Cheating Broke the Relationship—But This Is What Actually Destroys It After

Infidelity doesn't just break trust, it exposes everything that was already broken underneath. I'm your host, Edna White, and this is Keeping It Real On Purpose, where we stop playing small, break patterns, and build what actually works. Today, I'm joined by Vanessa, and you know what, I didn't ask her how to pronounce her name, so I'm going to allow her to pronounce her last name. Cardenas. Cardenas. Okay, I was close. A relationship reset expert and certified betrayal recovery specialist based in Westchester County, closest to me on Long Island, thank you, New York. She's the founder of Understanding Ear, and she helps individuals and couples navigate infidelity, emotional disconnection, and broken trust, not by just treating the issue, but by rebuilding the relationship from the ground up. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. We're going to have such a great conversation. I think we are. This is a hard topic to speak about and to go through, but when you connect with someone like you and I connected, boy, it just flows right out. Doesn't it? Doesn't it? Let's get straight to it, though. Let's get straight to it. People think cheating is the problem, but it's usually just the explosion. Let's talk about that. Yes, absolutely. You know, cheating breaks the relationship. It absolutely does, but actually what destroys it is what comes after it. It's how both people respond to it. Now, keep in mind, I am not a traditional couples therapist. No, I'm an alternative. I work in the real-time dynamics of it. I help people actually understand what's happening in the moment and not just talk about it over and over and over and over and over again. That's what happens. Absolutely. Because what's happening first when you discover betrayal, people think, I need answers. I need to know. I need to understand. And everything floods in all at once. What's actually happening first and foremost is shock. Yeah, absolutely. Never. Never. I didn't see this coming, you know, as if you were supposed to see it. This orientation, like, who am I? Who are they? Where am I? Right. I feel like you're in bizarro world. Absolutely. Absolutely. Then we become hypervigilant. We watch everything, every movement, every ding, every ping, every time the phone gets picked up, we're watching it very closely. And then, of course, we have the emotional flooding where we're sad one moment and ugly crying and the next minute we're raging in the next moment. Believe it or not, we become very hyper-sexualized. We want to be chosen. We want to be seen. Suddenly we're really concerned with how we look. Right. Because we want to be the chosen one. Yeah. Absolutely. Oh, that's scary. People think that they're trying to understand what happened. Actually, what they're trying to do is stabilize themselves. Yes. Yeah. Because the ground just pretty much quakes. Out of balance. And you fall through and you fall deep and hard, especially if you have a lot of insecurities. You've been plagued with a lot of insecurities that your relationship don't soothe, give you some confidence, and suddenly that relationship breaks. Right. All of those insecurities that you've had pretty much your whole life, they come flooding back in. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And the cracks, you try to put all your fingers and toes into them, but there aren't enough. Yeah, there's not enough. So, infidelity doesn't create the disconnect. It's probably part of it, like you said, but it reveals a lot of other stuff. Now, most people are trying to fix the betrayal without addressing the pattern that led to it. What is that? Well, first and foremost, it's really hard. And that's why people who actually ask for help, they ask for help initially from their friends and family. If they choose to share it, some of us want to scream it from the mountaintops. We want to take a Louisville slugger to both ends. We want to key the car. We want everybody to know. Others know that once they let the toothpaste out of the tube, they won't get it back. And if there's any, any, any, even a sliver of hope of reconciliation, when you have that judgment from everyone else, it's really hard. To go back. Yeah, it really is. It's everybody's judging you. And I think I went through that with my last marriage, my second one, is that he was just, every time I turned around, he was with somebody different. And it was just to the point that he was even, like, had a baby on me. So it was, like you said, a sliver of possibility said, you know, and I was willing to try to get back with him. I was like, you got to give me time. But seeing everybody's faces, just for me saying, you got to give me time. It could have been time, like, to think about whatever's going on, and just, like, absorb all that's going on. The looks, the judgment, what are you going to do? Like, everybody's asking you, coming from everywhere. So it would never have happened. It would not have. It was just too much to even bear from the white noise, you know? Correct, absolutely. Yeah. And a lot of people get stuck. Yeah. And the reason that they get stuck is that they're asking questions over and over and over again. Because one of the things that happens when we're hurt, we tend to lose our hearing. We don't want to hear it, yeah. We don't want to hear that. We want to hear something different, okay? Peanuts, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. Perhaps it's not here now, but I don't know what you're saying. Yeah. And the other thing is that we replay conversations. Oh, yes. Over and over and over again. Over and over again, yes. And we're looking for that full truth. We want all of the details, or we want none of the details. We want to bury our head in the sand. We don't want to know. The problem with not knowing anything is that we fill in those holes. Right, yeah. And usually those holes that we fill in, oh, boy. We have such landmines that wind up so far from the truth. They absolutely do. And answers give a temporary relief. But they don't create safety. No. And that's what we need, especially right afterwards. And what I work with my clients on, first and foremost, is trust. Not trusting their partner. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. Trusting themselves. Exactly. Yeah, I was going to say that. They're struggling. They're absolutely struggling. How did I not see this? Why did I miss this? Their sense of reality becomes very warped. And not only do they not trust themselves, besides their partner, they start not trusting reality. The people around them. They start to become very mistrustful of everybody around. Did you know? Did you suspect? Did you suspect it or you knew? How come you didn't tell me? And suddenly you're battling everyone else. Yes, absolutely. Yes. So suddenly you displace your anger from your partner to everybody else. Because you're trying to defend yourself and be safe. You just really try like you don't feel safe now because everybody's asking questions that you have no answers to. Correct. And all you're doing is so when those questions start flooding in and they flood in, they absolutely do. And you will ask the same question in a little bit different. Yeah, the exact same way. But the interesting questions and there's a difference that happens between now and. So when a woman discovers betrayal, the first questions that she normally asks relate to. Do you love her? Yeah. You love her for a man who discovers that his partner has cheated on him. His first question. Did you sleep with him? Yeah. So for a woman, it's emotional. Right. And it's physical. Yeah. Still painful. Bottom line is it's still painful. Absolutely. Does happen both ways. So when we have that break, we need that safety and stability so that we can learn to trust ourselves first. A lot of people make the mistake of trying to figure out why can't they trust everyone else. Right. Then maybe trust their partner to some extent, depending on the circumstances. Again, the trail is defined very differently for very different reasons for different couples. Everybody has a different threshold. Everybody has different parameters for the relationship because every single relationship is unique as your fingerprint. Yeah. So what might work for one couple absolutely will not work for another. Absolutely not. You got that right. We don't know that. Yeah. We don't know what's going on behind closed doors and other relationships. Right. So we have that truth that we're so desperate to get our hands on. It's more about regulation. We need to settle ourselves down. We need not to react. It's gone. Absolutely. There's this urgency that we get. The first couple of days, weeks of discovering the trail. And this is huge. It's huge. And it's, am I staying or am I going? And is this over? And those questions play and play and play without that judgment from other people. We also have our own judgment. We have been raised a certain way for expectations. And we might have our line in the sand that says, I would never speak to someone who has betrayed me. Right. But then we learn of the circumstances. And again, please don't misunderstand me. There is never an excuse for betrayal. Never, never, 100%, never an excuse. Because there is always an opportunity to talk to your partner and say, hey, listen, I'm getting the attention from someone else. I kind of like the way that makes me feel. But I don't want that. I want that with you. So we work on our relationship. Can we figure out what's going on so that we can come back together? Because this other outside thing has me worried. Yeah, yeah. So we have that conversation. Unless, of course, we have, and in your particular case, a habitual. There's no going back from that one. Yeah, I think it's just getting traumatized over and over and over again. And then you become hypervigilant. And then what I started doing is started not caring. I didn't care. I just stopped caring. I was like, if I care, then I'm going to hear something new. And I don't want to hear anything new. So I just stopped asking, stopped wondering. He was coming in and coming out. I didn't care. I was like, whatever. It was like, whatever. And then just explosively at the last one when he had the baby by this lady, it was on a job that I knew the director, that I got him the job there. And that did it for me. It was like, oh my god, I'm embarrassed. And it was on camera. It was just horrible. It was just the worst. I don't think I could come back. I couldn't. I didn't know how to. It was just like, it was enough. I was like, if I don't get the lesson now, I'm going to be doing this long time. And I was like, so one of the agreements in my head was, you know, culturally I'm taught marriage is to the end forever. You know, that thing, you know, and the biblical version to death do us part. I agreed to those things. And then when I realized it's not the death of the people, it's the death of the love for the connection that they have. And I had to say this. God doesn't want us to suffer like this. There's no way he wants this. There's no way. And yeah, I had to end it. And it was one of the better things I've done for my life, I will tell you that because just it's too much, you know, seeing, you know, I see women going through it and I just tell them, listen, I just I'm one of those ones. I'm not going to tell you what to do with your life, but to see you going, you know, over and over and getting the same result, I just know something has to give. And that's where boundaries come in, right? Absolutely. It's definitely where boundaries come in. And again, you learn to trust yourself. Yeah. Trust your judgment. Yeah. Do what was best for you. Yes. In the circumstances that you had. I had something similar for me. It's a little bit different. And I was still there. It was intense. It was, you know, sitting on a park bench. Vanessa, there's something I need to tell you. I've met someone and my world shattered just like that. Right. And as we went through the process of attempting to rebuild our marriage, someone very wise that I was a pupil of said something early on. And I couldn't accept it because sometimes we need to hear things more than once. Because the first time we hear it, it just doesn't land for us. And then we hear it at the right moment, right time. And just like that, it kicks for us. Yes. They said to me, Vanessa, you're going to have a new relationship. You get to decide who that's with. Right. And in that moment, the first time I was like, a new relationship. Oh, you know, kind of thing. But the second, I was like, yeah, I get to choose. And I chose my husband because he had gone through a lot of work, self-discovery, who he was. And he's not the same man. I'm not the same woman. Therefore, we don't have the same relationship, a new relationship. And we celebrated 35 years of marriage with an asterisk, you know, but there's more to the story because there is a chunk of time that we were very close. We were on the brink of that divorce. Absolutely. Because I had a ton of insecurities that came forward. Right. I was going to ask you that. I was going to ask you. Absolutely. Very much so. Insecurities I didn't even realize I had. Right. Until that safety, that identity that I had. I was his wife. I was my kid's mother. And I had all of these identities. And somewhere along the way, I lost me. Yeah. I lost who I was. Yeah. And that's why I stopped trusting myself. Yeah. And I stopped trusting the people around me. How did this happen? Why did this happen? And where most couples break, like completely break. And again, it's not necessarily the cheating. It's what comes after. After can be defensiveness. And my husband wasn't defensive at all. He completely took 100% ownership for what he did. He would not let me take any responsibility whatsoever because it's somewhat natural to think, what did I do or didn't I do? That's causing this situation to happen. That caused the cheating. We take on that responsibility unnecessarily. But we do that. He didn't minimize the situation. He didn't over explain it either to the point where I couldn't like comprehend what was happening. And he didn't emotionally shut down. Right. Took it because I gave it. I mean, there were times where I was a vicious Karen and I just screamed at him. We would go to marriage therapy and I would spend 50 minutes screaming at him. I was just angry. And the other thing that, as I mentioned, is he took real accountability for his actions. He didn't try to minimize it. He didn't say, well, you did this or you didn't do that or any of that. He took it. And that was a really big difference in our relationship because I knew where he stood. And he stood in remorse, in regret, in shame and in guilt. And then therefore he needed to work on himself. Again, as I said, it doesn't the relationship doesn't break in the betrayal. It's how the two people handle what comes afterwards. Right. And that's in any challenge that we have. We had a catastrophic situation where a loved one had a car accident. That car accident is the moment. But how we all respond by going to the hospital, asking the doctor questions, so forth and so on. That's what leads to the mending of it. Right. The coming together during a crisis rather than separating. I see people trying to rebuild trust first, like with questions you have to. I might get back to you, but I have to trust you. But what I found, even with myself saying that, I did not learn how to feel safe first before I started asking my ex-partner now to start building trust back. So it kind of built up, again, my hypersensitivity around who's calling, all of this stuff. And I didn't feel safe. And I had to realize that I had to build safety for myself. How does one begin to do that, if you could tell the audience? Yeah, great question. Well, safety and trust kind of go hand in hand. And the way that you can learn to trust yourself is make commitments to yourself, even just little commitments. If you're somebody that reaches for your phone first thing in the morning and you want to break that habit, make a commitment to yourself, the first five minutes of the day, I'm just going to lay in bed and I'm going to breathe. I'm not going to look at my phone. And when you do that consistently, you have trained yourself to trust yourself to the commitment that you have made to yourself. Right. And it starts off small, and then you continue to expand it over time. It's incremental, right? Because you buy the most expensive running shoes does not mean you're right. It's not going to happen. Incrementally, you learn to trust yourself by making promises to yourself, commitments to yourself, honoring those commitments, because then you learn to trust yourself. And when you can trust yourself, you feel safe in your own. Because you now have that ability to judge the situation and recognize, you know what? This doesn't feel right to me. This doesn't feel safe to me. I am going to remove myself from the situation, or I'm going to ask the other party to remove themselves. We start to honor our intuition. Yes, absolutely. And that's a great point. Because as women, sometimes we give everything over to the partner. I mean, the bank book, they take care of it. You know, those things like that. I don't know. And we even give ourselves over to them. And I think we do that out of culture. We have to give ourselves over. And we're just oblivious. Like, everything's about them. And then when something happens, that probably is a normal part of, you know. I'm not saying stepping out is a normal part. But like, maybe, you know, I didn't get any attention because you're going to work. And, you know, we're not paying attention to each other. And then it breaks and everything. But you're my everything, you know. And I've heard women say that. You're my everything. And I didn't like that saying anyway, because it can't be, you know. But what's more damaging? Is the betrayal itself? Or is it the accountability afterwards? Because I hear you talking about that with your situation. Yeah. For me, it's definitely the lies. I think the lies leading up. Because at some point, this doesn't quite line up. Can't quite put my finger on it. My intuition's screaming. Right. Yes, yes. Put my finger on it. So I'm going to ask some questions. Where were you? What's going on? How are you feeling? You know, why is there lipstick stains? You know, there's this earring that I found, you know, little things that will be quickly explained away. Those are the lies. And when the lies start, yeah, they start to topple over. And that's when we find ourselves just in that perpetual state of just uncertainty. Yeah, because the lies have built that up for you. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So let's shift this a little bit. If someone feels completely broken right now, what do they need to understand first, Vanessa? Oh, what they need to understand first is not their fault. Not their fault. And as hard as it is to hear this, this was hard for me to hear it. Again, we talked about the things that people say that we hear the first time and we dismiss and we might hear the second or the third time and then we finally get it, was that though this happened to you, it wasn't about you. Very powerful. Very powerful indeed. It is not about you. And I know that you feel it. You feel it all over. Take a moment to pause. Get the clarity that you need. Get the support that you need. Build an army around you of supportive people where you don't feel their judgment, but you feel their guidance. And that was something because my situation happened almost a decade ago and then there wasn't a lot of support out there. And I found a grief group. It still wasn't quite right. Right. Grief, the person is gone. They are just not there. You're grieving the loss of a pet, the loss of a person. Yeah, they're not there, yeah. Betrayal, you're grieving, but the person's still there. You can actually put your hands on them. And not too good of a way, but yeah. So it's a little different and there's nuances to it and whatnot. And that's why for me and my husband, we really struggled with marriage counseling and marriage therapy. First of all, 50 minutes. I can't get anything done in 50 minutes other than chatting. And that's what we found. And I would find that this, you know, at minute 48, I would feel like I'm having a breakthrough and the tears would start. And I feel something, movement happening, it's going to happen. And then, you know, therapists would be like, yeah, time's up. And I'm like, you're leaving me like this? Like, yeah, yeah, that state of, I'm getting, I'm almost there. I just, I need, I need just a little more. Two minutes, three minutes. Guidance. That's why when I started this work, first of all, my sessions are 90 minutes at minimum, 90 minutes. We usually go over by at least an hour because things are happening. Movement is happening. I'm not going to interrupt that movement because that's what we need. We need to move through the avalanche of feeling, have all of those emotions. Second thing for me is therapy continued wanting to go backwards. Just wanted to say, well, you know, what did you miss and what did you not see? And I felt like it was very much guilt, guilting me and shaming me. And it was doing the same for my husband as well. We had enough guilt and shame right in the present moment. We didn't dredge it up past. And I found it distracting. Like, I want to work on this thing right here, right now. And you keep pulling me back to my childhood. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. Right here, right now. Give me a chance to have a conversation with my husband that doesn't escalate into me screaming at him and him retracting. We're not going to solve anything. It doesn't keep going in circles like that. A lot of people feel ashamed for staying or ashamed for leaving. What do you say to that, Vanessa? It's your life. It's your relationship. It's who you are. You get to choose that. You choose it. And whatever decision you make, you can absolutely change that decision. My husband knows that. I know that. A relationship, as you said, we make vows till death do you part. You said it perfectly. Sometimes it's the death of the relationship, not the death of the human in the relationship, the relationship itself. And Disney has done us dirty because they happily ever after. After can be on a timeline. It doesn't have to be until you die. I think Dan Savage said it best. He talked about that if a couple is getting divorced and everybody's like, oh, sorry. But if if on the way to get the divorce, one of them gets hit by a bus, suddenly it's a widow rather than a divorcee. It's a different it's a different dynamic. But they were still going to separate anyway anyway. Yeah. So why is it different whether it's death or divorce? There's still words, by the way. But, you know, here we are. You know, well, we were married for 20 years. I wasted 20 years. No, no, you didn't. You had experiences. You had joy. You had bliss. You wouldn't have married had you not had that. There were those moments. So hold on to those moments. Honor those moments and go. I've learned some lessons and I want to make sure that I don't take my ex into my next relationship. Right. Oh, that's good. So audience, you're not weak. You're in decision process. I like that. I like that, Vanessa. Absolutely. Looking without state, without without clarity. You will keep stuck no matter what you're doing. You know, if you leave or you stay, you're going to stay stuck. Correct. I love that. I love that what you said, Vanessa. That's really good. So for anyone that's out there right now, that's just going through all of this, give them one step. One step. Oh, the first step is to breathe. How important it is to breathe. Just a nice, deep breath all the way down to your hips. Hold it and let it go. I know it sounds, Vanessa, really? Come on. No, I know that to be true. What you're going to leave me with is to breathe. Yes, breathe. Settle yourself down. Learn to respond rather than react. Enjoy the pause. You hear something and you feel that flood of emotion come in. Allow it to be a wave. Let it wash over you. And then if it's knocked you on your ass, pick yourself up. If you are still standing and you're swayed from the wave, recognize that you're still standing and then respond. Don't have to react. Honor yourself. Remember who you are and mirror every single morning and find something so beautiful about you. And this was an exercise that I needed to do because after betrayal, I covered all my mirrors like I couldn't look at myself. I was so disappointed in myself that I couldn't look in the mirror. And when I finally took the pillowcase off the mirror and could look at myself, I did this exercise. I had to find something on my face that I absolutely loved about me. And then I needed to say it, not say it in my head, say it out loud. Beautiful green eyes. And that was it. Every morning I said it to myself because I needed to remind myself who I am. Remember that. Remember who you are. And if you connect with me, introduce yourself to me. Introduce yourself to me because you have an identity that is separate from your partner, separate from your children, separate from your employer, separate from your family, separate from your friends. Who are you? That's right. That's beautiful, Vanessa. Thank you for putting all that in perspective for us in the cheating realm of a relationship. This is bigger than infidelity, people. This is about identity, self-worth, and what you're willing to accept moving forward. You heard the story. Now let's talk about, not just talk about it, but let's do something about it. If you're stuck in a cycle of broken trust, overthinking, and emotional confusion, check the bottom of the comments from this video or from the audio and you'll find information to reach our beautiful Vanessa Cardenas. Okay, I want you to stop trying to process this alone and book a session as soon as you possibly can. This is Edna White, your host, and this is Keeping It Real On Purpose, where there's real stories, real healing, real direction. And if this episode hit you, just don't listen. Share it because someone else is sitting in the same confusion you just got clarity on. Bye for now.