Janelle: Do you know that four out of five women struggle with confidence and knowing who they are? The Women Emerging Fearlessly podcast is dedicated to helping women lead their lives with fearless confidence and discover how amazing they truly are. In this show, you will hear from women who have overcome many obstacles to pursue their dreams and passions. They will inspire you and encourage you to stand up, step out and speak up, be your authentic self and bring your true gifts to the world. My name is Janelle Anderson and I am your host. If you enjoy this podcast, please leave a great review, subscribe and share the show with your friends.
Today’s guest is going to share some amazing tips with us. It’s an inspiring story of emerging fearlessly through a very difficult period of finding out about her husband’s adultery, and getting a diagnosis of breast cancer, and she’s dealing with both of these things at the same time. So, the title of this episode is very appropriate: using adversity to thrive in your midlife and beyond. I’m so excited to introduce you to CJ Grace. She’s the author of The Adulterer’s Wife: How to Thrive Whether You Stay or Not, and currently completing Hotel Chemo: My Wild Ride Through Breast Cancer and Infidelity.
She dealt with the double whammy of infidelity and cancer by refusing to be a victim and keeping her wicked sense of humor. CJ was a BBC journalist and voice over artist in the UK and later worked for China Radio International in Beijing. She insists that the obstacles she’s faced have enabled her to make midlife better than her younger days. Well, welcome to the show. CJ.

CJ: Thank you so much for having me. I’m thrilled to be here.

Janelle: So, you’ve done so many interesting things in your life. I would love just to have you share a bit of your story with the audience, especially how you overcome these obstacles, but tell us first like what it was like for you to find out that your husband had committed adultery and then you getting cancer.

CJ: Well, it was a bizarre turn of events because prior to that, I felt I had been living a charmed life. I’d had my dream job with the BBC, meeting celebrities and politicians and having my pulse on current events. And then I got transferred to China Radio International in Beijing. I had a fairy tale falling in love with an American that I met there. And obviously, our marriage had ups and downs like many do, but our 25th wedding anniversary was the best ever. We spent it in Hawaii, where we had bought a second home. I felt like we were living in the land of the gods. But little did I know that just two years later, my health and my marriage would both be in tatters because I found out that my husband was carrying on an affair with a woman half his age and barely older than my firstborn son.
Shortly after I got my second diagnosis of breast cancer. And that, as you said, was a double whammy that left me reeling. I felt like the ground had been kicked away from under my feet. I also was a carrier of that dreaded BRCA gene that Angelina Jolie saw as a terrible death sentence in a way. To be honest, it was as if time had stood still. A door had opened to lead me into a brave and terrifying new world. It wasn’t my first instance of breast cancer. I’d had it back in 2007. At the time, I thought, well, I’ve done breast cancer. I’m over with it. I had my BRCA breast cancer now I’m fine but then in 2014 I got it again on the other side.
It was a worse case than what I’d had before. So that was what I was dealing with. It was definitely a time that was pretty difficult and pretty dark. I worked out ways to get through it because I realized that that if I didn’t, I wasn’t going to get well and wouldn’t be able to have anywhere near as good a life as I had felt that I’d had before. So, I worked out a 6-part system of how to deal with it.
The first and most important thing was to find confidants and mentors that I could trust. They weren’t necessarily the same as friends, because sometimes you can tell friends things and then they tell all their other friends or they’re a little bit judgmental, or they don’t give you a response you really want to hear. You need to have people who are good confidants and sometimes that may be somebody you have to pay to see, like a counselor. But in my case, I had some very good people who actually had counseling experience themselves who gave me valuable advice. I made a point of choosing both male and female confidants because you get a totally different view, particularly when you’re dealing with adultery, when you talk to men about that rather than when you talk to women.

Janelle: I think even just one of those things would set somebody reeling, as you said. I know that’s how I felt when I found out my first husband was unfaithful. He came home and told me that he was having an affair, and it was an affair with a friend of mine. I knew something was going on, but I didn’t know what and our daughter at the time was only about six months old. I was still breastfeeding her I was sitting on the couch holding her when he told me. It felt like I was hit with this tidal wave. Literally, I felt like something had physically hit me and knocked me backwards. I was just in shock from that.
And then you on top of that are getting this second diagnosis of cancer. What was your initial reaction at that time? Do you remember what you were feeling and thinking?

CJ: Well, I went through the standard negative array of emotions. I was angry with him, I was very scared about how my life would turn out because I thought, am I going to be able to live in this home anymore? How am I going to manage if we get divorced in terms of finances? And what’s really interesting is that it completely changes your view of who you are and what you’re like. In a flash, it made me feel old and ugly. Wow, when your husband’s gone for somebody who’s half his age and much younger than you, how does that make you feel? It doesn’t matter if I felt quite fine with my appearance before then. At that point, I thought, “Oh my God, I’m old and ugly! Am I ever going to be able to find another partner? How am I going to deal with this?”
Initially I thought about how to try and live with it. My husband would have obviously have been happy to just keep the affair going and not have had me find out. I found out from a text—such a cliché. Ironically, he had asked me to fix his phone and transfer everything to a new device because the old one had broken. Just at that point, up came up a nice text from his girlfriend. It made me feel pretty dreadful, but I soon realized that if I didn’t get myself out of it, I would be in a mess. You either get stuck in post-traumatic stress, or you can move on to post-traumatic growth, because you can use what you go through as a catalyst to make changes.
My husband even offered me a part time marriage position because he didn’t want to give the other woman up. It was quite bizarre. And I even sort of thought about that, because I didn’t want to break up what we had together. But considering my husband’s offer didn’t last very long. Thankfully, my children were grown and out of the house, otherwise the decision would have been much more difficult. Soon, I realized, no, I just need to I need to move on and make my own way.

Janelle: Absolutely. I love what you said that there can be post-traumatic growth, because we can really look at these hard times and continue suffering. We can get all caught up in the victim mentality and get stuck there. It’s hard and it’s difficult, but we can grow through it and make the choice to make our lives even better from it. That’s what you chose to do. So, let’s get back to the 6-part system that you came up with. The first thing is to find a confidant or a group of confidants, your tribe, right? Your support group, right, the people you can share your deepest darkest feelings with in a safe non-judgmental environment, and get good advice back from them. What would you say would was the greatest benefit of having that group of confidants for you?

CJ: I think it helped me to avoid getting into that revenge-blame cycle. One of the main mantras of my book, Adulterer’s Wife: How to Thrive Whether You Stay or Not, is that the best revenge is to get past the need for it. Revenge is such a toxic emotion that prevents you moving on. When I looked at what a lot of women in similar circumstances had written online and websites about cheaters and so on, they were extremely vitriolic, focusing on ways to get back at the guy. I thought it was such a waste of energy. And such a horrible hole that you get yourself stuck in. Of course, here I’m talking about the husband that’s cheating, but I know it also happens the other way around too. It’s just more common that men are unfaithful. What I realized was that, if a man is unfaithful after a long-term marriage, often what happens is that one minute a woman has thought of the guy as the love of her life, a fantastic human being. And the next minute, he’s the devil incarnate. Well, it’s the same guy—he’s just a flawed human being like most of us, and you have to assume that there was something good in that long-term relationship. And if you’ve had kids together, you’ve got wonderful children to bring you joy beyond that marriage, so I felt very strongly that I did not want to get into a hostile relationship with my ex. Of course, he’s not a close friend anymore. And do I approve of what he did? Absolutely not. Do I want him to treat me like a doormat? No, but that still doesn’t mean that I have to have vitriolic hate for him and feel like everything I do needs to be a revenge move against him. That to me is completely pointless.

Janelle: Well, as you said, it’s very toxic, and it only hurts you. As they say, it’s like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die, right?

CJ: Yes, I think it was Carrie Fisher, who said that, Princess Leia from Star Wars. And it’s so true.

Janelle: So, tell me what is number two in your process?

CJ: Number two is similar. It’s about cultivating existing and new connections and building a community. And what I found was that almost all my friends, my community, were connected to my husband’s business or were friends of his. I had to let go most of my own friends, especially moving from Britain to America, because my closest friends were back in Britain. There was a very close friend of mine from university days who had sent me emails, and I hadn’t responded because I’d been so busy dealing with our business my husband, my family, and running the house. Since I hadn’t responded, my friend genuinely thought that she had done something to offend me, and that I no longer liked her.
That was a wake-up call because I really needed to reconnect with all my friends. I decided to leave no stone upturned. I connected with old friends, I connected with old boyfriends. I wasn’t doing it because I thought, oh, I’ve got to get myself another guy. I just wanted to have community again. It was amazing that some of these people said to me, once I was apart from my ex, “Oh, it’s fantastic! It’s like we’ve got the old CJ back.” When I had been with my husband, my nose was on the grindstone, always taking care of everything. Our joint business was mainly based on his expertise. I was always ministering to his stuff. If I had any complaints about how he was behaving, I certainly was not going to be venting that on our community because that would be really unprofessional. You don’t air your dirty laundry to people you’re working with. So, I realized that it was absolutely vital to build my own community.
Some people might find community in their church. Some people might find community in following their passion and doing activities that they enjoy. This is another point in my six-part program. I know that’s one of the things that you work with people a lot on—finding your passion. It doesn’t mean you have to give up your day job and go off and become a writer or whatever it is that you want to do. But it is very important. It allows you to pursue activities where you will meet like-minded people, and enjoy the time that you have on this earth. It’s important to embrace your inner hedonist in a way because if you’ve been in a long-term marriage, you may not have let yourself go and enjoy things that much. You’re always conscious of having to look after others. It’s a very female role to do that.

Janelle: Just listening to you talk about finding your community again, I know so many women that I work with, and I know what happened to me, we do tend to get caught up in our husband’s world and in supporting him and being with him because we as women love that companionship and relationship. We can if we’re not careful, lose ourselves in that process and our own connections in our own world. If you have a really good marriage, you don’t have to lose your friends and your passions, but that does happen to some women. Just like finding your passion, it’s also really important to reconnect with your community. It gives your life meaning and purpose. It validates you and builds confidence in yourself. It allows you to find your calling, a purpose in the world now apart from a partner that you may have been so tied to. It’s super important to pursue that purpose and passion

CJ: Absolutely. It’s so easy to get caught up in the busyness of life. So you never, put your head up out of that and think, “Oh, goodness me, what do I enjoy? Why don’t I go out and smell the roses?” It’s very important. What I was hoping to do, all the way through this program that I developed for myself was to become a more complete, creative, and joyful person with or without a partner. That’s a critical issue. You can become so desperate when you’ve had an unfaithful partner. You think, “Well, my relationship with my husband hasn’t worked, I’ve got to find somebody else. I’ve got to find them right now. I’m in midlife, it’s tough. I’m not getting any younger. I’m not going to be any more attractive ten years from now.” All that horrible stuff goes on in your head. No, you really don’t want to go straight out frantically into the dating world, because the more desperate and needy you are, the harder it’s going to be to find somebody that’s a good fit for you.
One of the things that I felt also was critical in my recovery, so to speak, was laughter therapy. It’s so important to find the humor in life. My watchword was, well, if you don’t laugh, you’re gonna cry. And why cry? You want to laugh. Even though I was a journalist for many years, especially when I got cancer, I stopped listening to the news, because it was all bad news. Why did I need to be filling my head with things that would make me feel even worse? I hear about enough from other folks—it’s not like I’m completely insulated. I no longer actively watch news programs. Instead, I try to focus on things that I find inspiring, educational, and humorous as well.
One example was when I was going through the cancer, somebody invited me to go and see Wild with Reese Witherspoon, which is apparently an excellent movie about her getting over depression. You know, when you’re going through infidelity and breast cancer, the last thing you really want to do is see a movie about depression. So, I turned that down. I found that I was making those kinds of choices. It was definitely a good thing for me.
Coming from a background of Monty Python—my parents would let me stay up late to watch Monty Python when it was airing on the television, which shows you how old I am—that was the way my mind worked. I always would see the absurd Monty-Python style humor in situations, especially going through cancer—there was some amazingly weird absurdity there. So, when I wrote my cancer book, Hotel Chemo: My Wild Ride Through Breast Cancer and Infidelity, it became a comic self-help memoir, even though it covers some pretty dark subjects. The book has lots of cartoons and humor because there’s so much craziness in that world. All you can do is laugh.

Janelle: Yes, laughter and joy is very healing. There’s a scripture in the Bible that talks about how laughter is good for you—like a medicine. A cheerful heart is like a form of medicine. There’s a lot of science behind that.

CJ: That’s right. There’s even laughter yoga, an Indian tradition of laughter yoga, where you’re supposed to laugh a certain number of times, and it’s supposed to make you feel better. But I prefer not to have to laugh because I’ve been told to do it a certain number of times. I prefer to actually look at something that’s funny, and, and laugh with friends.

Janelle: When I was young, they used to have those laughter tracks and we would listen to them and it would be contagious. We would just start laughing and laughing to the point where you are really laughing from your belly. Not a made-up laugh, but a real laugh, but just hearing those laughter tracks can get you going. Have you ever heard somebody laughing about something? You have no idea what they’re laughing at. But you hear their laughter and it makes you want to laugh.

CJ: Yes. Even if somebody’s laughing at a terribly bad joke that they’ve made, you have to laugh because they’re laughing.

Janelle: Exactly. Sometimes my husband upstairs is laughing and laughing at something and it just makes me want to laugh too.

CJ: Laughing does cheer you up and makes all the heaviness lift away. I know I’ve read about several scientific studies about the benefits of laughter because I remember quoting some of them in my book, Adulterer’s Wife: How to Thrive Whether You Stay or Not, because as a journalist, I’m a bit anal about research. So, if I say something, I try to find studies to back it up—the book has a really long bibliography of other books and studies that I’ve used for research.

Janelle: Yes, it’s good to find things that make you laugh in the middle of adversity and hard times.

CJ: Absolutely. It’s really important. We do take ourselves way too seriously anyway, so it’s always good to lighten up and avoid getting into a churning, dark space.

Janelle: Yes, it really does help. So, what else is on your in your program?

CJ: There are two more items. One of them I’ve touched on earlier. It’s about loving your body and becoming more beautiful. That incorporates eating well and exercising to get healthier and banish the blues. Outdoor exercise is an incredibly good antidote to depression. No question about it. Outdoor exercise more so than indoor exercise. Outdoor exercise, when you’re out in the fresh air and walking in nature, is extremely healing. But loving your body is not just about how you look in real terms, which touches on what I said earlier, it’s about what’s in your head.
So, I mentioned that when I first found out that my ex was having an affair with a much younger woman, it immediately made me have a very negative view of my own appearance and made me think, “Oh, I’m old and I’m ugly.” Then when I started a wonderful relationship with a man that I had used to work with in the BBC in London, he made me feel young and sexy. I had the same body. It wasn’t any different. It was just my attitude towards it that had changed. Of course, it does help if you have a partner who gives you nice feedback. My ex’s compliments were about as rare as palm trees in the Arctic. That was just the way he was. It didn’t mean he was a bad person. But that was just the way he was. My boyfriend, he’s great. He always tells me how attractive he finds me. So that’s terrific.
You have to get in a space where you accept your body for what it is, and you love it for what it is. I write about something similar in my Adulterer’s Wife book. There was a lady, I believe her name is Betty Dodson, who ran all these workshops for women back in the 1970s. A good friend of mine went to one of these in San Francisco. The woman who was leading it asked all the participants to take their clothes off. Of course, that was a very difficult thing for them to do. All these women took their clothes off, and a lot of them were drop-dead gorgeous, my friend said. However, most of them had really negative views of their own body. Oh, my breasts are too small. My breasts are too big. I’ve got such a big butt. My belly is too big. Everybody was critical of their own body, even though these were young, attractive women in the 1970s, who were at the event. It demonstrates how so much of your opinion of how you look is in your head and has nothing to do with your actual appearance.
One interesting point there was that Betty Dodson found that women who exercised tended to have a much more positive view of their own body. So that’s a good thing too, as a takeaway, that exercise does make you feel better and does make you have a much more positive view of your own body and your physical appearance.

Janelle: I would agree with that. I started working out with a trainer in my mid-50s. I decided I had to do something, so I hired a personal trainer. One of the things I gained from working with him was appreciating my body because of what it could do for me as I worked the different muscles and did the different exercises. I began to really appreciate the muscles in my body.
And after a while, my body was able to do a whole lot more than I imagined. Then of course, I felt better and got more fit and toned. I felt stronger and had more endurance and all of that. So, I could really appreciate my body in that way.

CJ: Because our bodies are more than just how they look. And our perception is affected by what popular culture tells us is beauty. It’s better to come up with your own definition of beauty and see yourself as beautiful as you are. That’s a huge thing in our world, especially for women, this body image issue. I do think that if you are exercising your body and you’re giving it what it needs in that way, then you can begin to really love your physical body, no matter what shape you are, and just appreciate it for the wonderful thing it is. If you look at the standard image of somebody who’s depressed, a woman who’s depressed, you’ll see a woman eating a tub of ice cream from the from the container, lying in bed watching television for hours on end. And of course, that’s the worst thing you could possibly do to try to lift yourself out of depression. You get stuck in that lethargy and you feel worse and worse. So, you’re so right, Janelle. It’s really important to just get out there, however lousy you feel. Just get out there and walk. Your body will thank you. Your brain will thank you. Your mood will be lifted. Exercise is wonderful—we’re built for it. I’ve read about studies that exercise improves your brain and your cognition and helps delay or even avoid the onset of Alzheimer’s. So, it’s very important, not just for body health, but for brain health.

Janelle: Yes, absolutely.

CJ: Well, there’s one more thing I haven’t mentioned in that six-part program and it’s very important, too. It’s about living in the present and becoming more mindful and fully engaged in what you’re doing right now. So many people, even if they haven’t had to deal with cancer or infidelity or any of those kinds of obstacles, so many people are really not living in the present. They’re worrying about what they’ve done in the past. They’re churning about choices already made, “Oh, I made the wrong decision there. Oh, I really regret this.” Then they’re looking at the future and they’re worrying about, “Oh, is my relationship going to fail? Am I going to be able to make enough money? What’s going to happen to the economy? What’s going to happen to this and what’s going to happen to that? How’s my health and is my health going to fail?” It’s completely pointless because all you’ve got is now. You don’t have the past—it’s gone. The future doesn’t exist and whatever you might imagine it to be may well be complete fiction. So, all you have is the present.
So there is a section in my book about becoming more mindful. I put together a FREE mini e-book, which is called Overcoming Infidelity: Tools to Tame the Roller Coaster of Negative Emotions, which you can get from my website. I’ve got some techniques in there about how to become more mindful. One of them, because I’m a recovering chocoholic, is about how you can use a piece of chocolate to become more mindful. I won’t go into great detail, but it’s all about involving every single sense of your body and becoming mindful of all of that. You have to be very relaxed before you even start. You sit in a chair and feel very relaxed before you start enjoying your chocolate. I like to do this practice with those Lindor truffle balls, some people might like to do it with Hershey’s Kisses, but I prefer those Lindor balls with that wonderful gushy praline and stuff inside. Anyway, you look at the chocolate and feel it in your hand. Then you’re hearing the unwrapping of the wrapper crinkling in your hands, and then you can put it up to your nose and focus on smelling the chocolate. Finally, you put the chocolate in your mouth and you just feel it in your mouth and roll it around a bit and savor it and become present to every sensation. Then you can swallow it and enjoy the flavor as it goes down your throat. So that is a way of becoming more mindful. I didn’t invent the technique. It has been done in schools in Britain. Kids have been doing it as part of mindfulness classes in British schools. As you can imagine, the Chocolate Mindfulness exercise was a very popular. And if children can do it, I’m sure as adults can as well.

Janelle: Yes, I’m going to run out right away and get my Lindor chocolate!

CJ: Yes, I think Lindt should give me a kickback for advertising them. I need to get a load of free ones coming to me now!

Janelle: Who wouldn’t want to do that exercise? It reminds me of those commercials—the chocolate commercials are just like that.

CJ: That’s right. And I do genuinely believe that if anybody does not like chocolate, there’s something severely wrong with them.

Janelle: Yes, they should see a doctor! I love talking about being present in the moment because it is true. It’s all there is. Being present will release all the panic and the fear, and that reactivity mode. It will calm you down and allow your mind to be back online again and just settle down that roller coaster. Breathing is huge.

CJ: Yes, and you have to be able to breathe. The number of people that are holding their breath over something. It’s not like I’m immune—if I’m a bit stressed and somebody says something to me, I realize, “Oh, geez, I’m holding my breath. That’s not good. That’s making me feel more tense.”

Janelle: We do that without even knowing it and or else we’re breathing very shallowly. So yes, your breath and breathing deeply is important. Whenever you think about it all throughout the day, just make relaxed breathing a practice. It’s a great way to get yourself in the present moment, too. I remember a couple years ago, my daughter and I were hiking through the Grand Tetons, and we decided to take a break on this bridge over a river. We just lay down on the bridge for a while and I became really present in that moment. I listened to the river and smelled the air and listened to the wind and the trees and just really, really got in that moment with my daughter. In my mind, and it seemed like time stood still.

CJ: That’s right. Yes.

Janelle: We don’t have enough of those moments. We really don’t. And you can do it anytime. Yes, yesterday, I think it was I was out in the backyard getting, taking a break. And I just brought myself into that moment. Again, just be aware of what you hear and what you smell and what you feel in that moment and just be appreciative of it and enjoy it, you know, and if you make it a practice, then you’re more and more in tune. You learn to be more and more used to being present. Then you’ll start to notice how often you’re thinking of the past or thinking of the future.

CJ: That’s right, your mind is off there somewhere else so much of the time. It’s, it’s very hard to bring it back. I think in Tibetan Buddhism, they call it the Monkey Mind. It’s always darting from one thought to another.

Janelle: Yes, the Monkey Mind. So those are all really fantastic practices for people to take away from our time together to help them. I will put in the show notes your link for everyone that’s listening to grab hold of CJ’s free PDF. It’s called Overcoming Infidelity: Tools to Tame the Roller Coaster of Negative Emotions.

CJ: That’s right. And as I said, you could use it not just for infidelity, but for any obstacles you’re trying to overcome.

Janelle: Yes, it will be helpful for everything in life. Well, thank you so much for spending your time with us today. CJ, I am so impressed that you took all of that adversity and are using it for good to help others and obviously you have created a better life for yourself. So, kudos to you for that.

CJ: Thank you very much. I think we covered a lot of ground today and I’m really happy to have been on your program.

Janelle: Yes. And if you guys are interested, just definitely go grab her books. Is the second book out, Hotel Chemo?

CJ: The second book, Hotel Chemo, is coming out in 2021. But on my website, www.adultererswife.com, you can read the Introduction and the Table of Contents. I have two websites: adultererswife.com for my books and blogs and rentabrit.com, which showcases my British BBC broadcasting background for voiceovers and a forthcoming podcast which I plan to launch next year.

Janelle: You have the perfect voice to do voiceovers.

CJ: Well, it was honed in the BBC.

Janelle: Well, thank you again for coming and thanks to everyone listening. If you would like to know how to work with me, to help you to become fearlessly confident, just email me: janelle@emerginglifecoaching.com. You can also go to my website for lots of great resources, including a FREE mini course called Be Confident. Be Real. Be You. It’s a three-video course with downloadable action guides that will definitely help you to get on this journey to becoming fearlessly confident. My website is emerginglifecoaching.com. Thanks for listening and until next time, be fearless, be confident and be you!

This is a transcript of CJ Grace’s interview with Janelle Anderson on the August 29, 2020 episode of the Women Emerging Fearlessly Podcast. The episode title was “Using Adversity to Thrive in Midlife and Beyond.”