Why I Became a Betrayal Trauma Life Coach

From my Social Media Post leading up to the launch of my company:

Six Days Until Launch:

I decided to talk a little bit about my journey to recovery from betrayal trauma each day leading up to my launch. I want everyone to know this wasn’t something I just “decided to do” on a whim. There are some things in life that seem to be predestined or fated somehow. I never will believe my ex-husband was fated to cheat on me. I believe he absolutely wasn’t and shouldn’t have done that. I also don’t believe that I was fated to suffer as much as I did either. It was a suffering that no one should ever have to feel. It was souls shattering, gut wrenching. I was balled up in the fetal position on the floor in my closet, sobbing for the entire first year. There is something about crying out to God in your closet that seemed to ring true for me.

I contemplated everything from suicide to murder. So many emotions I was not equipped to manage so I just let them wash over me like a torrential flood. I drew a picture of this, I might share it someday. Water is powerful! It is cleansing. I also spent hours a day soaking in a tub of Epsom salts, not knowing how it was pulling toxins from my body. Water saved me in ways I only later came to understand. The baths…the buckets of tears I shed could fill an ocean.

I was so broken that I felt I was so far gone past the point of no return. I was a shell of my former self. All of my hopes and dreams for the future we forever out of my reach. Who could live like this?  My resting heart rate was 107. I was probably well on my way to a stroke or heart attack. When I wasn’t sleeping I was in the bath or laying on my bed sobbing. I only got up to potty train our new puppy. I’m pretty sure that dog saved me.

When I went into the closet I dropped to my knees pleading with God to save me or take me home. My most often question was “why?”  Why was God doing this to me? Why did he let it happen? I learned that God didn’t do anything to me. My Ex did. And God had to let him make that choice. It sucks, but it is a law. Choice and Accountability. I was an innocent bystander, suffering needlessly. So what about me? Don’t I matter? Why became my favorite word. Then one day the answer came, about a year later:

Yesterday I told you what it was like to experience betrayal trauma. Today I promised to explain how God used this experience for my good. I really don’t think God liked what my ex did to me. But I also think God knows me better than I know myself, and he had a back up plan.

One thing that shocked me was how lost I felt. Anyone I reached out to in those first few months didn’t really know what to do to help me. I was counting on someone, anyone really, to tell me how to fix this. I heard over and over again, “you are the only one who can decide what to do.” That’s not what I wanted to hear!  I wanted them to tell me what the chances were that I could fix my marriage! Silence. I never felt so alone! Here I was trying to navigate something that nobody knew anything about, and to make it worse, nobody ever talks about. 

Surely someone had done some studies? I hoped professionals would tell me how serious this was? Nope. In those first few months I got little to no solid help. It was discouraging. I kept hearing that sex addicts can recover, but what did that look like? Should I give him another chance? Can he recover? How would I know he was serious about choosing me?

Without any clear direction or information, I decided to give my Ex a year to get into recovery. He wasn’t really interested, and continued to cheat while he told me he doing his recovery work. He wasn’t. He really just wanted to keep cheating AND have me back too. But I kept following what little advice I was given by the “Reconciliation Industrial Complex” as I like to call them. I was on a fools errand, but I didn’t know it at the time. What I did know is that I couldn’t take much more cheating! It was taking a terrible toll on me! All in all I tried to reconcile for 2 years.

In the mean time, God kept telling me that I needed to kept a record of everything that was happening. I wasn’t much of a journal keeper, but my therapist told me that keeping a journal was good for healing. So I did it.

Later God kept telling me that the path He would show me would be the right path and then I would turn around and share it with others who would experience the same heartbreaks. I was doubtful.

Five Days Until Launch:

Yesterday I told you what it was like to experience betrayal trauma. Today I promised to explain how God used this experience for my good. I really don’t think God liked what my ex did to me. But I also think God knows me better than I know myself, and he had a back up plan.

One thing that shocked me was how lost I felt. Anyone I reached out to in those first few months didn’t really know what to do to help me. I was counting on someone, anyone really, to tell me how to fix this. I heard over and over again, “you are the only one who can decide what to do.” That’s not what I wanted to hear!  I wanted them to tell me what the chances were that I could fix my marriage! Silence. I never felt so alone! Here I was trying to navigate something that nobody knew anything about, and to make it worse, nobody ever talks about. 

Surely someone had done some studies? I hoped professionals would tell me how serious this was? Nope. In those first few months I got little to no solid help. It was discouraging. I kept hearing that sex addicts can recover, but what did that look like? Should I give him another chance? Can he recover? How would I know he was serious about choosing me?

Without any clear direction or information, I decided to give my Ex a year to get into recovery. He wasn’t really interested, and continued to cheat while he told me he doing his recovery work. He wasn’t. He really just wanted to keep cheating AND have me back too. But I kept following what little advice I was given by the “Reconciliation Industrial Complex” as I like to call them. I was on a fools errand, but I didn’t know it at the time. What I did know is that I couldn’t take much more cheating! It was taking a terrible toll on me! All in all I tried to reconcile for 2 years.

In the mean time, God kept telling me that I needed to kept a record of everything that was happening. I wasn’t much of a journal keeper, but my therapist told me that keeping a journal was good for healing. So I did it.

Later God kept telling me that the path He would show me would be the right path and then I would turn around and share it with others who would experience the same heartbreaks. I was doubtful.

Four Days Until Launch:

The path that God took me down was very unusual and unexpected, but it’s just what I needed. After doing therapy for a few years I just wasn’t feeling as good as I wanted to be.  I was still having anxiety and panic attacks everyday. My prayers changed. I asked God to help me feel better. I was so desperate that I made a promise.

“I will do whatever you ask me to do, no matter how odd it seems I will do it!” He held me to my word!  What happened next was very remarkable.

The first thing God did was send me to yoga! Yes Yoga!  I learned about my energy centers aka chakras. In the first class we were asked to locate the root chakra which is red and located at the base of the tailbone. I am usually pretty good with my imagination but I couldn’t “see” it. I was getting frustrated because I knew the instructor was about to move on to the next one. I heaved a big sigh. In my mind I saw gray dust blow away from a faint ember buried in the dust. “Hmm, that’s odd,” I thought.

After class I asked the instructor about it. She considered me for a moment and asked, “You aren’t suicidal are you?”  I told her I was. It was then I learned that the root chakra connects us to the earth and governs everything we need to survive. Food, clothes, shelter, etc. I was not grounded to the earth and all of my survival and safety were at risk. That made sense to me! She taught me to ground and how to provide safety for my body, mind, and spirit. To my surprise, I was getting better and the panic attacks lessened. Next I learned how to breathe. Nobody really breathes correctly, we weren’t taught how.

Breathing and grounding changed my life! Those were two things I could do immediately and it didn’t cost me anything. From that point on I used these two new skills as often as I needed them. In the beginning that would happen nearly every 10 minutes. But I could feel my body respond with calm. It was magical! But that was only the beginning…TBC

Three Days Until Launch

What happened next was very curious to me. I always believed that God puts people in your way when you need them the most. But this was different and dramatic. People I had not seen in a long time or weren’t particularly close to at this point in time stepped forward to help me and to teach me about the power of energy healing. There were four of them that appeared suddenly in the space of a month. It was clear that God wanted me to know what they knew! It was one of the most magical things that has ever happened to me! It was also so confusing.

The first person to reach out to me was a dear friend who said she was prompted to call me and share something with me that she was learning. She said she was becoming certified in something called Emotion Code. After she explained it to me I felt I should agree and that this was one of those things I promised God I would do. After I got to her house she taught me how to release stuck emotions. She worked on me for a hour and agreed to meet with me again later that day. The effect on me was immediate! Much to my amazement I felt better!  I bought the book and started on my own to learn all I could about Emotion Code. I was mesmerized by the process. I released emotions as quick as I could. I eventually became certified in it.

The next person was the daughter of a dear friend who I haven’t seen in years. She messaged me and said that God told her that she should reach out to me and offer her help to me. This one was hardest to explain and for a long time I kept it to myself because I really didn’t know how to explain it at the time. She balanced all of my chakras and put my soul back together. Some of my chakras had left altogether and my soul had shattered into 21 pieces. Some of the pieces were missing she explained. In 2-3 sessions she put me back together energetically. She also continued to teach me how to do this myself. Today I understand that our energy is very powerful and with the help of our spirit guides and guardians we can set intentions and the energy within and around us and those helpers we can change matter. If you want to know more look up quantum physics and epigenetics.  

The next person to reach out to me was offering to do Reiki on me. She was so kind and helpful. One thing she said to me was that she was amazed to see how connected I was to God. She said I had a golden cord that was connected to the top of my head and ended up at the throne of God. It was shaped like a double helix. I was overcome with emotion! I had always felt very close to God but this experience caused me to feel completely separated from Him. I no longer felt Him the way I had before. So I was overwhelmed to know He wasn’t very far away, even in my distress. I have a theory about this in relationship to why Jesus cried out on the cross, “my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” I don’t think God had forsaken him. I think the trauma of this experience prevented Jesus from feeling close to his Father. 

Later on I learned that scientific studies had been done where they hooked up electrodes to people’s brains to see how the brain responds to spiritual experiences. I was shocked to find out that spiritual experiences only happen when we are in our thinking brain. In other words, spiritual experiences are not an emotional response!  They also discovered that spiritual experiences could not happened when a person was in fight, flight or freeze. So it made perfect sense that I couldn’t feel God because I was always in my limbic brain. So how do I to fix that?

Next up - meditation.

Two Days Until Launch

Now where were we? Oh yes! Meditation …

Meditation really gets a bad wrap! I hear too many people say they can’t meditate, myself included! I wasn’t a fan, at first. I would sit there, crossed legged on the floor, with my mind running a thousand miles an hour and my heart pounded out the rhythm of my thoughts.  It felt like a gigantic waste of time to be honest!  Until someone taught me how to do it right!

It has nothing to do with quieting the mind and disconnecting from your thoughts! For some reason this is what everyone thinks of when they think of meditation. So what is it then?

Meditation is simply bringing yourself back into the present moment. Being in the now. This is most easily accomplished by focusing on your breath. Just noticing every breath in and every breath out. Sounds easy enough, right?  Not really. Mediation is not supposed to be easy. It’s a discipline of the mind and body. It is supposed to take effort. It’s a practice. And just like practicing the violin, you do it everyday even if you stink at it, until you don’t anymore!

This is something I can’t teach you to do in one post. But I can teach you to do it if you take my courses.  Would you believe me if I told you I now meditate 1-2 hours a day? Well I do! And I love it, most of the time. I still stink at it sometimes. But I am practicing to keep my mind and body connected and in a state of homeostasis. That’s a fancy word for rest and repair. When we mediate we give ourselves much needed rest so the body and mind can heal. It’s as simple and powerful as that. And it’s why I do it. Nothing helped me calm my central nervous system faster than making an effort to get good at mediation. Now I can get into a meditative state in a matter of minutes because my body knows what to do automatically. It’s now pure muscle memory. There is so much more I would love to tell you about the magic of mediation, but I just can’t do that here! So take my courses if you want to know more about the magic of meditation!

One Day Until Launch

So why did I become a Life Coach? The short answer was that I felt that God had a hand in it.  I don’t believe that He caused this horrible thing to happen to me just so that I would find my purpose, but I do believe that He helped turn it all around FOR me. Tony Robbins has a quote that I have come to really love”

What if something is not happening TO you, but FOR you? 

It’s my belief that my husband’s betrayal should have never happened, but it was always own his choice. God couldn’t stop his choices, no matter how much HE may have wanted my husband to make different choices. After the fact, or even before, all God could to was to devise a plan that was something better. Something that was FOR me. With that in mind, I believe this company is a sacred blessing from heaven, meant to bless me and all of His daughters who experience the same betrayal.  I just have the opportunity to be His hands. For that blessing, I am humbled and grateful. If you choose to work with me, I hope you know that I consider it a sacred trust. 

Launch Day

Inner Peace Pathways is officially launched! Yay! I am so excited to be doing this and for all the people who helped me along the way.  I am so thankful for my family for their love and support. Lots of people worried and prayed for me, hoping I would survive it. Now, almost 10 years later I am turning all of that pain into purpose.  

Thank you to everyone who has allowed me to pay it forward!  I was able to gift 20 people with the Rescue Pathway. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to serve you in this way. I look forward to hearing what you think! 

If you know someone who has experienced the betrayal of a spouse I would love for you to send them my way. The Rescue Pathway is very affordable at $99. That is less than $7 a session. And a ton of resources and bonuses come with it as well. I even have a payment plan!