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Well, hey there. Welcome to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale. This is episode number 266, "When It's Not Your Fault." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale, and I'm your host for Intentional Living.

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Hello there, my friends. Welcome to the podcast. I'm always just so happy to be here with you. Now, the last four weeks, I have been doing some greatest hits. Sometimes there's just stuff that I'm like, "oh, this has to get back out there." And it's just good. And summer time is a good time for me to do that, because I've been busy with like, going around and doing fun things. And though I've been making time for all my clients and this, it's been nice to be able to go on trips and not have to worry so much about my podcast. I absolutely want to keep giving you good content. And so I'm putting out some of the great stuff in the greatest hits. But today, we are back on track with some all brand new content.

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So here we go. Today we are talking about when it's not your fault. So this is spawned by an email that I recently received from someone who listens to the podcast and I'm gonna read it to you. I don't have her permission to share this but considering I'm not sharing any of her name or anything, I hope that she's okay with it. So here we go. She says, "I've really enjoyed your podcast and emails this past year as I've worked to navigate my divorce. A big part of your message is taking ownership of what happened and getting out of victim mode. I understand this in theory but have really struggled to apply it. Does your recommendation in this regard stay the same even in a situation where there was infidelity or where one partner leaves the other without explanation? When my ex left me, I feel like the counsel I received and what I needed to hear over and over was, 'this is not your fault.' I'm trying to reconcile these two seemingly opposed ideas. I'm certainly open to seeing how imperfect I was as a wife, I'm human after all, but do I really need to figure out how to take responsibility in a case where he cheated?" Okay, wow, such a great, great question. And I'm pretty positive that she's not the only one with this question. So I wanted to address it in a podcast and dig a little bit deeper into some of the things that I responded to her in the email.

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So I want to start by coming in through a side door first. I've had people ask me since I started coaching whether what I'm teaching is just Pollyanna-ish thinking, meaning taking a positive spin on everything and ignoring all the difficulty in life. And I can see how at first glance it may seem like that because basically I'm teaching change your thoughts, change your experience. And although at face value, that's really true, we do change our thoughts and it does change our experience, we're also not out to ignore the human experience, which means there's a 50-50 in life. We have 50% amazing experiences, 50% challenging experiences. And I find it fascinating that when I read scriptures, I will see verses that talk about different emotions that God feels. He feels love, sadness, grief, anger, kindness, grace, and that's just a start. We also see in scriptures that Christ also felt these emotions and more while he was ministering here on the earth. God and Christ feel emotions, all kinds of emotions, and they are our model for all things.

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So in learning that our thoughts create our emotions, I don't want it to be misconstrued into thinking that we always want to do what we call a "thought swap", meaning that we just change our thoughts so that we don't feel a more difficult emotion, and we get rid of it with positive thinking. Emotions were given to us by our Father in Heaven. We were created to have emotions and there are so many things we can learn and ways that we can grow by learning how to feel and process through all kinds of emotions. So our goal when encountering really tough circumstances isn't to avoid all of the more difficult feelings or to pretend that they're not there. We want to feel all of the emotions that life brings us, even if they're sometimes difficult and uncomfortable. That is our human experience.

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But the truth of the matter is we are the recipient of other people's actions. Their actions go into our circumstance line and sometimes their actions cause us a lot of pain. And in the case of the woman who sent me this email, her husband had had an affair and part of the fallout is a divorce that she wasn't anticipating. Now we could get into arguing that if he hadn't had

the affair, she wouldn't be going through a divorce. So the divorce is not her fault. And guess what? That might be 100% true. If we could somehow hook up a meter that measured how much each person was at fault, we could kind of figure all that stuff out, right? However, even if we did no percentages, you're 68% at fault, you're 32% at fault, right? That wouldn't help us. The point here in this circumstance is that the infidelity did happen and that she's now going through a divorce. Those are the facts. And those facts are painful for her. And from my own experience, it is one of the most difficult times in my life and I'm sure it's been one of the most difficult in hers and a lot of the rest of y'all who are listening to this. But what happens when someone in the situation takes the strong stance that it's not their fault, that it's their spouse's fault that all of this is going down? Well, nothing really happens unless you qualify being stuck in frustration and anger and not progressing forward as being something that happens.

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So I'm going to start off by saying that in response to her question, "yes," it means you take ownership even in cases of infidelity or where the other partner leaves without explanation. Now, in saying that, what I'm not saying is that the infidelity was her fault in any way, and she is not responsible for her husband's choices. She has no responsibility for the decisions that he chose to make at any point in the relationship. I'm also not saying that anything she did caused him to make the choices that he did. She doesn't need to take responsibility for that. He did that all on his own. I'm also not saying that his choices didn't impact her in a significant way, because they absolutely did. And this is where it's so important that we acknowledge the pain, that we allow ourselves to feel and process it.

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So when people kept telling her that it wasn't her fault, they were exactly right. Regardless of how difficult or dysfunctional the marriage may have been, she did not make him seek out another woman and have a sexual relationship with her or an emotional relationship. That behavior is all on him. She doesn't need to own or be responsible for any of that. What I am saying is that when her focus is only on his behavior, what he did, she will stall out. When we can stop the blaming, stop making the other person the villain, stop making him or her the focus of our story, then we can start taking responsibility and we can start to heal and move forward. It's a process of moving your focus from what you're looking at. If you're looking at him, to start to looking at you.

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So especially in cases of infidelity, it can be so easy to think about. to keep your focus on his behaviors and what he did and how it impacted you and woe is me. This is difficult. Of course it's difficult. But the reason it's so easy is because it's so painful. It is a serious breach of marital protocol and it goes against every covenant or promise that we have made to each other when we choose to get married. And this sort of betrayal is so hurtful. It can even be traumatic. In fact, they've started to use a new phrase in the last couple years called "betrayal trauma." Okay? It can feel like the breath has been knocked out of us and we can't breathe. And I tell you it's important that we take some time to process the pain, to process the situation. It's like we're stopping, bending over, and putting our hands on our knees and breathing super hard to work to catch our breath. It's important that we allow ourselves time to wrap our heads around this situation, especially if it's been sprung on us suddenly. This is the place where we most keenly and most overwhelmingly feel those difficult emotions we talked about earlier. We will sometimes be so overcome with the pain that it feels like we're drowning, like we're being swallowed up in the pain and the anguish, like we can't move at all. Take time, catch your breath. These things are hard.

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Okay, what I'm not saying is that our husband says, "I had an affair, I'm leaving," and we go, "okay, I'm just going to move on. I'm going to take responsibility." No, we got to take that time. We got to catch our breath. We got to put our hands on our knees and rest for a second and process everything going on. We will hit a point, however, when we start to feel really

uncomfortable in that space, when we have caught our breath a bit and then continuing to talk about how hard the hit was and how challenging it was to breathe, starts to feel like we're dragging it out. If we're too deep in it and we aren't aware that we're dragging it out, sometimes it can be really helpful to use the people around us as cues, because they will start to disengage from our story. They may not come around to talk to us as often. They will try to change the subject. We can start telling when other people are going, "okay, like this is just going on and on and on." Now, they're not necessarily the gauge, because everybody has their own capacity for dealing with that, but if you're starting to wonder, "am I dragging this out too much?" That's a cue you can look at to see.

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Now, this isn't to say that it's not still painful for us when other people start to disengage a little bit. These things don't just go away with time. Time does not heal all wounds. But we will hit a point where we've had time to process our situation and then we start to feel unsettled. We just know when it's time to move on. There's a feeling inside of us that says, "I feel unsettled, it's time." And there isn't any timeline for this. Everybody's on their own schedule. It may take weeks, it could take months. But pay attention because you will hit a point where you begin wallowing and that's when you know it's time to pick up your bags, stand up, and get moving again.

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So also be aware that your primitive brain will want to stay in this wallowing place because it doesn't take energy to continue to wallow. It takes energy to change trajectory and to get moving and our primitive brain likes to conserve energy so it will want to stay in wallowing. But you'll also feel that tickle in your prefrontal cortex that starts to feel uncomfortable being where you are. And at this point, we need to stop focusing on the other person's behavior and start focusing on our own.

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Though continuing to blame may feel true to you. It was all his fault or all her fault. It isn't helpful at all. It's keeping you stuck. So though it may be true, it's not helpful. And when I do coaching with my clients, this is a huge thing when we identify thoughts. We're like, "okay, is that a true thought?" Sometimes it is. But then we ask this follow-up question, "is it a helpful thought?" And almost always the answer is "no, it's keeping me stuck." So when we can learn to let go of the other person's story of infidelity and causing us pain, and focus instead on where we want our story to go, we will start the process of moving onward. The other person has their stuff to work through for sure. And you letting go of it and letting him or her focus on their story is your most empowered move. Continuing to focus on their behavior doesn't allow you to engage in the behaviors that will allow you to move forward. It's a product of forgiveness and it's a process of accepting what happened. That doesn't mean you have to like what happened, but accepting that it did happen and then figuring out where do you want to go from here. It's looking to the future rather than focusing on the past. There will be, the other person will be held accountable for their choices at some point, whether in this life or the next. And that is all theirs to own and to work through. Or not, they don't have to work through it. But here's an important point as well. You will also be held accountable for your choices, not only how you showed up in the marriage, but also you will be held accountable for how you are choosing to forgive and and take ownership of your life at this point.

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So one reason I focus so much on this podcast on what makes healthy relationships is so that we can start to see how we showed up in the marriage, how we didn't show up in our previous marriage in great ways, and then we can make adjustments to move forward in a healthier way. Because when we start to recognize our own tendencies to one-up or one down, to be transactional, then we can start to clean that up in our own lives. And if we were engaging in those behaviors in a marriage, you can be sure that you're also engaging in those behaviors with other people you have relationships with in your life, such as your children, siblings, parents, friends, coworkers. So learning to clean up these behaviors by identifying the thoughts and feelings behind them, increasing our awareness surrounding these behaviors, it strengthens every relationship in our life. And then in years to come. If you decide to start looking for another marital relationship, another spouse, you will be in a much better position to have a successful next marriage.

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So with that, I'm also not saying in that, that those types of behaviors made you deserving of his painful behaviors. We all engage in passive aggressive gaslighting, manipulated behaviors, one-upping, one-downing, transactions, et cetera. All of us do that. It's our primitive brain, desperate to survive with as little immediate pain as possible. But cleaning up your side of the street is all you can control. And that's where your power lies to heal and to move forward. So be aware as well that often the other person who has had the affair or filed for divorce or whatever your situation is, they may try to make you believe that their behavior was their fault. Okay, this is a pretty normal human response. When we know that we've hurt someone or done something we know to be wrong, we try to deflect the blame onto somebody else. So think about the last doozer of a discussion you had with someone. Okay? If they came at you or you went at them attacking them, telling them how wrong they were, how hurtful they were, chances are pretty good that their defenses were pretty strong. That protective wall came up fast and hard and they started looking for ways to attack you back. That is just what our primitive brains do. They want to avoid pain so they move into protective mode. And part of protective mode is just not walls up. It's also attacking back. We don't naturally become introspective to ask where the truth is. We naturally seek for protection first. And before we know it, we're neck deep in hurling accusations at the other person, both of us telling each other all the wrong things they're doing and blaming them for all of our unhappiness and disappointment in life. And when someone knows they have done something egregiously wrong, the shame may become overwhelming and they will go into what we call fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.

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Very often in a situation like this they will go into fight which means they will start blaming you in order to appease the feeling of shame in them. They'll start pointing out all the reasons they felt they needed to get involved with someone else, all the ways you weren't meeting their needs, all the things that you did that were hurtful. You didn't have enough sex, you didn't give him the attention that he wanted and needed, you weren't fun or spontaneous enough, you weren't there for them when they needed you, therefore he had to go somewhere else to get those needs, those wants, met. If we're in the habit of taking everyone else's stuff in order to keep the peace, We may be tempted to believe these accusations and to start blaming ourselves as well. "Well, of course he did that because I did this," right? And yet it's really, really important that we work to stay in our own lane and not take on the responsibility for other people's behaviors or feelings. Does that mean that we were practically perfect in how we showed up and were we the perfect spouse? No. No, none of us will ever be that. And here's where what we take ownership over can move us out of victim mentality and into responsibility for our past and also our future.

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So a quick side note about being a victim. Sometimes we really are a victim. Sometimes people's behavior really does victimize us and there isn't anything we can do about it, except choose not to adopt a victim mentality, not to make being a victim part of who we believe ourselves to be. That's the space I'm talking about here. Not that we aren't sometimes a victim, but that when we start to believe that story, that "I am a victim," and it becomes part of who we are, that's where we start creating problems for ourselves. I am not saying that other people's behavior doesn't put us in some horrible and even precarious situations sometimes. What I am saying is that when we buy into thinking that we are victims, when it becomes who we are, we become powerless and that powerlessness comes because the other person has to change what they are doing in order for our situation to change or to be better.

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And that is not the case at all. Our power comes when we stop fixating on the other person being the villain, on all the things

that they've done to us, and how they've helped to create our difficult situation. And instead, we start fixating on what wecan do to change how things are, on how we can make our situation better. Learning to shift our focus from the other person's past, or even present behavior, to our future and taking ownership of where we are going. This makes us the hero of our own story. It puts us in control of our lives, our own trajectory, and where we will eventually end up. So are we sometimes victimized by other people? Sometimes yes. But that does not mean we have to become a victim. Whether we adopt that persona is a matter of whether we are focused on the problem, which would often be focusing on blaming the other person or whether we are focused on the solution, which is where we get to take responsibility for where we're going and stop blaming the other person. Not that there aren't things that aren't their fault, but that continuing to sit in the same space, blaming them and focusing on all the things they did wrong does nothing to help us heal or move forward.

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So take a bit of time to catch your breath if needed and then take your eyes off of them and look at yourself to figure out how to move forward into a better and a stronger space. Part of this process is letting go of the pain by stepping into forgiveness. The other person doesn't have to acknowledge they're wrong for you to forgive. The other person doesn't have to change their behavior for you to forgive, because forgiving isn't letting them off the hook; it's letting you off the hook. It's allowing and trusting God to take care of their decisions and choices, and it's moving into being responsible for your decisions and choices. I don't think you have to love them. I don't think you have to want to hang out with them. I don't think you have to want to even be friends with them. You get to set any boundary that feels appropriate to you in order to keep yourself emotionally and physically safe. What it does mean is that you stop letting them be the main character of your story and instead you give them a teeny tiny little character part in the background, hardly seen, and you step into the spotlight to be the main character of your story, the hero, if you will.

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So one last thought. Well, there's a lot of thoughts in this last thought but here we go. The other person may make some accusations that are hard to hear. Choose to acknowledge and listen to those. The examples I used before were that they might accuse you of not wanting sex, not giving them the attention that they needed and wanted, not being fun or spontaneous enough, that you weren't there for them when they needed you. Here's an amazing trick. If you can muster the courage to look at their accusations and ask yourself where they might be true, you will find some gold nuggets that, if addressed, could uplevel your life. Now everything they accuse you of might not be true, but if you can take an honest look at yourself and notice even a sliver of truth, cleaning that up will change your life for the better. And that, my friends, is hard and scary work. It is the work of growing up into our next best selves, into a version of us that is more capable of engaging in relationships the way we really want to.

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I am so honored to be part of your journey here on the podcast and to my clients who I've worked with one on one. I have been, and I'm so honored to be, an even more intimate part of your journey. You allowing me into this scary and difficult space is a sacred privilege and one that I don't take lightly. And I thank you for allowing me to be here. This is important work. This is some of the most valuable work we can do in our lives. I really believe that it helps us to become more like Christ in every way. And we can't go wrong with that. Thanks for being here. I wish you all the best.

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If you want to check out coaching and talk with me about it, please go to tanyahale.com. Go to my, there's a top tab that says "free consultation." You can click on that. You can set up a time on my calendar. This is the deal with coaching. You can do this work on your own. I know that and I believe that and I don't keep any secrets. I mean, I put everything that I've got out on this podcast. There are no secrets. What the trick is about coaching one-on-one is that you can move to a place in three or six months that it might take you three to six years in your life doing it on your own because of the awareness piece. I can see things that you can't see. I can identify thoughts you're having that you don't know that you're having, that are keeping you stuck, that are keeping you not feeling better, that are keeping you from growing. And if you can clean up the next 20, 30, even 40 years of your life and have better relationships, more fulfilling relationships, because you make an investment of time and energy and money right now, it is so worth it. I promise you it's worth it. The life that I'm living now because of coaching is unbelievable to me. Unbelievable. My ability to engage in ways that are healthy and that are fulfilling and loving is just mind boggling to me sometimes. And I'm not perfect. I can promise you that. I make a lot of mistakes but this is the thing...I can get myself on track pretty darn quick. And I see things I didn't see before and I've cleaned up so many of my behaviors and I'm just such a fan of coaching for what it has done for me. So if you want to check it out, go to my website, sign up for a free consult and let's chat about coaching. Okay. That, my friends, is a wrap and it's amazing. I

love this concept. Work on it. Let me know if you have any questions. You can also leave me an email, write me an email. You can find that on my website as well. Have an awesome awesome day, and I will see you next week. Bye

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Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.