Overcome the Impacts of Betrayal Trauma with Support
Betrayal trauma is a specific type of psychological trauma that occurs when someone is betrayed by a trusted individual or institution. For example, you could have been betrayed by a romantic partner, friend, or family member. Sometimes, people facing betrayal trauma have experienced betrayal multiple times.
If you have arrived at our resource, you know how difficult this can be.
Betrayal trauma can lead to intense emotional distress, especially when triggers arise. Betrayal can impact your ability to trust others, maintain healthy relationships, and feel calm and secure in daily life. It can impact self-perception. That said, you can recover from the impacts of betrayal trauma. Often, the healing process is multi-step with various components.
First, let’s discuss steps you can take toward betrayal trauma recovery and why they matter. Then, we’ll talk about the role of professional support at Catalina Behavioral Health for our trauma clients and gain a better understanding of betrayal trauma theory. Finally, we will look at the possible symptoms of betrayal trauma, and what rebuilding and moving forward might look like long-term.
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A 5-Step Process for Betrayal Trauma Recovery
If you’ve experienced betrayal trauma, you can meet people you trust, create a life you love, and trust yourself. Here’s a step-by-step guide you can use to approach betrayal trauma boundaries and achieve recovery effectively.
1) Acknowledging the Pain and Breaking the Silence
It can be hard to accept that you were hurt, judgment-free, and without self-blame. Acknowledging your pain is the first step toward healing. It requires recognizing the betrayal you experienced and its impact on your mental health, including your ability to trust. It’s okay to acknowledge that you were hurt without qualifying the situation, protecting the other person, or blaming yourself.
Breaking the silence can be difficult, but it’s essential for seeking emotional support and professional help. This can look like opening up to a therapist, another provider, or support groups. It’s vital that you have a place to turn and talk about what happened and how it’s impacted you.
2) Coping Skills for Betrayal Trauma Triggers
Coping with trauma and even more for those recovering from trauma bonding requires developing healthy coping strategies, such as mindfulness, journaling, and creative expression. A therapist, psychologist, or counselor can provide individualized guidance on coping with trauma and help you find strategies that work for you.
3) Building a Support Network
Forming a support network of trusted friends, family, and other individuals or loved ones can support your healing journey. It’s important to find people your nervous system feels safe and secure around. Creating a support network can help you feel less isolated and more connected to the world around you.
4) Cultivating Self-Compassion and Resilience
Cultivating self-compassion is essential for rebuilding and moving forward after experiencing betrayal trauma. This involves practicing self-kindness, recognizing strengths, and developing a positive inner voice or working on positive self-talk. Self-compassion is connected to resilience in research, among other benefits.
Self-compassion and resilience can help you navigate challenging situations and build healthy relationships. Compassion toward yourself can increase self-worth and the ability to talk yourself through situations or problem-solve.
5) The Ongoing and Essential Importance of Self-Care
Self-care is essential for healing and growth after experiencing betrayal trauma. It involves prioritizing physical and emotional well-being, including engaging in activities you enjoy or that help you relax or self-soothe. Self-care can take many different forms.
Examples of self-care habits you can use to support yourself through trauma healing include but aren’t limited to the following:
- Good sleep habits (getting enough sleep, proper sleep hygiene before bed).
- Making time for fulfilling hobbies.
- Eating regular meals and snacks.
- Physical activity.
- Setting boundaries.
Some trauma survivors have difficulty with self-care, even in recovery from trauma. You might also find it tough to establish self-compassion or take other steps toward healing on your own. Seeking professional help can be integral, and it can be a critical starting point for those who need to open up about their experiences, work through self-doubt, or process traumatic events.
Understanding Betrayal Trauma Theory
The term betrayal trauma was first used by Jennifer Freyd in 1996. Betrayal trauma theory suggests that those who have been through betrayal become unconsciously aware of the event as a mode of self-protection. For example, someone experiencing emotional abuse from a partner might not be aware that that’s what’s going on, even if everyone else around them can see that they’re enduring abuse. This is called “betrayal blindness.”
Some people develop amnesia for this reason. For example, those who survived childhood abuse. The reason the brain does this is because we don’t want to believe that the individual we were supposed to be able to trust betrayed us.
While this can be protective at the moment (e.g., for kids stuck in their situation), it isn’t protective or productive long-term. The effects of trauma impact your mind and body, even when you aren’t in a place to acknowledge it yet. That is why acknowledging trauma is a vital step in the healing process.
Overcoming the Emotional And Physical Symptoms of Betrayal Trauma
Like other trauma survivors, a person facing betrayal trauma may experience difficult emotions like shame, guilt, and self-blame, alongside other post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms. For example, depression, anger, anxiety, hypervigilance, and negative perceptions of oneself, the world, or other people.
Physical symptoms, like headaches, fatigue, and sleep disturbance, can also emerge. Even if you don’t meet the criteria for a full-blown PTSD diagnosis, traumatic events can affect your life seriously and shouldn’t be overlooked.
Rebuilding and Moving Forward after Betrayal Trauma
If you’ve experienced betrayal trauma, you can move forward. Some of the goals you might set in betrayal trauma recovery include but aren’t limited to the following.
Reduced Mental Health Symptoms
Those who have been through trauma may set out to reduce symptoms like self-criticism, hypervigilance, depression, difficulty with emotion regulation, or anxiety. Your symptoms will be unique to you.
Finding Effective Ways to Cope with Triggers
There are multiple ways to navigate triggers, and often, coping with trauma triggers is a multi-step process. For example, communicating triggers to others, asking for space, and finding ways to self-soothe are all essential skills that might go together.
Establishing Interdependence in New or Existing Relationships
As opposed to forms of codependency or hyper-independence, both of which trauma survivors can be prone to, the ability to create interdependence and trust in current or future relationships is a common goal for those moving forward or working to heal from betrayal.
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Setting Boundaries with Loved Ones
It can be hard for trauma survivors to set boundaries. A therapist can help you role-play boundary setting, find the right words to use when you set boundaries, or identify what boundaries would support your mental and physical recovery from betrayal trauma the most.
Building self-care routines and finding enjoyable hobbies.
As stated, self-care routines and finding things to look forward to can both be important for those overcoming any type of trauma. This is part of why our programs include recreation activities that can help you explore enjoyable hobbies; it’s also why we focus on finding healthy coping strategies in group therapy, mindfulness, and individual therapy sessions.
Choosing Romantic Partners and Friends
Sometimes, those who have been through trauma have trouble trusting their own feelings and intuition. It can be hard to find friends and partners who treat you well when you’re not sure how to trust yourself. Part of your path, depending on the situation, could be to reflect on what to look for in relationships or friendships moving forward.
Rebuilding Trust in Existing Relationships
If you are going to stay in an interpersonal relationship of any kind with someone who has betrayed you, rebuilding trust is integral. To rebuild trust in a relationship effectively (e.g., after infidelity), it is vital that the other person is dedicated, too.
Increasing Stress Management Skills
Stress can worsen trauma symptoms. You can gain tools that help you reduce or cope with stress, reducing the impacts stress might have on the body or mind otherwise.
Don’t give up if you don’t see a change, meet your goals, or move forward right away. This is a difficult process, and it often requires thorough healing work. You don’t have to do it all alone, and we all need a support system.
Seeking Professional Support for Betrayal Trauma
Seeking professional support is crucial for many people healing after experiencing betrayal trauma. In addition to working through your experiences, self-doubt, or events you may have been through in a safe space, professionals can help you work toward healthy interpersonal relationships, stop using an unhealthy coping mechanism that is no longer serving you, and meet your unique goals.
Professionals can be an essential component of your support system. A trusted friend and other supportive people will take a different role in your life and healing than a provider will, though every single person in your support network is valuable.
Catalina Behavioral Health’s team of mental health experts takes an evidence-based approach to healing trauma. Every client receives a personalized treatment plan, which may include any combination of the following activities or others offered at our facility.
- Individual therapy.
- Group sessions.
- Recreation activities.
- Mindfulness.
- Family therapy.
- Life skills.
Couples therapy can also be helpful for some individuals, such as those who have been through infidelity or have otherwise been betrayed by a spouse. Our therapists use research-backed, trauma-oriented therapeutic modalities during sessions. Call our Arizona treatment center today to discover more about how Catalina Behavioral Health can help.
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Reach Out to Catalina and Recover From Betrayal Trauma
We understand that betrayal trauma is a complex and challenging experience, and can often feel impossible to overcome, but healing is possible. The right approach can help.
By acknowledging what you’ve been through, seeking professional support, practicing self-care, and working through other steps that may be unique to you, you can overcome the effects of betrayal. It takes time, and it is not a race, but you will get there.
Make the confidential call to Catalina Behavioral Health today to find out how our programs can help you heal. We offer multiple care levels and have a friendly admissions team here to take your call, answer your questions, or start the admissions process.
FAQs Regarding Betrayal Trauma Recovery
What is betrayal blindness?
Betrayal blindness can be common among trauma survivors. The term betrayal blindness refers to when someone is unable to identify that they’ve been betrayed or that another person’s actions weren’t okay, even if it seems obvious to other people.
This is also common in those who have been through emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and other traumatic situations or events. It is an adaptive response and doesn’t mean that you’re “stupid” or unable to pick up on poor behavior or threats to your emotional and physical safety. You can; therapy is often extremely helpful for trauma survivors in this process.
Why does betrayal blindness occur?
The reason people unconsciously fail to see that they’ve been betrayed or mistreated is often that they have some type of connection with the person who mistreated them, whether it was a parent, romantic partner, or someone else. Betrayal blindness is a way that the brain protects itself from realizing that that person who was supposed to be a safe person for you wasn’t.
What type of traumatic event is betrayal?
Betrayal trauma can stem from a wide range of events. Examples of betrayal trauma include but aren’t limited to the following:
- Emotional abuse, sexual abuse, physical abuse, or neglect from a parent or caregiver.
- Being harmed or mistreated by an institution that was supposed to protect you or treat you fairly.
- Being betrayed by a friend (e.g., being lied to).
- Infidelity in a romantic relationship.
Identifying that what you’ve experienced is betrayal trauma is often a fundamental first step toward healing from it. If you’ve been through any of these situations, there is nothing to be ashamed of, and you can heal.
Does treatment relieve symptoms of trauma?
Decades of research show that multiple types of therapy are effective for reducing or mitigating trauma symptoms. For example, cognitive processing therapy (CPT) or trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Some people benefit from medication alongside therapy, but everyone is unique.
