Trusting the Process, Part 1

The First Year: Survival, Not Healing

This post is part of an ongoing series written by “Rising Phoenix,” a woman giving an honest account of how she’s learning to rise out of the pain and destruction of betrayal. Read all her posts by clicking the Rising Phoenix link above. To read all her posts chronologically, start with her first post and then click the “Read Rising Phoenix’s Next Post” link that appears at the bottom of each article.

The first year after discovery was not about rebuilding. It was about surviving.

My nervous system lived in a constant state of alert. Triggers were everywhere—songs, shows, memories, moments that once felt neutral but now carried weight. 

Grief, anger, fear, and disbelief competed for space in my body. No clarity. No sense of direction. Just survival, and brutal honesty. I was trying to stay intact.

While my pain was consuming, there was unraveling on his side too—though it looked different. Patterns that had once remained hidden could no longer survive exposure: avoidance, entitlement, emotional distance, gaslighting, and lying. 

The affair didn’t just reveal betrayal; it revealed a life built on disconnection from himself. Nothing could be bypassed anymore.

In that first year, everything felt immediate and raw. There was no “big picture,” no meaning-making, no lessons extracted neatly from the wreckage. There was only the body—reacting, remembering, bracing. I lived inside my nervous system, and it was exhausted.

Healing did not arrive as clarity or relief. It didn’t show up with answers or reassurance. What came instead was something far less comforting: awareness. Awareness of how deeply unsafe I felt. Awareness of how much I had normalized disconnection. Awareness that what had broken was not just trust in my marriage, but trust in my own internal sense of safety.

Before anything else, I need to say this clearly, because clarity matters at the beginning just as much as it does later: His infidelity was his alone.

He made that choice. No amount of therapy, childhood trauma, mental health diagnoses, communication struggles, or marital strain explains it away. 

Understanding context did not excuse the decision. 

Accountability is not something we outgrow. What followed was not redemption or a silver lining. It was a reckoning. A reckoning that forced me to stop skimming the surface of my life and confront what had been buried underneath it. Survival stripped everything down to what was essential.

There was no room for performative strength or spiritual bypassing. I had to tell the truth—to myself first—about how deeply this had fractured me.

In that first year, trust was not something I could conceptualize. I wasn’t thinking about what the marriage would become, or whether it would survive at all. I was thinking in hours and days. In breaths. In how to get through the next trigger without disappearing inside it.

The first year didn’t give me answers.

It gave me honesty. It showed me what survival actually looks like when illusion falls away. It taught me that healing does not begin with understanding or forgiveness or trust—it begins with staying present long enough to tell the truth about how much something hurt.

Trusting the Process: Then vs. Now

It’s hard to put the last three years into a few posts. So much has happened—more than words can fully hold—but I’ll do my best to capture the pain, the healing, and the growth we chose to walk through.

Trust didn’t return as blind faith.

It returned as grounding. When I get triggered now, I say it. And he turns toward me—fully. He doesn’t rush me. He doesn’t minimize it. He doesn’t tell me to move on. He stays. We talk about the song, the show, the memory, the moment that surfaced it. What once felt like landmines slowly became places of safety.

Trust isn’t the absence of fear.

It’s knowing fear no longer runs the show.

When Safety Replaces Surveillance

I’ve talked before about loyalty, boundaries, and access—especially in early recovery. In the beginning, I had access to everything. I knew where he was at all times, who he was with, and how long he’d be gone. I had all his socials and all his emails. We lived that way for about the first two years, maybe a little longer.

During that time, I was always searching for reasons to question him. I checked his phone. I looked for proof. The fear of what if—what if he’s lying, what if I’m missing something—was constant and freezing.

But over time, as we examined our whole life together and began dismantling old patterns, something shifted. We learned. We unlearned. And one day, I realized I didn’t feel the need to look anymore.

The moment it clicked was simple. One day, he forgot to message me about a change in plans and a different destination. He came home late and immediately started explaining. I looked at him and realized I hadn’t even noticed. I hadn’t worried. I hadn’t felt anxious. I’d gone about my day assuming traffic, a busy store, anything except the old narratives.

That’s when I understood something important: I didn’t feel safer because I had access to everything. I felt safer because my nervous system was no longer on high alert.

Do I still get triggered? Yes.

But now I’m aware of them.

For a long time, the phone was a major trigger. Every beep. Every text message. That has changed—but it hasn’t disappeared entirely. There are still moments when I pause. Moments when I walk into a room, and he quickly puts his phone away. But now, when that happens, I ask. Without fear, and he understands why. He recognizes how it might look, even if there’s nothing behind it.

Sometimes he explains that he put his phone down because he wants to give me his full attention. Other times, he shows me exactly what he was doing—without defensiveness, without hesitation. Not because he has to prove anything, but because reassurance is part of rebuilding safety.

Another trigger used to be anything related to cheating or infidelity—watching it, hearing about it, even casually. For a long time, neither of us could tolerate it. It felt gross. Dismissive. Minimizing. 

And honestly, most movies and TV shows still glamorize infidelity or treat it like a plot device, while completely downplaying the devastation it leaves behind.

Just the other day, we watched a show with infidelity as part of the plot line. It wasn’t overly glamorized—but the pain was still minimized. It was upsetting. And then we talked about it.

We can’t fully escape those narratives. They’re everywhere. I strongly believe no movie or TV show will ever truly capture what betrayal does to the faithful partner, to the family, to the sense of self. The aftermath is quiet, long-lasting, and deeply personal—far beyond what a screen can show.

Feeling safer doesn’t mean being untouched. 

It means being aware, being honest, and being able to face triggers without letting them control the present.

And for us, that awareness has become its own form of healing. What came next was not linear. It wasn’t gentle; it didn’thappened all at once. 

And over time—through honesty, confrontation, and effort that couldn’t be hurried—survival began to transform into something different.