Today we're talking about something I've wanted to make an episode about for a long time: infidelity. Specifically, the woman who cheats.

If that's you, I already know you're carrying a crushing weight — the secrecy, the panic, the shame society piles on top. Because we've all been told that cheating is the ultimate, unforgivable relationship sin. But after years of coaching and hundreds of women, here's what I've come to believe: cheating is the symptom, not the start. It almost never shows up in a vibrant, healthy relationship. It shows up after years of what I call the invisible sins — chronic emotional neglect, stonewalling, contempt, weaponized incompetence, being starved of affection and visibility. The partner who looks great on paper while you slowly disappear inside your own home.

This is a judgment-free zone. I'm not here to make excuses or decide who's right and who's wrong. I'm here to explore what was actually happening, what was missing, and how you move forward.

So I ask the questions I ask in coaching. Before the affair ever started, what were you tolerating every day? Who did you get to be with someone else that you weren't allowed to be in your own relationship? Was it about the sex, or the feeling of being wanted and prioritized after years of feeling like furniture?

Here's the part almost nobody says: the perpetual giving is what created the vacuum in the first place. You were never taught how to know what you want. You were taught to perform — be a good girl, look good, keep it all together — and then you woke up one day feeling nothing. That's not selfishness. That's what happens after a lifetime of being told your desire is dirty and your job is to keep everyone else okay.

I don't do the shame-to-guilt thing you see all over the internet. Guilt is just as damaging as shame. And no — if you're listening to this, you are not a narcissist. What you need isn't more punishment. You've been holding yourself accountable every single day, or you wouldn't be here. What you need is to learn how to have your own back, how to move through the heavy feelings instead of shoving them down, and how to turn want and desire back on in every part of your life. When those things come online, everything else gets easier.

You were never the problem. And you are not the only one. I promise you that.

The free class: I'm teaching a class on all of this called The Anti-Hero — because you can be the hero of your own life even if nobody else sees it. Monday, August 24th at 12:00 PM Pacific, about an hour, completely free. Sign up at AmandaHess.ca/shame1 or through the link in the show notes. I'd love to see you there.

Takeaways:

1. Infidelity is often viewed as the ultimate sin, but let's be real: relationships can be super complicated and messy, with many hidden issues lurking beneath the surface.
2. Cheating is more of a symptom than the root cause of relationship problems, highlighting the need for deeper self-awareness and understanding of personal desires.
3. Many women don’t even know what they want due to societal pressures to perform and be ‘good,’ leaving them feeling empty and unfulfilled in their relationships.
4. In the quest for happiness, it’s crucial to learn how to advocate for yourself and embrace your desires, rather than feeling guilty or ashamed for wanting more from life.
5. Emotional neglect and invisible cruelties in relationships often lead to infidelity, as individuals seek validation and fulfillment outside their primary partnership.
6. To truly move forward from any shame or guilt surrounding infidelity, it's essential to tackle those feelings head-on, developing a stronger sense of self and what you truly desire.

Links referenced in this episode:

1. amandahess.ca/Shame1

Hey, I'm Amanda Hess.

I'm a certified life coach.

But what you need to know is I'm a sensitive woman just like you, and I'm going to help you understand yourself better so that you can approach your life differently and feel really good about it.

Let's go.

Hello, my beautiful friends.

Today I have an episode for you that might be a little bit surprising, but it's something that I've actually wanted to create for a while.

I want you to know that today we're going to be talking about infidelity, and we're going to be talking about the women who are the cheater, the woman who cheats.

I know that if you're listening to this right now, that you are carrying a heavyweight, okay?

If this is you, you are carrying a crushing weight.

You are carrying a crushing weight of secrecy, panic, and societal shame.

And I need you to know that society tells us that cheating is the ultimate, unforgivable relationship sin.

But what I have grown to understand through my years of coaching and the hundreds of women that I've helped is that relationships are complicated and messy and often filled with horrific things that happen long before anyone crosses a line.

Cheating, to me, is the symptom and not the start of the problem.

What I want you to know about this episode is that this is a judgment free zone.

The goal isn't to make excuses.

The goal isn't to say who's right and who's wrong.

It's to be able to explore the issue, explore what's happening, explore what we do next, how we move forward.

So what I've noticed in the world of coaching, of all the people that I've helped, both men and women on both sides of infidelity, is that there is a shock value of physical or emotional cheating and there's this slow social acceptance of all the other ways that partners are destroying a relationship.

And.

And I like to call them invisible sins.

And they're things like chronic emotional neglect.

They're things like stonewalling, weaponized incompetence, contempt, or completely starving a spouse of visibility and affection.

A lot of times in relationships, a partner will look really good on paper.

They are providing financially, they don't drink, they don't yell, but they actually are actively maintaining an environment that is emotionally suffocating or even abusing.

I want you to understand that the truth is that cheating doesn't just show up in a perfectly happy marriage.

That typically vibrant, healthy ecosystems in relationships are not experiencing cheating.

And we want to really understand the nuance that appears Here because it is so important.

I ultimately want to spend this episode helping you move past the surface level guilt, the surface level shame that keeps you really stuck and guide you into a deeper self awareness that allows you to move forward in a way that is healthy and whole for you.

One of the things that I like to do in coaching is ask questions.

And asking a question can allow you to explore your thoughts and your beliefs that you have about any situation.

So I like to ask questions when I'm speaking with someone about this and really dig into before the affair, before the affair ever started.

What were the invisible cruelties you were tolerating every day at home?

Who did you get to be with?

The other person that you weren't allowed to be in your marriage?

Was it about the sexual or the intoxicating feeling of being desired and prioritized after years of feeling like furniture?

If society didn't tell you that this was the ultimate sin, how would you honestly rank your mistake against the ways you've been mistreated in the past?

Did you cross the line because you wanted to hurt your partner or because you were tired of being the only one feeling the pain?

These are important questions because they allow us to separate out what was missing, what was lacking, what wasn't there.

Quite frequently, what I notice with the women in my practice that have engaged in affairs is that there has been big chunks and big pieces of the relationship that haven't really been working well, that there are actually big chunks and big pieces of the person internally that haven't been addressed and that haven't really been allowed to grow or thrive.

And in fact, they've been stunted.

So if you're wondering why, you come onto a podcast called how to Love Yourself no Matter what and we're talking about women who will say commit in air quotes, infidelity.

It's because those women typically are struggling.

That's why we're here.

That's why this happens.

We want to really be able to understand that the way that our brain puts together the information that we use to be able to make our decisions is influenced by so many different things.

It's influenced by how we were raised.

It's influenced by our parents, our parents relationships, and the way that our parents treated us.

It's influenced by our parents and how they treated each other.

It's influenced by the kind of modeling that we received on what a healthy relationship looks like.

It's influenced by the fact that women in today's age, the way that we are raised and grown in a patriarchal society is to believe that we need to perform to be quote, unquote, good.

And so we get very, very good at being good girls.

We work very hard at it, and we model it as best we can.

But what we don't realize as we're modeling that is that that's not where fulfillment and happiness and joy comes from.

And so the more we try to do it and the emptier that we feel, the worse this gets.

And what I really see is a lot of women in relationships and out of relationships that really don't know how to go after what they want, because ultimately they don't know what they want.

And they haven't been taught how to figure that out, and they haven't been given permission to even explore that.

And I really see it as women start moving up the ladder of their life and they start being in relationships, getting high responsibility, careers, moving into management, having all this responsibility at work, having older kids, having a partner, having a house, having more bills, having more expenses, having friends, having to show up in a way that is, hey, I've got it all together.

I'm doing all the things.

It's amazing when, frankly, there are pieces of it that are not actually hitting that we're not actually getting to, that we are being neglected emotionally.

Now, whose fault is that?

Well, it's nobody's fault is what I want to offer.

It's nobody's fault.

We don't live inside of a society that teaches us to care for ourselves.

We don't live inside of a society that teaches us, hey, Amanda, you need to learn how to figure out what you want.

You need time alone.

You need time doing things you really want to do.

You need to be more selfish, not less selfish.

So what I think is so interesting about this conversation is that so many times women are told that they're so selfish because they had an affair, but it's because for so many years, they didn't know how to be selfish at all.

In fact, it was the perpetual giving that created the basically the vacuum for the affair to fall in.

It made sense, of course.

There was a huge hole, and that's how it got filled.

So to me, the reason why affairs happen is nuanced and messy.

And it's rarely that there's this person, this woman, who's like, you know what I'm going to do?

I'm going to destroy my whole life.

I'm going to ruin my partner.

I'm going to ruin our relationship.

We're not thinking like that.

Nobody is so when you look at somebody who has engaged in infidelity, what is happening is a combination, a compilation of all, all of the things that are going on here.

And what I typically find is that a lot of times this woman, her self esteem is in the gutter.

She does not know how to have self worth.

She does not know how to operate in the world and believe in herself.

She doesn't know how to set really strong boundaries.

She doesn't know how to give everybody back their feelings and take responsibility for her own.

She doesn't know how to do that.

Why?

Because, number one, we're never taught it.

Nobody has modeled it to us.

Like, did your mom teach you that?

My mom didn't teach me that.

Most people have no idea.

And we live in a world where we are taught to be performative, get married by a certain age, have kids by a certain age, raise them a certain way, have a house with a garage, with cars, with a career, but take care of yourself.

But that means, like, looking good.

It doesn't mean feeling good.

It means your skin looks nice and your hair looks good and you're keeping your body fat where it should be.

And you know you're fit, you're still fuckable, right?

Like, that is how we're taught to be.

And then we reach a certain point where we realize, I, I don't feel anything.

And that's where things tend to fall apart.

And so I just think it's really fascinating as a culture how we have glommed on to this idea of cheating as being the worst thing you could ever do to me.

Emotional abandonment.

How about that?

How about abuse?

How about emotional abuse?

How about stonewalling?

How about just completely not being actually engaged in the relationship at all?

And how long is somebody supposed to exist inside of that dynamic and be okay, well, we can perform it?

And what I find is that most women that engage in affairs, they've been performing for a long time, and this is their escape hatch.

This is where they get to feel alive again.

And what I will tell you is that it doesn't really create what you want.

And I've seen this in so many different ways.

I have coached clients who have had secret affairs.

I have coached clients who have had affairs and the affair has come out and they have gotten together with their affair partner.

I have coached clients who have had affairs and the affair has come out and they've stayed with their partner.

I've coached all of it.

And what I will say to you is that at the end of the day, it Typically, isn't creating what we want anyways?

Because what we want is we want to feel alive, we want to feel seen, we want to feel validated, we want to feel important.

We want to feel like we're doing things in our life that allow us to feel good sometimes.

And for many women, we're not feeling that at all.

I will say to you that I remember times in my life when I started coaching where the emptiness felt crushing, crushing, and yet nobody would really know it because I would drink through it, I would party through it, I would pretend.

But nobody was with me on those Sunday nights when I was falling apart alone, crying, right?

Who was there?

Nobody.

And the reality is, is.

Is we tend to oscillate like that.

We go through perform, perform, perform, perform, fall apart, and we find ways to cope.

We find ways to cope, we find ways to survive.

And to me, a lot of the times, the things that we're doing are just survival.

We are trying to survive.

And it's important for anyone listening to this episode whether you have actually engaged in an affair, thought about engaging in affairs, haven't at all, and are just listening to this episode, wondering what it's all about.

It's important, though, to understand that what it is, is.

It's a tool.

And I understand that if you're on the other side of that, this is painful.

And I get being on the other side of the affair because I've coached that too.

I've coached both sides.

To me, it's one of these things where when I'm coaching someone, what I'm really looking for is, how do we move through.

How do we move through this?

How do we get through this?

Because nobody has to live in your brain but you.

You have to live in your brain.

And it can be a really beautiful place or it can be a really painful place, and we get to decide.

But it's more than a decision, you know, it's.

It's more than a decision.

We have to be able to step forward in a way that feels authentic, that we feel emotionally.

That's why I'm not a big fan of mantras or thought swapping, because we're not going to feel that.

And that's why some of the questions that I asked you earlier on in this episode are important and they're powerful because we do very much need to address that.

There are other things that were going on here other than the affair, that there are things that are missing, and we need to learn how to move through shame.

We need to learn how to Move through guilt.

Because shame and guilt are not the truth about you.

They are one perspective of this.

And I've seen so much content online and even in researching this episode where it talks about moving shame to guilt, I don't think anybody should do that.

Guilt is just as damaging as shame.

Do I think you're a narcissist?

No.

If you're listening to this episode, I do not think you're a narcissist.

And what I will tell you is that what you need to do is you need to learn how to have your own back way more than anything else.

That that is your number one job.

That is the number one skill, learning how to have your own back.

Without it, we can't move through this because we will get small.

We will shut down, we will break down, we will go back inwards.

And what happens?

Well, what happens is our life shrinks some more and we are creating more and more of a void and more and more of a vacuum.

And what are we going to do with that?

That is not sustainable.

We can't keep that.

We can't keep moving along with that.

We need to be able to fill the void.

So when I'm working with someone, what I'm looking at is I'm like, ok, number one, we need to know what to do with big emotions like shame and guilt.

You need to know how to handle those.

That is a skill.

That is something that anyone can learn.

How do I know that?

Well, I feel emotions.

Huge.

You know, if you've listened to earlier episodes of this podcast, you know that I have been diagnosed with a personality disorder that ultimately told me, you're gonna have to deal with this for the rest of your life and you're never gonna be able to do anything other than hopefully cope.

Well, let me tell you, I do way more than cope.

I thrive.

And so if I can get through the heavy emotions that they say are somehow disordered about me, I certainly can show you how to do it right.

It is possible for you.

You can do it.

The second part of it is learning how to advocate for yourself and have your own back.

And you have to do that in a world that is telling you that you're bad.

Even if you didn't have an affair, you're bad.

You've been told you were bad your whole life.

You're a bad girl for thinking about sex.

You're a bad girl for wanting to feel happy.

You're a bad girl for feeling desire.

Right.

We live inside of that world, and so we've been Told to shut down our desire, to shut down our passion, to not be excited, to not be passionate, to not have an opinion.

So we.

We gotta learn how to have our own back.

From the standpoint of number one, it makes sense that I want to just beat the shit out of myself.

But I'm not gonna do that anymore.

I'm gonna learn a new way to do this.

I'm gonna start having my own back.

And I will tell you, you will never have your own back a hundred percent of the time if you do it as much as you possibly can.

My hope is that you can do it 50% of the time.

That's how I know you won't be a narcissist, because you will be able to get to a point where 50% of the time you can do it.

And it's going to give you that balance.

We don't need to hold you accountable, my friend.

It's not necessary.

You're holding yourself accountable every day or you wouldn't be listening to this episode, we wouldn't be here.

The last part of this is we need to turn on what you want and what you desire.

Now, does that mean sex?

Sure.

Maybe.

Doesn't only mean sex, though.

It's so much bigger than that.

We need to figure out what you want and desire in all aspects of your life.

We need to figure out what your brain wants to chew on, what your brain wants to work on.

We need to find what lights you up in business, in your career, in your personal life, in your friendships.

But we need to get into all the things that you think are fun and interesting.

Why do you think I figure skateboarding?

Not because I'm going to go into the Olympics.

I figure skate as an adult because it lights that part of me up.

It's a place where I can work and create excitement and create fear and create all the really spicy, juicy emotions that I want to feel that feel really good, that lives there.

We can develop that in all different aspects of our life.

And not only do we want to, in my opinion, we need to.

That is what's required to be able to have a life where we're not trying to replace it with a person that is damaging the life that we actually want to have.

Right?

So we want to be able to learn how to create a fuck, yes.

Life.

We need to learn how to turn on want, turn on desire.

Not be afraid of it, not decide it's dirty, but in fact realize that's a part of us that we need to really channel and use when we do those three things, everything else becomes easier.

We are able to start feeling fulfilled.

We are able to start feeling excited and happy and pleasured and all the things that we were looking for whenever we made the decisions that we made that you were looking for when you decided to engage in an affair.

This is the thing, this is the step, this is where we go.

I have worked with so many women through this process.

It works every time, every time.

I'm really passionate about this because I just think that as women, we have been taught that we are bad.

You know, if you look at the story in the Bible of Adam and Eve, we are the original sinners.

I just don't buy that, that Eve is the original sinner.

She is the worst one.

I don't buy that.

I'm not living into that.

I think that humans are inherently messy.

Life is inherently messy.

We are all out there trying to get our needs met and a lot of us don't know how to do that.

And that's not a problem.

But we can learn how to do is possible.

It's not wrong to want your life.

It's not wrong to want more.

It's not wrong to feel unfulfilled by all the things that life says should fulfill you.

But that also doesn't mean that we only have one other option, which is to escape.

What it means is we need to learn how to do that.

We need to learn how to turn ourselves on.

We need to learn how to turn ourselves on in a hundred different ways and go for the things we really want in life and feel that desire, engage and know, I can go do that.

But we can't do it if we're drowning in shame and guilt.

That's what's going to keep us small and stuck.

And that's what the world is really teaching us to do.

And so when we tell people that our shame is our penance, we're wrong.

We're wrong.

Nobody needs that.

You don't need that.

What you do need is you need to learn how to deal with those feelings when they come up so that they're not constantly coming up.

Right now what happens is you're so afraid of them.

The feelings that come up because they feel so all consuming that you shove them down.

And when you shove them down, they just keep popping up.

They pop up in the middle of the night, they pop up in the middle of a conversation.

They are ever present versus letting those feelings pass through, knowing how to handle them.

So that's not.

That's not your experience of them all the time so that you know how to handle them.

Then when we know how to forgive ourselves and we know how to have our own back, we stop hyper focusing on how other people are not okay with us and we start getting real about what do I need?

What do I want?

What am I going to create?

That's the way forward.

I know this is different than pretty much anybody talks about it.

I know that other people don't talk about it like this.

I can also tell you that this way of addressing this creates happy people.

It creates well people.

And well people do good things and have great relationships and grow beautiful lives.

When we are stuck in the past, we rob ourselves of our present.

You are living right now in your life today.

So listen, I have a class that I am teaching on this and if this is something that speaks to you and you want to be able to learn more about this, it is a free class.

It is called the Antihero because I'm a big believer in the antihero in that I can be the hero even if nobody else thinks I can even if nobody else sees it.

I can take my flaws and I can hold them in and I can take how I navigate the world and decide I'm here for me.

I am going to advocate for me.

I am going to push forward and really work on being truly myself and being okay with being a flawed human being because we're all flawed human beings.

And I'm still going to be on my own side.

That is the antihero.

So if you want to sign up for that, you can go to amandahess ca Shame one, the number one.

You can sign up for that class or you can go to the Show Notes and sign up.

We're going to be doing it on Monday, August 24th at 12pm Pacific and it's going to be about an hour.

I'm going to walk you through it all piece by piece.

Like I said, it's a free class.

I'd love to see you there.

Otherwise, I'll see you here next time.

Bye for now.

Thanks so much for listening today.

If this podcast is helping you, please follow wherever you listen and consider leaving a review.

It truly helps this community grow and allows me to support more women like you.

I'm excited to see you back here next week with a brand new episode.

Until then, take care friend.