This week’s letter comes from our Senior Coach, Michelle Leon. Michelle has helped hundreds of our clients, on all sides of an affair, come out changed the other side. Her private work has been praised by clients as "more valuable than any therapy I've ever had" and "worth more in one hour than I achieved in months with someone else." I'm lucky to have her on this team, and every client she's met with would tell you the same. - Lauren

Dear Reader,

Lauren and I have a lot of clients walk through our door hoping for the same thing: that we are going to help them get through their infidelity situation without having to feel much of anything hard along the way.

And I always start in the same place. I tell them, gently but honestly, that this just is not possible. If an affair came with a warning label, it would say this: nobody gets out of this without some uncomfortable feelings. That is the bad news. But here is the good news, and it’s a big one — there is an incredible amount of helpful, life-changing work that can be done to get you through this, and to the other side of it. In fact, I truly believe the work we do here applies to most areas of a person’s life, not just this one.

Here is what that work actually is. It isn’t us telling you what to do. It’s us helping you build a different relationship with uncomfortable feelings — because those feelings aren’t going anywhere. Even the people who complete Lauren’s Decision-Making Method, who get completely clear on what they want and what they’re going to do, often say they still feel stuck. And that is usually the moment we ask them to consider something: are you actually stuck, or are you avoiding the discomfort that comes with following through on the decision you have already made?

Why We Get Stuck

Most of the time, that is exactly what’s happening — because as humans, our whole operating system is built to avoid pain and seek pleasure. You can see it everywhere. We reach for something more pleasant, or we shift our thinking until it feels better, because discomfort is something we’re wired to want to escape.

A lot of what I do with clients is help them reframe their relationship to that discomfort. Instead of treating an uncomfortable feeling as a problem to solve, we practice viewing it as a necessary experience — one that’s actually required to get where you are trying to go.

Say you’ve ended your affair, and you are miserable. You miss your affair partner. You feel sad, you feel grief. If that discomfort registers as a problem, the solution your brain reaches for is often to go back — to call, to text, to check their social media. But if instead you can view that same discomfort as necessary — as proof that you are actually doing the thing you decided to do — it changes everything. That ache is not a sign you made the wrong choice. It is a sign you are moving toward your North Star. You did the internal work. You worked the Method. This discomfort means the journey has actually begun, because there was never a version of this where you would get to the other side without feeling it.

The same is true if you and your spouse have chosen to rebuild. Affair recovery work is uncomfortable — full stop. And if that discomfort gets labeled a problem, it can sound like I’m not supposed to be here. Or it can show up as reaching for old coping behaviors — reengaging in the affair, drinking, gambling, porn — anything that distracts from the feeling. But when that same discomfort gets relabeled as necessary — this is what it takes to build the marriage I actually want — it becomes something you can move through instead of something you have to escape.

The Bad News and the Good News

So here is the bad news: there is no version of infidelity recovery where nobody is uncomfortable. And here is the great news: once you are at the decision-making stage, you have real control over how you relate to that discomfort.

I like to use lower-stakes examples to make this land — something from fitness, or work, or school. Take training for a 10K race. You know you need to be up at 5 a.m., bundled up, running outside in the freezing cold (and if this is my example, yes, in Toronto that is genuinely uncomfortable). But I don’t experience that discomfort as a problem if I am very committed to running that race. I experience it as a necessary part of building the fitness I need to reach my goal. Short-term pain, long-term gain, as they say.

When you know your why, and you know why it matters to you, that why is your buy-in — the thing that keeps you motivated to feel the discomfort fully instead of avoiding it, instead of reaching for the coping behaviors, instead of hitting snooze. Because the alternative is waking up one, two, ten years from now, still not having run the race you said mattered so much to you. When you are clear on your why and your goal, you become far more willing to keep doing the work — to feel what needs to be felt, knowing that on the other side of it, you’ll have either reached your goal or moved that much closer, having built real resilience and grit along the way.

As always, we are here to support you. Thank you for being here.

If you’re somewhere colder, I hope you are soaking up these last couple of weeks of summer. Wishing you good health, as always.

Be well,

Michelle

(P.S. from Lauren - Many of you reach out asking how you can work directly with us. To learn more, and to schedule with Michelle, just click right here.)

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