Remind me again how feelings work, because this feels awful

Feelings do not happen to us. Feelings do not happen in a vacuum and that is a good thing.
 
Feel them
Feel those feelings if you want to heal faster. The feelings exist regardless of whether you acknowledge them.
Learn how to feel them instead of avoiding them.
Learn how to change feelings and distract momentarily before going back to them.
 
Change the story
Most often, the stories we tell ourselves create feelings. We wire ourselves and make associations. You can change the story to change the feelings.

Here is one technique to deal with feelings that may feel unbearable right now. Over time, with exposure to the feelings, your response will shift. Your brain will wire differently as you do the tapping and remembering.

Try it with a therapist if you have serious trauma. If it is run of the mill trauma, try it now.

Trauma Technique: Bilateral Tapping (part of EMDR- trauma therapy)
Some people, while they’re thinking about the affair, tap using bilateral stimulation.
That means tapping on one leg with one hand and tapping on the other leg with the other hand. You tap in a rhythmical, alternating fashion.

As you’re talking and thinking about the affair, you tap left right left right left right. You brain will calm down within minutes. It is hard to escalate feelings while you are doing this. Your brain is using more of its capacity and balancing thoughts and feelings.
 
As you are talking about the affair or the details, thinking about it and simultaneously tapping, your body rewires the connections.

It stops perceiving it as an imminent threat.

You are then able to think more clearly and do your threat assessment.

Sometimes after the trauma of an affair, everything looks like a threat and that is not a fun experience. This tapping is used for trauma in many emergency fields. It can be done anywhere at anytime.

Experiment:
Try this tapping for 10 minutes while thinking about your relationship.
 
Experiment:
Try tapping for 30 minutes while thinking about the affair and what impact it had on your relationship.
Difficult emotions and taking responsibility is the title of this audio:
https://archive.org/details/dfficult-emotions-gratitude-im-right-youre-wrong-you-do-it-too-taking-responsibility

Did you know that people freely give attention to those who nurture and support them? I challenge you to nurture and support those around you in ways that are meaningful to them.

I would ask my clients to please let me know if you use my blog to continue the growth between sessions. It can be another resource for you.

Thank you for joining me today and I look forward to spending more time together in the future.

Thank you for subscribing,

​Don Boice, LCSWR
“The go- to guy for conflict”

How to Learn from Pain

Inventory
What new coping mechanisms did you discover as you went through this process?
 
What does it say about your strength and handling stress?
 
In what other parts of your life could you use these tools?
 
When you feel your feelings, you learn. When you avoid the feelings, you not only create suffering, you do not learn the lesson and are likely to repeat it, creating more drama and pain. That is not your best option.
 
Want some prompting on how to feel your feelings? Listen to this audio:
https://archive.org/details/how-do-feelings-work-feel-the-feelings-13-minutes
 
Did you know that people freely give attention to those who nurture and support them? I challenge you to nurture and support those around you in ways that are meaningful to them.

I would ask my clients to please let me know if you use my blog to continue the growth between sessions. It can be another resource for you.

Thank you for joining me today and I look forward to spending more time together in the future.

Thank you for subscribing,

​Don Boice, LCSWR
“The go- to guy for conflict”

This hurts so bad: The story does change over time

When comparing how you felt about the affair when you first found out versus how you feel now, did you notice the intensity of your emotion change? The event itself has not changed, so make sense of that.
 
​
Ask yourself:
Did you notice new emotions or thoughts coming to the surface?
Challenge: Can you track the pattern? What created the new emotions?
Were you able to distract yourself from the emotional experience of it?
Were you able to feel the fullness of the feelings?
Do you view it differently now?
Has your emotional response changed? How and why?
Were you surprised by the change?
What does that say about you?
What does that say about your ability to change the narrative?
What does the change say about your capacity to manage distress?
 
Chances are that feelings got in your way. At least your ability to manage them got in the way. Listen to this audio “How to do feelings”
https://archive.org/details/empathy-meditation-and-how-to-do-feelings-for-couples
 
We are in control of the narrative/story we tell ourselves. If it does not serve you, change it. If you do not like how you are feeling emotionally, consider that your narrative needs to be addressed.

Did you know that people freely give attention to those who nurture and support them? I challenge you to nurture and support those around you in ways that are meaningful to them.

I would ask my clients to please let me know if you use my blog to continue the growth between sessions. It can be another resource for you.

Thank you for joining me today and I look forward to spending more time together in the future.

Thank you for subscribing,
Don Boice, LCSWR
“The go- to guy for conflict”

My apologies. I could not access my account for a few weeks and finally was able to do so. More blogs on their way

This hurts so bad: The story does change over time

When comparing how you felt about the affair when you first found out versus how you feel now, did you notice the intensity of your emotion change? The event itself has not changed, so make sense of that.
 

Ask yourself
Did you notice new emotions or thoughts coming to the surface?

Challenge: Can you track the pattern? What created the new emotions?

Were you able to distract yourself from the emotional experience of it?
Were you able to feel the fullness of the feelings?
Do you view it differently now?
Has your emotional response changed? How and why?
Were you surprised by the change?
What does that say about you?
What does that say about your ability to change the narrative?
What does the change say about your capacity to manage distress?
 
Chances are that feelings got in your way. At least your ability to manage them got in the way. Listen to this audio “How to do feelings”

https://archive.org/details/empathy-meditation-and-how-to-do-feelings-for-couples
 
We are in control of the narrative/story we tell ourselves. If it does not serve you, change it. If you do not like how you are feeling emotionally, consider that your narrative needs to be addressed.

Did you know that people freely give attention to those who nurture and support them? I challenge you to nurture and support those around you in ways that are meaningful to them.
I would ask my clients to please let me know if you use my blog to continue the growth between sessions. It can be another resource for you.

Thank you for joining me today and I look forward to spending more time together in the future.

Thank you for subscribing,

​Don Boice, LCSWR
“The go- to guy for conflict”

Cognitive Approach
 
“But, It doesn’t make sense to me”
Our brain desperately wants it to make sense.
 
Feelings might get you there faster. Listen to this audio if you want some hints
https://archive.org/details/feel-the-pain-and-be-gentle-with-self
 
“It has to make sense”
We impose logic on situations that have no logic sometimes. Like an affair makes zero sense. Everyone involved gets hurt, damage is done and the illusion gets shattered. No one wins.
Make sense of that!
 
If people could see what they are doing and that they are chasing an illusion, they would stop and choose a better option. They would promptly tell their partner that something is bothering them and sit down and make it better. Or they would tell their partner that they want to be done and then go looking.
Obviously, not every affair is exactly the same, but many of the patterns overlap.

Deep down, many of us believe that if we could just figure it out, we’d be okay.

 
Certainty
That kind of certainty is rare and elusive, so why shoot for something likely out of our reach. Demanding certainty from life is a fool’s errand.

We can check ourselves for logical fallacies and cognitive distortions, so that we do not make things worse.

Challenge: Check the narrative, the story you tell yourself about the affair, for accuracy. The way you tell the story might just make you feel worse. You get to tell it differently and you get to change the ending. You are the author of this chapter. Tell your story with care.

Did you know that people freely give attention to those who nurture and support them? I challenge you to nurture and support those around you in ways that are meaningful to them.

I would ask my clients to please let me know if you use my blog to continue the growth between sessions. It can be another resource for you.

Thank you for joining me today and I look forward to spending more time together in the future.

​Thank you for subscribing,
Don Boice, LCSWR
“The go- to guy for conflict”

Top daily reminders for healing from the affair

It gets better, eventually. You stop thinking about it all the time, after a while. This is the hard part.

“You were always on my mind,” is from a song that was intended to be touching, not to be about rumination.
​
Overthinking
When we overthink, it is usually related to avoiding feelings.

If we feel, we tend to not overthink. Ruminating and obsessing are not good for you. Please stop yourself and figure out tools to cope.

Daily, remember to ask yourself:
How do I feel?
What do I need?
 
Want some practice with feelings? Listen to this audio for suggestions
https://archive.org/details/how-do-you-feel-practice-with-a-mirror-exercise
 
Challenge: Put those questions in your phone and prompt yourself. Contact your feelings if you want to recover faster and more thoroughly. Feel the feelings, witness them.

People who “Do feelings” are consistently going through them faster and move on with their life. Do you want to move on?
 
Narrative
What is the story I am telling myself about this event? (By the way, the event may be painful in and of itself. I am the author of the story about the event. If I am the author, I can change the narrative to make myself suffer even more. I can create a victim story and torment myself. That is an option that some people choose without even realizing that they did that to themselves.)

Radical acceptance- Not being okay with it but accepting that what happened is what happened.
You don’t have to make it worse. You really don’t have to. It is bad enough on its own and you do have the power to make it worse.

Most of us do that by mistake.

Thank you for joining me today and I look forward to spending more time together in the future. Let’s have good conversations about this so that we heal rather than hurt.

Thank you for subscribing,

Don Boice, LCSWR

The go- to guy for conflict

Top tools to help with healing after an affair
 
Talking about the affair can lead to stupid advice from well-meaning friends and family.
You don’t need advice that is harmful, you need tools to cope and get through the pain so that you can make an informed decision that you will respect over time.
You need to stabilize the pain before making decisions. Let’s look at the best of the best for helping you heal and stabilize and recover. I have included those below.
 
“Why should I care?”
Well, your life could be different if you heal. Learn how by reading more about the techniques and go towards mastery.
 

 
You can feel better faster

Many couples find that the relationship was in severe distress. That does not justify an affair.

It does make you question the relationship and if you choose to stay together, you are going to need to change some things about it. You might even design a relationship from scratch to make sure it works for you.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Heal the affair before you take these parts on. They will wait.

If you can heal thoroughly and quickly, you would prefer that. There are tried and true tools you can use.

Use them, then decide if you are ready to try the relationship again.
 
Not a reader and want some tools to let go of limiting beliefs and to anchor some feelings? Listen to this audio to learn how.
https://archive.org/details/pre-game-3-anchoring-feelings-and-let-go-of-limiting-beliefs
 

Tools:
Prolonged exposure is a tool wherein we ask people to feel their emotions until the emotions evaporate. Ask me about these. (Overview: 3x a week for 45 minutes per time, feel the emotions until the emotions are no more. Your brain grows bored with the repeated exposure and you learn that you need not cope, just experience feelings. The feelings are not deadly or catastrophic, just uncomfortable, and inconvenient. You can do it.)

Distress tolerance- lean into doing difficult things. Get used to doing hard things. Watch what happens when you consistently do difficult things. Your confidence soars and you have the courage to face new challenges. The new challenges feel exciting, and your self-esteem grows. Oh, and if you are healing, you know there is distress and discomfort that you must go through to get the good stuff.

Hypnosis- great tool for dealing with situations like this.

Neuro linguistic programming- Ask me about the video editing concept, as it relates to images in your  head about the affair.

The video in your head about what happened can be edited or altered. Great for images that you would like to scrub from your brain. Great for trauma, such as the trauma of an affair. You are the director and producer of the video in your head and can change many aspects of it to lessen the impact. As you edit parts of the video, your brain will have a harder time ruminating or obsessing because your brain will not find it as easily. It makes you suffer less.

Exposure and response prevention- There are techniques and ideas from OCD that could be helpful to you. People who manage ocd know how to deal with obsession and the affair can feel like an obsession.
Get used to feeling the feelings and not acting out simply because you have an emotion. Let’s say you want to go through their phone because you have a feeling. You would bring on the feeling (yes, on purpose- “exposure”) and then deliberately deal with it and not go through their phone.
Don’t do the compulsive behavior even when the feelings get intense and watch how liberating that is. It breaks the automatic nature of it. You have choices instead of compulsions, by the end. A lot of your thinking might look like OCD in the initial stages, so we will teach concepts from the world of OCD to help you. I am not diagnosing you with OCD.

DBT- is a field that catalogs coping skills. If you truly need skills for coping, search the internet or AI for “DBT coping skills.” Teach yourself the skills and maybe join a group to practice those skills. The more skills you have to regulate emotions, the more in control you will feel.

CBT- is a field that helps you dispute and challenge the thoughts in your head. Often those thoughts are not accurate, and they can even be harmful. People who go through CBT training are often shocked how often they used to believe thoughts that are not accurate or helpful.
Is there evidence that your belief is accurate? Is there any other explanation than the one you are hanging onto? Questions like that help you be more mentally flexible and suffer less. Is it possible that I am misinterpreting what just happened?

Habit replacement therapy- when you have a habit like obsession, we can replace it with something else. Ask me for more information. What could you do that would compete with your obsessing? Fill your time with positive, growth oriented behavior and watch how hard it is to obsess. Challenge your thoughts, change your behavior and give yourself grace.

Behavioral training includes a whistle, clicker, small rewards, codewords, touch, chime, touching the pad that makes a word- like dog training, but for people.

When you see your partner put down the phone when you walk in a room, that elicits a feeling. When you hear the ding for the notification or feel the vibration from a text, you might immediately associate those with the affair. Like Pavlov’s dogs, we are strongly influenced in this manner.

Just as you can be negatively affected by these stimuli, you have the opportunity to be positively affected.

That is where the audio comes in- we are consciously and with full awareness looking at how to program our minds and intentionally creating an anchor for feelings that benefit you.
 
You have choices

You always have choices in how you respond and behave. Learn the above if you need help with changing behavior. Set up a system designed for you, specifically, and learn to reinforce yourself.

Consider going for counseling, too. Many therapists have training in the above tools, so there is help out there for you.

Thank you for joining me today and I look forward to spending more time together in the future. Let’s have good conversations about this so that we heal rather than hurt.

Thank you for subscribing,
Don Boice, LCSWR

“The go- to guy for conflict”

I wish it didn’t happen
Context: For the next bunch of weeks, I will be blogging about healing from an affair. There will be coping techniques, ways to approach it and how to heal. These same techniques can be applied to other life concerns.

*Please share this blog with people who might benefit, so we can alleviate suffering.
 


"I wish it didn't happen," he said.

My definition of “suffering”- “not living life on life’s terms. Wishing it were different instead of accepting what is.”

That will be you causing yourself suffering. It might be too early for that concept to land well and maybe we are just planting seeds. Of course, when something painful happens, we want things to be different.

Don’t add to your pain by wishing things were different. Accepting that this happened is vital. I am not saying be okay with it and pretend it did not happen. Acknowledge your feelings, your perspective, the story in your head for what they are.

Be upset, just don’t add to your pain.
 
"I wish it did not happen," she said.

You have control over the narrative. Do not program your brain to be mad, hurt, upset etc. when something happens. You might have legit anger, but don't make yourself pre-mad. If they do x, I must be angry.

You made me angry? Nope

I made myself angry by the story I told myself about the event. The event is such that an event is not capable of making us mad.

It is semantics and will liberate you. Even though it is hard, I ask you to allow yourself to try on the idea. If I am right, you will be spared significant suffering.

You get to determine how you feel.
​ 
Check out the included video on YouTube below to see your role.
 
I want you to have choices instead of going into automatic pilot. You have options, you are not a puppet!!
 
Options
Here are some things that you can do, some of the tools that we have, some of the options that you have:
Somatic routines (13 routines) from my blog- go to my website www.boicecounseling.com and in the blog, look at august 2024 for 13 consecutive blogs about routines- ways to hack your emotions.  Go through the blogs and see what works for you.

The more ways you find to make yourself feel better, the better off you are. Some days, very little works and I like having plan b, plan c.
  
Why do those routines?

Again, if you know how to keep yourself in a good space and deal with emotions, it is easier to heal quickly, because you will be able to tolerate the discomfort of the healing process. If you get easily triggered, then healing is much more challenging. Of course, you will be triggered at times and one of our goals is to move away from hyper vigilance. Be vigilant, not hyper vigilant.

Thank you for joining me today and I look forward to spending more time together in the future. Let’s have good conversations about this so that we heal rather than hurt.

Next blog will discuss several tools you might find helpful in healing after an affair.

Thank you for subscribing,
Don Boice, LCSWR
“The go- to guy for conflict”
​

​How to use these blogs about healing from affairs to help me

That’s where I come in.

I don’t want you to suffer. It hurts enough without adding to it.

Want an audio for more information?
https://archive.org/details/she-cheated-audio-how-to-do-feelings-after
 
Make sense of what happened

Let’s look at options to make sense of what happened and heal as quickly and thoroughly as possible. There are many ways to heal, and we know that you can heal, and it is also true that healing takes a little longer than any of us would like.

Again, we know how to heal, so please be patient with yourself and your pace, you will get there if you have a good process to follow. Trust that the process has worked for many people, and it could work for you. Go at your pace, but please don’t avoid feelings.
 
Feelings
Yes, feel the necessary pain, but not add to the pain.

This is how it will make life better for you- you will go through pain instead of avoiding it. You will lean into the pain, not add to it. As you experience that. You will upset your expectations. Pay attention and believe the words of experts, and give them attention if you want to progress faster.

Knowing what your triggers are and preparing for the ones you can predict are likely to happen. Not the ones that are possible, but the ones that are probable. Live life on life’s terms and you are likely to reduce your suffering.
 
Theory
I have borrowed heavily from the work in OCD because so many people are ruminating after an affair. There are many thinking traps, so let’s use the tools available to us to challenge or dispute those unhelpful thoughts.

Let’s look at strategies that have been successful for so many other people. Keep trying until you find what works for you and then master those.
 
Let’s be partners before parents. See this video and you will realize how we have been focusing on the kids and neglecting our relationship.
 
Did you know that people freely give attention to those who nurture and support them? I challenge you to nurture and support those around you in ways that are meaningful to them.

Use my blog to continue your growth

I would ask my clients to please let me know if you use my blog to continue the growth between sessions. It can be another resource for you.

Thank you for joining me today and I look forward to spending more time together in the future.

​Thank you for subscribing,
Don Boice, LCSWR
“The go- to guy for conflict”