PartnerHope

Authentic HOPE After Betrayal

Michelle Mays

A Valentine’s Gift For You

Valentine’s day is a hard day when you are dealing with betrayal trauma. Even if you are still with your partner it can be a day filled with ambivalence. Part of you loves your spouse. Part of you hates your spouse. If you have lost your relationship due to betrayal, Valentine’s day can be incredibly lonely and a day that brings a fresh wave of grief about all that you have lost.

So today, I want to give you a little present, to help you get through this Valentine’s day, whatever your situation and wherever you are in the process.

This present is a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke’s found in the Book of Hours. This little book of poems was one of my steadfast companions when I was in the middle of dealing with betrayal and a well-loved, dog -eared copy stayed by my bedside for several years. Whenever I cracked it, I was able to find something that met me wherever I happened to be that day.

I went and dug that book out today looking for one particular poem to send to you all. I haven’t read it now for many years and looking through it brings me right back to the rollercoaster ride of being a betrayed partner.

The poem below is one that I read repeatedly. It helped to remind me that there was more going on in my life and in my healing then I knew.  It reminded me of who I was, what I longed for, and helped me maintain faith and hope even when things were bleak. So, I offer it to you today, from my heart to yours, to remind you of the same things. Happy Valentine’s Day.

Du siehst, ich will viel

You see, I want a lot.

Maybe I want it all:

the darkness of each endless fall,

the shimmering light of each ascent.

So many are alive who don’t seem to care.

Casual, easy, they move in the world

as though untouched.

But you take pleasure in the faces

of those who knew they thirst.

You cherish those

who grip you for survival.

You are not dead yet, it’s not too late

to open your depths by plunging into them

and drink in the life

that reveals itself quietly there.

~Rainer Maria Rilke

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.

Circuit Overload: The Early Symptoms of Betrayal Trauma

According to a study of partners of sex addicts conducted by Barbara Steffens in 2006, 71% of partners demonstrate a severe level of functional impairment in major areas of their lives after discovery.

I went through my own story of Betrayal Trauma many years ago. When I was in the initial crisis after discovery, life felt surreal and I did strange, silly, and downright dangerous things. I accidentally sprayed my hair with hairspray instead of mousse and dried it upside down into a strange and shocking Mohawk. I ran out of gas on the side of the road and had to be rescued by a friend because I couldn’t figure out what to do next. I couldn’t decide what to name my new kittens so I named them Black Cat and Grey Cat. I had too many ‘almost’ car accidents to count. I lay awake until 7 a.m. having panic attacks. I shaved just one leg (many times). I rode my bike into oncoming traffic, I went through many cell phones (dropped in glasses of soda, puddles, orange juice), I lost my two indoor cats outdoors (I eventually found them). I was short-tempered, tired, teary, and couldn’t concentrate.

Here are some things betrayed partners frequently experience during the first few months after discovery:

  • Forgetting things
  • Clumsiness, accidents
  • Sleeplessness or a desire to sleep all the time
  • Difficulty concentrating
  • Mixing up words when talking
  • Inability to complete small tasks
  • Wanting to isolate
  • Anxiety and panic attacks
  • A sense of overwhelming fear
  • Unstoppable crying or the inability to cry
  • Anger, rage or frustration
  • Depression
  • Racing thoughts or an inability to ‘turn your mind off’
  • Intrusive thoughts of real or imagined scenes of your partner’s sexual behavior
  • Twitching eyes, legs, arms
  • Loss of appetite or increase in appetite
  • Headaches/migraines
  • Body aches
  • Feeling numb, robotic, or disconnected
  • Sour or churning stomach
  • Guilt or shame
  • Thoughts of suicide or self-harm
  • Frequent illness

During this initial stage, whatever you are feeling and experiencing, you are normal and others have experienced the same. You are on a wild emotional ride, and betrayed partners have reported an incredible variety of feelings and experiences during this time. Be patient and gentle with yourself and do not expect more from yourself than is possible during this early period. Your bodily system is handling more than normal and is overwhelmed. You may be searching for the right thing to do or an action to take, but kindness, patience, realistic expectations, and lots of self-compassion are needed during this phase.

 

This blog was originally published October 24, 2016 and updated March 4, 2021.

Where is the Hope?

One of my Clinical Team members at the Center for Relational Recovery told me the other day that in her betrayed partner’s group the women were talking and one of them said, “There is just no hope…I mean, even Michelle is divorced…there is just no hope with this addiction.”

When I heard this, the thought that popped into my head was, “She’s missing the whole point!” I want very much for marriages to heal and couples to stay together and we work very hard and for the most part quite effectively in helping couples to do this at the Center.

However, and this is a big however, the most important thing we are doing with people, the most important thing that underlies our beliefs and guides our relationship with our clients is that we believe there is hope for them period. Whether the relationship works out or not. Regardless of the level of betrayal that has been experienced. Despite all the hurt and wreckage that may presently be in their path.

Betrayed partners are in a position they did not volunteer for. They did not get into their relationships thinking they would be betrayed and lied to and have their hearts crushed.  They have found themselves in the middle of an unwanted journey and there is no good way out for them. They can either lose the relationship, life and future that they have worked so hard to build and start over. Or they can work to heal the relationship and stay together. These are both incredibly hard roads and for partners there is no way to parachute out. They must go down one of these paths, both with very uncertain outcomes.

So, like the partner in the women’s group, you might be asking, where is the hope? The hope lies in the journey. No matter which path you go down, you are going to face new experiences and challenges that are going to ask you to grow. You are going to be asked to take leaps of faith, lean into your support system or build new ones, grapple with your understanding of God and how and why suffering takes place, take risks toward new opportunities, learn how to grieve losses, and learn new skills.

In this process, if you will keep your heart open and allow the new experiences to come in, you are going to find out who you are. You are going to build a relationship with yourself that is like nothing you ever had before. You are going to end up liking yourself, trusting yourself, knowing how to care for yourself and bringing yourself into relationships with others differently.

What you get as you go through the journey of recovery as a betrayed partner is pure emotional gold. You will have these new skills and this new sense of yourself for the rest of your life. No one will ever be able to take it away from you. It will change you and as a result it will change your future.

I would not be who I am today, doing what I do, enjoying the rich friendships and lovely life that I have if I had not gone through the experience of being the partner of a sex addict.

So here is my recommendation to you if you are a partner who is looking at your spouse and wondering where the hope is. Lift up your eyes and look out past him. Hopefully he will be in your future and part of the bigger picture that you see. But don’t forget to look out past him and see what life might be able to be like for you. Don’t forget to open yourself up to the possibility that all this pain may end up changing you, not in bad ways but in profoundly unexpected and beautiful ones.

 

This blog post was originally published on January 30, 2017 and updated on February 25, 2021.

Betrayal: The Bigger Story

Everybody is called at some point (and most of us are called several times throughout life) to go through something so challenging we think it will break us. We are called out of our place of comfort and are asked to go to a new place, a place of challenge and change. We are asked to walk through the fire or to brave the sea, to navigate the dark woods and to conquer the sky.

When we finally accept that yes, we must go forward, we must face the challenge, take it on and move through it – we are changed. Like the caterpillar that must do battle with the cocoon to break free and live into its glory as a butterfly, so too must we be willing to go through the struggle that is sometimes required to achieve our own metamorphosis.

When dealing with the crisis of betrayal and the overwhelming trauma symptoms that often follow, it can feel easy to be focused just on surviving the day, hour or minute you find yourself in. Stopping to think about the big picture is not first on everyone’s list of things to do in the aftermath of betrayal. However, at some point, it is important, I would even say imperative, that you do pause, take a breath and ask yourself the question, ‘is there something bigger happening here? Am I, without asking for it, in the middle of a transformative moment in my life?’

The key question is this: Is experiencing betrayal about more than pain and suffering? Is it also potentially an opportunity wrapped in a crisis? An opportunity for enormous positive changes, personal growth and transformation that only a crisis that shakes you to your core and stretches you beyond your limits can produce? Because this is a big truth about being human – it often takes significant events, circumstances and challenges that bring us to the brink to get us to leave our comfort zone and make big changes (even positive ones).

As we begin a New Year together, this is the question I want us to contemplate: is betrayal the event that, if we allow it to, will produce positive transformation in our lives beyond anything we would have thought possible? Can we become the hero of our betrayal story?  

In countless fairy tales, legends and folk stories told through the ages, the individual who becomes the hero or heroine of their tale starts out as just a normal person, minding their business, living their life, just like you and I were before the tsunami of betrayal rolled in. Then in some unforeseen way, life suddenly presents them with a test. This test requires that they must make a choice. They can ignore it and stay where they are, or they can accept the challenge and venture into the unknown.  

Ignoring it means giving up the benefits the test has to offer and the possibilities of it changing your life forever in wonderful ways. But you get to stay safe and life remains familiar and known. You will not have to risk losing anything. For us as betrayed partners this might look like ignoring the signs of addiction and staying in a place of blindness about what is unfolding. Or it might look like discovering betrayal and immediately filing for divorce and moving on without ever stopping to find out how we might need to grow ourselves.

The alternative to ignoring the call, is to accept that life has suddenly plopped you down at a crossroads. In one direction is the familiar, worn path that loops around on top of itself creating an endless ring. You already know this path. You know where it leads, you know what it looks like. You’ve been there time and again, going around and round.

On the other side is a new path. This one stretches out into the distance. You can’t see very far down it. It’s unclear where it leads, how long it will take to travel it and what you will encounter on the way.  But this path also seems to represent opportunity. Your old path brings you back to the same place over and over again. This new path appears to at least go somewhere new and provide a chance for things to become different.

So, you stand at the crossroads and deliberate. You have not asked for this challenge; you did not want to find yourself at this fork in the road. This challenge has in many ways picked you. Nobody, and I mean nobody, volunteers to be a betrayed partner. It is a position that no one wants. Most partners are just like I was at the beginning of things; trying as hard as they can to find the quickest way out of the pain. In fact, it may be that I am just making you angry with all my talk of growth and accepting the challenge. I would have been pissed off if someone talked to me about that at the beginning too. However, eventually I needed to hear about hope and healing and freedom. I needed to understand that I was in the middle of a change process that was going to eventually be worth every dreadful, crappy, excruciating minute.  Without that, I couldn’t have kept putting one foot in front of the other.

So, you stand and face a pivotal, life-altering question: will you accept the challenge? Will you go down the new road? Will you leave what you know behind and head out into the uncertain world ahead, launching yourself into the hope that this new untried journey will lead you to deliverance. You nod once to yourself, and you slowly tentatively take your first steps.

This is where it gets interesting… 

 

 

This post was originally published in January 1, 2019 and updated on February 18, 2021.

 

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.

The Cheating Partner’s Moment of Truth

Two things motivate change in human beings: fear and desire. After the crisis of betrayal, fear is what initially motivates and drives the process of change. However, to achieve long-term transformation, a person’s motivation must eventually shift from fear to desire.

Over the past two weeks, we have talked about both avoiding and allowing the moment of truth in your relationship with your cheating partner. As you may recall, the moment of truth is when you stop monitoring and regularly reminding your partner of how he has hurt you. Instead, you step back and see what happens. You see if he steps up and continues to invest in his recovery and healing the relationship. Or not. When this moment is allowed to happen, it typically marks a significant transition in the recovery process for both you and your partner.

In the beginning, your cheating partner’s recovery is usually driven by fear—mostly fear of losing the relationship. He enters recovery not because he wants to change his behavior and make amends, but because he does not want to lose his relationship with you. Going to therapy, attending group and 12-step meetings, doing homework, making phone calls to supportive peers and mentors, and changing long-ingrained habits are all motivated, at least initially, by fear of losing the relationship.

You, as the betrayed partner, are also motivated by fear—fear that you will be hurt again, fear that if you don’t stay on top of the cheater he will do it again, fear that he won’t be willing to do what is necessary to heal your relationship. So, the crisis of betrayal trauma creates massive fear for you and your partner alike, as your relationship is brought to the brink of destruction. This fear pushes both of you to work toward change.

However, there is a moment in the recovery journey when you as the betrayed partner need to step back and allow your cheating partner’s energy, rather than your pain and his fear of losing the relationship, to become the primary motivating force. This moment is as important for your cheating partner as it is for you and your relationship. This is the moment when he must move beyond the pain and fear-driven paradigm of early recovery and find within himself a different impetus for change and healing.

This means your partner must connect with what he wants for himself long-term. What does he want his relationship to look like? What will a healthy sex life look like? What does he want for his children? What does he want for his friendships? What is his value system? What does it mean for him to live a congruent life where his values and his behaviors are in alignment? Who does he want to be?

Connecting to these deep desires about relationships, meaning, purpose, and legacy is a key task in your partner’s recovery process. Often, infidelity and addiction hijack a cheater’s life, pushing him off course and diverting his energy and attention away from what he truly believes in and values. Rediscovering and connecting to his truest, deepest desires and beliefs about what gives life meaning and purpose transforms his motivation for recovery, shifting him away from pain and fear and connecting him to his true longings and desires for the future.

Fear-based motivation takes an enormous toll on the goodwill in the relationship, as it requires both the cheater and the betrayed partner to stay in constant connection with the pain, fear, and damage that infidelity has brought. Couples who are unable to move out of the pain/fear phase of recovery and into the longing/desire phase often find themselves stuck in a toxic relational cycle. This can only be sustained for so long. Thus, the transition from fear-based motivation to desire-based motivation is vital to long-term recovery and healing.

For your cheating partner to make the transition from fear-based to desire-based motivation, he must quit looking to you as the primary driver of his recovery. He must quit using your pain as the energy behind the changes he is making. He must find his own reasons for changing. He must connect to his own desires, his own vision for life and relationship, and his own longing for things to be different. These must become the primary motivators that energize him and sustain him for the long-term.

If you haven’t risked the moment of truth yet, consider having a discussion with your cheating partner about the need for the two of you, as a couple, to make this transition. Take this topic into couple’s therapy and get assistance with it there. And know that making this transition is not a one-time deal. You will loop back into the fear at times, but you will come out of it quicker and find your footing faster if you and your partner are focused on the long-term vision of what you long for and want for yourselves and your relationship.

 

This post was originally published in April of 2018 and updated in February of 2021.

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.

Understanding Boundaries

 

Most people know about boundaries and instinctively understand they are important. Betrayed partners are no exception. Often, they feel a keen need to set and maintain boundaries with their cheating partner after discovery. However, what a boundary actually is, how to set a boundary, and how to effectively maintain a boundary can be highly misunderstood or just downright mysterious. For betrayed partners, learning to create healthy boundaries is vital to healing and regaining a sense of stability and safety in the relationship.

My understanding of boundaries comes from my training with Pia Mellody, one of the early pioneers in defining and understanding boundaries and exploring the reasons behind why so many of us struggle with our boundary systems. Here are some key things to know about boundaries:

 

Boundaries facilitate relationship.

One of the many misconceptions about boundaries is that they are a way of keeping people out rather than a way of allowing people safely in. Basically, boundaries are mistaken for walls and used as a way to protect against vulnerability when they really should be used as a way to facilitate vulnerability and healthy connection in relationships.

Functional boundaries allow you to determine the level of physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and sexual closeness you want to have with various people depending on who they are to you and how close to them you want to be. When your boundary system is operating well, it helps you to have good and satisfying relationships with other people.

 

Boundaries are about your behavior.

Boundaries are always about your behavior and not about other people’s behavior. Many people do not know this and try to use boundaries as a tool for attempting to control the actions of another person. For example, one of my clients recently said to me, “I told my mom that my boundary is that she is not allowed to talk to me about my boyfriend anymore, but she keeps doing it anyway.” This client was trying to use boundaries as a way to control her mom’s behavior. However, as she learned, trying to control another person’s behavior is like trying to hold smoke in your hand. Impossible.

My client and I talked about what she does have control over, which is her own behavior. By the end of our time together she had adjusted her boundary, and the next week she reported how she had implemented that boundary with her mom. She called her mom and said, “Mom, I find it really hard to talk with you about my boyfriend and I would appreciate it if you would not bring that topic up with me. If you do bring it up, I’m going to ask you to change the subject and talk with me about something else. If you won’t change the topic, I’m going to need to get off the phone and talk with you at a later time.”

 

Boundaries are protective not punitive.

If the purpose of boundaries is to facilitate healthy relationship rather than to shut relationship down, it makes sense that boundaries are protective rather than punitive. This means that when we use our boundary system or set boundaries with someone, we do it in a way that protects us without shaming or punishing the other person. The purpose and intent of the boundary is to create safety and to facilitate relationship, not to push the other person away or to make that person feel small or diminished in some way.

This can be quite a challenge for betrayed partners because the time when they most need to set some serious boundaries is right after discovery of the betrayal, which is when they are the most hurt, angry, and emotionally reactive. It takes heroic effort to set boundaries with your partner that are not about revenge, making him pay, or hurting him as badly as he has hurt you.

 

Boundaries are about both protection and containment.

Pia Mellody identifies two key parts of each person’s boundary system. There is the protective boundary, which helps us to interact with people while feeling safe from them impinging inappropriately on our physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and sexual space.

Then there is the containment boundary. This boundary helps us be appropriate in relationship with others. Our containment boundaries keep us from becoming offensive or impinging on someone else’s physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, or sexual space.

Each part of the boundary system is needed to have functional boundaries. If we have good containment of ourselves but let others overwhelm us, then there will be negative consequences for us. The same is true if we protect ourselves well but allow ourselves to operate in uncontained ways that violate the boundaries of others.

 

 

This post was originally published on August 8, 2017 & updated on January 19, 2021.

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.

But If Not…

 

My sister is a potter. Well, really she is an artist and one of the ways she expresses all the pent-up artistic ability she carries around is through pottery. I get pictures texted to me at random times of vases, pots, sculptures, and platters, all thrown and carved, showing exquisite care and intricate detail. Often, these are pictures of the raw clay item waiting to be glazed and fired in the kiln.

I will text a few days later, “Have you fired that vase? Send me a pic of it.” Sometimes I get back a glorious picture of shining glazes and mixed colors. Other times I get a text that says, “Broke in the kiln.”

What I have learned over the years is that the heat of the kiln is both friend and enemy to the potter. It can produce the most wonderful blend of colors and textures, or it can take a pot that required many hours of careful artistry and crack it wide open, leaving fragments of potential on the floor of the kiln.

Facing a personal and relationship crisis like sexual betrayal and entering the recovery process is like being put into the kiln. This type of crisis puts life as you know it on the line. And when that happens, the outcome can go either way. It can crack you into a hundred bitter, angry, walled-off, isolated, sharp-edged pieces. Or it can transform you into something new—stronger and more beautiful than ever.

The critical question is what makes the difference. What helps a person who feels fractured by betrayal trauma go through the fire without shattering?

In the Bible, there is a story about three men who refuse to bow down to a golden image as their king has demanded. When confronted by the king, they tell him they will not sacrifice their belief in God to worship his golden idol. They tell the king that if he so chooses he can throw them into the furnace and their God will save them.

And then they say the most interesting thing. They say, “But if not, we will still not serve your gods or your statue.” With their “but if not” statement, the three men tell the king that even if God does not rescue them, they will stay true to their larger purpose and to what they believe. (Spoiler alert: They are thrown into the furnace and come out unscathed).

Flash forward to World War II. In May 1940, German soldiers advanced into France and trapped Allied troops on the beaches of Dunkirk. For the Allies, this was an epic disaster. Almost. To save the day the British people answered the call and set sail, guiding their fishing and pleasure boats across the English Channel to France to go get the troops off the beach. Braving heavy air and ground fire, British civilians rescued over 330,000 British, French, Dutch and Belgian soldiers in one of the most miraculous and heroic military rescues of all time.

Here is what is most interesting to me. In the middle of this near-disaster, Churchill sent a three-word message to the war command. “But if not.” At the time, people were much more up on their Bible stories, and Churchill’s message was immediately recognized as a reference to the three men, the golden image, and the fiery furnace. By sending those three words, Churchill was essentially saying, “We are going to stay the course and attempt the impossible because it is better to risk and fail than not to risk. It is better to stay true to our purpose than to abandon hope.”

This is the strength that makes a difference in any crisis. This is what brings one through the fire. It is the ability to believe there is a larger purpose, something bigger than just the circumstances right in front of you. It is the willingness to risk it all to achieve that larger purpose. It is the commitment to maintain hope in the face of more than daunting odds.

 

For you, “But if not” could mean, “Maybe our marriage won’t make it, but I still commit myself to the process of recovery and healing.”

 

For you, “But if not” could mean that even if you get hurt again, you are committed to risking love.

 

For you, “But if not” could signify a ground level commitment to learn from what life brings, and to allow even the hardest circumstances to be part of your growth and development as a person.

 

For you, “But if not” could be the simple recognition that without the willingness to risk, you cannot gain.

 

Whatever “But if not” means for you, my hope is that you will stay connected to the larger purpose and story that is unfolding in your life. Whatever the crisis, there is more going on than just the situation in front of you and believing and staying connected to that great truth is key to going through the fire and coming out the other side not only whole but thoroughly alive.

 

 

 

This post was originally published on August 28, 2018 & updated on December 28, 2020.

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.

Lesson #2, Part 2: Learning to Stop Talking and Start Observing

In my previous post, I introduced the idea that betrayed partners often find it helpful to stop talking and start observing. Simply stated, when you stop talking and start observing, you can change your behavior patterns and grow in emotional and relational health, and with that change, you can participate in your relationship in a much healthier way. That was certainly my experience.

Before I stopped talking and started observing, I did not realize how sick my spouse was. I understood he was sexually addicted, but I was still getting my head around what that meant. It wasn’t until I stopped agitating the waters of the relationship with my unhealthy behaviors that I clearly saw that my spouse was drowning. 

During this time, as I stopped talking and started observing, I took what I learned to my therapist and support group so I could reality-check my observations and process my feelings. I needed these supportive others to help me sort through and understand the truth of my relationship and my experience within it. As I did this, I started to get clarity, and I was able to step out of the pattern of reactivity I had been stuck in.  

It was during this time that I realized that I could either drown alongside my spouse or I could save myself. I had been trying to get him to swim for the edge for a long time, thinking that if he would do that, then I too could be saved. Now, however, with the clarity that came from being quiet and allowing myself to see the true state of my relationship, I understood that it was up to my spouse to save himself, and it was up to me to save myself. 

If you are in the post-discovery stage of dealing with sexual betrayal and you find yourself talking, arguing, fighting, cajoling, reasoning, agitating, encouraging, nagging, and maybe even threatening in an attempt to get your partner to enter recovery and take steps to get well, I encourage you to try a six-week period where you stop talking and start observing. 

As I said in last week’s post, this takes some serious discipline. So get your therapist and support peeps on board to help you. 

As you move into this process of not talking and instead observing, you are going to experience some painful realities and some wonderful realities. It’s possible you will see that your partner is not taking the actions needed to repair the damage. You may see that your partner is gaslighting you. Or still acting out. Or that your partner is withdrawn or emotionally absent. On the other hand, you may find that when you stop filling the space, your partner is right there, actively working on recovery and pursuing emotional connection with you. 

My hope, of course, is that your significant other joins you in a process of healing and recovery and that you find, when you quiet yourself, that your partner is showing up in ways that you were missing and are glad and relieved to see. But even if what you find when you stop talking and start observing is similar to what I found – absence, disconnection, and loneliness – this process will still benefit you in transformative ways. 

First and foremost, you will learn about where your partner is (and is not) in your relationship. You will also learn a lot about yourself. You will find out why you were talking in the first place. If you are open to it, you will learn what all those words were helping you to avoid. You will discover that you can handle knowing and seeing the things you were trying to avoid knowing and seeing. You will learn that you are strong, resilient, creative, and resourceful. You will see the unhealthy coping patterns that the trauma of sexual betrayal has triggered, and you will trade these out for healthy relational behaviors. You will find out what you were afraid of, and you will choose to walk into and face your fear so you can heal it. You will begin the process of saving yourself regardless of whether your significant other joins you in a process of healing.

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.

Lesson #2, Part 1: Learning to Stop Talking and Start Observing

We are in the middle of a series where I am sharing with you the key lessons I learned as I earned my way out of my relationship with my sexually addicted spouse. The first lesson I presented was how to step out of the cheater’s gaslighting game. Our second lesson is learning to stop talking and start observing. 

When you stop talking and start observing, you can change your behavior patterns and grow in emotional and relational health. And with that change, you can participate in your relationship in a much healthier way. 

As you do this work, your partner will either join you in it and the two of you will create a new relationship together, or your partner will not join you and you will have decisions to make about staying in or leaving the relationship. Whether you ultimately choose to stay or leave, when you do the work and change your behavior patterns, you earn your way into a new relationship – regardless of what your partner does. 

Once I found my therapist and started working on my recovery, I came to a place where I realized that I needed to stop talking in my relationship. I needed to quiet myself so I could take a breath and sort out what was actually happening. I had been activated and confused for so long that I was caught in a pattern of reaction. I was not able to clearly assess what was happening, think through my responses, and choose the best course. Instead, I reacted to my situation in a state of hypervigilant fear. What I mean by that is that I reacted to my situation from outside my window of tolerance, from outside the emotional space where I was able to connect to my best self and make good choices.  

When I realized that I needed to back away and find some solid ground from which I could view the reality of my situation more clearly, I decided to stop talking and start observing. When I say I stopped talking, I mean exactly that. I stopped talking. Not in a hostile way. Not in a way where I gave my spouse the silent treatment. In fact, my spouse didn’t even notice. When I say I stopped talking, what I mean is that I stopped filling the void in the relationship with my words. 

This took some discipline, my friends. I had to make a conscious decision to not jump in over and over again, to not fill the space between my partner and me with my ideas, opinions, and thoughts. When I did this, I was able to emotionally settle myself in a way that allowed me to observe what was happening in my relationship. 

What I discovered was painful and sad, and it became very clear to me why I had been filling the space with words. When I went quiet and started watching, what I found was a gaping void of absence, dissociation, distraction, and distance between me and my significant other. 

I remember sitting at meals with my spouse where there was no conversation and he did not notice there was no conversation. He was so lost down the rabbit hole of his addiction that he looked like a drug user – bloodshot eyes, vacant stare, body there but mind gone. Over time, as I realized how disconnected and dissociated my significant other was, I also realized that I had been talking, arguing, and fighting all as a way to try to get him to come back. 

I did not know how to sit in the aching fear and loneliness of being married to an active addict. I did not know how to handle the feelings of abandonment that this canyon of absence evoked within me. So I had been filling up the space, making noise and distracting myself from the painful reality of being alone in my relationship. It was only when I stopped talking and started observing that this became clear to me. And it was only when this became clear to me that I was able to take the actions that I needed to take to heal and to earn my way into a new relationship.

This discussion will continue in my next post, on what to expect when you stop talking and start observing.

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.

Lesson #1: Stepping Out of the Cheater’s Gaslighting Game, Part 2

Hear ye, hear ye betrayed partners. Gaslighting does not just happen to you, and it does not just stop happening and then you are fine. Gaslighting is something you participate in. Gaslighting is something that takes a significant toll on your ability to trust your own perceptions and think clearly. Gaslighting is also something you have to unwind from over time. Healing from gaslighting is a process, not an event. It takes time and effort on your part. 

For most betrayed partners, there is a phase of gaslighting where they are truly in the dark about the reality of their relationship. In this phase, the cheater has lied and manipulated the partner successfully enough that the partner truly doesn’t know about the affair or the sexual acting out. The cheating is truly hidden and secret. This phase is not what we are talking about in today’s post.

In this post, we are talking about the second phase of gaslighting. This is the phase where there has been some discovery of the cheating behaviors. Some amount of information about the cheating has come to light and the cheater is caught in the dilemma of trying to calm you down while keeping undiscovered secrets and behaviors hidden. At this point, the gaslighting ramps up and becomes a toxic dance between the two of you. This is when you, as the betrayed partner, may unwittingly participate in the gaslighting – just as I did (see my previous post). 

When I say gaslighting is something you participate in, what I am talking about is the crossroads where the words and events that are happening meet your fears about what those words and events might mean for you and your relationship. For many betrayed partners, it is easier and feels safer to move into denial, minimization, justification, and self-doubt than to face the reality of what is happening. In my own relationship, I know that when I let myself look fully at the truth, it was terrifying. Living in confusion felt safer. Until it didn’t. 

The words and behaviors of my spouse threatened the survival of my relationship because I knew I could not stay with someone who was treating me the way I was being treated. However, I was also completely unable to tolerate the idea of potentially losing my relationship. That loss and the feelings of abandonment that accompanied it were too overwhelming for me to face. So instead, I moved into confusion, chaos and self-doubt.

This dynamic is called Betrayal Blindness which I think is a much better term than denial. Betrayal blindness occurs when we do not allow ourselves to know information that we could and should know because the implications of knowing are too frightening for us to face.  Betrayal blindness is how we get caught up in participating in gaslighting. We allow ourselves to be manipulated, to question our perceptions, and to engage in self-doubt and self-blame because at a primal level that is easier than facing the reality that the person we love most in the world is lying to us and manipulating us in ways that shock us to the core. 

This is a core truth for all betrayed partners:

To begin to unwind from the detrimental and harmful impacts of gaslighting, we have to be willing to face the fears that have made us vulnerable to the lies and manipulations of the cheater. 

From both personal and professional experience, I can tell you that we can only do this with support. Our fears are real and significant. I could not have tolerated the feelings that staying grounded in reality brought up for me if I had not had both a great therapist and an amazing circle of friends to support me and hold my fears and anxieties with me. Your process of healing from gaslighting will be no different. You cannot do this alone. You need others who will ask you the kinds of questions my therapist asked me, who will help you to connect to and work through the emotions that come up as you move into reality, and walk with you as you slowly become resilient in the face of gaslighting.

 

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.

Lesson #1: Stepping Out of the Cheater’s Gaslighting Game, Part 1

Gaslighting is a systematic and chronic pattern of manipulation and lying that betrayed partners experience when cheaters work to hide their secret behaviors or manipulate their partners into accepting behaviors that they’d rather not accept. Most betrayed partners experience four primary types of gaslighting: the straight-up lie, reality manipulation, scapegoating, and coercion.

One of the hardest processes I had to go through as a betrayed partner in recovery was learning how to quit giving in to the gaslighting. Until I was able to do that, I remained a participant in the gaslighting dance – not a willing participant, but a participant, nonetheless. 

When I hit my bottom (which I talked about in last week’s post), I asked for and received a referral to a therapist who, at that time, was a bit of a unicorn – she actually knew how to help betrayed partners! When I went in for my first session with her, I sat down on her couch and said:  

I need help. There is a whole bunch of stuff going on in my marriage and it has been going on for years. I think it may be me. I think I may be making a big deal out of things that aren’t really a big deal. I think I may be causing the problems. And if I am, I am OK with that. I just need someone who will be really honest with me and help me deal with what is going on because I can’t stay in the level of pain that I’m in. 

Now, you may read that and think, “You must be joking.” But I am not. I said this to my new therapist with absolute sincerity and conviction. I was utterly confused about reality because I had been expertly gaslighted for a very long time. I really believed that quite possibly the whole problem was me. And even in moments when I didn’t totally believe that, I was in so much pain that I was willing to take responsibility if it would get me out of the pain. Even if that meant owning all of the problems in my relationship.

I can only imagine what went through the mind of my new therapist, but she had a great poker-face and did not even blink. She was quiet for a moment and then she said, “I will make a commitment to you. I will tell you when I see something that belongs to you and is your part to own. I will be honest with you about the things you need to change that are problematic and unhealthy.” We looked at each other as I evaluated what she had said, and then I nodded.  I did not fully trust her yet, but we had made a beginning. 

Thus started the lengthy and arduous process of my therapist working to help me unwind from the years of lying and manipulation that I had been subjected to in my relationship. This was painstaking work on her part, and she deserves a house on a beautiful beach with unending umbrella drinks and sunshine for the heavy lifting she did to help me.   

Here is how it would go. 

Me: I think I may be exaggerating, and it really wasn’t such a big deal. I mean, he might not have really meant to say that and I’m just making it into something that it isn’t…

Therapist: Did he say X, Y, and Z? Did those words come out of his mouth?

Me: Yes, he did say that, but…

Therapist: If he said those words, then it is a problem. So please, come out of the racing thoughts in your mind so you can sit with the fact that he said X, Y, and Z to you. What happens when you just sit with that for a minute and don’t rush to dismiss it or minimize it? What happens when you just sit with the words that were actually said? 

(Long pause.)

Me: I feel shocked and I feel scared.

Therapist: Hmmm. I think the words he said are shocking and scary. So, tell me what it’s like to let yourself know this instead of pushing it away?

Me: Very scary. I don’t like it.

Therapist: I don’t like it for you, either. That said, I want you to pay attention to your body right now. Notice what it feels like now compared to when you came in and first started telling me what happened. What do you notice? 

(Another long pause.) 

Me: I feel like I’m in my body and grounded. I felt like I was out of my body and swirling around in the air when I came in.

Therapist: Right. So even when the truth is scary and hard to face, if you bring yourself into what is true, it grounds you and you land in your body, connected to your feelings. 

Me (laughing): Great, I feel better and worse at the same time. 

My therapist and I had dozens of versions of this conversation and just as many rounds of her helping me ground myself in reality. Eventually, I learned to stop participating in the gaslighting through minimization, rationalization, dismissing information, ignoring things, and allowing myself to move into self-doubt and confusion repeatedly. 

My therapist taught me to come back to the facts: what was said, what was done, what happened. Then she taught me to sit with myself so I could find out what I felt about what was said or done. She taught me to tolerate feelings of fear, uncertainty, loss, and grief – all feelings that I had been using self-doubt and confusion to avoid. In my next post, I will discuss how betrayed partners often become unwitting participants in gaslighting, as I did in my own relationship. This is when we may actively fail to see the truth, and we actively take on responsibility for problems we did not cause.

 

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.

To Stay or Leave After Cheating: Earning a New Relationship

Several months after divorcing my sexually addicted spouse, I was talking to the clinical supervisor overseeing my Residency to become a Licensed Professional Counselor. We were discussing the process of me deciding to leave my marriage and what led to that ending. 

My supervisor said to me, “You earned your way out of your marriage.” 

I cocked my head and looked at her, surprised by her choice of words. “What do you mean?” I asked. 

“You looked at your own issues within the relationship,” she said. “You changed patterns and behaviors that were not serving you or the relationship and started doing things differently.” Then she paused and looked at me thoughtfully,  “When you grow in health and become more equipped and able to participate in your relationship, you either earn a new relationship with your partner because he joins you and cleans up his end of things too, or you earn your way out of the relationship because it becomes clear that he’s not going to join you and it’s not a relationship you can stay in when you’re healthy. Either way, you’ve earned your way into a new relationship by changing your own behavior instead of waiting for your partner to change his.”

I had never heard the process that I had gone through described in this way. All I knew was that once I was in recovery, staying in my relationship and then leaving my relationship were two of the hardest things I’d ever done. They were also two of the things I was most proud of because I had done them both well and from a place of health. I had allowed myself to move through a growth process that I thought at the time I might not survive but that ended up being a source of complete transformation and freedom. 

When I found real help and was able to move into recovery, I was so sick of circling the drain as I engaged in the familiar unhealthy behaviors that I had grown accustomed to that I was finally willing to face whatever truths I needed to face in order to become healthy myself. Even if those new truths were scary (they were) or hard (they were) or required that I change myself in significant ways (they did). 

I came to a place where I decided that I had to save myself, even if that meant leaving the marriage. Up to that point, I had wanted the relationship more than I wanted myself. I had been willing to stay activated, confused, and compromised in order to stay in the relationship. I kept waiting for my spouse to get well so that I could get well, too, but without losing him. I wanted the relationship to survive because I felt like I needed the relationship if I hoped to emotionally survive myself. 

However, I finally came to a point where I realized that I was losing myself completely to the unhealthy dynamics created by living with an actively sexually addicted partner who wasn’t willing to make changes. 

There is an ancient spiritual saying: “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” It was when I finally hit bottom that I realized I had to do things differently. To continue with what I was doing was just costing me too much. So, I found an experienced therapist who was able to provide real support and direction as I entered my process of recovery and healing. I was ready, and my teacher showed up. 

My journey of recovery began with two huge and very scary leaps into the unknown. The first was a decision to save myself even if it cost me my relationship. Now, as you will see over the coming weeks, I was in no way actually ready to leave my relationship when I made this commitment. I was still scared to death of that possibility. However, I did commit to my own healing, regardless of what happened. 

The second big leap was that I decided to separate my choices and behaviors from my spouse’s choices and behaviors. Up to that point, I’d been caught in the cycle of action and reaction that all betrayed partners know so well. Trapped in a swirl of trauma symptoms, I’d been reeling from one betrayal to the next for years, never able to get my feet under me for a long enough time that I could figure out what to do. Now, by some grace, I’d found a moment where my feet were on solid ground, and I decided that I was done letting my spouse determine my reality. I decided that I was going to emotionally step back far enough to figure out how to respond to what was happening instead of automatically reacting to my trauma. I was going to figure out who I was and how I wanted to handle things. I was going to quit giving my power away to him and his addiction. I was going to figure out what healthy meant for me, and I was going to do that. 

These two key decisions were what opened up the way for me to ‘earn my way out of my marriage,’ as my supervisor so eloquently put it. They launched me on a path of healing and freedom.

Many of the blogs I’ve written here at PartnerHope have been about how to stay in your relationship and heal both individually and as a couple. However, for many betrayed partners staying in the relationship is not the healthiest option or even a possible option. Either way, whether you are staying or leaving, beginning to operate from a place of ‘earning your way to a new relationship’ by changing the patterns and behaviors that are not serving you well, regardless of what your significant other is doing, will open up new possibilities for healing and change. 

Over the next few weeks I am going to share with you some of the key issues that I had to wrestle with – patterns and behaviors I had to change and lessons I learned as I went through my healing process.

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.