Betrayal Trauma

When the floor gives way

You found the messages. Or the bank statement, the second phone, the app, the hotel booking. Perhaps someone told you. However it happened, the person you trusted most turns out to have been living a part of their life you knew nothing about.

What follows is often not what people expect. It is not simply sadness or anger. It is closer to shock: images that will not stop, the urge to check everything, sleep that will not come, and a frightening loss of trust in your own judgement. If I missed this, what else have I missed? That reaction has a name, betrayal trauma, and it is a recognisable and treatable response to a real injury.

What betrayal trauma looks like

• Intrusive images or replaying of what you discovered
• Checking phones, accounts and locations, and feeling unable to stop
• Swinging between rage, numbness and a desperate wish to repair things
• Difficulty sleeping, eating or concentrating at work
• Doubting your own memory of the relationship, and of yourself
• Shame, as though the betrayal said something about you

None of this means you are overreacting. The person who should have been your safest place became the source of the threat, and the mind responds to that as it responds to danger.

Why it often starts with you, not the couple

When an affair or a hidden life comes to light, the instinct is often to go straight into couples therapy. Sometimes that is right. More often, the betrayed partner first needs a space that is entirely theirs: to steady, to be believed, and to think before deciding anything about the future. Decisions made in the first weeks of shock are rarely the ones people would make once they can think again.

Couples work can come later, if both partners want it. Couples therapy in London and online explains how that is done, and the affair as symptom looks at what an affair can be telling a couple.

How the work is done

The work combines psychotherapy with EMDR, which Dr Jacquet has practised for more than twenty years. EMDR is particularly useful for the intrusive images and the sense of alarm that keep returning long after the discovery. Psychotherapy holds the larger questions: what the relationship was, what it can still be, and who you are now.

Where the hidden life involved an addiction, to sex, pornography, gambling, alcohol or drugs, that is a specialism of the practice, and both sides of it can be understood.

Online, in English and French

Sessions are held online by secure video, in English and French, so the work is available wherever you live, including in places where seeing a therapist locally would not feel private. Many people come from abroad, from the Gulf, Europe and beyond.

Strictly confidential

Nothing is shared with your partner, your family or anyone else without your consent, save for the narrow legal and safeguarding limits explained at the outset.

Dr Philippe Jacquet is a UKCP registered psychotherapist, a Jungian analyst and an HCPC registered art psychotherapist, with twenty-five years of clinical practice. His Professional Doctorate in Analytical Psychology at the University of Essex examined male eating disorders from the perspective of analytical psychology. Registration can be checked on either public register.