Welcome to Betrayal Trauma Recovery. This is Anne. I have Karen on the podcast today.

Karen is a victim of betrayal trauma and she's also a therapist but she is using a pseudonym today to separate out her professional work from her personal story.

And we're just going to jump right into this as all of you have experienced betrayal.

Karen, let's start with your personal story. betrayal. been unfaithful, approximately not quite four years ago. And what happened to me was what happens to so many partners.

It was a very slow leaky discovery, whereas I initially thought that there was one a fair partner and just as I was ready to move on from that discovery and had actually handled that quite well.

I began to discover, of course, the rest of it.

There was sexual addiction involved

and multiple affair partners and acting out.

That was going on, exchanging of photographs and so forth.

That was the beginning for me of discovering what had been actually going on for probably

eight years prior to my discovery of it. I think it's really interesting when women say I dealt

with it quote unquote quite well right because you're a victim of abuse and you're recognizing it and you have the right to react to it any way that you see fit.

You can react with anger or with sadness or however it is, but even now after knowing that women have this feeling that they have to

act a certain way when it happens to them can you talk about that for a little bit?

I think what was involved in that at at least for me, was that I didn't know the extent or the depth of what had happened.

And in fact did not have the awareness of the emotional abuse and the depth of that either. I was in the dark and wasn't aware

even though I knew something was wrong. There were issues in the marriage with the

emotional abuse and the cycling through of that, I didn't know the

extent of it. So given that I have the tools that I have and the experience that I

have, I was able to process that people make mistakes and we all are flawed and that it made

sense to me that my husband at that time and stage in his life had taken a wrong turn and

made a bad choice and that now he was back on track and he was very motivated to heal the marriage.

...