Welcome to Betrayal Trauma Recovery. This is Anne. Today we have Ashley on the podcast.

Ashley went down a path that she now realizes was not the best path.

And I want her to talk about her experience.

So Ashley, I'm going to let you introduce the topic for today

and talk about what you did and how it affected you.

I discovered my husband's addiction shortly after we're married and I was obviously

devastated and completely traumatized.

He had withheld things from me and lied to me.

And that created a distrust in our relationship and caused me to question everything that he had ever told me, that I had ever experienced with him.

And so I just from the beginning could not stop looking through his computer and through his phone and really any device or anything that I could verify or find information on I would search into the late hours of the night and into the morning.

That was just a response to my trauma and I've learned since then that it's not useful, it has not helped me,

and it really only harmed me and caused me further pain.

I want to contrast your story with the story of many women that I've spoken with who have said,

I had this impression that I needed to check his phone and I checked it and I realized he was having an affair or I had this impression that I needed to look at his computer and I looked at the computer and I saw this.

In some cases, women really benefit from safety seeking behavior.

And in some cases, it starts driving them crazy and really keeps them in the abuse cycle.

So today we're going to focus on when it is unhealthy.

Right, right.

I also want to cover why we call this safety seeking behaviors as opposed to cod dependent behaviors.

A betrayal trauma recovery we use the trauma model meaning once you've experienced trauma you are trying to create safety in your life again.

And we do not believe in the co-dependent model.

Some people are co-dependent and they've been co-dependent for a cod dependent

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