From Betrayal to Brilliance: How Lora Cheadle Helps You Reclaim Soul Power After Heartbreak

Introduction to betrayal recovery 0:00

Hey friends, I'm your host, Dr. Elizabeth Samanta, the intuitive psychiatrist. And today, today we are opening a conversation around some thing that really, really hits home for a lot of people. One of the most painful and yet deeply transformational experiences a soul can face, and that is betrayal. Our guest here knows this journey firsthand. She's a former attorney turned betrayal recovery expert. And she weaves together law, psychology, and consciousness in a way that helps others find meaning in the midst of heartbreak.

Laura Chible, it's an honor to have you with us. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much. And what a beautiful introduction because yes, betrayal is something we all experience and it is so painful and so transformative, but it easy to lose the fact that it was transformative when we're so enmeshed in the pain. Yes, yes. And for those that don't know you, we'd like to learn a little bit more about you. Your story, how this transformation happened. Could you share your journey from turning into this unexpected path of becoming a betrayal recovery expert?

Absolutely, I really enjoyed practicing law. I enjoyed so much about it, the research, things like that. But the reason that I went to law school was really to create justice in the world. So many injustices out there. And the longer I practiced, The more I realized, darn it. I'm really not righting wrongs, I am really bringing justice to people's hearts and souls.

Laura's path from law to healing work 2:04

And I felt kind of disillusioned by that. It was so transactional. I started burning out and I walked away. And my idea was to go into more of the holistic wellness space because I really saw that justice was within. It's not really contingent on those external circumstances. That's how we feel in our bodies, in out minds, and our spirits. So that's when I started really opening myself up to spirituality, intuition. I went back to school, became a hypnotherapist, you know, all energy work, And you know, I really thought I had nailed it.

I was perfect. It was helping people. And then I found out that my husband had been cheating on me for 15 of our 23 years together. Oh, geez. I can't even tell you how devastating that was. It didn't make sense. We were friends, we were partners, and we had a really good life. I was intuitive, like, how could I have missed all of this? And it took a long time. For me doing work with other people to start figuring out what is missing. Why don't we have a good betrayal recovery practice? It's not just grief.

It is not loss. So much more than that. Its identity, its expectation, it's betrayal of all these other things. And that's when I really got curious, both for my own healing and for other people and started researching and deep diving and learning what is betrayal? How does it impact on a soul level, a physical level and mental level? So I never planned on getting here, but I do feel that it was the exact right place and where I'm supposed to be. Can you speak a little bit to that? Like you mentioned that you went and did a deep dive into the trail, like what it is and what you uncovered.

Tell us a bit about what, what means, I guess, your perspective on a soul level. Yeah, yeah. If you look at the definition, I'm a lawyer, and I have to start with definitions. I love it. Bring it! Good. The definition of betrayal is the breaking of an expectation, but not just any expectation. An expectation that you have relied on that ruptures your view of yourself or the world. So, it ruptures a material expectation about how safe you are, about who you, are about what you. And that's the intersection of spirituality right there.

We think we are humans. The world is there to support us in certain ways depending on so many different things. All of these beliefs about who we are and what the world is like get ruptured. I thought good things would happen to good people. Because I was kind and I tried hard to do the right thing, even though I would make mistakes, then I'd get rewarded because good always wins,

Defining betrayal and reclaiming identity 5:47

right? I though would be safe. Thought I could be protected. And betrayal rips that away from you, and it's easy to fall into a victim mentality. Nothing is safe, nothing is fixed. No matter what I do, it is never going to be enough. And this is where you really have to go within and be like, no, Nothing IS safe. nothing IS fixed, but I AM. I am a spirit. I am capable of creating my own experience. I can be victimized and not wear the hat of victim.I can victimize and feel it fully and process it, but I get to choose my identity.

And I got to make my life and my experience exclusive or irregardless of what happened to me. It is exclusively my choice. Oh, I love it, it's going from victimhood to empowerment. Can you tell our listeners who are in the midst of betrayal, what's the first step? Yeah. Yeah. This is so hard to hear. So hard. We're here for the truth, though. Go ahead. Exactly. I'm not going to lie. The first step is to slow down and to feel it all. You know, our nervous system gets hijacked, we either want to fight, I'm gonna fight you and I am gonna win, and kick you out.

We want run away, pretend that it didn't happen. we want curl up in a ball, want fix things, if I can just fix you, just go to counseling, look at this fix, fix yourself, any time the nervous is hijack, were not making true, authentic, thoughtful decisions because we are in survival mode. The first step is to feel it, to recognize you're in shock. You can't just re-regulate your nervous system in two days. Your whole world has been disrupted. Your identity, your whole future. You have to reprocess the past.

Slow down and just feel. I laid on the floor and cried. Yes, I did other things too. I would get up, see a therapist, a coach, do some energy work, try to walk. But I felt it all. And we have to feel it, all the grief, the loss, shock, pain. Slow down and let yourself feel. It's so powerful. As a psychiatrist, Um, tears are, are incredibly healing. It's something about that, that it's that therapeutic release. Oh yeah. Pint up, um, pent up emotions, energy. I, I wonder if you could tell us about what helped because that that's a significant betrayal.

What helped you most as you were going through that? It varied. You know, it would be really nice to say it's this one thing and it helped. It was a variety of things, but I would very conscious of what I needed.

The first steps after betrayal 9:42

I'm good at taking care of other people. I think so many of us are, I'll take care my kids, take my family, my spouse, things at work. But I have very rarely truly taken care myself. You know, sometimes people would be like self-care and I'd be, like, yeah, I get manicures. I got a pedicure, but that's not it. And I would have to go to that base level of what do you need right now, Laura? Do you want water? You need to just go sit in the sunshine. Do need a call a friend? What do need now? And sometimes it was movement and sometimes I need the weight of blankets on me.

Sometimes I found so much comfort in listening to Esther Hicks. Just her voice and her messages. What do I need? And just taking care of myself at that very base level. Sometimes it would be like, I needed a frozen pizza. You know, it was just asking and listening and allowing and not judging it. Not being like no, you should go work out. Oh, that's not healthy. I wanted comfort and I had to comfort myself. So it sounds like you were in communication. with yourself, you were listening to yourself and that is such a beautiful thing.

For those people who have trouble, there's a lot of stuff going on in their outside world. And so it's hard to hear what their inner self is trying to tell them. What advice would you have for those? You're not dropping the ball permanently. I hear that, you know, my son was at home, I had classes to teach, clients to serve. You can still do those things. Do it at the bare minimum. The laundry will keep, the house can get dirty. If you need to reschedule on a friend or a client, if you to share with your employer that you're going through something and step back and take some leave or take personal days, you deserve that.

This is not permanent. I think there's that thought that we all have, I can't do it, and I have to be the overachiever. I need to keep all the balls in the air all of the time. Now is the right time to drop the ball. You're not dropping them forever. This is more significant. Then you realize, if you got run over by a truck and you saw the physical injuries, you wouldn't be doing it at all. You just got ran over a by truck internally, just because you can't see the, physical, injuries. you still need to take that time.

I know there's a lot to do, but just do the bare minimum. I love that. Such a, I loved that analogy. Yes, yes. Because so often we minimize the extent to which these things like betrayal, grief, like it hits home and it's hard. Yes. Yes, it's so significant. And part of the reason that I do what I, do is I want to break the stigma around it, because we have these thoughts like, It happened to me because I'm not pretty enough. It happens to be because, I am not a good enough wife. because somebody else chose it.

You really had nothing to do with it." I've said to people before, unless you held a gun to your partner's head and said, you must go cheat on me, I guarantee you didn't cause it, so step back, allow yourself to feel the significance of it We have a lot of trust in our partnerships.

Self-care, boundaries, and letting go of stigma 13:41

We Have a Lot of Trust in Our Relationship. This is significant, this is painful, it's more than heartbreak. It's trusting the world, its trusting, the institution of marriage or partnerships, It disrupts your idea of how the World should work. than, oh my gosh, he saw somebody else and she was really hot and then he went and had sex with her and it's, you know what I mean? Like the narrative around infidelity does not tap into the depth of the emotional pain. Absolutely. Yeah, as a psychiatrist, I would agree that it doesn't.

I wonder if you could, because you've worked with people, and I wondered if there is a client story of someone who using the techniques that you use as you do energy work, hypnotherapy, where they were able to reclaim their life after heartbreak. Oh, yeah. Again, being very honest, it takes time. You know, I know exactly the client I want to talk about. It's beautiful, it's amazing, but it didn't happen in six weeks because you have to go through that initial shock. And we went through the initial shot and she saw a therapist and a couple of therapists for a while.

She wouldn't see me for some of the energy work. We did a lot of somatic processing because she was holding so much in her body and we got her breathing and moving and flowing and processing again. Once this initial crisis had passed, then she had to get into some of the practicalities. What am I going to do? How is this going look going forward? Her husband was doing a lot of work and they were going work it out. And then about halfway through that, she has this realization Actually, the infidelity has nothing to do with it.

I've been out of this marriage emotionally for a lot longer than I realized and I am choosing to separate because that's my choice. It doesn't matter with the Infidelity. Then she went through the whole divorce. Its a Lot. Her last phase now She is back to who she was. And what I mean by that is she's still a loving and kind woman taking care of her family, but she puts herself first. She's traveling with some girlfriends. It sounds silly, she is going to game nights, trivia nights. She's taking trips, she's doing all of these fun things.

And she was like, this was me. I was a community oriented person.I had friends, I had family, and I kind of let that all go and played the role of wife and mom. Now I'm back to playing the roll of me and it can be kind a subtle shift externally. But what she talks about now is that freedom internally, that this was the soul lesson that I went through. I spent the first half of my life, three quarters of life like she'd say, putting layers on, I will do this, it will become this. You know, acquiesce to this and she's like, this last part I've been taking layers off.

And it's this internal sense of freedom. She's fine. Whether she meets somebody or not inside, she's flying. It's the internal joy that she is radiating. That is so beautiful to witness because all of that judgment.

A clientu2019s journey from heartbreak to freedom 17:48

Well, what if somebody says this? Well what, if I never find somebody, but what? If I don't have enough for a retirement, that's just gone. And she's just solid. It's inspiring, really. Because with that story, it's as if she is remembering, like you said, remembering who she truly is and living it. live in it. You mentioned something, you talked about somatic practices and for people who are, I'm a psychiatrist, so I hear that word a lot, but for the people in our audience who aren't familiar, can you tell us a little bit about that and like what are they, and who is it good for, what does it help with?

Oh, I loved you because I'm so passionate about it. Somatics basically just means of the body. We are a body, we have a, body we live inside this body and you know what? You start getting stressed and start feeling it in your gut and then you feel it your shoulders and the you start hunching and your like I feel sick to my stomach over this. That is all of that energy, all that muck just gathering in your body. And one of the things I say, you can't think your way out of trauma. You can't just decide, oh, I'm not going to be a victim anymore.

Yeah, have those horrible experiences. It's all okay. I can just let that go. We have to feel our way through trauma, through the body. So if you have a memory of something that happened to you and you're feeling it and it's holding in, you One of my favorite things to do is putting your hand on your belly, putting you hand in your heart, seeing if you can just drop the breath into your body and loosen that low belly and just make contact. And it feels kind of awkward because it's this big. But I hold in my belly, I grip in belly as my heart moving.

When there's anxiety, another one of my favorites is to just flap my hands. You might see kids doing a hand flap. Yes. Yeah, hand flops are amazing. Where is that anxiety? Think about the anxiety. It's like, when you start hand flapping around your ears, around you head, or around just shoulders, and you can take that I anxiety and your like here's my anxiety here. And you're flowing up to your fingers and hand-flapping and up and down. Then you just kind of go like you are shaking water off your finger.

Flip that an anxiety away. You are doing with your body what you need to do to get that stuff out of your. So soften my belly, move my heart. move my head. And there's what I love about somatic processing is, yes, there are tools. There are tricks. I can tell you how to do some things, but kids know how do it naturally. A toddler rolling on the floor having a temper tantrum, that's sommatic processing. Nobody said roll on your floor, kick your feet, flail your arms, you'll feel better. Kids just know.

Yeah. We lose touch with our bodies. Turn on music and just dance. What does your body feel like doing now? Does it feel shaking, bouncing? Doesn't matter. Do it. It's going to help. And if it doesn't, try something else. Because otherwise, we hang on to it and it hurts and can make us sick.

Somatic practices for processing trauma 21:38

What are the different ways you've noticed that when people hold on to that, oh the betrayal, the resentment, like what have you seen happen to people? Oh, so much. So much! I'm going to start. Whenever we go through this betrayal, we compress, We collapse. When we move forward,we collapse,We compress. That can be fine.That's part of the processing. But we have to expand again. Otherwise we stay in that crumpled, collapsed space.When we're collapsed we can't process. We're in sheer grief. Grief is valid, but we cannot live in grief A lot of my work is around the word flaunt.

And flault is the energy that I want to lead people to. It's from that collapse into that flaut. The heart open, the chest open. When you live in a crumpled, collapsed place, The diaphragm can't move up and down. Physiologically, you're not taking in as much oxygen. when you don't have oxygen, your mind isn't going to work. Your muscles aren't gonna work, You're going get tired. When you get tired, you're going to feel depressed and you'll say, what's wrong with me? I used to be able to get up and spend all day.

You don't look good, your posture is forward, you look sad and insecure. You start not attracting other fun people because you looked like a depressed, collapsed in person. So it becomes this downward spiral of, I'm not feeling good. I've not having good relationships. Nothing is good anymore. And you're literally looking down and you are missing life all around you. So even if you don't feel like it, take that flaunt position, raise the chest up, pull the crown of your head to the sky, move that low belly, open up the heart, even smile.

I'm not saying walk around with a fake smile on your face, but when you smile and you contract the muscles in your It sends those chemical messengers into your bloodstream that, hey, I'm feeling good, and it creates a more positive mindset. You get more oxygen to the body and you begin an upward spiral. Very true. So many truths in that statement. I wonder, as you're helping people, let's say they get past the betrayal, they've healed from the from betrayal. I wonder about the next step, like opening up their hearts again to love.

Can you tell me a little bit about tips, techniques, things that can help with that transition? Yeah. This is hard to hear when you were newly betrayed, when your in the middle of it. But betrayal is such a reflection. All things that happen around us are mirrors for something inside. And this is not- Think it! Yes! Oh yeah! And, this not blaming. If you've been betrayed my question to you is always, how are you betraying yourself? How are you not having your own back? And opening your heart up to love again means fully having own your back.

It doesn't mean being armored up, it means trusting your truth, trusting intuition, thinking and feeling, and knowing that if you see red flags going forward, you don't have to be hijacked. You can sit with it, you can process it. You know, earlier I said, touch your belly, your chest. How does that feel? How is this new relationship feel. Does it feel good in my heart but bad in the gut? Okay, that's something to listen to. Life is fluid, You are fluid.

How betrayal affects the body and mind 25:48

Trust yourself when you have your own back. It's safe to open yourself up to others because you will not let yourself down again. Yes, yes. very, very just powerful words. So there are steps that they can take as they're making that transition. And we are spiritual creatures. We are multi-dimensional persons. I wonder how that aspect affects our healing journey. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to go deep on this one. Yes, we're here. Exactly. And I channel a group of entities known as the librarians. What they do is they collect the records around lessons that we have as a collection of souls.

So it's not your records or my records. It's the records around the experience of betrayal, judgment, abandonment, whatever. When I started channeling them and I starting understanding what I learn, I learned on behalf of me, but I also learned it on the behalf the collective. What somebody else learns, yes, they learn on their own behalf, but their knowledge and their wisdom and experience, I can also gain information and knowledge from. We all elevate this humanity based on what we're all doing.

And when I started really understanding that, Yes, this is the trail is for me. It's also a gift to my husband. We ended up reconciling. it's changed his world. He dealt with his past trauma that he never dealt. This is also. A gift. To people in my immediate family. to give to people that I touch, but on a solo level, I am walking this path for all of humanity. You go through this experience, you are walking the path. For all. Of humanity, It's not just about you. What can you learn? What you can share?

This is ancestral. This goes to the past, this goes the future. And that's a high level of responsibility. When you are, and I hate this word, but lucky enough to go through something deep, it's because you're being tasked with doing this work for humanity. So it helps you elevate. Oh, absolutely. You elevate, other people elevate. We're helping each other. And so I guess as we wrap things up, I wonder if there is a practice that you do that has helped you really connect with your spirit,

Opening the heart again and spiritual perspective 28:38

especially when tough things like this happen. Yeah. My favorite thing is just taking some time in the morning. to not do anything, to sit in silence. Sometimes I'm in my bed, sometimes in the summer I'll go sit outside on the patio. I don't have my phone, I do not have a book, and I just sit there and feel myself. And sometimes it's a very short practice. And other times I'll have the luxury of time and I'd be like, I can sit here for 20 minutes. But just allowing myself to be and to connect with who I am without all of that external noise or sound or input is really life-changing.

I feel it. Just as you were talking about it, I was like, oh, that transformative experience that she's having, and I'm sure you'll inspire many of our listeners to do the same. For our listener, we're hearing you, seeing you and we'd love to connect with you. Tell us, how can we connect after this show? Oh, absolutely. Please connect with me. A couple of things. If you'd like to get a free copy of a betrayal recovery guide that I've put together, it includes channeled wisdom, some somatic practices, journal prompts, go to betrayalrecoveryguide.com and download it for free.

I am on all social media. You can also find me on my main website, laurachetel.com. And my name Laura is spelled a little bit different. It's L-O-R-A-C-H-E- A-D-L- E. So Betrayal Recovery Guide, Laura Cheadle, or social Media.

Morning silence and where to connect with Laura 31:08

Well, Laura, thank you so much for your vulnerability, your insight, you're your brilliance. You've just you've shown us that betrayal doesn't have to be the end of the story. It can actually be. The beginning of a deeper and more radiant chapter. Thank you. I appreciate you. The soul in me honors the soul and you." If you'd like to see more episodes like this, please subscribe or click here. And friends, if this spoke to you, leave a comment below. We would love to hear from you!