When your heart is shattered & your body is on high alert

Shawn Haywood, PhRD
Dec 22, 2025
3 min read

When your husband has an affair, the pain doesn’t just live in your mind or your heart.

It hits your body hard too.

The constant knot in your stomach
The racing thoughts you can’t shut off
The startle, the panic, the dread
The sleepless nights replaying conversations and images

That’s your nervous system trying to protect you after trauma. It’s doing its best, but when it gets stuck in survival mode—fight, flight, freeze—long after the crisis has passed, it

wreaks havoc on the whole of you.

So…

You’re not “crazy.”
You’re not “too emotional.”
You’re not lacking willpower.
You’re not “bad” because you can’t seem to ‘just get over this.”

Your body is simply overwhelmed.

Why meditation helps after an affair–

Gentle, guided meditation is like a soft hand on your back saying, “You’re safe enough to breathe now. It’s ok, everything is ok….”

Meditation can help you:

Move your body out of constant alarm and into calm regulation
Soften the obsessive looping over details of the affair
Clear some of the mental fog so you can think and decide more clearly
Fall asleep, stay asleep, and wake up feeling more rested
Begin to feel a sense of safety inside yourself again

This isn’t about spiritually bypassing what happened or forcing yourself to “just forgive and move on.” It’s about giving your nervous system a real, practical way to start coming down from constant crisis.

Guided meditations created specifically for affair recovery

Because this kind of trauma is so unique, I’m sharing a set of Guided Meditations for Affair Recovery that were created exactly for what you’re walking through right now.

You’ll find four powerful meditations designed for this season of your life:

Trust Meditation – To gently rebuild a sense of safety and self-trust after betrayal, so you can lean on your inner wisdom again.
Surrender Meditation – To help you release the heavy emotions and painful stories that keep you stuck in the same mental loops.
Acceptance Meditation – To support you in making peace with what’s real now, so you can move forward with more clarity and less self-blame.
Sleep Meditation – To quiet the late-night racing thoughts and soften anxiety so your body can finally rest.

You can choose the one that speaks to you most right now—or grab the full bundle for deeper support as you move through different stages of your healing.

👉 Explore them here: Guided Meditations for Affair Recovery

A tiny invitation for today

If all you do today is put in your earbuds, lie down, and let someone lovingly guide you for 10–20 minutes…That is not “nothing.”

In fact, it is everything!

That is you saying to your body:

“I see how hard this has been. I’m going to take care of you now. I love you deeply.”

You don’t have to think your way out of trauma.You can support your nervous system in

healing—slowly, gently, one breath and one meditation at a time.

With so much compassion, Shawn

P.S. If your brain is saying, “I can’t focus, I’m too scattered to meditate,” these were created with that in mind. You don’t have to do them perfectly. Just press play and let yourself be held. 💛 Check them out here.

About Dr. Shawn Haywood

Dr. Shawn Haywood is the founder of Reimagine Love. She is a classically trained therapist, as well as a life and marriage coach, who loves to work with women and couples to help them heal fully after an affair. Over the past 25 years, she has helped thousands of women move from the cycle of disconnect to one of unbreakable love and connection, while healing fully after infidelity, in a fraction of the time of traditional marriage counseling.