Healing After Betrayal: When Trust Was Broken

Betrayal during a marriage can make you question your own mind, your memories, and your ability to trust what’s right in front of you. If infidelity, lying, hiding, or a double life showed up in your marriage this episode can be your next step in your divorce healing journey.

This is the second episode in the Ex-Files where I'm talking about why betrayal pain feels so different from “normal” breakup grief, and why your brain may keep reaching into the past to re-check old moments for clues. I share the validation so many women need to hear: being deceived is not evidence you’re naive, broken, or unlovable. I explain concepts like betrayal trauma and betrayal blindness, and how intrusive thoughts, hypervigilance, and sleepless nights can be a documented nervous system response, not a personal failure.

From there, I get practical. I walk you through how to rebuild self-trust after betrayal by separating facts from the story your brain layers on top, grieving the reality you thought you were living in, and setting boundaries with rumination so you’re not trapped in the 2 a.m. timeline replay. You’ll also learn grounding tools you can use immediately and a simple approach to rebuilding confidence through small daily decisions that honor your intuition.

If you’re ready to stop outsourcing closure and start coming home to yourself, press play. Subscribe, share this with a friend who needs it, and leave a quick rating or review so more women can find support when betrayal turns their world upside down.

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DISCLAIMER: THE COMMENTARY AND OPINIONS AVAILABLE ON THIS PODCAST ARE FOR EDUCATIONAL, INFORMATIONAL AND ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY AND ARE NOT FOR THE PURPOSE OF PROVIDING PSYCHOLOGICAL, COUNSELING OR PROFESSIONAL HEALTHCARE ADVICE. 

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Transcript

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Welcome And Who This Helps

Karin Nelson 0:00

Welcome to Becoming You Again. This is the podcast for divorcing and divorced women who want to come home to themselves after years of self-abandonment. I'm your host, Karin Nelson. I'm a divorce coach. I love helping women learn to trust themselves again, learn to reclaim their identity and build lives that actually feel like theirs. This is the second episode in my Ex-Files series where I'm going to be talking about betrayal in your marriage. Let's get started. Welcome to Becoming You Again, the podcast where you learn to step into your power as a woman in this world, where you learn to reconnect to your wholeness, your integrity, and bring into alignment your brain, your body, and your intuition after divorce. This is the podcast where you learn to trust yourself again and move forward toward a life that you truly want. You are listening to Becoming You Again, and I am your host, Karin Nelson. Welcome back to the podcast. So we are back in the Ex-File series. So last week we talked about what happens when your ex moves on. And today I'm going to go in a little bit maybe of a deeper direction or a different direction.

What Betrayal Really Changes

Karin Nelson 1:14

And I just want you to know this episode is not for everyone. Because I don't think everyone has experienced betrayal in their marriage. So if that doesn't fit your story, come back next week for the next episode. But if it does, this one is specifically for women whose divorce includes that idea of feeling betrayed through infidelity, lying, hiding things, some kind of double life that you didn't know you were taking part of. I definitely think that there will be tools that I offer that can be used in anyone's experience, whether you've had betrayal in your marriage or not. But again, if this doesn't fit your story, come back next week. It's okay. Not everything has to be for everyone, right? Okay, so here is what I know to be true. If betrayal was part of your marriage, your healing probably has an extra layer that some divorce device, some divorce advice doesn't even really touch because betrayal kind of go moves beyond that layer of heartbreak. Heartbreak is like just losing someone when we're sad over the breakup of a relationship, or we're sad because someone has passed on, right? Betrayal is finding out that the reality that you thought you were living in wasn't necessarily all real or wasn't what you thought it was. And that can feel different as you go through the healing process. So today, my my goal is to just help you understand it a little bit better, to help you as you move through your healing process.

Validation And Her Betrayal Story

Karin Nelson 3:02

Before we go any further into this episode, though, I want to offer some validation because I want to say this just so that you have an understanding. Being deceived, being lied to, it is not evidence that you are naive in some way. It is not evidence that there's something wrong with you, that you're stupid, that you're broken, that you're unlovable. It's not evidence that you should have seen it coming or you should have known. I don't care how long you were together, I don't care how many signs you think you should have caught or seen in the moment, you did not cause someone else's choice to lie to you. Like for me personally, I talk about this on the pod. You guys, most of you, if you listen to my podcast or many of the episodes, you already know my story, right? Because I've talked about it before, but you know that I found out my husband, he was my husband at the time, that he was cheating on me. He didn't tell me. I found the evidence. I found the pictures of them together, I found the messages back and forth, and he didn't know that I knew yet. And this was information that I held like close to my chest for weeks because I wasn't even sure what I wanted to do with it. When I first found out, I was in major shock. I I had no idea. I was sick to my stomach, I was confused, I was sad, I was angry, I was scared, I felt rejected, I felt stupid. I felt so many things, so many things. And so, like, I understand this idea of feeling deceived, feeling lied to, feeling like the reality of what I thought my life was wasn't actually the case. And and trying to understand what that means. I've felt that, I've been through it, I understand it. So I want to talk about like why this specific kind of pain of betrayal feels different from other kinds of divorce pain, like grief, like sadness, those kinds of things.

How Betrayal Rewrites Your Past

Karin Nelson 5:09

Betrayal, what our brain does when we have that information is it actually tries to go back in time and rewrite or decide what you thought was true when it was happening in the moment. So let me give you an example. Let's say you had gone on vacation, maybe a year ago, maybe two years ago, maybe a few months ago, before you knew about the lying and the cheating, all that. So you go back to those memories of the vacation and you thought that you they were happy memories. But now you're like, you start to question well, was it actually happy? Like when he was texting for work, was he actually texting for work or was he texting this other woman? Right? Or you go back to like the Tuesday before, before you knew, and you remember it just as like a typical, boring, fine night at home as the family. But now you're wondering, you're sitting there and you're wondering, well, was that actually just a typical boring night? Was that what's what was actually happening? Or when he was on his laptop while we were all watching TV in the same room together, was he messaging her or was he catching up on emails like he said he was, or was he just lying to me the whole time, right? So it doesn't betrayal when you find out about the lies and the cheating and all this, it doesn't just take your present and your future of what you know to be happening and what you think is going to happen now. What it does is it reaches backwards into the past and it puts a question mark over everything that has happened in the past. And that is why this betrayal thing feels so much bigger than just a breakup. Because it's not just grief, it is like this sense of your whole reality previous to this being shook up, being shaken up. Shook or shaken, not sure. I don't know, but take it however.

Betrayal Trauma And PTSD Symptoms

Karin Nelson 7:11

You know what I mean, right? So there's a researcher named Jennifer Freyd, I think that's how you say it. It's F-R-E-Y-D, Freid, who has studied this for decades. She calls it betrayal trauma, and she makes an important distinction between this. Like she says, betrayal by someone you depended on for safety and closeness hits the nervous system differently than a threat from a stranger ever could, precisely because you needed them to be safe. So you believed these people were creating a sense of safety for you because you know them, you're with them, right? You live with them, you trust them. And so it feels different, it feels more heavy or harder when that betrayal comes from that person. And then clinicians who work with betrayal describe the aftermath in almost identical language to trauma recovery. We have intrusive thoughts, we're playing replaying the discovery of what happened over and over. There's hypervigilance, there's trouble sleeping, you have a nervous system that's constantly heightened, that is you have a trouble realigning it, right? Like some research on betrayal partners puts the number of experiencing PTSD level symptoms as high as 30 to 60 percent. So if you felt like you were spiraling, like you couldn't stop replaying the timeline at two in the morning, like your body would not calm down even months later, that is not you overreacting. That is like, that is a very documented response that is very common. And your body is doing exactly what it knows what to do in this kind of experience.

Self-Blame And Why It Stalls Healing

Karin Nelson 8:43

So I want to move into when we start to question ourselves and we start to kind of take the blame on to ourselves, which very often happens when there is this type of like lying and cheating and betrayal going on. We will start to question how did I not see it? What is wrong with my judging judgment that I miss this? Am I someone who can't trust the reality that's going on around me? Can I not like read the room? Can I not see things accurately or for what they are? Or how could I be so stupid not to see the signs? We will, we as women, we do this. We will blame ourselves for things that are absolutely not our responsibility to take the blame for. And what happens is when we do this, it keeps us stuck because it's not really questioning him anymore. It is self-judgment, and we are piling it on ourselves, and that is what is stopping you from actually being able to move into a healing process and being able to move forward in your life, what toward whatever direction that looks like for you, right? And so, what we need to do is we need to widen our lens about what is really going on and then break things down from there. And this is what I do with my clients. We very often have to like widen or tighten the lens depending on the situation. And so that's what I mean by we're gonna like widen our lens of what we're looking at, and I'm gonna kind of walk you through this.

Deception And Betrayal Blindness

Karin Nelson 10:17

So, first, deception, it is designed to not be seen. That is literally what it is, right? So the person who is actively hiding something is by definition working really hard to make sure that you don't see it. So you're not a failed detective for not catching your husband in his own game of deception. Like the perception was not yours to have. It was his choice to build something specifically and hide something specifically so that you wouldn't see it. The second thing that I want to point out is there's something researchers call betrayal blindness. And this I can look back, and I absolutely had betrayal blindness when I was going through my marriage. Is basically this idea that someone that we depend on for our safety and security and all those things that we depend on our partner to be, right, is the source of that threat. Our mind actually protects us by not fully registering it. Because fully registering it in the moment can threaten our need for our own stability, our own safety. So this isn't weakness. This is actually just your brain trying to keep you safe, right? It is trying to keep you being able to continue to function, to be able to parent, to be able to work, to be able to go about your day-to-day life and survive. All it means is that you didn't let yourself fully see it. Your brain didn't let yourself fully see it because your brain and your nervous system were trying to protect you and this structure that you have that is your life that you're living in. The third thing that I want to point out is that hindsight can be a liar. Like often, and I've said this before on the podcast, hindsight is 2020, maybe and maybe not, right? Like looking back with everything we know now, of course, things look obvious. Of course they do. Because we have information now that we did not have back then. So you are sitting here now in the present and you are judging everything that happened in your past with evidence that we have now. Not evidence that we had then, evidence that we have now. And so, like this judgment process is flawed. It's broken. You were missing information back then that someone was deliberately withholding from you. That does not make you stupid. Okay. I really want to cement that in. That does not make you stupid or mean that you were missing things. Yes, you were missing information that someone purposefully did not tell you about. Okay. So let's move into the next steps of healing.

Stop Waiting For Answers

Karin Nelson 13:02

Many women get stuck on this idea of waiting for their partner to give them something in order to be able to heal. So that could look like tell me exactly why. Why did you do this? Tell me everything that happened, give me the complete timeline, give me the full open reason of why you chose to do this, why you betrayed me, all of that, or maybe even just like an apology. An apology where it sounds like he actually means it, or there's remorse that proves that he understands that what he did was wrong or bad, or take accountability for his actions, or anything along those lines. We think we need those things to be able to. There's my kitty, he's saying good morning, um, to be able to heal and move forward. And I want you to know you do not need those things. You do not need any of those things to heal. Yes, it would be nice. Yes, of course. It would be amazing. Like, of course, it would be amazing if they could be completely, completely honest, right? Like, we deserve those things. Not saying you don't deserve those things, you do. But it is not essential to your healing process. Because if you are sitting here and you are waiting for their willingness to be honest, for their willingness to have a capacity for remorse or a readiness to tell the whole story, or ability to take accountability and to own up for the way that they lied and cheated. Like if you're waiting for those things, or even the apology, right? If you're waiting for those things to be able to allow yourself to recover, your healing, you basically what you're doing is you are giving your healing process over to him and saying, okay, I'm gonna give this to you to protect and make sure it happens. And I can't do it until those things you come through on your end. That doesn't make any sense. We're not doing that. We have been taught that closure has to come from the other the other person, but it absolutely does not. Closure is something that you build on your own, it is not something that someone hands to you, and you don't want to put something that um important in their hands in the first place because we already know we can't trust them fully, right? So we are not gonna trust them with that either. We are going to take our own control of closure for ourselves so that we can create and build on that for ourselves. So I want to talk about what build rebuilding the ground of trust for yourself actually looks like.

Rebuilding Self-Trust With Facts

Karin Nelson 15:47

Because it is not trust in the other person, it is being able to trust your own perception and being able to trust your own judgment and being able to feel like you can read your own reality. How do we do that? We separate facts from story. This is a practice that I talked about in the previous podcast episode. I've talked about it in many other podcast episodes, is what I do with my clients when we're working one-on-one. But it's really powerful here because the facts are what actually happened, what you actually know and what's objectively true. And then the story is all of the meaning that we layer on top of it. It's the story of like telling yourself, well, I'm such a fool, I'm so stupid, I should have known, I can't trust myself again. I'm never gonna be able to trust anyone else. Like, and so when what we do is we take the whole thing, the whole thoughts, all of the thoughts that we have about the affair or the cheating or the lying or the betrayal, and we get it out on paper. So if you want to do this practice, please sit down and do it. Get it out all on paper. And then what I want you to do is I want you to go through and I want you to circle the facts, the objective truths. And then you underline anything else that is story, that is meaning, that is what your brain is making up to fit and explain what has happened. Explain the facts because it is that story that is creating so much suffering on top of what, on top of the pain that you're already feeling. So again, remember, when you do this, the facts are what happened. The story is the meaning that you are making about it. And they are very different things. The next thing you want to, I want you to do is I want you to give permission. I

Grief And Rumination Boundaries

Karin Nelson 17:31

want you to give yourself permission to grieve the reality that you thought you were living in, not just the relationship, right? You're not just grieving him, you're not just grieving your marriage or whatever. You are grieving the version of your life that you truly believed was true while you were living in it. That's a real loss, and it deserves real grief and real like processing through that grief. Number three, I want you to set a boundary with your own rumination. This one can feel really hard, but I do think it really matters. Like replaying the timeline once, twice, even a couple of times, trying to make sense of it, that is normal. That's part of, that's possibly part of your healing process. But replaying it every night at 2 a.m. for the 400th time, that is when your nervous system is stuck in a loop and it is not helping anything. So when you notice yourself spinning, I want you to be aware enough, if you can, right? This is all a process. We're not asking for perfection in any of this, but if you can, pull yourself out of it for a second and do a grounding process or and do a grounding practice or a somatic process to bring yourself back into your body and into the present moment. With rumination specifically, looking for patterns around you can be really, really helpful. So, like in my office right now, I could look for rectangles. I've got these French doors. I have two sets of French doors in my office, and their window panes are rectangles. So I could be like, there's the rectangle, there's a another rectangle. I have a cat tree that there's another rectangle. I have some drawers on a chest against the wall, there's another rectangle. So, like those types of tools can help pull you out of the rumination loop and can keep you from continuing to like look for more new information in terms of how did I not see this? So you can set a boundary for yourself in that way. Um, another one that can work really well, especially in the middle of the night when our brain is tired and when we're kind of at our most vulnerable because it's harder to manage our brain when we're tired, can be the 54321 exercise, which is basically you just name five things you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear, two things you smell, and one thing you can taste. And then

Grounding Tools And Self-Compassion

Karin Nelson 20:00

as you're doing it, you just remind yourself in this moment, in this moment I'm safe. You just remind your nervous system and your brain, like I'm safe in this moment and I can, I can be present with these things. And then I want you to like lean into self-compassion, especially when your brain keeps going back to how did I not see this? Right. You didn't see it because you trusted someone that you loved, and there is not a flaw in that. That's what I want you to say to yourself. I trusted this person, I loved them. There's not a flaw there. Like, that's not a bad thing. Okay. So that's where the self-compassion, that's I want you to like lean into that, step away from the self-criticism because judging yourself is actually what is creating all of that suffering that you're feeling. Doesn't mean you're not going to feel sad, doesn't mean you're not gonna feel the grief, like we just talked about. Those things are part of the healing process, but the suffering is like the judgment of you're the worst. I can't believe that you didn't see this. How could you stay in this relationship this long? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All of that is creating an extra layer of suffering that is so unnecessary. So step into some self-compassion, because that will really do a lot of good in terms of taking away a layer of the pain that you are feeling.

Daily Self-Trust And Closing

Karin Nelson 21:17

And then the last thing that I want you to focus on is just learning to rebuild trust in yourself, in your judgment. This happens through small day, daily decisions and not continuing to relitigate the past, right? This is kind of that rumination of stepping out of that rumination. So every time you make a decision today, follow through on it. Every time you notice a red flag in real time, act on it. Listen to your intuition, listen to what your gut is telling you and honor it. Those are ways that we create self-trust in ourselves and we trust that our judgment actually is there and can work. All right, that is what I have for you today. I want you to remember that next week I've got my next episode in three Ex-Files series where I'm going to be talking about emotional detachment 2.0. This is going to be a deeper, more updated version of the previous emotional detachment episode, which is the most downloaded episode in this podcast's history. So make sure and come back for that one because I think you're going to get a lot of great information out of it. And I really hope that this podcast has been helpful for anyone who has gone through some kind of betrayal in their marriage. Thank you so much for being here. I love you all. You are all amazing. I will be back next week. Hi, friend. I'm so glad you're here and thanks for listening. I wanted to let you know that if you're wanting more, a way to make deeper, more lasting change, then working one-on-one with me as your coach may be exactly what you need. Together, we'll take everything you're learning in the podcast and implement it in your life with weekly coaching, real life practice, and practical guidance. To learn more about how to work with me one-on-one, go to Karin Nelson Coaching.com. That's www.karin, N-E-L-S-O-N coaching.com. Thanks for listening. If this podcast agreed with you in any way, please take a minute to follow and give me a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. And for more details about how I can help you live an even better life than when you were married, make sure and check out the full show notes by clicking the link in the description.