The Trauma of Betrayal & Infidelity
Can broken trust be restored?
“Sit down. I’ve got to tell you something…” What follows might be your worst nightmare as your spouse confesses their betrayal and infidelity.
Matthew and Joanna Raabsmith have lived through this themselves, and work with couples who are trying to rebuild their relationship after trust has been shattered. They are clinicians, speakers, and authors of the book Building True Intimacy: Creating a Connection that Stands the Test of Time. Together, they have over 20 years of combined experience in counseling, coaching, and guiding couples toward healing and transformation.
When you listen to this episode of our ongoing series, Surviving and Thriving After Trauma, you’ll better understand what happens when betrayal is discovered, what couples’ ongoing counseling sessions look like, signs of growth (or lack of growth), and how to know when trust is being restored.
Topics of discussion with Matthew & Joanna:
Their own story of betrayal and healing
How betrayal affects a relationship
What kind of counseling is needed after betrayal
Healthy signs that a relationship is healing
Austin’s Conversation with Matthew & Joanna
Austin: Today we’ve invited Matthew & Joanna Raabsmith to talk about healing from betrayal. Matthew is a Professional Certified Coach (ICF) with a background in pastoral leadership and Joanna is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and EMDR practitioner. They both have Master of Divinity degrees and have served together on multiple church leadership teams. Currently, they co-lead their private practice, The Raabsmith Team, where they specialize in helping couples rebuild connection, trust, and intimacy.
Hi, Matthew & Joanna! Can you share a little bit about yourselves with our listeners?
Joanna: Thank you, we’re very excited to be here! We've been married for 15 years now. Right from the beginning, we were really passionate and excited about our relationship. We felt a calling to help marriages early on. We didn’t know what form that would take, but we always felt that call.
Matthew: We knew we wanted a good relationship, but we had no idea how to make that happen. We bought books, went to conferences, and made a lot of progress, but there was always an underlying issue standing in our way. Joanna didn’t know what it was, but I did – a decades-long struggle with pornography and sex addiction that I had kept hidden. When it finally came out, everything changed.
Joanna: Once we started helping couples in general, naturally we would get couples who were dealing with betrayal. Being able to help them after putting in all the hard work and time and effort into our own relationship was a gift. God gave us a calling. I can’t imagine doing anything else.
Austin: We are so glad you’re here to talk about this. For our discussion today, I thought we could take a chronological approach to betrayal and trauma. Starting right at the beginning, what have you seen happen to the person who’s been betrayed, or have found out there is infidelity in their relationship?
Joanna: It really is a trauma, right? That’s why we call it betrayal trauma. When you find out that the person you have been open and vulnerable with, the person you have been building a relationship with, has been withholding their true selves the whole time, it’s incredibly painful and scary.
Trauma changes the way you see yourself and the way you experience the world. Many partners have an identity crisis because what they understood about themselves was in the context of the relationship.
Austin: Do they ask themselves questions like, “How could I have let this happen?” or “Why couldn’t I have seen the signs?” or “What’s wrong with me?”
Joanna: Yes, many partners have those thoughts and feelings. They also wonder, “Am I not worth it? Am I not enough?” And they have other thoughts like “Can I protect myself?” and “Am I safe?” They also wonder who their partner really is – they thought they knew them, and now they feel like they don’t know them at all. They don’t know their story with this person, their relationship timeline. It’s extremely unsettling and creates a ton of insecurity for the betrayed spouse.
The other thing about betrayal is that even when the spouse finds out about it, they don’t know the full story. They only know a tiny bit and they realize there’s a lot they don’t know. That is extremely traumatic, just knowing that there’s more they don’t know. So that person doesn’t know if their world is safe anymore and so they have a fight or flight response.
Austin: How do people generally respond in this situation?
Matthew: When people are dealing with betrayal trauma, we see a lot of hypervigilance, which means they will consume information on betrayal, or they will start becoming an expert on sexual addiction or whatever it is their partner is struggling with. They start caretaking their partner, monitoring them and checking up on them. That behavior is safety-seeking. They’re trying to regain control of their reality.
Austin: Do they become angry? Is there a temptation to get revenge?
Joanna: We see a lot less of that than you would think. Most partners don’t want it to be true. They’ve shoved down the gut sense for a long time that something is going on. Maybe they’ve even asked about it and their spouse has denied it, and they would rather believe the lie than believe the reality that their partner is cheating on them or keeping a toxic secret.
Austin: Is there a reason that the lie is more comforting?
Joanna: Because we crave intimacy and connection. Secure attachment is one of the main things we need to thrive as individuals. That’s why betrayal is so traumatic – it severs the secure attachments that is one of the foundational needs of a human being to live and thrive in the world. People would rather deny their reality, their instincts, than give up the illusion of secure connection.
Matthew: If we do see anger, it’s usually for a different reason. It’s not retaliatory anger, it’s controlling anger. They stay angry because they don’t want their partner to forget how hurt they are.
All of us have had trauma of some kind, but most trauma happens in relationships we’re no longer part of intimately. But in a relationship, when you’ve been betrayed, you have to wake up every day to that person and see them and be reminded what they’ve done. A lot of the anger is trying to control the person to try and stay safe, but that ends up limiting that person’s healing. The more you’re focused on the other person, the less you’re able to heal.
Austin: One of the things I look for in couples where there’s been some kind of betrayal is anger. If I don’t see it, it means someone is not being completely honest. Because there should be some righteous anger. That’s natural and a good, healthy response to infidelity or betrayal.
Have you seen differences between men and women in terms of impact when they're betrayed, or do they have similar responses?
Matthew: There is a baseline human nature response to betrayal because everyone, male or female, requires and thrives on secure connections. So when that is broken, that is incredibly wounding.
One of the differences we often see is that when the man is the betraying partner, it’s usually with something that’s brought into the relationship. A history with early sexual exposure, maybe they were sexually abused, they struggle with pornography or other sexual addictions. Those sexual struggles were present before the relationship began. They’re hiding their history. They have been hiding throughout their lives in some form or fashion, and it continues in the relationship.
With women, betrayal occurs within the relationship. It’s not a pattern that’s brought in. As porn has been more readily available, more women are using it, but that starts after the relationship and is usually a reaction to a breakdown within the relationship. That may change how you deal with it in counseling. But the impact is still there.
Joanna: In our culture, men often have more power than women, so if the woman has been the one who is betrayed, we need to be alert for any kind of abuse that’s happening within the relationship.
Austin: Those are all such important things to keep in mind when dealing with these situations. So let’s talk about a counseling session. What is it like when you’re meeting with a couple for the first time?
Matthew: The first session is very hard. We get calls from people who found out two days ago, or someone who found out two years ago and they either buried it or did some type of work on it but haven’t found healing. So there’s a difference for us in terms of where the couple is.
If this betrayal is brand new, one of the first things we ask them is, what are you committed to? Even if you’re not committed to each other, are you committed to the process of healing? We tell the betrayed partner that if they’re not ready to commit to the partner that betrayed them, that’s fine. We take that off the table. But if they are willing to commit to the process, we can work with that.
Austin: What kinds of things are people dealing with? Can you share some specifics?
Matthew: Sexual addiction can run the gamut of so many different things. People spend thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars on their addiction, or have multiple affair partners over decades. There are couples who seem to recover from betrayal only to have it happen again years later. But even those couples can be restored.
Joanna: One of the early steps in the process is called a therapeutic full disclosure. The spouse who has betrayed the relationship writes a full sexual history inventory, including before and during the relationship along with any lies or deception. We help a couple prepare and walk through that document. For most partners, this is probably the worst day of their life at that point.
Austin: How does that help? Sounds terrible for both sides.
Joanna: It does sound terrible, but it's healing for both sides. Remember we talked about that D-Day when the spouse discovered the betrayal, there was so much they still didn’t know. That’s so traumatic. Your brain has to fill in the gaps, and it fills in the gaps with the worst possibilities.
One of the ways for the betrayed partner to heal is to know exactly what has happened. They can't fully forgive their partner if they don't know what they’re forgiving.
Matthew: In these situations, there are usually two traumatized individuals: the person who was traumatized by the betrayal, and the other partner who was traumatized earlier in life and has coped with the trauma through addiction and sexual sin. They've stayed traumatized by hiding their pain.
The full disclosure process lets this partner deal with their own trauma instead of burying it. They get to see the reality of how far they have strayed from their core values. It also gives them a chance to be chosen by someone who knows their full history.
Austin: What are some tangible signs that show you that a couple is on the path towards healing? Conversely, what are some signs that the couple is on the wrong path?
Matthew: A good sign is when the spouse who had committed the betrayal is taking a leadership role in the healing of the relationship. Not leadership in dictating what happens, but taking responsibility for themselves and figuring out what the relationship needs. That creates space for the betrayed spouse to address their own healing.
On the flip side, when the betraying spouse forgets to do things and doesn’t keep their promises, the other spouse will begin to feel hopeless. And if the betraying spouse is impatient for their spouse to heal, if they’re asking, “When are you going to feel better?” or “When will things go back to normal?”, that’s a sign that they don’t see recovery as salvation. They see recovery as penance. And penance may get you out of hell, but it doesn’t bring life.
Joanna: The biggest shift we see in couples is when the betraying spouse can stay emotionally regulated in the presence of the pain that they have caused and make space for their betrayed spouse to be vulnerable. That’s the beginning of the journey towards trust, then honesty, then intimacy.
Matthew: The betrayed spouse has to know that they can share their pain with their partner. The betraying spouse might start to feel that they’re a monster, that they’re defective and broken. They need to remind themselves that they are loved by God and are capable of loving well. Then they can look at their partner and say, given what I’ve done in our relationship, knowing what you’ve gone through, it makes sense for you to feel that way.
Austin: Are there ways that the Christian community can support couples going through this?
Matthew: It can be encouraging to let a couple know, “We see how hard this is.” Recovery from betrayal is almost a full-time job. Couples are spending hours every week in counseling, writing full disclosures, working up boundaries. Bringing a meal or offering to watch the kids is super helpful.
Austin: What good signs do you see in couples who are nearing the end of the recovery phase?
Matthew: They follow a process; it starts with reestablishing honesty, then safety, then trust. If they focus on honesty, they become radically transparent and then safety and trust come naturally. I tell the guys I work with: “Your goal is not to be trusted. It's to be trustworthy.”
Joanna: You can tell it’s going well when the betrayed spouse is moving back into relational aspects. There are differences that are telling them it's safe to re-enter the relationship. Many couples think that once there has been healing, they never have to talk about the past again. It’s actually the opposite! You are ready to move forward when there is no fear in talking about the past together.
Many couples think that once there has been healing, they never have to talk about the past again. It’s actually the opposite! You are ready to move forward when there is no fear in talking about the past together.
Matthew: I learned in the journey of recovery that I don't always see God's healing as good from the outside. Many times Jesus had to ask someone if they want to be healed. God had been asking me that question my whole life: Do you want to be healed? I kept telling him no, because what he was inviting me into was scary. It was vulnerable. Even now, God is still asking me, “Are you ready for more healing?” And I need to remind myself that it’s going to be good.
Joanna: We like to say that recovery is a marathon, not a sprint. If you're expecting to be out of that wilderness next week or even next month then you're going to be really disappointed. Having appropriate expectations for the healing timeline is so important. We don't want couples to get stuck and not have any movement forward, but being willing to do the daily work required to heal and do it consistently over months and years will bring healing.
Austin: I'm so glad to have this conversation and I hope we can talk again. Take care, Matthew and Joanna, thanks for being with us.
Matthew: Thanks so much!
Listen to Austin’s entire conversation with the Raabsmiths:
Resources:
Building True Intimacy: Creating a Connection That Stands the Test of Time by Matthew & Joanna Raabsmith