Melissa Howard

Anger and Betrayal: Anger is a Catalyst

In the same way that anger is a messenger, it is also a catalyst.

Merriam-Webster defines a catalyst as “an agent that provokes or speeds significant change or action.” In other words, anger lets us know that something needs to change. Something about our current situation is not serving us well, and corrective action is needed.

If we listen to the message in our anger, it will often reveal our longings to us. It will help us recognize that we want something different than what is happening. We need something more, we deserve something better, we desire something healthier and more life-giving.

Anger also lets us know about our pain and suffering. Anger tells us that we cannot continue to tolerate what we’ve been tolerating. It shows us the negative impacts that are piling up. It reveals the costliness of our situation.

When anger connects us to our pain, our suffering, and our longings, it is acting as a catalyst. It is advocating for change. And the higher our level of anger, the more significant the need for change.

When we ignore the message in our anger and instead persevere in our suffering, we can unintentionally make anger an emotional home. Over and over, betrayed partners enroll in our Braving Hope coaching program stating that they need to find a way to deal with their anger. They are angry and have been angry for months and sometimes years. They know their anger is eating them alive but they can’t figure out how to move out of the rage that has become their prison.

Often, a significant portion of the work we do in the program is focused on helping these individuals listen to their anger. Usually, their anger is telling them something that feels too scary to acknowledge. It may be telling them that they need to start having a voice in their relationship in a new and different way. It may be telling them that their partner is unwilling to change and their relationship needs to end.

Whatever the message, anger usually is asking them to create change in their relationship. Because this feels risky and scary, however, they have gotten stuck in their anger. Rather than using their anger as the catalyst for needed change, they let it become their emotional home. And with that, they are trapped in the old painful patterns that revolve around and continually generate more and more anger.

Anger can also be a catalyst for feeling and processing deeper emotions – the emotions that betrayed partners typically find difficult to experience. This is another place where we can get stuck and stay in anger rather than allowing ourselves to dip down into emotional experiences that may feel overwhelming.

Emotions such as grief, sadness, and loneliness can be hard to bear. These are tender, heart-breaking emotions, and we can get stuck when trying to navigate them. Anger, with all its powerful action-oriented energy, makes us at least feel like we are doing something. It can pull us out of grief and sadness. But in the process, it will short-circuit the healing work that needs to be done.

The goal for us is to allow anger to bring its messages, thereby acting as a catalyst, and to then let it move through us. Anger is not meant to be an emotional home, and it will damage our physical, mental, and emotional health if we allow it to become one. Instead, it is meant to be a powerful signal alerting us to the need to pay attention and tend to whatever issue it is highlighting.

In next week’s post we will look at how we express anger – the good, the bad, and the ugly – and how to develop something called anger competency.

About the Author:

Michelle Mays, LPC, CSAT-S is the Founder of PartnerHope.com and the Center for Relational Recovery, an outpatient treatment center located in Northern Virginia. She has helped hundreds of betrayed partners and sexually addicted clients transform their lives and relationships. Michelle is the author of The Aftermath of Betrayal and When It All Breaks Bad and leads the field in identifying and crafting effective treatment strategies for betrayed partners.

Braving Hope is a ground-breaking coaching intensive for betrayed partners around the world. Working with Michelle will help you to move out of the devastation of betrayal, relieve your trauma symptoms and reclaim your life.

To find out if Braving Hope is right for you, Schedule a Call Now.

Anger and Betrayal: Anger is a Messenger

Anger is the emotional response that moves through our bodies when we are faced with injustice, betrayal, or violation. In her book Atlas of the Heart, Brené Brown says, “If you look across the research, you learn that anger is an emotion that we feel when something gets in the way of a desired outcome or when we believe there’s a violation of the way things should be.”

As a result, anger is a gift and a messenger. It exists to tell us that something is amiss. It signals to us that we are experiencing injustice, betrayal, or a violation of our personhood in some way. This can be something small like being cut off in traffic, which may trigger low-level frustration, or something big, like being cheated on, which could trigger high levels of rage.

When anger surfaces, it is telling us to pay attention to what is happening. If we listen to our anger, it will nearly always tell us about something that needs to change.

A great example of this is the way that resentments are handled within 12-step communities. Resentment, which is a form of anger, typically surfaces when we have not held our boundaries appropriately with another person or situation, or we have not used our voice effectively on our own behalf.

In the process of working through the 12 steps of recovery, we learn that when a resentment surfaces, it is about us, not the person toward whom we hold the resentment. The resentment is a messenger, telling us that we have over-extended and said yes when we should have said no. Or we have not spoken our truth about something. Or we have allowed someone to take advantage of us. As such, resentment, when we take responsibility for it and listen to what it is trying to tell us, helps us adjust our boundaries, speak up for ourselves, and change how we show up in our relationships.

Anger in any form – frustration, resentment, rage, etc. –contains a message for us. If we listen to our anger, it will help us to change patterns that are not serving us well.

Our anger may be directed toward our partner for their cheating and lying. It might also be directed toward us because we feel stuck in our situation. Anger may be telling us that we must make a change, set some boundaries, and even risk the loss of our relationship to demand change. Anger may be telling us how deeply our sense of dignity is suffering because of the compromises we are making. Or perhaps the anger is about recognizing the extent to which we have lost our voice and sense of self.

Anger like this rushes through us each time we feel dismissed or ignored by our partner. This red-hot emotion is trying to tell us that a relationship in which we must reduce ourselves to get along creates suffering and is not healthy.

Our anger might also be about our loss of sexual expression, experiences, and self-esteem during years of living with a sexually addicted partner. This type of anger generally resides right next to our sexual and romantic longings. It reminds us of what we long for, who we are, and what is possible for us.

Whenever we feel anger, we need to pause and create space to listen to what our anger is telling us. This can be challenging because anger has a strong action tendency toward making us want to fight. If we do not pause and create space for our anger, we can sometimes be swept up in expressing our anger before we have sorted out what the anger is about and the message it contains for us.

That said, the action tendency in anger does need to be expressed. Sometimes we can’t find the message in our anger until we allow some of its energy to move through us. Taking a brisk walk, going for a run, throwing rocks in a pond, hitting a punching bag, screaming in our car with the windows up, repeating a mantra – all are ways to help anger move through our bodies. As that energy moves through us, we want to listen to it and ask ourselves:

What am I so angry about?
What is my anger trying to tell me?
What does my anger want me to do or to stop doing?

As betrayed partners, our anger is a gift and a messenger. Our challenge is to slow down and give ourselves permission to hear what our anger is trying to tell us. Next week, we are going to continue this conversation by looking at anger as a catalyst.

About the Author:

To find out if Braving Hope is right for you, Schedule a Call Now.

Anger and Betrayal: The Hidden Gifts

First comes discovery of sexual betrayal. Then comes anger.

Anger does not arrive gently or slowly. It roars in like a flash flood, sweeping everything up in its path, uncontrolled and uncontained. Anger roils through us, erupting from our bodies, shocking those around us and even shocking ourselves.

When I experienced my own story of betrayal, I turned into an emotional street fighter. I had no idea I had it in me to say the things I said, yell as loudly as I yelled, or feel the flow of physical violence that surged through my body.

I grew up in a household where only one person was allowed to be angry, and that was my father. The rest of us avoided our anger, repressed our anger, and masked our anger. Now, here I was, a grown-up dealing with ongoing betrayals, and I was ANGRY.

The problem was that I did not know what to do with this anger. Not only was I raised in a household where I was shamed for showing anger, I was female. And in North American culture, women are not allowed to be angry.

Don’t believe me? “In a 2010 large-scale study conducted in the U.S. and Canada, only 6.2 percent of people thought that expressing anger is appropriate for women. This statistic is staggering; it means that 93.8 percent of respondents believe it is inappropriate to be an angry woman.”[1]

I am not alone in the dilemma that anger creates for many betrayed partners. We are angry, and we have a right to be angry. However, our childhood shaping and our cultural training often tell us that we are wrong for being angry, wrong to express our anger, wrong to give our anger a voice.

The belief that our anger is wrong coats us in shame. And guess what this does? It makes us angrier.

When we are told that our anger is wrong, when we are instructed to repress our frustration, squelch our sense of injustice, and bury our dignity, it is enraging. And with that, our anger becomes its own cyclical problem. We release the lightning of our anger, striking out at our cheating partner. This is followed by a gut punch of shame that makes us feel nauseous and wrong. Then, as we feel our need and right to anger squelched, our anger morphs to rage.

Anger is one of our primary emotions. Anger itself is neutral, but as it moves through us it becomes a tool that can be wielded for great good or great destruction. Anger can sweep and sift debris and old patterns, ushering in positive change. Or it can surge through and destroy, maim, and ruin.

When anger is shamed, repressed, and avoided, it becomes more likely to be expressed in damaging ways. The inability to feel and express anger becomes a crucible that escalates and twists our anger into uncontrolled rage that is destructive and harmful.

Many of us get stuck in this dilemma. We are angry and rightly so. Yet we do not know how to express our anger, or we do not feel we have permission to do so. As a result, our anger builds until it is unleashed at our cheating partner in ways that feel bad, create more conflict, and damage and violate our own relational values.

In this blog series, we are going to look at both the pain and the gift of anger. My hope is that we will learn to honor our anger, express our anger well, and allow our anger to teach us the lessons that it longs to bring us. Next week, we will look at anger as a messenger.

[1] Johns, Cheryl Bridges. The Seven Transforming Gifts of Menopause: An Unexpected Spiritual Journey. Brazos Press 2020 p. 71.

About the Author:

To find out if Braving Hope is right for you, Schedule a Call Now.

All About Betrayal Trauma – Podcast Interview with Jodi White, LPC

Recently I joined Jodi White, LPC on her podcast, Journals of a Love Addict, for a discussion on betrayal trauma. Read the episode description and listen below!

“We might think we know the meaning of the term “betrayal”, but what actually happens when we’re truly betrayed by the person closest to us?

In this episode, Jodi talks with therapist and betrayal trauma expert, Michelle Mays, about the complexity of this relational trauma, as well as recovery resources. Jodi also discusses her new awareness of the role that betrayal played in her love addiction.”

About the Author:

To find out if Braving Hope is right for you, Schedule a Call Now.

Stay or Leave: Shamed If You Do, Shamed If You Don’t

In the last two posts we’ve been looking at the complex issues that partners face when deciding whether to stay or leave the relationship with the cheater. Instead of focusing on the outcome – staying or leaving – I’m encouraging us to instead focus on how we make the decision. We want to decide to stay or leave from a place of emotional health rather than fear, shame, or confusion.

To help us with that, we have looked at the need for clarity about our reality and what is best for us, as well as the need for freedom from fear that keeps us stuck or propels us into choices that are not good for us long-term.

Today, we are going to going to wrap up our conversation by examining the role that shame can play in our decision to stay or leave and the need for freedom from shame in order to fully own our choice.

I started these posts by talking about witnessing betrayed partners telling each other what to do about their relationships on social media. This is so common that we have made a rule in our Hope After Betrayal Facebook group that prohibits anyone from telling someone else whether they should stay or leave.

I’m always curious about patterns and what shapes them. As I’ve watched this advice-giving behavior and seen how frequently it occurs, I’ve done some thinking about what this pattern is about. My conclusion at this point (and I reserve the right to change my mind) is that this is largely about shame.

For betrayed partners, the issue of staying or leaving the cheater creates a no-win shame bind. Shame raises it head and attaches itself to us if we stay, and shame gloms on and shadows us if we leave. Trying to get free from shame to make a clear choice can be like trying to scrape tar off from our skin – it sticks and sticks and sticks.

Shame If We Stay

In our culture, we have an incredibly powerful deeply embedded belief that if someone cheats on us, we must leave them. Our dignity and self-respect can only stay intact if we sever relationship and walk away. Supporting this black and white idea, are accompanying beliefs such as, “Once a cheater, always a cheater,” or, “You can never trust someone again after they cheat.”

This incredibly un-nuanced position is so widely held that it is often not even questioned. I have had several individuals enroll in our Braving Hope coaching program and tell me that they didn’t know that staying with the cheater was an option or that healing the relationship was possible. Only by sitting in the group with other betrayed partners who have chosen to stay with their cheating partner and are successfully repairing and healing their relationships has this option become known to them.

The first time this happened, it took me by surprise. As someone who has spent over 20 years helping dozens upon dozens of couples heal and thrive after betrayal, it was a shock to see how limiting, blinding, and shaming this culture story about leaving can be.

The belief that we must leave the cheater robs us of choice. It robs us of possibility. It robs us of relationship. It shames us for valuing our attachment to the person who we have chosen to do life with. It devalues our children, our extended family and friend networks all of whom are impacted by the health and wellbeing of our primary relationship.

Betrayed partners who choose to stay with the cheater and repair the relationship grapple with the impacts of this cultural shaming. They feel like they are weak, pathetic, have no self-respect or dignity. The pervasiveness of this cultural shaming robs partners of their reality. They lose awareness and connection to their own courage and strength as they brave hope after betrayal, rebuild trust, learn new ways of communicating, extend into emotional vulnerability with the person who hurt them, co-create a new sex life, co-parent through the crisis, and re-imagine a new future together.

This is hard work and I have unbounded respect for the couples I work with who engage in this process of healing. Particularly because they are swimming against and through cultural shaming to claim what they believe is possible.

We can only choose to stay in our relationship if we release ourselves from the burden of this black and white, assumptive, judgmental cultural story.

The story that tells us we must leave after cheating ignores our attachment systems and devalues the potential that we as humans have to redeem ourselves even after we make egregious mistakes that harm those we love. It limits possibility and treats relationships cavalierly. It serves no one and we need to collectively join together to leave this harmful belief behind.

Shame If We Leave

As with any good shame bind, leaving does not remove shame from our path, it simply changes the shape and messaging that we experience. Now the shame attaches to our sense of relational possibility raising questions about our worthiness and ability to enjoy healthy fulfilling romantic relationships.

After all, our relationship has “failed.”

That is the cultural terminology and belief about marriages and long-term relationships that terminate – the relationship has failed and by default the two individuals who make up the relationship have failed as well.

Now we feel shame about our inability to make the relationship work. We wonder if some lack in us caused our partner to cheat or to develop a sexual addiction. We grapple with what others will think about our divorce or uncoupling and we worry over our fears that we will not be able to find another partner.

This shame story once again is black and white, lacks nuance or context and is filled with judgements and assumptions. Terminating the relationship is automatically deemed a failure. Yet, here is the reality that I witness every day with the betrayed partners I work with.

Leaving is a decision that is often wrestled over for months and even years.
Leaving is often incredibly terrifying and enormous fears must be worked through in order to make that choice.
Children, extended family, and friends are all weighed carefully and many times sacrificially.
Leaving is rarely the first choice and often is pursued only when staying requires them tolerate the intolerable.
Leaving is a heartbreak and grief and loss are deeply felt and take significant time to heal.

When leaving a relationship includes self-examination, attempts at forgiveness and reconciliation, thoughtful decision-making about others who are impacted and choosing to navigate uncoupling in the healthiest way possible are we failing or are we choosing the best path for ourselves in light of our situation?

Shame about leaving is as pervasive as shame about staying. Both forms of shame block us from knowing what is best for us. Instead, we unconsciously make decisions to try to avoid shame. Maybe if we stay, we won’t feel the shame about leaving? Maybe if we leave, we won’t feel the shame about staying? This shame bind traps us in a no-win situation where our sense of self gets lost in our attempts to avoid the judgements of others and ourselves.

When I see betrayed partners tell each other what to do – leave or stay – I believe this often springs out of unconscious shame about decisions they have made regarding their own relationship. The certainty about what someone else should do can be a defense against shame about our own decisions. “I chose to stay/leave and that is the right decision, and one you should make too,” can be a coping strategy to fend off the sticky tar of cultural shame.

It is only when we identify these culturally weighted shame messages and recognize the way that they are shaping our thinking and beliefs that we can begin to unwrap ourselves from the shame bind that they create.

When we release ourselves from these harmful judgements and assumptions, we create space where we can now begin to be curious about our own experience and what might or might not be possible. Now, we are truly free to explore our options and make informed and thoughtful choices about what is best for us. Now, the focus shifts to growing our emotional and relational health and learning how to engage in the next steps (whatever those might be) from our wisest self.

When we shift our focus from, “Should I leave or should I stay,” to “How should I engage in engage in the process of deciding whether to stay or leave?” Or “How can I make this decision in the healthiest and most life-giving way possible?” This releases us from the shame bind by shifting our focus to what really matters. It creates space, possibility and best of all, hope.

About the Author:

To find out if Braving Hope is right for you, Schedule a Call Now.

3 Key Skills to Help You Stay or Leave from a Place of Emotional Health, Part 2

In last week’s post we looked at the emotionally charged issues around staying or leaving the relationship with the cheating partner. I am challenging us to change the conversations we often hold around this topic.

Instead of thinking of staying or leaving as “right” or “wrong” choices, we want to expand our perspective and instead recognize that how we stay or leave is the bigger and more important issue. We want to make our choice from a place of emotional health and the freedom to choose what is truly best for us.

We started our conversation by looking at the issue of gaining clarity. Clarity comes through giving ourselves the time to understand our situation, learn about the healing process and make a thorough assessment of our options. This week we are going to look at a second skill needed to make the best choice regarding staying or leaving: freedom from fear.

Freedom from Fear

Some betrayed partners have enough of what we call ego strength or inner resilience to make their decision to stay or leave their relationship from a position of clarity and conviction about what is best for them.

However, for many other partners, decision-making turns into a quagmire of confusion. Confusion about what is best, what others will think, what life will be like if we stay or go, etc. When we peel back the confusion and probe underneath, what we almost always find is fear.

Because our romantic partner is our primary attachment figure, we do not make decisions to stay or leave them lightly. These decisions have enormous impacts on our attachment systems creating stress and distress as we contemplate the potential loss that will accompany a decision to leave or the potential risk that will accompany a decision to stay.

Both decisions create loss. If we leave, we will be plunged into the grief of separating our lives, our families, our finances, our goals, and our dreams. The anguish that contemplating this loss creates is real and severe and can overwhelm betrayed partners’ ability to act.

If we stay, we will be plunged into the grief of losing the relationship we thought we had. We will never again be someone who has not experienced cheating. Our future with our partner is fraught with the risk of more loss if we venture into the uncertainty of trying to build a new relationship with them.

For many partners, this fear is paralyzing. It creates such a sense of threat to our attachment systems that we go into a freeze response and become unable to make movement in any direction.

Often this fear is unconscious. We know that we are confused, or uncertain about what is best. Or perhaps we see ourselves setting boundaries or making threats to leave if the cheating and lying doesn’t stop but we don’t follow through. We are unaware of the fear our body holds around the potential relational loss that we will experience by making a choice to move forward in one direction or another. Our unconscious fear puts us in a freeze state.

The goal is to become aware of the fear of relational loss that is paralyzing us. This fear is held in our bodies, and we often need expert help to identify and connect to it without it overwhelming our nervous systems. When we can contact our fear with the support of another, we can then begin the work of slowly holding the fear, feeling the fear, and becoming familiar with it. Just doing this helps the fear to begin to feel more manageable as we are no longer avoiding it but are now consciously engaged with it.

As we do this work, we can then begin to identify small actions that we can take that are risky and do create some fear but are not the big overwhelming decisions that create paralysis. For example, we might take the risk of requesting that our partner go to therapy, or we may take the risk of sharing with our partner how hurt we are because of their behavior. Maybe we ask them to move out of the bedroom or to begin to work on a full therapeutic disclosure. We might take the risk of deciding that we need to take a sexual hiatus to heal or that we need to limit contact with our partner.

Each of these actions brings with it the risk of relational loss as our partner may not respond well to what we are suggesting. And maybe some of the things listed here feel impossibly big and scary. If that is the case, then you want to do more work with your therapist around the fear and you also want to break your risk-taking down into even smaller chunks that are more manageable for you.

Notice that I am not suggesting that we work with our therapist until the fear goes away and then we take action. This is because fear of loss does not just go away, no matter how much work we do around leaning into the feeling of fear and creating space for it.

Fear diminishes as we build our inner resilience and resourcefulness. Fear diminishes because we move toward the fear, walk into it, and find, by doing so, that we are still OK.

For example, we set the boundary that we have been terrified to set and find that we are still intact and whole afterward. Or perhaps we take an action we have been afraid to take and find that we are OK on the other side.

Each small victory builds our internal sense that we can handle things we thought would defeat us and that we can trust and rely on ourselves to carry us through scary or daunting situations. This is the beautiful, amazing process of building a core self that you can depend on.

When we experientially know that we can face our fears and not just survive them but thrive because of walking through the fear, we are then truly free to make the decisions that are best for us.

Now, as we face the decision to leave our relationship, we are free from the fear that keeps us stuck, lost in chaos and confusion, distracting ourselves with conflict and threats. Instead, we know, deep in our guts, that we will be OK if we leave our relationship. We will grieve, we will experience heartbreak, but it will not overwhelm our coping capacities and take us out. We can move through it and flourish after as we create a new life.

Or perhaps, now that we know we are truly able to leave our relationship, we are fully free to make a choice to stay. We are staying not because we are stuck or because we are afraid, but because we choose to stay. Our newfound inner resilience and resourcefulness has equipped us with the ability to risk leaning into the vulnerability of relational repair.

Can you see that the point is not whether we stay or leave but how we come to that decision and whether we are free to choose. To make a fully free choice, fear must not stand in our way. It may still be present, because as I’ve said it doesn’t go away completely. But it must lose the power to stop us, to put us into freeze and immobilize us. When this happens, we are truly free to make the choices that are best for us. And that is priceless.

In next week’s post we will look at the last skill that is needed to choose what is best for us in terms of staying or leaving: freedom from shame.

About the Author:

To find out if Braving Hope is right for you, Schedule a Call Now.

3 Key Skills to Help You Stay or Leave from a Place of Emotional Health, Part 1

If you have spent any time in online forums or groups for betrayed partners, you know that a big topic of discussion is whether to stay or leave your relationship with the cheater.

It is always interesting to me to see how confident one person can be about what another person should do. Many times, I have seen posts and comments telling someone to either leave or stay in their relationship. Without any information about the relational context (other than that there has been cheating) a judgement is passed.

What I notice in these discussions and comments is that the idea of staying or leaving is often viewed in a binary, black and white manner. Leaving is looked at as the healthy choice and staying is the weak or codependent choice. Or, on the flip side, staying is seen as the right and loyal decision and leaving is seen as a loss of faith or lack of perseverance.

What gets lost in these emotionally charged conversations is the reality that staying and leaving are simply outcomes. They are outcomes of choices that people make about their relationships. Neither outcome is good or bad by itself. Both outcomes can be arrived at by healthy means or unhealthy means.

The reality is that you can choose to stay in your relationship from a place of health or from a place of brokenness. Staying in and of itself is not an indicator of emotional wellness. Same with leaving your relationship. You can leave from a place of health or leave from a place of brokenness.

What this means is that we really need to shift the conversation that we are having around leaving and staying! The question is not, “should I leave or stay?” The better question is, “Am I able to make the best choice for myself from a place of emotional health?” And better yet, “What does staying from a place of emotional wellness look like? And what does leaving from a place of emotional wellness look like?”

For betrayed partners, leaving and staying are complicated questions and each person’s situation is unique. Thinking through how to make these decisions in a healthy manner that creates positive outcomes is a vital part of the healing process.

My wish for every betrayed partner is that they can make the decision to stay or leave from a place of clarity, freedom from fear and freedom from shame. We are going to look at the issue of clarity below and then next week we will discuss freedom from fear and shame.

Clarity

To know whether it is best for us to stay or leave, we first need to get very clear about what is happening in our relationship. We often cannot know what is best for us right after discovery. We don’t yet know if we are dealing with infidelity or addiction. We don’t yet know the entire scope of the betrayal. We don’t yet know if our partner is willing to do what is needed to repair the relationship. We don’t yet know what is required to heal.

I’ve had many people land in our Braving Hope coaching program and tell me that they didn’t even know that staying and repairing the relationship was an option. They thought their only possibility was to divorce and move on. Some of them reverse course and begin a new journey with their partner toward healing. Others are saddened that they didn’t have the information sooner.

In the crisis of discovery, emotions run hot and heavy as the pain is acute. Most partners want to leave their relationship during this time. However, the truth about whether the relationship can be saved or whether the relationship needs to end, is often hidden at this point. Clarity about this comes over time as you onboard expert help, learn about healing betrayal and begin to stabilize from the initial trauma.

One of the biggest gifts you can give yourself during this stage is the gift of time. Time to get clear about what has happened, how you feel about it, and what is possible or not possible given the realities of your situation. Time to gather support and information and begin to process it. Time to grow your internal capacity to navigate the new foreign land of betrayal. Time to develop your resourcefulness so that you are free to choose the best outcome for you.

Clarity moves you toward choice. Without the ability to choose to leave, staying becomes a default option or the relationship continues because you are stuck. When we are free to leave, we are free to choose to stay. The goal is freedom to choose what is best for you and gaining clarity is the first step.

About the Author:

To find out if Braving Hope is right for you, Schedule a Call Now.

Protest, Despair, Detachment: Three Predictable Responses to Loss of Safe Connection

Sexual betrayal is a relational trauma that impacts our sense of safety, trust, and security with our significant other. Relational traumas involve not just our threat response systems (how we react to fear and danger) but also our attachment systems (how we bond). When faced with cheating, both systems activate in response to danger and relational threat.

When our threat response system fires, we will go in one of two directions. Either we will go toward fight/flight as our nervous system becomes hyper-aroused (activated) or we will go into freeze as our nervous system becomes hypo-aroused (deactivated).

This activation of our threat response system animates our attachment system, and we respond with relational moves that are an attempt to cope with our loss of safety. Our initial move is almost always to try to reconnect and regain safety with our partner. However, when that is not possible, research shows that a predictable sequence of attachment behaviors unfolds taking us through three phases: protest, despair, and detachment. We are going to look at each of these below.

Protest

Protest is when we try to re-establish the lost sense of safety by reconnecting with our partner. Author and researcher Sue Johnson PhD describes protest by saying, “Following traumatic abandonment, the entire relationship often becomes organized around eliciting emotional responsiveness from the other partner or defending against the lack of this responsiveness.”[1] When we are unable to get our safe connection back, we begin to protest the loss of it in different ways depending on how our nervous system and our attachment styles are interacting.

Hyper-arousal (activation): If we are anxiously attached, we will tend to up-regulate into hyper-arousal when we experience threat. We will pursue our partner to try to reestablish safe connection and thereby get back to a state of calm. When we are hyper-aroused, we protest by clinging to or pursuing our partner as we try to gain their attention and get them to respond to our distress. We talk, argue, defend, and explain. We might cry, or even scream or throw things. These types of fights can look like we are pushing our partners away, however they are a form of protest and an attempt to capture our partner’s attention, empathy and understanding so that we can move back toward relational safety.
Hypo-aroused (deactivated): If we are avoidantly attached, we will tend to down-regulate into hypo-arousal when we experience threat. Our relational moves then look like pulling away and distancing to try to get back to a state of calm. When we are in hypo-arousal our protest tends to look quieter. We might appear bored or even dismissive. We can numb out, withdraw, become depressed, go inside ourselves and retreat. We are protesting and signaling our loss of safety by shutting down.

It is important to note that the entire cycle of attachment ambivalence (that I have written about in other posts) is a form of protest. Wherever we are in the cycle of attachment ambivalence, whether in connection or disconnection, we are protesting our loss of safety and trying to restore what we have lost so that we can find our way back to feeling safe and calm.

Despair

When protest proves futile, partners move into despair. Despair is the loss of hope that the attachment bond can be re-established in a way that provides safety and security. If attachment ambivalence is the experience of cycling through different forms of protest, then despair is when the disconnection phase begins to last longer and longer, and we find ourselves returning to it more and more quickly.

We feel defeated. This is because over time as we have tried to re-establish trust and safety our attempts have resulted in more pain, loss, or danger. Each time, our inability to find the safe connection we are looking for thrusts us back into despair. Nothing feels safe. Self-preservation moves us toward hypo-arousal as we experience more withdrawal, numbness, and shutdown in response to our partner. As we experience this repeatedly, we move out of protest and into resignation and toward despair and long-term detachment.

Detachment

Detachment is when we have lost hope in the restoration of a safe bond with our partner, and we move toward disconnecting from them emotionally and often physically. Betrayed partners often begin to move toward permanently ending the relationship at this point as they are no longer able to tolerate the level of pain and threat present in the relationship. Other partners, unable to tolerate the ultimate loss of the relationship move into a state of detachment within the coupleship, thoroughly withdrawing from their partner to stay safe while remaining in the relationship.

Protest, despair, and detachment are functions of our attachment system. Our threat response system animates them so that they are exhibited in different ways for different partners depending on our attachment style and whether we tend to move toward activation or deactivation when your threat response system fires. However, the sequence of protest, despair and detachment is predictable and universal in response to the loss of our safe bond with our partner.

Regardless of how we tend to protest the loss of safe connection, it is helpful to understand that this predictable sequence of behaviors is normal. Safe connection is what helps us to regulate our emotional selves. Without it we are set adrift on a sea of distress. Attempting to re-establish safe connection is what our attachment systems are wired to do.

[1] Johnson, S. M. (2019). Attachment theory in practice. Guilford Press. p.150

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200

This is the 200th PartnerHope blog post!

To celebrate this milestone, I thought I would share a little bit about our big-picture vision and how the blog and other resources play into what we are doing and creating at PartnerHope.

As many of you know, I went through my own story of betrayal. That was more years ago than I really want to tally up (sigh) but it was during that time that the seeds for all that is happening now were planted.

Like you, I did not want to volunteer as tribute for betrayal but was selected anyway and went through a prolonged and difficult process of dealing with my partner’s sexual addiction and winding my way to recovery and healing. During those years, I was appalled at the lack of knowledge, understanding, research, empathy, and resources for betrayed partners.

While I knew I was dealing with sexual addiction, which was just starting to be recognized, I was also acutely aware that cheating was as old as humanity. Intimate betrayal is incredibly common. I could not figure out why there was not a clearer understanding about and pathway for healing for those suffering from the ordeal of betrayal.

Over and over again, I ran into incredible bias, prejudice, and misunderstanding about the experience of being a betrayed partner. Often, the resources that did exist blamed the victim, labeling partners of sex addicts as co-addicted and codependent and blaming partners of those having affairs as not providing a ‘good enough’ relationship (sexual or otherwise) to keep the cheater from cheating.

This. Made. Me. Mad.

Never in my life had I been in such need of effective help. I was desperate for information and resources to clear out the confusion and point me in the direction of healing and wholeness. Instead, I saw professionals who pushed me toward more loss of self, more compromised integrity, and more broken relationship.

As I wandered in the desert looking for healing water, that little seed planted by the experience of betrayal began to sprout and grow into a conviction that betrayed partners needed better treatment, resources, strategies and understanding. I wanted to be part of creating this change.

And that is what I have been working toward ever since. First in private practice and then through founding the Center for Relational Recovery and building a clinical team that works together to treat individuals and couples dealing with sexual addiction, betrayal, and trauma.

In 2017, I wrote the first blog post at partnerhope.com and we began our mission to change the way the counseling and coaching fields understand, treat, and interact with partner betrayal. Below is an outline of the ways that we are accomplishing this mission and resources that you can take advantage of:

By treating betrayed partners directly…

…through our Braving Hope 12-week online coaching program, our Braving Forward alumni community and our Braving Together couples mastermind all based on the groundbreaking Attachment-Focused Partner Betrayal Model. And through the Center for Relational Recovery where we work as a team to treat individuals and couples in our local area.

By providing free and low-cost educational resources to betrayed partners and treating professionals…

…through the PartnerHope blog, through the Michelle Mays YouTube channel, through our free private Hope After Betrayal Facebook group, through ebooks and tools for use in treatment, through the Relational Recovery Disclosure Prep Model, along with workshops, and the books The Aftermath of Betrayal and When It All Breaks Bad: Ten Things to Do (and Not Do) After Betrayal.

By creating new treatment models addressing partner betrayal…

…through my upcoming book The Betrayal Bind: How to Heal When the Person You Love the Most has Hurt You the Worst. This book (out in February 2023) introduces a new treatment model called the Attachment-Focused Partner Betrayal Model. The book outlines new language, concepts, and imagery to explore the crucial relational dilemma that betrayed partners face when their significant other is unsafe to connect to, yet connection is the key to healing.

And we are just getting started! There is more to come as we continue to evolve in our capacity to serve betrayed partners and create transformation.

This blog has been the heartbeat of PartnerHope since we published our first post in 2017. Some of you have been on the journey with me since the beginning and others of you have joined along the way. I am so grateful for each one of you who have read and replied and received support.

It is impossible to summarize in words the joy it brings my team and me when we see betrayed partners transform their lives and relationships and break free from the chains of fear, shame and powerlessness created by betrayal.

Betrayal is a dark, chaotic, confusing, and humbling experience. Our hope, is to shine a light into the darkness, bring clarity to the confusion, ground the chaos, and usher in healing. Thank you for being with us on the journey as we continue to learn and grow.

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4 Tips to Help Betrayed Partners Navigate the Holidays

The holiday season brings both expectations of joy and pressure to fulfill those expectations. We feel as if we must be the perfect partner, parent, chef, gift-giver, decorator, etc. This seasonal stress can be difficult to manage when you’re in the middle of a grief process related to your partner’s betrayal. With that in mind, I want to give you with a few tips that might help you successfully navigate your way through the holiday season.

1. Don’t Overdo It

When you’re in the midst of betrayal trauma, you are already at the outside of your window of tolerance – the area in which you are well-regulated and able to manage stress. This means you’re not in the best space for the additional expectations, tensions, and anxieties that come with the holidays. You’re already in a hyperactivated state where you’re struggling to make it through the day without accidentally lighting the house on fire. And now you’re supposed to become Martha Stewart for the next month?

Even if you’re managing the trauma of betrayal incredibly well and not having emotional breakdowns every hour on the hour, you probably don’t have the extra bandwidth to deal with holidays stresses (both big and little). Betrayal trauma compromises your normal level of functioning making it harder to do your daily routines and carry your typical workload.

Plus, the holidays can make your betrayal wounds come even more alive and you can experience more loneliness, sadness and anger. This is because the holidays heighten the loss of your dreams as you struggle to manage the fallout from the betrayal. Even attempts to offer support made by family, friends, and well-meaning others, not to mention your cheating partner’s misguided attempts to “make nice” for the holidays can grate on your final nerve. This can leave you feeling exhausted, physically and mentally clumsy, and suffering from headaches, body aches, stomach issues, and more.

If this sounds familiar, it’s time to step back and give yourself a break. It’s also time to accept that this holiday season you’re not going to be able to do as much as you would normally do. You’re going to have to make some decisions about what to say yes to and what to say no to. You’ll need to prioritize taking care of yourself and honoring the feelings and limitations that betrayal is creating.

2. Differentiate Privacy from Secrecy

Many of my clients tell my they are going to be around family for the holidays but don’t want them to know about their relational struggles. These clients don’t feel like it is appropriate or safe to tell the family and friends about the betrayal. However, at the same time, they struggle with feeling that they are keeping a secret.

If you identify with this, you need to differentiate privacy from secrecy. Secrets are things we keep hidden for the good of others (a surprise birthday party for example) or things we keep hidden because we feel shame about them.

Betrayal automatically creates feelings of shame that often attach to the betrayed partner. This shame does not belong to you, but it can still stick to you making it challenging to release and let go. This shame is what can make it feel like we are holding a secret about the betrayal when in fact we are simply maintaining good boundaries around something that is private.

Privacy is different from secrecy. Privacy is exercising wise judgement about who you share personal information and experiences with. Privacy is knowing what is good for you to share and what would open the door to further emotional stress or harm. Privacy is having good boundaries that allow you to share the parts of yourself with others that you feel are appropriate to share and to keep the parts of yourself that belong just to you or your relationship private.

3. Feel the Feels

The holidays can amp up your emotions, both good and bad. In addition to being hyper-aware of the betrayal you’ve experienced, you’ve got family gathered, children opening gifts, and the magical traditions and rituals of the holidays. All of that added togetherness can create big waves of feelings.

Rather than fighting the fact that your emotions will run hotter during the holidays by trying to ignore or repress your feelings, I want to encourage you to create room and space for these hard emotions.

As you navigate the holidays, feel the feels. Enjoy the good moments; experience and process the bad moments. Cry when you need to. Accept that this holiday season you are likely to feel grief, sadness, fear and uncertainty about your relationship and life. Instead of pushing them away, allow the feelings to be felt, cried, journaled, talked out etc., so that they can move through you. This will create the ability to feel the good feelings of joy or connection that the holidays can also hold (even during betrayal trauma). When we shut off the emotional faucet, we shut off everything. Instead, work on keeping the connection to your emotional self in place and come alongside yourself in a nurturing supportive way.

4. Practice Gratitude

My final tip is to practice gratitude. At this point, we hear this advice everywhere and it can make us want to roll our eyes and say, “yea, yea, whatever”. Even so, I’m including this suggestion because focusing on gratitude is a powerful way to change your brain state.

When you make a list of the things you’re grateful for, even in the middle of betrayal trauma, you help the threat center of your brain to calm down and you shift your emotional state out of distress into gratitude, abundance, connection and support. This shift helps you come back inside your window of tolerance, where you can access your resourcefulness and better cope with whatever you’re facing.

Gratitude is a useful practice all year round. It’s not just a special tool for the holidays. It’s a coping skill that can be used on a daily basis as a way of shifting from the brain’s threat center into clarity and coping. So whether gratitude is a new skill or an old standby for you, I encourage you to use it and use it often during the holidays, and to carry that practice into the new year.

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5 Building Blocks to Understanding the Trauma Response Created by Betrayal, Part 3

Building Block #1: Defining Trauma
Building Block #2: Affect and the Brain, Body, Mind Connection
Building Block #3: Our Threat Response System
Building Block #4: Our Window of Tolerance

This week we are going to look at building block number five: the dance between our attachment and threat response systems.

Building Block #5: The Systems Dance

When trauma is relational our attachment systems activate and are intertwined with our threat response system. Both systems fire in response to danger and relational threat. As this happens, our attachment style is animated by the hyper or hypo arousal that we are experiencing. If we are anxiously attached, we will tend to up-regulate into hyper-arousal when we experience threat and we will pursue our partner to try to reestablish safe connection and thereby get back to our window of tolerance and emotional regulation. If we are avoidantly attached, we will tend to down-regulate into hypo-arousal when we experience threat by pulling away and distancing to try to reestablish safety and thereby get back to our window of tolerance and emotional regulation.

In addition, regardless of whether our nervous system prompts us toward hyper- or hypo-arousal, our attachment system will respond with relational moves that are an attempt to cope with the loss of safety. These relational moves form a predictable pattern of protest, despair and detachment.

Protest

Protest is when we try to re-establish the lost sense of safety by reconnecting with our partner. When we are unable to get our safe connection back, we begin to protest the loss of it in different ways depending on whether we are in a hyper-aroused or hypo-aroused state.

When we are hyper-aroused, we tend to protest by clinging to our partner as we try to gain their attention and get them to respond to our distress. What can be confusing about this type of protest is that in addition to talking, reviewing events, crying and expressing hurt, we can also protest through having a turbulent fight where we express acute anger and rage toward our partner. While these fights can look like we are pushing our partners away, they are actually a form of protest and an attempt to get our partner’s attention so that they will move toward us to restore safety.

When we are in hypo-arousal our protest tends to look quieter, but it is a protest nonetheless. These partners will numb out, withdraw, become depressed, go inside themselves and retreat. They are protesting and signaling their loss of safety by shutting down.

Sue Johnson describes protest by saying, “Following traumatic abandonment, the entire relationship often becomes organized around eliciting emotional responsiveness from the other partner or defending against the lack of this responsiveness.” p.150

Despair

When protest proves futile, partners move into despair. Despair is the loss of hope that the attachment bond can be re-established in a way that provides safety and security. If protest is the experience of cycling through rounds of connection and disconnection, then despair is when the disconnection phase begins to last longer and longer and you find yourself returning to it more and more quickly. This is because over time as you have tried to re-establish trust and safety your attempts have resulted in more pain, loss or danger. Each time, your inability to find the safe connection you are looking for has thrust you back into the despair of not being able to get your needs for safety met. This despair moves you toward hypo-arousal as you experience more withdrawal, numbness and shutdown in response to your partner. As you experience this repeatedly, you move out of protest and more toward despair and long-term detachment.

Detachment

Detachment is when you have lost hope in the restoration of a safe bond with your partner, and you move toward disconnecting from them emotionally and often physically. Betrayed partners often begin to move toward permanently ending the relationship at this point as they are no longer able to tolerate the level of pain and threat present in the relationship. Other partners, unable to tolerate the ultimate loss of the relationship move into a state of detachment within the coupleship, thoroughly withdrawing from their partner to stay safe while remaining in the relationship.

Protest, despair and detachment are functions of our attachment system. Our threat response system animates them so that they are exhibited in different ways for different partners depending on your attachment style and whether you tend to move toward hyper or hypo arousal when you are bumped outside your window of tolerance. However, the sequence of protest, despair and detachment is predictable and universal in response to the loss of our safe bond with our partner. We may be someone that spends years in protest with short visits to despair and then finally we hit our limit and move quickly through despair to detachment and end the relationship. Or we may spend months in protest with visits to despair as we wait to see whether our partner will enter recovery and do the hard work of repairing the relationship. As our partner does his or her part, we find ourselves moving out of despair and into more moderate forms of protest as our safety returns.

The way in which these attachment-based responses play out can look vastly different for each person. But awareness of them and that your attachment system is very much involved in how you are responding to the trauma of betrayal opens up new opportunities to cope in healthier ways that move us out of our trauma symptoms and toward healing.

Putting the Blocks Together

Whew! Are you still with me? We just covered a lot of territory together. So far in this series of blog posts we have identified the key building blocks that help us understand how our threat response systems and our attachment systems are interwoven and shape our response to betrayal trauma. We explored the connection between our brain, body and mind and highlighted the importance of affect that begins in the body and moves out from there affecting our emotions, thinking and behavior. We identified the significance of our window of tolerance and the way that overly stressful or traumatic events can bump us outside of our window of tolerance into either hyper-arousal or hypo-arousal and the way this is connected to our attachment style. We have connected this to our understanding of the way our threat response animates our attachment system and plays out relationally in moves of protest, despair and detachment.

All of these building blocks create an important foundation to help us understand ourselves, our relationships and how to heal after betrayal. Understanding opens the door to choice. Instead of feeling helpless to impact our behaviors, thinking and feeling, we become empowered to make choices that move us toward healthy coping rather than leaving us stuck in the confusing cycle of activation and reaction.

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5 Building Blocks to Understanding the Trauma Response Created by Betrayal, Part 2

In this series of posts, we are exploring the way in which betrayal creates traumatic responses that impact our body, brains and minds. We are bringing together our understanding of our threat response systems and our attachment systems and the way these two systems interweave to create the behaviors and reactions that we experience after betrayal. To do this we are looking at five building blocks that all weave together and impact each other. In last week’s post we looked at building block number one where we defined trauma and building block number two regarding affect and the brain, body, mind connection. This week we are going to look at building blocks three and four.

Building Block #3: Our Threat Response System

Our Amygdala is connected to our bodies through our ANS and is in charge of how we respond to the loss of safety. The ANS has two branches and both branches are involved in different ways in how we regulate ourselves throughout the day.

The Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) is the branch that amps up in response to threat and danger. It connects from our brains, down through our spinal cord and out to the different organs in our bodies. When activated, the sympathetic branch causes blood to rush to our organs, our hearts to pound, our sweat glands to activate and adrenaline, cortisol and other hormones to pump through us. This part of the system sends us into a hyper-aroused or hypervigilant affective state as our body prepares to either fight the threat or flee and seek safety.

The other branch of the ANS is called the Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS). Think of this system as your brakes. The PNS helps us to calm down, to be in a state of rest and relaxation. When our sympathetic branch gets activated and sends us into fight or flight, the parasympathetic system responds by pumping the brakes and
sending out its own set of signals and hormones to help the body to calm back down. Breathing and heart rate return to normal and the body once again enters a state of alert restfulness.

Our PNS plays one other important role in responding to threat or danger. Dr. Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory identifies the PNS as a key actor in the third common threat response: freeze. When we are unable to utilize fight or flight or when those coping responses are simply overwhelmed, we can move into a state of shutdown where we experience things like numbness, dissociation, depression, helplessness, hopelessness and feeling stuck or trapped. This is a parasympathetic response to threat.

Ideally, the state of being both at rest but aware is the well-regulated state that we want to (hope to) spend most of our time in. When we are not facing a threat or dealing with chronic stressors, the SNS and PNS interact with one another all day long in a balancing act that helps us maintain our sense of calm alertness. This state can also be thought of as our window of tolerance.

Building Block #4: Our Window of Tolerance

Author and researcher Dan Siegel first coined the term window of tolerance to define the state we are in when our nervous systems are well-regulated. When we are in our window of tolerance, we are able to access our thinking and reasoning, we are connected to our resourcefulness and are able to problem solve and make decisions. We take in information, process it and integrate it into our lives. We can meet challenges and function well.

When our sympathetic or parasympathetic systems fire in response to threat and danger we can stay within our window of tolerance and respond as long as the threat is something we can handle. Someone cutting us off in traffic may momentarily make us stressed but most of the time we can frown or say a few choice words and resume on our way without it truly disrupting us.

Other stressors or traumas, like sexual betrayal, can overwhelm our coping capacities and when that happens we are bumped out of our window of tolerance. When we leave our window of tolerance, we lose connection with our ability to think well, reason, and access our resourcefulness. Our functioning can be compromised, and we can begin to reach for ways to cope that may surprise us. Being bumped outside our window of tolerance is a neurobiological event. Our body, brain and mind all move into dysregulation.

When we are outside of our window of tolerance we are usually in a state where one branch of our ANS is dominating our experience. If our sympathetic system is more activated, we are going to experience what is called hyper-arousal (fight/flight).

When we are in a hyper-aroused affective state, we can be anxious, revved up, hyper-alert, enraged, and agitated. What comes to mind for me is a stuffed donkey toy that my old dog Zoka used to have. That toy made a HEE-HAW braying sound anytime it was nudged. I finally did open heart surgery on the donkey and took the sucker’s little sound-maker out and put it on a shelf in the living room. However, any movement in the living room — walking through the room, sitting on the couch, sitting a glass down, would set off HEE-HAWING and braying from up on the shelf. This hair-trigger responsiveness is what it is like to be in hyper-arousal. We become super sensitive to any perceived threat, constantly scanning for danger. In our restless, hypervigilant, overwrought state we are biased to interpret events negatively to protect ourselves. Any perceived threat can set us to HEE-HAWING and braying emotionally in anticipation of something that may or may not materialize but threatens us nonetheless.

Some partners experience the opposite. If our parasympathetic branch is more activated, we are going to experience what is called hypo-arousal (freeze). Instead of being revved up we are going to shut down. As the sense of danger and threat overcomes our body’s coping capacities it puts our physical system into a state of freeze to manage the overwhelm. When this happens, numbness, depression, paralysis, denial, avoidance, and dissociation shape our experience of trauma.

Each of us can alternate back and forth between these two states as well, cycling rapidly through sympathetic and parasympathetic responses. But for most of us, one of these will be the dominant response that we experience more of when we are launched outside our window of tolerance.

Next week we will look at our last building block where we will see how our threat response system and our attachment system come together and create predictable patterns of relational responses for betrayed partners.