hey everybody I'm dr. Dawn-elise Snipes welcome back to part 3 of the betrayed
spouse in this video we're going to be talking about the cognitive effects of
betrayal we've already talked about the physical effects how it affects our HPA
axis our sleep and our general mood and pain levels we've talked about the
emotional or affective aspects of betrayal including anger guilt
resentment jealousy and envy now we're going to talk about the cognitive
aspects or how it affects the way we think and one of the first and most
obvious side effects or effects of betrayal is a lowered self-esteem
people often ask themselves why wasn't I good enough why did this person feel the
need to betray me it's important to turn our attention and focus on how much of
the situation had to do with you versus your partner maybe your partner has
attachment issues and felt too vulnerable getting that close to you so
they self-sabotage maybe your partner has an addiction to sex or pornography
maybe your partner has clinical depression and was trying to do
something to quote self medicate through engaging in frequent relationships and
experiencing that new relationship energy there are a lot of things there
are a lot of explanations for why it might not have had much of anything to
do with you if anything at all and it's important to look at those things
am i excusing the behavior with those reasons no all of those things are very
treatable and could have been addressed in ways other than betrayal however it's
important to recognize that it may not have been you the next thing you want to
do is look at what characteristics make somebody a good person
what type of person would you want to be in a relationship with are they loyal
are they trusting are they compassionate are they write down a list of words or
values or character is sticks that are important and then look
back at that list and see how many of those you have probably you have the
lion's share of them which means again you are a good person and this is an
unfortunate incident and your partner chose a bad behavior however it may not
have to do with you if you're trying to work through the relationship and work
through the betrayal it's also important to recognize and to look at those
characteristics in your partner that make that person a good person despite
making a bad a very very bad choice and separate the person from the behavior
and that is so easy to say and so freaking hard to do I'm not saying that
any of this is easy but if you're going to try to work through the relationship
it's going to be important to figure out how you're going to deal with this bad
act when we're betrayed it often gives our internal hecklers a voice and it's
important to figure out how to silence them and our internal hecklers may have
been saying you should have known or of course you weren't good enough or of
course that person was going to cheat on you or you know there's a lot of things
they could say how do you silence them and when I talk about silencing them I
want you to think like you are a comedian on stage and you are doing a
set and there is somebody out in the audience that every time you say
something they have something contrary to say back and how would you silence
that person would you ignore them would you say something back to them what what
is it that you would do one of the things that you can do is challenge them
with a who says if your internal voice says of course that person cheated on
you because you weren't good enough then you want to say well who says what's the
evidence that I wasn't good enough I am a really good person thank you very much
it's going to be important to start talking back to those negative voices
and sometimes just silencing them telling them to shush
and you'll find your own tools for distressed tolerance and for silencing
those internal voices but thought stopping is going to be important at
this point in time because sometimes you might not have time to engage in a
dialogue with that person or with that voice so you're going to have to figure
out a way to basically tell them to shut up because I got other stuff to do and
finally you may find yourself questioning your judgment or feeling
really stupid like how did I miss this how did I let this happen recognizing
that we are not omniscient you can't know everything about everything all the
time that's just not the way it is and given the information you had at the
time is it reasonable to expect you would have known now hindsight is 20/20
we can look back and we can see the clues we can see what was leading up to
it hindsight is much clearer than being in
the middle of it think about being in a forest if you've ever gone hiking now my
husband laughs because I always say I can't find my way out of a paper bag and
it's pretty much true but when you are hiking you're in the middle of the trees
and it's hard to know especially if it's heavy canopy it's hard to know which
direction is north south east or west so it's hard to know which direction you
need to go to get out of the forest when you're in a relationship you're it's
kind of like being in that forest you've got a lot of other things going on
you're not standing up you know above the trees and being able to say oh I see
that there's something bad going on over there all you're able to see is what is
in your immediate vicinity and when you're betrayed and you're looking
backwards it's like you're looking from a drone and you can see everything from
overhead you see it so much more clearly now well you didn't have all that
information before so now once you find out it betrayal existed some things that
didn't make sense before may make more sense now
and you can more easily put the pieces together
recognising that you did the best you could with the
tools you had at that point in time and sometimes when there's a betrayal
we may have an inkling but we may not want to know we may not want to accept
that it's happening so we put our head in the sand and we want to not beat
ourselves up for that we want to recognize the reasons that we decided to
try to ignore it and try to pretend it wasn't happening
maybe the alternative which is recognizing and accepting that we're
being betrayed or accepting the fact that this relationship is going to end
was too terrifying for us to deal with at that point in time or we thought that
the repercussions of ending this relationship would be too enormous and
it was better for whatever reason to just pretend it wasn't happening we make
the best choices we can based on the information we have at the time and the
tools and resources we have if you felt like it was too dangerous or too
threatening or too scary to leave this relationship or to call your partner out
then you know that tells me that chances are something else was going on and it
was too scary to think about leaving figuring out why it was too scary and
what you can do to prevent that in the future who do you have now that you can
rely on what were you afraid of and working through that so you don't have
that fear of isolation or being alone or abandonment and finally asking yourself
what can I learn from this situation every time we go through situations we
can learn something from it to prevent it from happening again one of the
things we need to be aware of though or be careful of is holding our future
partners hostage for something that our past partners did we can learn from it
you know if my partner before he betrayed me started being withdrawn and
spending more time on his mobile device and being late getting
home from work and then my new partner starts demonstrating those same
behaviors I may go oh my gosh this person is maybe cheating on me
because that is the experience that I had before but I need to remember that
my current partner is not the past partner they are two different people
and I need to find out the facts of what's going on and not just assume that
being withdrawn and spending more time on their mobile device and being late
getting home from work means that they're cheating you know it could mean
that my current partner has a big account at work that they're trying to
land and they're communicating back and forth with the other business developer
and it is exhausting and that's all they're thinking about but they know if
they can land this account they're gonna get a promotion or you know there could
be a lot of very innocent reasons for those behaviors recognizing you know
these were clues before so I need to be aware now but also getting the facts now
and going okay in the past this meant something bad was fixing to happen so
let's talk let's be transparent with each other help me understand what's
going on here and a lot of times that will assuage the person's fears so
remember learn from the situation but don't hold your future partner's hostage
I hope that was helpful and we will be back with part 4