Betrayal Trauma Therapy
What is Betrayal Trauma Therapy?
Betrayal trauma therapy helps you heal after a profound breach of trust—infidelity, secret-keeping, financial deception, chronic lying, digital affairs, or repeated boundary violations. When the person who was supposed to be “your safe attachment” becomes the source of harm, your whole system (body, brain, beliefs) scrambles to survive. This work is about restoring safety in your body, clarity in your mind, and choice in your relationships—whether you stay, separate, or are still undecided.
How betrayal trauma often shows up
It doesn’t look like “just relationship problems.” Common signs include:
Hypervigilance, body alarms, trouble sleeping, intrusive images
Compulsive checking (phones, banking, location), rumination, “detective mode”
Gaslighting wounds—doubting your memory, intuition, or sanity
Waves of rage, grief, numbness, or shame; emotional whiplash
Difficulty concentrating, appetite changes, panic in ordinary moments
Collapse of trust: in your partner, yourself, people, even your spirituality
Boundary confusion—overgiving, people-pleasing, or shutting down completely
Sexual distress: avoidance, triggers, or feeling disconnected from your own body
Using an attachment-based, trauma-informed approach, therapy creates space to make sense of the chaos and validate your emotional experience. Betrayal trauma treatment supports you in processing the relational harm, rebuilding safety within your body and nervous system, and restoring your sense of agency. With EMDR and other brain-based tools, we’ll gently work through the layers of pain so you can reconnect with your intuition, reclaim your voice, and begin to trust yourself again.
The goal isn’t just to get through it- it’s to help you feel whole again. Over time, this work can help you move from surviving to thriving- with more clarity, confidence, and connection to who you truly are.
Think of betrayal trauma therapy as rebuilding three pillars: Safety, Sense-making, and Self-Leadership.
Safety (body & life): Nervous-system regulation, stabilization, and a short-term plan for sleep, food, movement, and daily functioning. If needed, crisis/safety planning.
Sense-making (story & reality): Gentle, structured processing to untangle facts from minimization or gaslighting, name what happened, and validate your reactions.
Self-Leadership (choice & boundaries): Reclaim agency with values-led boundaries, communication scripts, and decision support (stay, leave, pause). We pace this to your window of tolerance.
I integrate somatic tools, parts work (IFS-informed), trauma-focused CBT, attachment repair, and when appropriate, EMDR to reduce the charge around discoveries, disclosures, and triggers.