170. Hope After Betrayal

Hello my amazing, beautiful listeners. Welcome. Thank you for being here with me today. Wherever you are and whatever you are doing, you chose to push play and listen, and that means a lot to me.

If you have not yet clicked follow or left a five star review, I would love it if you did. It helps this podcast reach more women who are going through a very specific kind of divorce. A divorce because of betrayal. A divorce where abuse is woven into the betrayal and often escalates around it. A life saving divorce.

I was just talking to a friend I had not spoken to in quite some time. She reached out because she is going through a divorce. One of the first things she said was how frustrated and lonely she felt because people around her could not understand why she is not still friendly and amicable with her ex. They did not understand why she did not want to sit next to him and play the happy divorced couple.

What they did not see was that she had discovered a deep level of infidelity and addiction in her relationship just a year ago. Along with that came lying, secrecy, manipulation, and gaslighting. No, she is not going to be best friends with him. And yet many people are giving her pushback because they do not get it.

This is why this podcast exists. There is a different kind of divorce story that needs language, validation, and a place to be heard. I did not have that over a decade ago, and I am grateful that you are here now.

Today I want to talk about hope.

When Hope Feels Completely Gone

Hope can be a tricky topic. We are not all standing at the same place in our healing, and where hope lands in your system might be very different depending on what phase you are in. So as always, if at any point this feels too activating for you, honor yourself. You can pause, skip, or come back later. Your timing matters.

Before betrayal, abuse, and a life saving divorce, many of us moved through daily life with a basic sense of purpose. We woke up, tended to our families, showed up for work or for our lives, and while yes, there were challenges, we were not waking up every single day questioning our existence from the moment our eyes opened.

After betrayal and divorce, that can change. You might wake up with a heavy fog of confusion, dread, or grief. You might move through the day simply going through the motions while your spirit feels somewhere far away.

Your mind might go blank mid sentence. Your thoughts crash. The idea of taking a walk feels too big because showering or getting dressed feels like too much. You find yourself wondering if taking another breath is even worth it.

When so much has been lost and so much has changed, it makes sense that hope feels gone.

Survival Mode and Resentment

In the early stages of my life saving divorce, I remember resenting people who could just go through their day without wondering how they were going to feed their children. Survival mode was not a season where I was counting blessings. I was counting dollars I hid under my mattress. I was counting the number of people who stopped reaching out or chose his side. I was counting angry texts and emails that painted me as the problem. I was counting the hours I lay awake begging my brain to stop long enough for sleep.

Hope, at that point, was not about optimism. It was about getting through the next hour without breaking apart.

If you are there right now, hope might not look like a bright, inspiring feeling. It might simply look like taking another breath or sending one text to someone who understands.

Misery Does Not Love Company, It Loves Understanding

You probably know the phrase misery loves company. I do not really think that is true. Misery loves understanding. Misery longs for someone to sit in the room with you and say I get it. You are not crazy. You are not alone. This is as hard as it feels.

That is why naming your experience as a life saving divorce matters. It is not about superiority over other forms of divorce. It is about accuracy and understanding. You are not just dealing with a relationship that did not work out. You are dealing with deception, betrayal, abuse, spiritual confusion, broken safety, and nervous system shock. You are dealing with lies told about you to other people while you are already trying to breathe through grief.

When someone finally looks at you and understands that, a tiny flicker of hope appears. Not because the circumstances have changed, but because you are no longer alone inside them.

Art, Witnessing, and the Sacred Space for Pain

There is an artist I love named Mark Rothko, a painter from the twentieth century whose work was not meant to decorate walls but to create a space. Standing in front of some of his pieces feels like standing inside an emotion. He once said that people who cry in front of his paintings are having the same experience he had while painting them.

To me that is the power of being witnessed. When someone or something can hold your pain without trying to fix it, argue with it, or rush you out of it, something sacred happens. It creates just enough room in your system for a tiny seed of hope to sit next to the sorrow.

That is part of why I show up here every week. So that women who have experienced betrayal, abuse, and loss can feel seen and understood. In that small knowing that you are not alone, hope begins to grow again.

Pain Is Not Proof That You Are Failing

Growing up, I believed that life was supposed to be joyful and that if I was not happy, I must be doing something wrong. So I became very good at scanning for my weaknesses and asking what am I doing to cause this pain.

Self awareness and accountability matter, but I misunderstood something important. I treated sadness, grief, and confusion as proof that I was failing as a human.

The truth is that pain, loss, and grief are baked into being human. They are not punishment. They are not a reflection of your worth or lovability. They are evidence of your capacity to feel.

Your body was designed to process emotion. It was not designed to carry chronic avoidance, resistance, or self blame piled on top of emotion. That is what overwhelms the system.

Acceptance, The Bitter Cup, and Being Human

For those of you with a Christian background, there is a moment in the story of Gethsemane that I relate to so deeply. The moment where Christ resists the bitter cup and asks if there is another way. That is such a human moment. It is the instinctive desire we all have to avoid suffering and sorrow.

And yet, in that story, he drinks. I do not see that as a show of perfection as much as a picture of acceptance. Not approval. Acceptance of what is being asked, of what is real.

Each of us has our own bitter cup. For some of you, that cup has been filled with betrayal, abandonment, financial upheaval, spiritual crisis, and the shattering of your family. When you finally stop fighting the fact that it is bitter and allow yourself to grieve, cry, rage, and feel, you are not failing. You are being human.

Our right is not to be happy all the time. Our right is to be honest.

When we stop treating suffering as proof that we are unworthy, we can begin to see ourselves again.

When Hope Keeps You Stuck

There is another side of hope that I see often in my work, and that is when hope quietly keeps you tethered to what hurts you.

You might say I still have hope. I still have hope he will change. Hope he will finally be accountable. Hope he will pay support. Hope he will tell the truth. Hope he will stop spreading lies. Hope that love will finally be enough.

That form of hope can feel noble and loyal, but it is what I call survival hope. It keeps you waiting, scanning, and forgiving injury over and over, believing that if you just heal more, love better, and do enough work, he will finally meet you there.

Real hope does not live in someone else’s potential. Real hope lives in your agency.

Embodied Hope and Your Agency

Brene Brown describes hope as a way of thinking. Not an emotion, but a combination of having a goal, believing you can move toward it, and finding a path forward.

That kind of hope is not passive. It does not sit back and wait for someone else to change. It does not pretend. It does not avoid reality.

Embodied hope might sound like

My goal is not to fix this marriage anymore. My goal is to create safety for myself and my children

My hope is not that he will stop lying. My hope is that I will stop allowing his lies to define me

My hope is not that he will repair. My hope is that I will restore my own sense of self

Sometimes hope shifts from wanting reconciliation to wanting restoration inside you. That is not giving up. That is growth.

Hope Inside Awareness, Acceptance, and Agency

This is where my three pillars come in.

Awareness
Where is your hope anchored right now. In his potential or in your choices. In fantasy or in reality.

Acceptance
Can you accept what is actually happening right now, rather than what you wish he would do. Acceptance is not approval. It is simply telling the truth about the present moment.

Agency
What can you choose next. Not ten steps from now. Just the next right step for you.

When hope is held in this way, it is no longer denial or pretending. It becomes a friend that walks with you, not a chain that keeps you stuck.

Sometimes hope just looks like this
Today I will get out of bed.
Today I will breathe.
Today I will trust that there is something ahead of me that I cannot see yet.

Even when you cannot see the light, you can still move toward it.

Hope and Dating Again

Before we close, I want to connect this to one specific place where hope often feels lost. Dating again.

Many women tell me

I have lost hope in finding someone healthy
I do not trust myself to choose
I do not think I will ever know what healthy looks like
I have lost hope in men

When you have walked through betrayal and a life saving divorce, hope in love can feel like a cruel joke. But again, hope here is not about wishing someone will appear and fix everything. It is about how you hold hope inside yourself.

When you anchor hope in your own healing, your own awareness, acceptance, and agency, hope becomes powerful again. You begin to believe in the possibility of safe connection because you have changed. You have done the work to know yourself, hold boundaries, and listen to your body.

That is exactly why I created the Dating From Within workshop. It is a three day live workshop happening January eighth, ninth, and tenth. Inside this workshop, we focus on dating you. Connecting to you. Showing up with all parts of you from wholeness rather than from wounds. We rebuild hope in your ability to trust yourself, not in your ability to trust just anyone who shows up.

Women who take this workshop often say I have hope again.

If your heart is ready to feel that, you can register through the link in the show notes or at amy woolsey dot com under Dating From Within.

Remember, hope is not about waiting for love to find you. It is about reconnecting to the love that already lives in you. When you put one foot in front of the other, even in the messy middle, believing that you can heal and choose again, I believe you.

You are the chooser in your life, and you can create the life that you want with hope, because you can.