Rediscover Your Self-Worth After Betrayal Trauma: Empower Your Future

When you’ve recognized the impact of your partner’s sex and love addiction on your sense of self-worth, it can be a challenge to identify how to break out of that trap.  You may feel stuck or powerless to change.  Your emotional landscape or confusing thoughts may make it difficult for the truth about your inherent worth and value to sink in.

We built the foundation of understanding the impact of betrayal trauma on self-worth by evaluating symptoms in Part 1 and reviewing reminders of what is true in Part 2.  Understanding the truth about addiction and trauma may be reassuring intellectually. But understanding might not change the way you feel, which is a major component of insecurity around your self-worth.  Today, we’ll explore how these insights can influence your behaviors such that your feelings of confidence begin to grow.

Acting “as if” as a pathway out of low self-worth

If you believed that your worth was inherent and not based on what others think of you, how might that change the way you interact with others?  If you believed that it was impossible to be “enough” for the addiction, how might that influence the way you relate to your spouse?  How might that create space for more self-care and boundaries?  As you answer these questions, begin to experiment with taking different actions that fit those changes in beliefs. 

Here are a few examples of potential applications if you acted “as if” these statements were true:

Attend a 12 Step meeting or support group.

If you believe that you are worth spending time with, it makes sense for you to reach out for social support.  Finding a safe place to talk about your doubts and hear others’ stories helps you know that you are not alone.  Outside help will both validate you and challenge you when needed. 

Begin personal counseling.

When you come to realize that the only person you can control is yourself and that you are worth caring for, you will be more likely to seek out professional help on how to do that.  You have a right to receive support and care in the process of moving through the trauma. Seeking out specialized counseling is a way to honor that right.

Release the burden of perfectionism.

If you’ve coped with feelings of failure or insecurity in the past by trying to keep your life together and be perfect, you might find the same patterns surfacing in your betrayal trauma recovery. Remember that your worth is not defined by how much you accomplish, by your status, or by your achievements.  Know that your worth is inherent and allows yourself to take a rest or ask for help.

Put your own needs first by practicing self-care.

Practice kindness toward yourself by recognizing the impact of the trauma of discovery and honoring your needs as a result.  Treat yourself how you would treat a friend if they were going through something similar.  Recognize your needs that aren’t being met and seek out healthy ways to meet them.

For many, self-care can be challenging because it contradicts beliefs that encourage you to put others before yourself.  However, in this case, re-centering on meeting your personal needs is necessary so that you can come into a place of serving and loving your family, spouse, and others more holistically in the future.  You can’t serve others from an empty shell of yourself.  You have to put on your own oxygen mask before you can help others.

Review your “bill of rights” and set healthy, supportive boundaries that affirm your worth.

In the fog that comes after discovery, you might be unclear about how to achieve a sense of safety and stability.  If you’re doubting your worth, you might not be aware of what you have the right to ask for to create a sense of safety in your marriage.  Resources like the “bill of rights” on Vicki Tidwell Palmer’s website, as well as her book Moving Beyond Betrayal, can help you identify what you have the right to ask for and begin to help you on the process of setting boundaries that honor your personal worth and value. 

Part of this process is recognizing legitimate rights related to your body. Acknowledging your right to say “no” to physical or sexual intimacy at any point and particularly in the early stages of recovery can honor your sexual self.

Explore your options.

Talk to your spouse about couples counseling or treatment, intensive opportunities, or other steps of support.  Seek out resources for legal and financial support if you are considering separating and want to pursue financial independence.  Read books and attend seminars on trauma and addiction to learn more about what you might be experiencing.  Seek out safe people in your life who can provide support and a listening ear.

Recognize your own patterns of denial.

Did you have a sense that something was off long before you discovered your spouse’s addiction?  Were there odd occurrences that you explained away or minimized because the thought that your partner might be an addict was too much to bear?  In a relationship without addiction, it makes sense to give your spouse the benefit of the doubt.  But when you discover addiction, rediscovering your intuition requires you to shift that pattern.

To better prepare yourself for future deception that may or may not occur, it is important to examine how your denial manifested itself: how did you explain away inconsistencies in behavior and words?  How have you taken on more of the blame for yourself rather than allowing the addict to own it? By exploring these thought patterns in yourself, you’ll begin to learn to trust your gut again. 

Connect the dots between past trauma and present-day emotional reactions.

Each betrayed partner has a different emotional response to the pain of the trauma.  These responses typically relate to your history: wounds from your family-of-origin, painful experiences in romantic relationships, or even trauma or abuse. 

Consider how the particular patterns of self-doubt you’re feeling are connected to insecurities that stem from your past.  Take the time to unearth longstanding patterns of self-talk that might be contributing to your lowered self-worth.  In this process, you may also uncover some dysfunctional patterns in relating that stem from your past experiences and begin to shift the way you connect with others.

Grieve the hurts without being consumed by them.

You will likely experience grief in waves that hit you for a time after the discovery of your partner’s addiction.  This grief can feel overwhelming and can lead you to a place of self-pity and hopelessness.  It can trigger shame and guilt and lead you further into doubting your self-worth. 

When you feel waves of grief threatening to overwhelm you, use that as an opportunity to acknowledge the reality of the circumstances that have contributed to the pain and redirect your attention to self-care and empowerment to change.  Accept the reality of what is outside of your control and commit to finding ways you can make changes that fit in alignment with your values. 

Recognize that sometimes doubt about self-worth masks the legitimate grief of finding out about the betrayal and having to make decisions about the future.  Staying in a place of self-doubt or shame can be a self-protective response, keeping you from having to face the hard realities of what comes next.

List your strengths.

Make a list of strengths you have which can uniquely help you to make it through this process of recovery.  If you have trouble writing a list, ask those in your support network, your family, or your friends to name strengths they see in you.  Take a strengths-based personality assessment to uncover which qualities of your personality will help you to get through this season.  Identify resources or strengths that you are growing and fostering to remind yourself that you have power to change what is within your control. 

Rediscover Your Self-Worth After Betrayal Trauma: Remember the Truth

When you’re caught up in self-doubt and questioning due to the recent discovery of your partner’s sex and love addiction, the line between what is real and what isn’t can be fuzzy at best.  Many of the explanations running through your mind affect your sense of self-worth as you attempt to understand what is impossible to understand.

 In Part 1 of this self-worth series, we identified thoughts and behaviors that are associated with low self-worth as a result of betrayal trauma.  In this article, we’ll cover some statements of truth that combat the swirling self-doubt and give you a supportive reality check. 

What is true?

When you’re being pummeled by these insecurities, it can help to remind yourself of some affirmations of truth about yourself and your partner’s addiction to ground you in reality. 

Your emotional response and reactions are normal.

You’ve experienced an intense trauma: survivors of betrayal trauma often demonstrate similar symptoms to those who have experienced sexual trauma or assault.  The feelings that come up in response to the betrayal are a reflection of the seriousness of the offense.  Even though you might feel crazy, what you’re experiencing is to be expected from the pain you’ve sustained.

The addiction isn’t about you. It is not your fault.

Sex and love addiction typically develops long before you and your partner meet. It originates as a form of coping with distressing feelings or discomfort.  Most addicts have a history of past trauma or abuse, which can be sexual in nature but also could be physical, emotional, or verbal. Addiction developed as a maladaptive way to cope with stress or pain caused by that trauma or abuse.

What if your relationship had problems beforehand and you can connect the addict’s desire to escape to the tension in the relationship? In this case, your partner still had a choice of how they would cope with that tension.  They did not have to choose addiction, but they did so because of a preprogrammed propensity that they had fostered through early experiences. 

Addiction is never satisfied, so you can never be “enough” for addiction.

When you begin to question whether you weren’t sexual enough for your spouse, remember that no amount of sex will fully satisfy a sex addict.  Many sex addicts believe that having more sex will solve their problems, but it never does.  Addiction is always in search of more and is never satisfied.  The concept of tolerance in addiction shows that what was once enough to provide a “high” eventually loses its intensity and the addict continually needs more to achieve the same effect.

Addicts are masters of denial and deception.

Addicts have years of practice hiding their behaviors so skillfully that no one could tell they were acting out.  They use techniques such as emotional manipulation and gaslighting to mask their behaviors and self-protect.  They will go to any lengths to protect their addiction, often acting in what seems to be contradictory ways to their proclaimed love for you as their partner.  They create an atmosphere to protect the addiction, whether consciously or subconsciously.  It’s crazy-making for you, but the smokescreen they put up explains why you couldn’t see it.

That being said, prior to discovery, you may have had moments when you felt like something was off or that your gut was telling you something was up.  Typically your concerns were met by your addicted partner with further denial and minimization, which may have led you to dismiss your intuition or question your reality.

You are worth spending time with.

In the aftermath of the discovery of betrayal, betrayed partners often feel isolated and alone.  You might be hesitating to contact friends or loved ones, which only adds to those feelings of isolation.  In addition, your insecurities may cause you to question your value in relationships and fear reaching out for support.  Believing that you are worth spending time with can help empower you to seek out your friends and family who can be supportive and safe during this time.

Beyond relationships with others, spouses of addicts lose a sense of their personal identity, whether that’s due to caring for children or caring for the addict.  Spending time with yourself becomes immensely important to reclaim yourself and your personal identity.  Learn who you are.  Spend time getting to know yourself as if for the first time because you are worth getting to know.

Your worth is not defined by external achievements or accomplishments.

When you’re still reeling from the discovery of your partner’s addiction, you probably weren’t the most productive person.  The impact of trauma can throw you off all parts of your daily routine.  Especially if you’re already someone who deals with perfectionistic tendencies, you might be overwhelmed by a sense of inadequacy as you grapple with the crushing impact trauma has on your life.

Emphasizing external validation as the primary place you find your worth and value will consistently set you up for failure.  The solution is to recognize that your value and worth is inherent and cannot be influenced or taken away by what others think of you. 

The only person you can control is yourself.

Excessive focus on the addict and their behavior can lead to extreme swings in mood and thought patterns because addiction can be so crazy-making.  Instead, focusing on what’s within your control (your own thoughts, behaviors, choices, and emotions) and caring for those parts of you can help you to detach in a healthy way from the chaos of your partner’s addicted world.  This focus on yourself allows you to align your actions with your own value system, and it acknowledges that you are worthwhile enough to receive care and growth. 

Addicts live a double life and compartmentalize their addictive behavior.

Like the classic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, addicts often completely separate their addictive acting out behaviors from their normal life.  They dissociate emotionally from their “normal” life while acting out, often dealing with memory fog or fuzziness about specifics of their acting out behaviors afterward.  Your addicted partner could truly love you even while they were active in their addiction, despite their actions communicating something entirely different.

In our third and last installment of this self-worth series, we’ll explore what it means to empower yourself to take actions that affirm your self-worth.

Rediscover Your Self-Worth After Betrayal Trauma: Evaluate the Impact

For many partners of sex and love addicts, betrayal trauma from discovering affairs or addiction can bring up a flood of questions: why did this happen?  Am I not attractive enough for my partner?  Have I not been enough sexually?  Am I stupid for not seeing this sooner?  Did he/she ever really love me, or was it just a lie?

This panicked flurry of questions is an attempt for your mind to make sense of something that is senseless, to explain why the addiction occurred.  It is a natural response to the acute stress of the trauma and the mind’s natural tendency to try to understand what has just happened to you.  Unfortunately, many of these questions damage your sense of self-worth as they create misleading conclusions about the reasons for your partner’s addiction. 

Often, the self-doubt that hits you first is influenced by deeply-rooted insecurities that already exist in your heart.  For example, you may already struggle with self-consciousness about body image and your fluctuating weight because of teasing and body comparison in your teenage years.  If this is the case, discovering your partner’s addiction may lead you to compare your body to images in pornography or affair partners, creating hatred toward your body. Perfectionism, codependency, sexual issues, or aspects of your personality can create sources of self-doubt.

These doubts are made worse when the addict is still in denial over his or her addiction and points out flaws in you that divert attention away from the addiction.  Your spouse may blame physical changes or weight gain for not wanting to be intimate.  He or she may criticize your parenting or spending.  Before your discovery of the addiction, these accusations may have led you to question yourself and set you up for a pattern that continues even after you find out about the addiction.

Discovering a partner’s sex and love addiction or betrayal targets your pain points, adds a few new ones to the mix, and creates the perfect storm that can wreak havoc on your sense of self-worth.

Signs of Impact on Your Self-Worth

Consider the list below of common indicators of insecurity or self-doubt triggered by the discovery of addiction.  Which of these symptoms have you experienced?  How are they playing out in your relationship today? 

Ambivalence about staying or leaving in the relationship.

Ambivalence is not synonymous with indifference: rather, it is the experience of a push-and-pull between two different extremes that you want at the same time.  You may have felt disgusted and wanted to get away from your spouse, but less than an hour later you feel love for him or her and a desire to fix the issues in the marriage.  

When you have this push-and-pull of ambivalence, it is common to become self-critical and angry with yourself for wanting either extreme.  You might fear the judgment of others if you choose either option.  Feeling stuck in not knowing what to do creates a sense of shame and self-contempt that can reinforce your insecurities.

Mood swings between self-contempt and contempt toward the addict.

Similar to the ambivalence between staying or leaving, you might also flip-flop between extremes of hatred for the addict and contempt toward yourself.  You feel angry about what they have done to cause harm to you and your family, but then experience self-hatred for allowing yourself to be in a relationship with an addict.  You blame yourself for their choice to step out on the marriage because you feel inadequate, but then you feel rage at them for gaslighting you into believing that you were the problem.

Shame around sexual desires or negative beliefs about your sexual self.

In some cases, partners find themselves desiring to be sexual with their spouses after the discovery of addiction.  You might be motivated by a desire to secure your partner’s love or to prove that you are satisfying sexually.  Other partners start out wanting nothing to do with sexual intimacy with their spouses but find themselves confused when sexual desire does arise.  Either response can lead to shame, as sexual desire feels contradictory or minimizing to the impact of the betrayal trauma.

A partner’s sex addiction also has a unique impact on beliefs about your sexual self, namely communicating that you are not enough sexually for your spouse.  You can begin to question what you offer sexually and feel unattractive or unappealing.  Your sexual self (your masculinity or femininity) and identity are linked together so closely that betrayal in this sexual realm can deeply impact the core of who you are.

Comparison of your body to affair partners or pornographic images.

Many partners wonder why the addict was drawn to objectify or sexualize other people through pornography or affairs.  You might explain this by coming to the conclusion that you were not attractive enough, or that your partner is sexually interested in people who look different than you.  These insecurities can arise for partners who have a history of body image issues or are feeling dissatisfied with their weight and health, but it can also come up for those who have never felt concerned about their body image.

Feeling stupid or foolish for not knowing the addiction was happening.

How could I have missed this?  For many, the discovery of addiction occurs after the addicted spouse has been acting out for years.  Often, the addiction started long before the two of you met, although it may have escalated into more intensity while the two of you have been together.  You likely were blind to the addict’s sexual behaviors because of their skill at deception and dishonesty throughout the course of your relationship.  The shock of discovering the addiction may lead you to feel like you were stupid for missing it. The fear of being duped or fooled again can lead to difficulty trusting your partner. 

Believing the addiction was somehow your fault.

Despite the fact that the addiction likely existed long before you and the addict got together, you might find yourself struggling with self-blame and looking to your personal flaws and mistakes as justification for the addict’s actions.  You might believe the emotional manipulation and criticism your partner has shared toward you, or you might have insecurities based on abuse or harm from your past that tell you that you are unlovable or worthless.  You might notice a chorus of “if onlys” telling you that if you were different in some way, your partner wouldn’t have chosen their addiction.

Suicidal or homicidal thoughts.

At its most extreme, the hopelessness and depression that comes with the trauma of discovery can lead to thoughts of taking your own life.  Similarly, moments of rage toward your spouse can create thoughts or situations where you could do harm to him or others.  If you are experiencing suicidal or homicidal thoughts, please call 911 or go to your nearest emergency facility.

Self-destructive behaviors.

Even if you haven’t gotten to the extreme of suicidal or homicidal thoughts, you may be engaging in self-destructive behaviors as a way to subtly punish yourself or to retaliate in a way that gives you a sense of control.  You might have your own affair or seek out the attention of others in response to finding out about the addiction.  You might escape into disordered eating for a sense of comfort.  You may relapse into your own addiction or find yourself turning to alcohol, drugs, or habits such as shopping or gambling as a way to get relief from the pain you’re feeling.

In future parts of this self-worth series, we’ll review statements of truth that contradict these sources of low self-worth and move you toward a more accurate view of yourself, as well as create a plan of empowerment and change for the future.