Hello, everyone and welcome to the Sex, Love and SuperPowers podcast show. I am your host, Tatiana Berindei, and I am delighted to have with me today, Ms. Stephanie Sharp. We are going to be discussing recovering from infidelity and a failing marriage. This is going to be such a good conversation. I cannot wait, and you will know why as soon as I finish reading her bio to you, so let me tell you a little bit about Stephanie.
Stephanie Sharp is the founder of Vantage Life Design, a provider of holistic coaching that specializes in helping women survive and thrive after infidelity. Stephanie had been serving women for over a decade as a mindset and holistic health coach when infidelity appeared in her own life. Without any personal or professional infidelity experience to draw from, Stephanie searched desperately for support, taking the standard routes, couples counseling, online forums, podcasts, articles, books, et cetera. None of it worked, so she turned inward.
Reviewing her years of client care and pulling from the fields of psychology, relationship studies, gender studies, anthropology, spiritual practices, NLP, and personal development did not only hear her wounds but provide a quantum leap in self-awareness and personal power. From this journey, Enlightened Affair Recovery was born. EAR denies victimhood and is committed to healing the insanity that our contemporary story of “love” creates. She says, “Women in our culture have been sold a bag of goods. We’ve been convinced that love is a commodity that we have to earn through being good enough, sexy enough, et cetera, and if we aren’t enough, we’ve been taught that love can be taken away. This narrative holds us hostage and holds us back from living our best lives from the vantage point of our highest selves. Surprisingly, infidelity offers the destruction necessary to break up our old limiting beliefs so that we can consciously create new beliefs and practices that support our authentic desires. Enlightened Affair Recovery is focused on using destruction to create whatever the hell we want without shame, blame, or victimization.” I love that so much, and I’m so excited that you are here today.
Thank you. I’m so glad to be here. Thank you. Thanks for having me. I’m excited.
Absolutely. It’s going to be a good one. Before we dive in, will you please tell our listeners what your super powers are?
Yeah. This is such a great question and I was really kind of sitting with it these last couple of days, and it’s funny. What I came to, what I was able to kind of wrap up in this great little fun race is I realized that my superpower is I have x-ray vision.
No way.
I do.
That’s awesome.
I can see the divinity within the human condition.
Yeah. It’s pretty standard power for superheroes, but x-ray vision in that … Why I chose that term as I thought what I have been blessed with through trial and tribulation and whatnot is that I really can see the love behind the confusion, and I can see the divinity within the human condition. You could call it hyper-empathy or whatever you want, but I love that idea of it being x-rayed vision because in my life experiences professionally and personally, getting to that place where you really can take that concept of like Namaste, like that the light in me recognizes and honors the light in you.
When you can actually have that x-ray vision, with people in the real world, people who are going around the world like we all are as the human being part of ourselves, sometimes making really bad choices or behaving in ways that don’t really reflect our inner light, and when you can have x-ray vision, I do really think that that, like nailed it down, that’s the super power, it’s so freeing. It’s so freeing because it really gives you that opportunity to not take things personally and to really, really speak to and connect with the real reality that’s behind all the stuff. Yeah, x-ray vision.
I love that. You nailed that super power question. I’ve just got to say. That was one of my favorite answers so far. Phenomenal.
Yeah. I mean, I couldn’t leap over tall buildings. I mean, I can jump pretty high, but I’m pretty short, five feet basically. There’s no tall leaping on any level for little shorties like myself.
Join the club. I’m in the short club too. I love that so much. That was so beautifully and eloquently said. The topic that we’re talking about and that you’ve devoted your career to, that can be one of the hardest places to have that x-ray vision because when there’s been an agreement that’s been broken, there’s heartbreak there, there’s all the pain and the stories and all of that. So, how have you been able to use your x-ray vision in those kinds of situations?
Well, I think that when you think about x-ray vision, it’s this concept that there’s something in front of something, right? X-ray vision is all about looking through one layer to get to the truth, and with the work that I have done, again, really springing from my own personal experience on it, it’s really about the unraveling and the taking down and really… Again, I talk a lot about destruction and creation. With the work that I do on that x-ray vision and the way that it has shown up is that when you can get to the point where you recognize that so much of what our beliefs are. Diving right into it kind of especially about love and relationships in our culture, when you can get to the point where you realize that so much of what we have taken as truth and as real and as all-encompassing, and it’s very black and white, and it’s this, and it’s that, and if it’s not this, then it’s that. This kind of thinking.
When we can get to the point where we can kind of pull ourselves back and go, “Okay, that’s presenting. Okay, there’s that layer there. There’s that thing that I’ve been drawn into,” and it’s actually being drawn into that particular story, that particular framing of the truth that is causing so much pain, when I can pull myself back from that and observe it from a more impersonal place and recognize that like, “Wait a minute. This is a layer. This is a story. This is a framing that we’ve all been sold, that we’ve all been taught, and there’s really not been a lot of questioning about it.”
Give us an example because I want our listeners to be able to really grasp something concrete. I mean, you gave some really clear outlines in your bio, but what are some of these sorts of collective stories that we can be in operation here?
Oh, yeah, sure. Let’s just talk about traditional marriage, right?
We’re obviously talking about Western culture because we have listeners from all over the world but we’re here from our U.S. framework.
Right. I apologize for the garbage man up the front of the window right now in case you’re hearing things.
We love the garbage man.
Yeah. Well, let’s just talk about Western traditional marriage. I mean, the whole thing is wrapped up in its concept of specialness, right? Then, there’s the story, right? There’s one person, goes and meets this other person. There’s this chemistry, and there are this connection and all of this stuff. Then, we call that falling in love. I think that that term is so great because it is like a falling. We’ve all experienced that. There’s not a whole lot of conscious entry into that falling in a love relationship that ultimately leads to marriage.
We fall in love and everything clicks.
We fall in love and everything clicks. Again, it kind of moves on its own. It has this own kind of life force that pulls us along. Then, the moment comes where, again in Western traditional marriage, the guy gets a ring. He asks the girl and whatever to marry. What’s implied in that is, “I’m giving you this ring, and I am making this commitment to you. You of every single person in the world are special.” In that, then there’s this whole next chapter of, well, we are going to get married and it’s going to be like this. There’s this implication of this happily ever after story, and again, all about that whole idea of this happily ever after, and it’s just when you find the “right person.”
The one, yeah.
The one, right. The two become one and soulmates and all this stuff. I mean, all you really have to do is look around every Disney story.
Yeah. It’s all over the media.
It’s in the ether of Western culture. So, there’s this implied specialness. Again, the problem with that is that if something happens in that relationship. Right at it, if infidelity happens or somebody decides that they need to leave, because the whole relationship was entered into with this initial concept of specialness, by default, as soon as something happens that’s drastic at that level, there’s a feeling, and again, it does tend to fall on the woman in a relationship, that that specialness has been taken away.
I’m going to stop because we do have to do a quick break. We’ve got a lot to talk about. Okay, so before we go to break, will you tell our listeners where they can go to find out more about you and your work?
Yeah. You can find me at vantagelifedesign.com, and you can always reach me at [email protected], and I get back to folks pretty quickly.
Yeah.
Thank you so much. We’re talking with Stephanie Sharp about recovering from infidelity and a failing marriage. Obviously, we’ve got a lot to cover, so stay tuned.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
Music Credit: All instruments played by Amanda Turk. Engineered and produced by Tatiana Berindei and Daniel Plane reelcello.com
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