty promises

I look at you
And I see me
An old me
Who held onto a broken love for dear life
Out of fear
Of what would happen If I let go

I was afraid I’d be powerless
But little did I know
I was more powerful alone

In the void of where he used to be
I filled with pieces of myself
I thought was lost forever

To be alone
Was the truth I needed
To discover the love, I deserved

I look at you
And I see me
And I say,“May peace be with you.”

The me in you
Tried so hard to make a bad thing work
Because that’s how my brain was wired

All there is to do is let go
Because I was not meant for a life with him

A life
Unconscious
To my power

A life
Desiring
His happiness over mine

A life
Never
Reaching my potential

I let you be in your journey with him
As I now focus on my untethered, unhinged, unbothered life
A liberating life of never-ending dreams

My journey is to take up space
Not to stay in a box
Leashed to a man who believed
He owned anything he touches

The me in you has found her way
The me in you has made peace with her demons
The me in you says goodbye

As I seek refuge in the present gratitude
Of no longer being you

Outro:

Thank you for listening to this episode. I hope it brought you closer to a place of peace if you have every experienced cheating or betrayal.

I hope you learned something about the process of writing our vulnerable stories, which I like to call trauma writing.

I use this term because I want to make this word less scary. I want to humanize the emotional triggers we have caused by an overwhelming event in our lives.

The word trauma means a response to an event not the event itself. When we suppress what happens to us it can manifest into unhealthy behaviors that keep us stuck. Writing my trauma stories is a healing process where I validate an experience so I can move forward to the life I deserve. 

I’ve learned so much through my process and now I want to pass my courage to you guys that are also interested in this process.

Enrollments for my Trauma Writing Mastermind are still open. Each class will be co-lead with therapists and life coaches. I know how expensive these individual sessions can be (from $150-$200), so I created this 4-week course so everyone can have access to these mental health experts as you learn the writing process. 

I hope you join this intimate class and if you have any questions, please send me a DM on Instagram.

Your story matters.

Your truth matters.

You matter.