Relationship betrayal: Healing from infidelity

It is rarely acknowledged that, for many of us, our most present attachment figure throughout our lives is our romantic partner. It is with them we form a bond that will take us through life, from those early days of awkward dates to supporting each other as our bones get brittle and our memories fade. We share decades of emotional connection, often deepened by physical and sexual intimacy, allowing us to find a space with another person which is exquisitely tender and inherently vulnerable.

It is also where we should feel the safest. So when this safe person becomes the person who betrays us, we can be left with a trauma that runs deep inside our body and can take a lifetime to heal. Societally, we often underestimate the trauma from infidelity.

There is a consistent message that we should get a haircut, buy a new car and get back out there into the dating world, all bruises hidden or ignored. But infidelity trauma has huge repercussions for our emotional world, our cognitive landscape and our body’s nervous system.

This article will look at the ways infidelity trauma can impact these three areas of your world and give five steps to help you move beyond the trauma of betrayal.

Infidelity and its impact on our emotions

The impact of infidelity on our emotional landscape is seismic. Often, we have to make difficult decisions about how we respond and what we do when our emotions are all over the place. It is like being asked to do complex quadratic equations whilst treading water in a deep ocean surrounded by sharks. We have to first allow ourselves to identify our feelings, give them space without fear that they will subsume us and let these emotions guide us in our decisions and choices.

The first emotion you may feel is confusion or denial. Perhaps you have a desperate need for answers and find yourself getting more and more lost in the minutiae of what happened when and with whom. If these answers help your emotions to settle a little, then ask your questions. You have a right to answers, even though they may not be given. If a point comes when you are pursuing details out of a drive to feel even more hurt, even more pain, then it may be a time to slow down and listen to your feelings. See if you can discover what is underneath the confusion.

Often, the emotion that sits beneath the confusion isfear. A deep, gut-wrenching fear of change and loss, which is destabilising to our very core. Allow yourself to identify what is behind your fear. Try using the sentence starter, “I am afraid that …” or “I’m scared that …” and see how many sentences you can complete. Keep going until you feel you’ve expressed all your fears and stared them in your face. We can worry that going into our fear in this way will make it worse, but fear needs a light shining onto it to dispel it, and often just saying our fears out loud can help them to ease a little.

And beneath the fear may be anger, at the cruelty or the carelessness of a person you trusted. Or even at yourself for trusting them in the first place. Anger is a powerful motivator and can drive us towards choices that are hidden from us by fear. But anger can also mask other quieter emotions that are straining to be heard. Self-anger is rarely helpful, however, and a gentler reframe to angry thoughts about yourself might start with asking “what is a kinder way I can talk about myself here?”.

So what is the quiet emotion beneath the anger? This is often a deep, pervasive sadness and loss. We can feel a potential loss of our partner, of our relationship, but also of our hopes and dreams and even our sense of who we are. Many victims of infidelity find themselves responding in unexpected ways, sometimes clinging to the relationship or betrayer in a way that can leave them questioning their own sense of themselves and their values. Loss is at the heart of a betrayal.

Even if the relationship remains, we will have lost some elements of it as it will never be the same again. Loss and sadness are emotions that need to be greeted with compassion. Even years after the event, these feelings can remain, and it’s vital we don’t try to hurry ourselves past them and prove that we’re ‘over it’ when deep down our sadness is drowning us.

How infidelity affects our thoughts

In the immediate moment of disclosure of an affair, we can feel a scramble of thoughts all crashing in at once, and it can be hard to pick them apart. These thoughts can range from one extreme to another. One moment you might be seconds from packing a bag, and the next you are sitting on the bed planning a date night. It can feel bewildering.

It is vital to allow your thoughts space and time to swing around, but to do so with control. Try clearly identifying what you’re thinking to create distance. For example, you might say “I’m thinking that …” or “I’m having the thought that …”. This gives your thoughts space to be heard but gives you some distance from them.

There are times when these racing thoughts are unhelpful and limiting. 3 am thoughts are rarely helpful. It is a time when our prefrontal cortex takes a break from filtering stressful thoughts and has a nap, leaving our reactive and alarm-based amygdala to take centre stage. If you find yourself suffering from unwanted thoughts, take a moment to reorient yourself in the moment.

At night, this might look like lying still and trying to hear anything around you or trying to see what objects you can make out in the room. Take some time to ground yourself in the present and then try a few cognitive distractions. Naming a vegetable that begins with each letter of the alphabet, trying to remember all the lyrics to your favourite song or imagining in detail a walk through a busy town centre or along a coastal path.

But most importantly, your thoughts are your brain sending you messages, so, as much as possible, take time to listen to them. If they begin to feel overwhelmed, use a distancing technique or a distraction technique. And remember that you did not ask to be put in this situation, so respond to yourself with compassion.

Thoughts that linger on your inner critic or make you feel self-judgmental aren’t helpful during the aftermath of an infidelity. Be kind to yourself, speak words of compassion to yourself and leave self-recriminations to a time when you feel more emotionally able to hear those messages.

Infidelity and our nervous system

Infidelity trauma is a trauma. Our bodies take it as a hit to our feelings of safety, and we can have a strong trauma response in the form of fight, flight, fawn and even freeze – our most primal threat response.

It is important to allow our bodies to enact a trauma response and to work through our physical feelings of unsafety. However, sometimes these responses can create situations and behaviours that don’t serve the people around us or us. Try to identify and name your trauma response.

To help with this, take a moment to feel your feelings as we discussed earlier. And this time, see if you can notice any sensations in your body. Do you feel a tingling or a heaviness anywhere? Perhaps you are just intuitively aware of a part of your body, for example, your palms, your throat, or your chest.

And now try to identify your body’s trauma response.

• Flight response: Are you feeling an urge to run? Do you feel as if you are holding your strong emotions in your legs, feet, or thighs?
• Fight response: Maybe you have a need to shout or throw things? Do you feel as if your emotions are living in your arms and hands?
• Fawn response: Perhaps you feel deep fear and an overwhelming need to keep things calm, brush over it all? Perhaps you are feeling your emotions in your throat, your chest, your stomach.
• Freeze response: You might feel like a numbing or shut down. Perhaps you are feeling a deep desire to block out the world, to stay in bed and withdraw, or to numb yourself with distractions like social media or alcohol? You might not be able to access any emotions and might even believe that you’re feeling nothing at all.

Once you feel you know your trauma response, consider some controlled and healthy ways you can release this response:

• A flight response can be helped by going for a run or changing your scene and environment, even if it’s moving the furniture around.
• A fight response can be worked through with physical exercise, pushing hard against a wall or attending an online rage club.
• The fawn response can be processed by setting some small boundaries and making time for acts of self-care. Acknowledging that you’re experiencing a trauma response and that this is OK is key to working with the fawn response.
• A freeze response can be honoured by allowing yourself small and gentle moments of connection with someone who feels safe. It is also helpful to spend time with your body with gentle movement and self-connection, for example, with yoga or tai chi movements.

Infidelity trauma is an assault to our emotions, our thoughts and our nervous system. It can destroy our sense of self-identity, our hopes for the future and our feelings of safety in our everyday world. It is destabilising both now and into the future.

Five steps to take to start moving beyond this trauma

1. Be kind to yourself and defer any self-recriminations to a time when you feel emotionally and situationally safer. Speak to yourself with the kindness you would use to a friend rather than with self-criticism or despair.
2. Focus on maintaining and seeking out connections with people who feel safe and who see the real you, even if you’re not yet ready to speak to them about what happened. These people can help you heal your sense of fractured self-identity.
3. You can ask for answers, talk about how you’re feeling and expect transparency in the form of access to phones, emails or location sharing if this makes you feel safer.
4. Now is not the time to dwell on thoughts of what you did or how you may have contributed to the breakdown of the relationship. This is a time for self-compassion, not conversations with yourself or others that feel like victim-blaming.
5. It takes time to heal, and you get to choose the timeline for when this healing happens and how long it takes. Don’t allow anyone to rush you, make you feel bad for still feeling upset or for not having ‘got over it’.

And don’t forget that you don’t have to do this alone. Whether the betrayal was yesterday or three decades ago, wounds from infidelity trauma run very deep. If you need support, reach out to a coach or therapist who is experienced in helping people work through the trauma that comes with a relationship betrayal. And remember, you are not what happened to you but are how you choose to respond to it.