EP 66: Why Our OWN Healing is So Important After Infidelity

0:00Hi everybody, welcome back to the podcast, it's great to be with you. I must apologize for many of you who are followers and subscribers. I have just been so busy I have not made many podcasts or videos lately. But today I wanted to share with you a quote that I read the other day that really stopped me in my tracks. It's by a gentleman I don't really know much about at all but his name is Corey Muscarra and I want to give credit where credit is due. But he said the pain that you heal is the medicine that you offer to the rest of the world. And I don't know where you're at right now. I don't know if you're on the brink of divorce. I don't know if your separation is going well or agonizing. I don't know if your recovery work is actually moving in the right direction. I hope that you can hear this quote from me today that it would resonate with you

1:03because you do have an opportunity to heal your own pain. The pain that you heal will become medicine to other people. How do I know that to be true? Well, close to 25 years ago I blew my life up at a level of explosion that I'm really good at screwing up my life. I've learned that over the decades. And if you to told me 25 or so years ago, hey Sam, one day you're going to be doing this and you're going to be doing this and you're going to be doing that, I'd have said, guys, you're crazy, you're on some great drugs. There's absolutely no way that any of that is possible. And if you had asked me that six months or five months into recovery work, I'd have said, I don't know who you think you're talking to, but I'm never going to be able to do that ever. I'm just going to disappear and try and just be a good dad and a good husband and take

2:06care of my three kids and that's it. I had never thought that I would be doing what I'm doing now. I started making videos close to 15 years ago because we were in a room and a meeting and somebody said, we need to start making videos. And one of them looked at me and said, you can do it. And I said, sure, I've screwed everything else up. Why not try and screw this up? True story. Here we are today, March of 2026. And I am amazed at the privilege that I get to be someone who helps other people heal. But ask yourself right now, the pain that you're in. Do you see any purpose to it? Do you see any redeeming value to it? Probably not. Because pain of this level, whether you're unfaithful or betrayed, can be massively disorienting. It just becomes a filter by which you see every relationship in your life. It becomes so intense that you can find yourself struggling to get out of bed, struggling

3:12to even want to read a book, watch a video, eat, even. But I want to tell you that right where you sit right now, you have no idea what the rest of your life is going to look like. You have no idea what either God or the universe, or even you are going to do with the pain that you are trying to heal. But I promise you, if you will heal this pain, it will create the opportunity to change other people's lives. Now I laugh because some of you are like, yes, Sam, I don't want to do that. You know, I never really asked for this. I don't really want to do that. I don't want to change other people's lives. I just want to go back to the way my life was, and I'm sorry you cannot. You cannot go backwards. You cannot go back and undo what has happened. A large part of that is called bargaining, and I'm sorry that is not how life goes. While we cannot go back, we can go forward.

4:15I'll never forget roughly a month into recovery, one of my early mentors said this to me. Now, if you come from faith, this is easy to grab hold of. If you don't come from faith, well, faith isn't just a construct that works in the religious kind of world. Faith is something that we have to have that when we log into our bank account, our money is going to be there. That when we go to pick up our child at the end of a practice that we're having faith that it's going to end on time, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it does. You get what I'm saying. But maybe it's not having faith and divinity, maybe it's just having faith in yourself. But here's how the statement goes, faith moves forward. Now, that is not a subconscious passive-aggressive message to the betray that says, faith moves forward. Get over it. Never. Have I ever said that? Never will I. I will say that. There is truth to the fact that faith does move forward.

5:20When you put it in this stream, if you will, I hope that it will resonate. Faith moves forward means I got to keep going. I cannot give up on me. I don't know what's going to happen in my marriage. I don't know what will happen in my relationship, but I cannot give up on me. I have to go forward. Going forward might mean going to a therapy or a coaching session. Getting forward might mean having a meal, working out, going for a walk, getting outside, getting fresh air, moving your body. I say this all the time to my clients. Moving bodies are healing bodies. Sometimes you just have to get moving. Sometimes you have to move your body to walk, run, jog, sprint, something to feel your heartbeat again, to be able to feel life again, to be able to move your body because you're worth the effort. But faith in yourself or in God or whatever you choose to believe in really decides to

6:25move forward. Forward means I get out of bed. I make myself eat. I make myself call my friend. I make myself go to my support group. I make myself go to a meeting. But I have to move forward because I, one day, want to be healed and I want to use this pain to help other people heal. Now you may not start a blog or create a podcast or make reels on Instagram for all the world to see, but you might just be a great best friend. You might be a better parent. You might help friends or family members, God forbid, but you might help them go through infidelity one day. What I do know is this, to this day when I meet people who have gone through hell, there's a certain way they talk. There's a certain way they look at me. There's a certain glimmer in their eye. There's a certain vernacular or vocabulary that they use that proves that they've been

7:31through hell. They're more connected with reality. They're more kind. They're more forgiving. They're more passionate. They know what they have been through. And I have to tell you, wherever you're at right now, I want to remind you that you're undefeated. I said this in a real the other day and I'm going to say it again here is that you are undefeated. You have survived every single one of the toughest days that you never thought you were going to survive. Well, guess what? You're undefeated. You have lived out every single one of them and I did an exercise one day with my therapist years and years ago, but it absolutely changed my life. It sent me into a bit of a tailspin for probably 48 to 72 hours before I really fully digested it. And I was talking to my therapist and he told me, you know, tell me about all this stuff that you say that you screwed up. And I went through all of the major milestones from high school, through college, into young

8:33adulthood, into midlife and all of that. And I just laid it all out for him and he said, you know, it's interesting. You are so focused on the mistakes that you've made, but yet you seem to have landed on your feet every single time. And he said, I wonder if you ever looked at that and were able to believe in how strong you are. And I just kind of stared at him like, what? Because what I had done is focused so much on my failures. I had focused so much on either when I failed or things went wrong for me and I felt like a failure, felt like a screw up. But he walked me through the fact that every single time I had screwed up or life did not go the way I wanted it to go, I had landed on my feet.

9:33I had survived it and actually I had integrated the traumatic event or traumatic events and I was able to actually transform that pain and not transmit it to everybody around me. And I'll tell you for a couple of days, I was like, wait a minute, am I allowed to think this way? I come from such a shame-based old-school Italian culture that is so driven on performance and works and being perfect or getting it all right all the time. It was a total transformative process for me to be able to say, wait a minute. You mean even when life crushed me or even when I self-sabotaged my life, that I can look back upon those events and look back upon them with a feeling of overcoming tenacity

10:37because I landed on my feet, yes, I'm allowed to do that. And you are allowed to do that too. Maybe what you're going through right now, infidelity, betrayal, trauma, shame, addiction, all the things that you might be navigating through if you're listening to my podcast. Maybe this will be something that you overcome as well. Maybe you can look back upon your life and go, you know this did happen and that did happen, but that's interesting. I have landed on my feet every single time. I have overcome everything that has attacked me. I have overcome everything that has tried to kill me because you're going to survive this too. I don't know about your relationship, but I know that you have the power to survive this and I have to tell you, unfortunately, I have seen people take their own lives because the pain of betrayal was too much for them, either as an unfaithful or as a

11:40betrayed. But I'm telling you, right now, you have the power to overcome this. You have the power to transform this trauma. You have the power to integrate this into your life, not as though it never happened before, but as though it did happen, you overcame it, you conquered it and you became a person that you never thought that you could become. You became a person who was so resilient, so tenacious, so gritty, whether you're unfaithful or betrayed, you're able to look at yourself and go, you know, I'm a badass. Not because you did it all right, but because you refused to give up and you chose to overcome. And you chose to move forward, becoming the person that you maybe didn't ask for the trauma, but you chose to still become a person that you love, you respect, and you are proud

12:42of. Maybe you're unfaithful and you go, Sam, that's a little bit hard to think that I'm going to one day live a life that I can be proud of, I'm sorry, I'm not proud of all my choices. I regret a lot of choices I've made, but I'm actually proud of who I am, I'm proud of what I do, I'm proud of what I get to do, I'm proud of the man that I am, I'm proud of the man that I want to be and I will never stop trying to be the man that I so desperately want to be, to everybody that is in my life. I promise you, you can overcome this and you can transform this. Pain that is not transformed will be transmitted, but pain that is transformed, pain that is healed will become medicine to so many people in your life and you have no idea what

13:42that looks like. So maybe borrow my hope, maybe lean upon my hope to tell you that what you heal from just might be medicine that you can offer anybody in your little hemisphere, but that's going to require a few things. Number one, you have to be tenacious, you have to be gritty, you have to be passionate, you have to invite safe people, which is number two, into your life to hold you accountable, to love you, to care for you, to even challenge you, maybe even to confront you as well as come for you. Number three, you cannot do this on your own and you need the help of an expert. I don't know who that expert is, but you need somebody that you can invite into your life that says, hey, teach me, train me, correct me, confront me, adjust me, slap me upside the head, but help me transform this pain. Number four, it's going to require sacrifice.

14:43If you're unfaithful, it's massively going to require the sacrifice of your ego and your pride. If you're a betray, it's going to sacrifice time, it's going to sacrifice attention, it's going to sacrifice even finances. It might even sacrifice your pain of the fact that you don't want to share this openly. So finding safe people is going to be essential. Number five, it's going to require that you never, ever give up on you. There might be a time to give up on your spouse. If they show that they are not safe and not willing to do the work and refuse to own the consequences of their behavior, but that doesn't mean that you have to give up on you. You are all you got. You are who you need. You need you to show up and fight. I heard this quote years ago and this guy said to me, you know, I don't want to see people's

15:44trophies. I don't need to see trophy boxes or medals or awards. Show me your scars. Show me the scars from what you've been through and what you went through. And even though it healed, there's still a mark. That's how devastating it was. You healed from it, but there's still a scar. And you, my friend, are going to have lots of scars to talk about one day as you offer hope to people who are looking for someone to believe in. If I can be of help in any way, please reach out to me at Sam's Healing Podcast at gmail.com. Don't forget about my other podcasts, which is Ask the Unfaithful with James and Near. You can find that on all the podcast platforms. And don't forget about Ask the Betrayed, which James's wife Sharon does. It's a fantastic podcast on YouTube and all the other podcast platforms that is specifically for the Betrayed. I'll see you next time on the podcast.