If your partner has experienced betrayal and you are now feeling frustrated because they can’t receive your love, then I’m gonna tell you something vitally important for the sake of you ever having a healthy relationship again.
First, you have to accept the fact that this will most likely take longer than you anticipate. The spirals, the late night conversations, the heated arguments—those are gonna happen and they’re gonna be pretty common. Because she has gone through a betrayal, which is physiologically a trauma.
The nervous system keeps scanning for threats.
Therefore, her nervous system will be scanning for threats. And the triggers can come out of anywhere at any time. Laying in bed late at night, out in public somewhere, watching a movie, something you say, something you do. And this is out of her control.
So you guys may have had 48 hours where things are great, but then all of a sudden, boom, she’s in fight or flight. She is coming down on you, maybe with some anger. She’s questioning, she’s interrogating. She can’t help that. That is her nervous system responding automatically.
Yes, she needs to try to regulate herself and control what she’s doing and what she’s saying. Yes, of course. But these cycles—she has to go through them, that’s normal. Every time that something comes up, she has to process it, whether it’s something of a timeline she’s trying to understand, like what you did when you did it. And that creates this response. She has to go through that.
Don’t take it personally.
You have to understand that when she responds like this, you can’t take that personally. You can’t internalize it. You can’t feel like, “Oh, I’m a failure. I can’t do anything right. She’s coming at me. She’s being mean, she’s attacking.” No. You have to remind yourself: she’s acting like this because of the pain inside her—the one that you caused.
And so in your position, your main priority is to stay steady and calm and create a safe space for her to go through these grieving cycles, while at the same time being able to answer any questions, being completely transparent. Because if a betrayal happens and you still trickle truth through all of this, you’re gonna get to a point later down the road where she exposes another lie and you guys are set back so far again. Don’t do that.
Stay steady and transparent.
So if you are consistent in this—giving a safe space while being transparent—the process of this will be much smoother. But this is where most couples get tripped up. The man takes it personally. His ego comes into play. “I’m not doing enough. She’s coming at me, she’s not healing. This is taking too long,” and so on.
You can’t get there. You can’t allow yourself to go to that place, because nothing will ever be repaired. You have to let her go through these cycles, and you have to stay steady while you continue to do your work.
