Last Updated on February 12, 2025
The discovery of an affair or act of infidelity is undoubtedly a traumatic event. When you find out your partner has been unfaithful, your brain is forced into disarray, busy recalculating everything you thought you knew about your relationship and its reality. While you may have a strong desire to heal quickly and move forward, more often, you feel like you’ve lost all stability, your identity, and even some of your personality. This is the impact of partner betrayal trauma.
Healing from betrayal trauma is complex but possible. It’s helpful first to understand how it has affected and hurt you. We’ll talk through the overarching definition of betrayal trauma, symptoms of partner betrayal, and the three traumatic injuries that shed light on the extensive impact of betrayal: attachment injury, emotional and psychological injury, and sexual injury. Let’s dive in.
What is betrayal trauma?
Betrayal trauma is a specific type of psychological trauma that occurs when a trusted person, often a close partner or caregiver, betrays the expectations of safety, security, and support within that relationship. This betrayal disrupts the betrayed person’s understanding of their relationship and themselves, leading to severe emotional distress.
Unlike traditional trauma, which often stems from a clear, observable threat or violence, betrayal trauma involves a deep breach of trust that can unravel your sense of reality, creating a confusing mix of disbelief, anger, and sadness.
During relational traumas, your brain is taking in information that directly contradicts your assumptions about yourself, your relationships, and your place in them. This reconfiguring of assumptions might sound like, “I thought I knew you, but now I don’t know. I thought we were happy, but now I don’t know.”
When you became aware of your partner’s betrayal, you instantly moved from a state of relative safety, connection, and unity to a state of fragmentation, fear, shame, and powerlessness.
Betrayal trauma symptoms vs. PTSD
If you’re impacted by betrayal trauma, you may experience symptoms that mimic Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). This includes problems with mood, emotional regulation and attention, interruption of eating and sleeping patterns, changes in perception of the self and the betrayer, flashbacks, rumination, paranoia, and other intrusive thoughts (Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 1992).
Freyd explains that in traditional PTSD, for example, trauma resulting from a terrible car accident or shooting, pathological fear during the event is what drives later trauma symptoms. In betrayal trauma, symptoms and behaviors are driven not by pathological fear but instead by attachment injuries and significant relationship disconnection. The disconnection is a result of the betrayal of trust by someone you are dependent on in meaningful ways, like in the case of children experiencing abuse from their primary caregivers.
If you’re experiencing betrayal trauma, you may disconnect from the reality of the betrayal or your feelings about it to avoid losing someone you depend on. Freyd coined this phenomenon as betrayal blindness, which we’ll discuss later. First, let’s explore the attachment injury at the heart of betrayal trauma more deeply.
Betrayal’s attachment injury
Attachments give us a feeling of safety and security, helping us feel protected mentally and physically. The way we form attachments is shaped by biological, social, and psychological factors, and this doesn’t change just because we become more independent from our parents. Research shows that in long-term relationships, we bond and intertwine our lives so profoundly that our new primary attachment figure can regulate our blood pressure, heart rate, breathing, and hormone levels (Attached, Levine and Heller).
John Bowlby’s theory of attachment states that each person has an attachment style that reflects how securely or insecurely we are attached to our parents as children and whether we felt we could rely on them during times of distress and need. We each have core attachment needs and relational desires, but we developed unique styles of seeking closeness to our partners and coping with relational disconnection. Different attachment styles shape each person’s experience of betrayal.
Attachment ambivalence
Betrayal is one of the most significant relational threats we can experience, so it’s no wonder our attachment systems come online when we discover cheating. Its impact on the system is called attachment ambivalence. With attachment ambivalence, we feel at war with ourselves. The person we love and trust—who can help regulate our body’s blood pressure and heart rate—is the same person who caused the distress and disconnection and who we now feel unsafe around.
Our response to betrayal is primal and not rational. Our attachment system says, “If you are distressed, reach out to your partner to restore connection and your sense of well-being.” Suddenly, though, you notice a sense of dread. Our threat-response system has turned on. It says, “You’re not safe, fight or run away from the danger.” This cycle of ambivalence is extremely confusing and dysregulating. Often, the betrayed partner feels crazy, ashamed, and as if they can’t trust themselves or their instincts.
Betrayal’s emotional and psychological injuries
The cycle of attachment ambivalence is not the only injury that causes a betrayed partner to feel crazy and at war with themselves. Gaslighting and betrayal blindness can also cause deeply negative impacts on the betrayed partner.
Betrayal trauma and gaslighting
Often, the betraying partner has engaged in copious lying and gaslighting behaviors to hide their infidelity. These behaviors leave the betrayed partner questioning their five senses, instincts, memory, perception, and judgment.
For many partners, the impacts of hiding the infidelity are just as painful as the betrayal, sometimes even more so. In these cases, the betrayed partner is not experiencing post-traumatic stress but is still mid-trauma — in the middle of an unfolding nightmare that seemingly has no end. Omar Minwalla, PsyD, an expert in sexual health, even categorizes these psychological manipulation tactics and deceptive sexual behaviors, including infidelity, sex addiction, and compulsive sexual behavior, as forms of intimate partner violence.
The effects of gaslighting are layered and challenging to break free from, and it’s essential to seek professional support to explore how to regain trust in your instincts and confidence in setting boundaries. Lying and gaslighting disempower the betrayed partner and rob them of the right to choose the relationship they want to be in. It also creates a lot of shame for the betrayed partner who believed their partner’s lies – called “carried shame.” To heal, you have to release carried shame, acknowledging that the betrayer behaved badly, not you.
Betrayal blindness
Another typical response to lying and gaslighting is Freyd’s “betrayal blindness.” Often, because of our biopsychosocial and sometimes literal dependence on the betraying partner, it feels unbearable to cope with our loss of connection. Thus, the attachment-driven survival strategy of numbness, avoidance, and dissociation from truth becomes the next best option. Put simply; it’s much easier for your brain to deny or ignore the betrayal than to face the uncomfortable truth that you are not as safe as you believed in the hands of the partner you love.
Betrayal blindness may not involve disbelieving that a betrayal occurred but rather minimizing its extent: “Well, they said it was just one time.” It may mean minimizing the reasoning for betrayal: “They said it didn’t mean anything.” It could even mean that you simply detach from your true emotions about how much the betrayal impacts you: “They said they need me to move forward with them, so I stopped bringing it up.”
It’s crucial to practice compassion for yourself and understand that your primal attachment system is activated. Your response to the betrayal is meant to be adaptive and protective against something that feels even more distressing.
Betrayal’s sexual injury
Finally, we must seek to understand the impact of betrayal on an individual’s and couple’s sexuality, which is highly influenced by attachment and emotional and/or psychological injuries. Sex is just as much about pleasure and procreation as it is about our core desires for bonding, belonging, and significance. In long-term, committed relationships, sex is linked to our deepest attachment needs to feel desired, wanted, known, loved, accepted, connected, noticed, and important. These emotional states are foundational to our sense of identity. When we are desired, we are desirable and accepted.
When we connect sexually and feel affirmed, we feel a sense of warmth and well-being. Thus, it can feel like a devastating blow when you discover your partner has cheated and had some of their core needs met outside your relationship. It is a deep loss of our sense of safety, belonging, and significance. The loss of these core needs can force the betrayed partner into a traumatized state of questioning why they weren’t enough, comparison to the affair partner(s), carried shame around sexual functioning, libido, sexual self-esteem, and body image.
Many betrayed partners describe shared experiences after sexual betrayal trauma. These include avoiding or being afraid of sex, seeing sex as an obligation, feeling anger, disgust, or guilt with touch, difficulty becoming aroused, lack of sexual desire, or not feeling present during sex. Others may even experience intrusive thoughts and images during sex or notice pain or orgasmic difficulties with sex.
Betrayal trauma treatment
In her book The Betrayal Bind, Michelle Mays, clinical counselor and certified sex addiction therapist, states, “If relational trauma happens in a relationship, then it makes sense that our healing and restoration must also happen in relationship with others and with ourselves.” As we’ve explored, betrayal trauma is incredibly complex. As you embark on your journey toward healing, consider doing so with the help of those you trust.
We offer a betrayal support group for women and individual therapy with availability for in-person sessions at our Charlotte, NC office or virtual sessions for residents of NC and SC. Both the betrayal support group and individual therapy offer a safe and supportive space for individuals who have experienced the devastating impact of infidelity.
Our Beyond Betrayal programs are designed for betrayed partners seeking guidance, understanding, and healing. Through shared experiences, insights, and evidence-based strategies, our therapists help participants find solace, validation, and practical tools to foster personal growth and resilience.