What betrayal trauma does to your brain. When someone has been betrayed, and let's talk about what betrayal is. Betrayal, we think of, of course, someone cheating on you, seeing prostitutes, having an affair with your best friend, someone at work, or you're a husband and your wife has cheated on you with your best friend or neighbor or someone like that.
That's the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of betrayal trauma. We call it partner betrayal trauma. If you want to Google that partner betrayal trauma, you'll find we've done a lot of research on that.
And infidelity is part of that. That's one part of betrayal trauma. Another part of betrayal trauma is pornography.
You think you're living in this great life and you find that your spouse is using pornography and that you're not enough and that what you believed about them isn't true. And then you find out the stuff they're into and it makes it worse and your whole life goes upside down. But then there's also a third part of betrayal trauma.
The next part of betrayal trauma is intimacy anorexia. You're married to someone who doesn't give you their heart. They're too busy for you.
They blame you. They withhold love. They withhold praise.
They use anger and silence. If they have sex, they're not connected or they're not having sex with you. They can't share their feelings with you.
And you feel neglected, alone, and unwanted in your own marriage or your relationship. That's another form of trauma. And that part of betrayal trauma.
It's interesting because all three of these traumas have the same statistical impact on the person. Now, I'm going to get to the brain in just a few minutes, but what this does is it can cause depression, weight gain, or weight loss. It can cause a shutdown of them spiritually and emotionally. It can cause PTSD symptoms, I mean, to the 80 or 90 percentile. on those symptoms, intrusive thoughts, dreams, not wanting to go out and connect with other people, shutting down.
The amount of impact that partner betrayal trauma has on the human spirit, soul, and body is massive. When someone's been betrayed, it's like they've been hit by a truck, but there's no blood anywhere. They're crushed inside. Their spirit's crushed. Their past is crushed.
Who they thought they were to this person, who they thought that person was. The holidays, the vacations, the birthdays, all tainted by now a new narrative, a new story. Their present is destroyed because they don't know what they're going to do.
Who is this person? Who am I? Do I have the courage to go forward with them?
Do I have the courage to leave them? These are all questions that now, existentially, they have to ask that they never thought of before. The whole rug has been taken out from under them, and they've planted their face on the floor, and they're out. They don't know what's real anymore.
And if that's not bad enough, their future is destroyed. Financially, they could be totally in a different place. If they leave, if they stay, do they put up with it? Is the person going to get help? Are my kids going to know?
Are they going to not know? Are they going to turn out the same way? All of these fears about the future now run on them all the time. So betrayal trauma...
Partner betrayal trauma is huge and it affects all of you, spirit, soul, and body. Okay, and if that's not enough, when betrayal occurs, your brain, I'm talking about the gray matter between your ears, your brain begins to operate in different ways. The fear center fires up and it can stay stuck, fired up, creating a man or woman to be hypervigilant, trying to check everything out, making sure everything's safe. make sure they monitor their phone and their computers and where they go and their cars.
That's a result of your brain being traumatized. Restlessness, anxiety, and a sense of perpetually being in a protect mode or a guard mode. This alters your ability to regulate your emotions and your mood, to be able to calm yourself down. It's like this app is running in your brain all the time, 24-7. It affects the way you think.
think. It affects the way you actually can reason through problems and even affects the way you can make decisions and whether they're intelligent or not. Your fear center hijacks your normal functioning and you find yourself in a world where every task feels challenging. Your mind will not stop. It races constantly.
You know, you go to pick up the kids, you're waiting for five minutes and all of a sudden downloads of all the feelings and thoughts. about what you now know as your life. Your emotions can feel out of control. You've never cursed.
You never yet. You've never been violent and you find yourself doing all of the above. Your brain has been impacted and your coping skills are stretched to the very limit because this is a whole other way of having to live.
It can also go into that fight mode, okay, where you're just going to, all your resources are going to be solving the problem. How do we get him help? How do we get her help?
What do we need to do? What's the next thing? How do we make sure this never happens again? and you're moving into that fight gear. We're going to fight for this, and it's all about that.
And other parts of your life get smaller. You can also freeze. And I'm telling you this stuff because in our office, and I've been doing intensives for partner betrayal trauma for over 20 years. I'm the father of the partner betrayal trauma movement.
I've done more for women and men in this movement than any single person on the planet. And I have great compassion. for the trauma that you have experienced.
It's massive, it's multidimensional, and it actually does affect your brain. And I have clients, they fly in, they do intensives here at Heart to Heart Counseling Center, but we also in the building have a neuromodulation where they go for five days and their brain gets assessed, and it's amazing how it'll be either all the way to the left or all the way to the right. And if you're a woman, you are affected by trauma 2.6 times greater than men. Because the way your brain is made, when it gets fried, it gets fried worse than men.
And so it can really, you can feel like you're not yourself. You can feel like you're not functioning at like even 70%. And if that's you, that neuromodulation treatment might be really helpful. Call our office.
But what happens is, your brain can go this way or this way, but it's not balanced. And I've seen a lot of ladies who are very stuck, stuck, stuck, stuck, stuck, stuck, stuck, stuck, stuck, and they can't... get out of that gear about the trauma. And over the few days, they become more neuroplastic. Their brain begins to be able to solve problems instead of staying stuck in one.
And I can literally see in their eyes the difference in the way their brain is functioning. And what's really neat is at the end of the week, they get this report and it says, here was your brain on Monday, and here was your brain on Friday. Now, let me give you an example from my own life that has nothing to do with someone else hurting me. I was in a very severe car accident just a little while back.
I have a great Jeep. Fortunately, the whole thing's metal in the front, and it was one of these snowy, white-out days in Colorado, and I was coming around a corner that kind of goes down and around, and as it went down and around, it didn't go, my Jeep didn't go around, it went straight, and the tires just slid right into a Dodge Ram truck. Unfortunately, it hit me on my passenger side. Unfortunately, there was a lot of steel in that Jeep.
Unfortunately, I wasn't hurt, but the airbag deployed, and boom! And man, I could have died that day, and I knew it. I knew I could have died that day. That's trauma for me.
And I could tell when I got out of the Jeep, I just wasn't myself. And I felt that way for about a week. And I'm like, you know what? I'm not shaking this. This is not me.
I feel shut down. I feel off. And sure enough, I went into the neuromodulation office, and I said, you know, I probably need to do a few sessions. This two me up.
And the technician said, you know, you've been doing this for a while. Your brain has never been this bad. It has never been all the way to one side. See, trauma affected my brain.
Now, after four sessions, my brain was back to better than it's ever been. Everything was centered. Everything was functioning in just four sessions. Okay, so I understand personally trauma affects you physically.
This isn't, what you look like. If you were hit by a truck, everyone would have empathy for you. You'd have a broken bone. You'd be bruised.
You'd have a black eye. You know, you would look distraught. You'd be limping.
That's what you should look like if someone could see what you look like emotionally and physiologically. Your systems were overwhelmed. They were blown out and they had very few options when you found out that your whole life is not what you thought it was.
Now, sadly, the other person can't fix this. This is something only you can fix and I would definitely recommend, you know, coming to office and do both. Do the intensive for the part of betrayal trauma.
If you're working on your marriage, you can come together and do the neuromodulation treatment for yourself and allow your brain to start to heal because it won't necessarily heal. Your brain will stay stuck in that one orientation until something readjusted, okay? And there's nothing in the natural order that's going to do that for you.
So this can help. make that happen for you so you get a more balanced brain again. Now you can't change the fact that you were betrayed. You can't change the fact that you were all in in your marriage or your relationship. Spirit, soul, body, all your heart.
was in and all of you got smashed when the betrayal trauma hits your heart. But as someone who's suffering from partner betrayal trauma, you're the only one who can help you now. I would definitely call the number on your screen, call our office, talk to someone who can really help you. Anyone that we would share with you to talk to has been through over 120 hours of training and so you can get help today.
You can start today. Don't wait to decide what your partner is going to do about their problems, how they got there, if they're a sex addict, intimacy anorexic. You can begin your path of journey and healing right now.
I've seen thousands of women get better. I've seen a lot of men get better from partner betrayal trauma. It affects both genders. It affects them differently, but it affects you both. So please, do yourself a favor.
Take care of your brain. as well as the rest of the impacts that trauma has had on your life. Now, if you haven't subscribed, you need to because there's so many.
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