7 Effective Strategies for Overcoming Post Infidelity Stress Disorder

Hey there, everybody, and welcome to this video on 11 symptoms of post infidelity stress disorder and tips for recovery. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. In this video, we're going to start out by exploring PTSD versus PISD or post infidelity stress disorder, and then we will jump into the symptoms of PISD and strategies for recovery. Now, a lot of people have heard of ptsd. It Post traumatic stress disorder is a diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental disorders, or the DSM 5TR. PISD is not an official diagnosis, but it gives you a way of understanding or conceptualizing what you might be experiencing after the trauma of betrayal. Symptoms of PTSD and PISD are very similar in their nature. Now, their intensity may vary, but it's important to recognize that a lot of the same reactions that someone has to a trauma that is characterized by PTSD are the same symptoms that they're going to have as a reaction to the trauma of infidelity, of being betrayed. So let's start with the first one, rumination. Rumination is having these thoughts that get stuck in your head and they just repeat over and over and over again. Some people will have thoughts about the infidelity. They'll keep remembering when they found out about it. They'll keep remembering when they saw something. They'll keep ruminating over it. They'll keep replaying different scenarios that they had with that person to try to figure out what did I miss? Or just remembering that horrible moment. Other people may ruminate on the better parts of the relationship. They will romanticize the relationship and try to ignore what just happened. Either way is going to be detrimental to the individual. So when you get stuck in a thought loop, when you get stuck ruminating, thought stopping can be very helpful. And thought stopping is really not all that complex. Basically, you are noticing that you're stuck in a thought loop and you're telling yourself, no, I'm not going to think that anymore. Instead, I'm going to think this. If you just tell yourself, no, I'm not going to think about that right now, and you don't replace it with another thought, guess what? That intrusive thought, that rumination is probably going to come back. We're also going to talk in a little while about sleep disturbances. And research has shown that people have much more difficulty controlling intrusive thoughts, memories and ruminations when they are not getting adequate quality sleep. Be compassionate with yourself. If you notice that you're ruminating and you don't want to, but it keeps happening Recognize that? Okay, this is your body saying, hey, you don't want to be caught off guard by this again. Or, hey, I've got this memory. I've got this thing that I don't know where to put it because it doesn't fit with what we expected out of this person, this relationship, or the world. So what do I do with this? Where do I file it? Okay, you know, reminding yourself, we can file that later, and then turning your attention to something else is going to be important. Having compassion for yourself during this time, recognizing you're not getting enough sleep, so you may be more hypervigilant, you may be more on edge, and you may ruminate more. Okay, you do you notice it, and you turn your attention away from those ruminations. You can also practice journaling, responding, and restructuring. And that sounds a lot more complex than it really is journaling. When you start ruminating, write down what you're thinking or what you're asking yourself. You may be asking yourself, how could I have missed that? Well, respond to yourself. Or you may be telling yourself, you must be completely unlovable because this person cheated on you, this person betrayed you. So you may want to restructure that thought into something that is less extreme and potentially more factually accurate. Intrusive memories are similar to ruminations, but somewhat different. They can include flashbacks, they can include nightmares. Ruminations are thought loops. Intrusive memories may be something that just kind of, bam, shows up in your. In your memory, shows up in your mind again. You can use thought stopping and replacement. When these things happen, all of a sudden you start remembering that and you're like, nope, I'm not going to focus on that. I'm going to change the channel. So you can even imagine picking up the remote for your. For your memory and changing the channel to something else. Another thing that can help, especially if you're having these intrusive memories when you're sleeping or they wake you up from your sleep, is guided imagery for sleep. Focusing your attention on something that helps you feel safe and empowered so your mind is not going to those ruminations, those unpleasant thoughts, those unpleasant memories. And if you wake up feeling from a nightmare, you know, redirecting your attention to something that encourages you to feel safe and empowered and loved, maybe even remembering a relationship with somebody else, like a caregiver that made you feel safe, empowered, and loved and how it should be. Numbness and or dysregulation are also symptoms of PTSD and pisd. Sometimes when you are hit by an emotional trauma or Even a physical trauma, you may emotionally numb up. You just don't. You don't stop feeling anything because it's so overwhelming. You just put up this wall. Okay, you know, that totally makes sense because you had this avalanche of emotions coming toward you, so you built a very strong wall to protect yourself from the avalanche. Makes sense now. Dysregulation is when you respond stronger than you normally would to situations. And people who've experienced trauma, especially ongoing trauma, but even in the aftermath of acute trauma may feel numb most of the time. But then if something breaks through that wall, if something is significant enough to break through that wall and the avalanche of emotions comes through, then they disregulate. And in other videos, I've talked about a tsunami of, of stress neurotransmitters. Whether you want to think of a tsunami or an avalanche, either way, it's a wave, it's oppressive, and it's completely overwhelming. Recognizing this is your body's response to what's going on. Right now, you are in fight or flight mode. You've been injured, you have been violated. So now you are on higher alert. When that happens and other stressors come your way, the body says, oh, heck no, and responds even more strongly in order to protect you while you're vulnerable. So recognize that both numbness and dysregulation are often the physiological reaction to the trauma. You can engage in grounding activities if you're feeling numb. You know, engaging in grounding activities just to notice. Maybe you aren't able to notice your feelings right now, but notice, you know, what do my feet feel like touching the ground? What do my hands feel like right now? What. What does it feel like when I rub my hands together? That can help you get more grounded, become more aware. You can also just get grounded in the moment, noticing your environment. What are five things you see? Four things you hear, three things you smell, two things you can feel. And have compassion with yourself. If you get angry with yourself or frustrated with yourself because you're numb or because you're disregulating, that just intensifies the problem. All you're doing is turning up the stress. Instead, have compassion for yourself. Recognize that you've been wounded and you are responding from a vulnerable place. You're trying to keep yourself safe. Compassionate response will help you get into your wise mind, not make the situation worse. Get into your wise mind and allow yourself to feel. Figure out what is the next best step to help me feel safe and empowered. Avoidance is another symptom of PTSD and pisd and you may be scratching your head going, you have avoidance down in the strategy section and Yes, I do. Avoidance is a problem if it starts causing you significant issues in your life. You have to start avoiding lots of different places and things right after a trauma. Especially avoiding avoidance may be more detrimental after you've been betrayed. Not going back to the restaurant that you and your significant other got engaged at, you know, that makes sense. Avoiding that, avoiding that strong reminder. Do you want to avoid that rel restaurant forever? Maybe, maybe not. But it's important to examine some of these things. Is whatever this is that you're avoiding, is it important enough to you to integrate back into your life that you want to go through that stress? Some things you're going to say, you know what? No, I just, I'm going to continue to avoid that. It reminds me of that person. It's not important in my life, not worth my energy. Other things are going to be worth reintegrating into your life, like relationships or activities that you love to do. Maybe you, you used to love to go hiking and you used to go hiking with your ex all the time, and now going hiking reminds you of that person of that betrayal. Okay. However, hiking was important to you, so you may want to reintegrate that into your life. You can potentially, at a certain point, when you're ready, start working through that with systematic desensitization, working with a therapist, you will start approaching or engaging in hiking again and managing your distress so it's no longer associated just with that person. You also might try emdr. EMDR has a lot of strategies for decoupling stimuli triggers in the environment from stress reactions. So that can be another technique that you might use if you think or if when you go hiking, for example, you start having this really strong emotional reaction. Okay, now there are a lot of other ways to deal with avoidance and reprogram things so you can integrate them back into your life and they don't constantly cause you pain and, and flashbacks. However, these are a couple things that you might start with. Abandonment anxiety. Now in PTSD is just generally anxiety, but after infidelity, a lot of times the anxiety is significantly related to abandonment. When am I going to get into a relationship again and have somebody betray me? Or maybe it would be better entitled betrayal anxiety. So how do you deal with that? Reflect on the lessons you learned in this relationship. I'm not saying it's your fault. I'm not necessarily saying it's their fault. I'm just saying what did you learn from this relationship so you can feel safer and more empowered in the next one. What things did you ignore? That in retrospect, you're like, yeah, maybe I should have paid more attention to that. And what do you want to do differently the next time? It's important to remember that the behaviors of your existence are behaviors. And if another person demonstrates those behaviors, for example, being sullen and withdrawn, that may mean they're getting ready to cheat on you, or it may mean that they've got something else going on. So you don't want to assume that your ex's behaviors mean the exact same thing from different people. Okay. And we're going to talk about checking those facts in a few minutes. I guess we'll do it right now. Don't take hostages. Don't hold people in your present life hostage for the sins of the people in your past, for the mistakes, for the abandonments, for the betrayals of the people in your past. Learn from those so if you see signs of them, you can check them out in the present and see, is this happening again or is this something else completely different? Identify and address the impacts of the betrayal on your self esteem. Self esteem is how you feel about yourself, how lovable you feel, how confident you feel, how confident you feel. And a lot of times when we've been betrayed, it really dings our self esteem. However, in order to address this abandonment or betrayal anxiety, it's important to rebuild our self esteem. So we feel like we are deserving of love. We feel like we are confident and competent in the environment. We feel safe and empowered. Even if people don't always like us, even if people don't always agree with us and develop a support system. If you're in a relationship with somebody and they betray you, they abandon you, something happens and it sometimes it does happen. Okay, that is awful. It sucks. And if you have a support system, then you're not losing your only source of support. You've got other people that you can turn to for encouragement, for responsiveness, for validation. Grief is another symptom of trauma, traumatic stress, and it often comes out as anger and depression. It's important to identify your angry heart, hopeless and helpless thoughts when you start having these thoughts or when you start feeling distressed. If you aren't aware of your thoughts, figure out, what am I thinking that is triggering this feeling in me right now? And then examine the accuracy of those thoughts based on the facts in the current moment with the current person. And when I say facts, I mean what you know, not what you're assuming, not what you think, think, but what do you know? And when you're dealing with other people, that often means actually communicating with them. Oh my gosh, go figure. And saying, you know, I am getting the feeling that this is happening or I'm having this concern. Once you've identified your thoughts and examined your ac, examine their accuracy, then you've got to decide how to react, how to use your energy purposefully to move toward the life that you want. Sometimes you may have angry thoughts that are spot on. Somebody did something that was unkind or threatening or but they betrayed you and your anger is spot on. That person is not acting in a safe way. Okay, so that thought is accurate. Now what are you going to do? Just sitting there being angry at them isn't going to help you feel safer. What can you do to feel safer in response to that person? What can you do with that anger? Anger is an emotion that is created when your body dumps stress hormones to give you the energy to protect yourself. Anger is not meant to be stewed on. Anger is meant. You're supposed to use that energy to figure out, okay, how can I keep myself safe or protect myself in this situation? Isolation and withdrawal is also common. Have self compassion. When you are experiencing or have experienced a trauma, you may be feeling a lot of different emotions. You may feel embarrassed and not want to have to face your friends or your family or other people who may have been telling you all along something's hanky here or maybe they didn't know either. But you may still feel embarrassed that you were betrayed, that you were cheated on. Some people may isolate or withdraw because they are just in overload emotionally. So many emotions, they're so exhausted, they're not sleeping. They're physically and emotionally they're in overload and they cannot take any more input from anybody or anything. It's just like I need, I need space. And people may isolate because of pessimism or negativity. After this happens, they may feel untrusting of themselves, of their own spidey senses. They may feel untrusting of other people, even people they've trusted for years. They may start feeling uneasy around. And that's a normal initial reaction. Being compassionate, recognizing, okay, this is my brain saying I didn't expect betrayal from this person, so what might I be missing from all these other people? It's a pretty natural reaction. It's important to address these things. You don't want to just stew and sit in embarrassment or pessimism and negativity. You want to start addressing those things. But in the short term, have compassion with yourself and say, okay, how is this a understandable or natural reaction? And what are the facts in the present context for embarrassment? Have other people been cheated on? Have other people been betrayed? Well, we all know the answer to that is yes. Who is telling me I should feel embarrassed about this? Evaluate that. So you really want to start looking at the causes of these things when you're ready. And, and that's where distress tolerance comes in. Sometimes we just need to sit with the feeling for a few minutes because we don't exactly understand it. We need to get a minute to understand it, or because we're just too overwhelmed and exhausted to even figure out how to deal with it at this moment. So giving ourselves a little bit of time to catch our breath after we've been kicked in the gut by the betrayal is a compassionate response. I mentioned earlier that sleep disruption is very common. When you lay down to go to sleep and your brain's not occupied on other things, guess what? It may start going to that one major threat, that betrayal, that thing you don't want to remember, the thing that you've been ignoring and trying to shut in the closet all day long. It's going to come out now. Sleep hygiene is really important. If you've been isolating, withdrawing, changing your routine, you know you haven't had the energy to do the things that you normally do. It's understandable. However, it may start messing up your circadian rhythms. So to the best of your ability at least maintaining some semblance of routine. Not staying in bed all day long, for example, or sleeping during the day and staying up all night or whatever it is, try to keep your routine relatively stable, but compassionate. You know, don't insist. If maybe you usually go to the gym every single day and work out for an hour and a half, well, you may not have the energy to do that. You may not even have the wherewithal to go to the gym and be around all those people. Okay, but don't go back to bed. Maybe go out on a walk or read a book or do something different during your gym period. So you're still awake, but you're not over exerting yourself. Now some people will prefer to go to the gym. They just, they really want to get out some stress energy. So whatever works for you. But being compassionate, maintaining those routines is really important. And then again, guided imagery when you lay down to go to sleep, envisioning something that helps you feel safe, envisioning a positive relationship, interaction with somebody that is hopefully still in your life. Or you can use guided imagery. Going to your favorite place, think of your favorite memory with somebody else. Obviously your favorite memory from childhood or even, you know, adulthood, maybe it was a vacation you took. And envision yourself in that place. All of the things, five things you see, four things that you hear, three things that you smell, two things that you feel, you know. Really ground yourself in that experience and then start moving forward. A lot of times that takes energy from all your senses. It requires you to visualize, it requires you to use words to describe it. So your brain is too occupied to go over to that other crap. Trust issues super common. So identify the important relationships that are in your life right now. Identify what you need to feel safe in those relationships. To feel accepted, to feel loved, to feel safe. And this includes relatives. You know, this isn't just romantic relationships. Friends, co workers, relatives. What do you need to feel safe in those relationships to feel like you can trust those people? And then when you're in those relationships, when you're interacting with those people, evaluate your emotion focused thoughts. If your spidey senses start going off, going danger, this person is acting hinky or this person is not being trustworthy. Okay, that may be true. Or you may be being hypersensitive, hyper aware of things that are projections from the past. Pay attention to your spidey senses. I'm not saying ignore them, I'm saying notice them. But then check them out with fact based information. If you feel like somebody's being untrustworthy, check it out. What facts do you have that they're being untrustworthy? Better yet, talk with them about it if you can. Hypervigilance goes along with trust issues. When you've been betrayed, you it makes you feel vulnerable. When you feel vulnerable, you become more aware of everything going on. Think about this is Halloween weekend, so it's a great example. Think about if you're out walking through the woods or even the neighborhood after dark, you're more hyper vigilant. You're more aware of sight, sound, smells in the environment. Because you're in a more vulnerable place. You're in a more vulnerable situation. The same thing happens after a betrayal. You feel more vulnerable in relationships. Your body, unlike you know, being out in the woods after dark, your body is not necessarily more vulnerable, but your heart is. And your heart and your feelings are raw and vulnerable. So it's very likely that you're going to be hyper vigilant to signs of untrustworthiness. Betrayal, abandonment makes sense. You don't want to get hurt again, you don't want to get surprised. So create safety wherever you're at in every relationship that you're with, what do you need to do to create safety? For example, if you were betrayed, it may feel very overwhelming to go out with somebody in to a restaurant, for example, where you're constantly worried that they are checking out every wait staff that comes by or every person that walks into the. Walks into the restaurant that may not be a great place to have a date or a coffee or a meeting. So how can you create safety so you feel like you are not having to defend yourself, actively defend yourself. Reflect on safety. And what I mean by that is regularly reflect on your interactions with people and how they actually have been safe, how, how they actually have been trustworthy. Remember the good. So E. It's so easy to focus and remember the two or three times somebody screwed up versus the 200 times that they were, you know, Johnny on the spot. And you know, I'm talking right now about somebody being late or forgetting an appointment. I'm not talking about betrayal. We don't want to, you know, obviously ignore or only focus on the three times the person's betrayed you. If they've focused, if they've betrayed you, then that's something different. But I digress. Reflect in your relationships with friends, co workers and other significant others how they've been safe. And so you're not adopting the notion that everybody is unsafe, everybody is dangerous. And imagine turning down your sensors, imagine turning down the volume of your sensitivity. So instead of having your sensors on high alert, you know, it takes a lot more for them to trip your trust sensors, if you will. And finally, relationship difficulties. If you're having difficulty trusting, if you're hyper vigilant, if you are somewhat withdrawn and protecting your heart, it may cause difficulties in your relationships. I encourage you to think about what I call schema reprogramming. Schema is the information you've got in your brain that is based on past experiences and tells you what to expect from other people in relationships henceforth and evermore. Well, you've had some unpleasant information to add to that schema, but we don't want it to dominate. We want to make sure that the schema is fair and balanced, so to speak. I encourage you to start schema reprogramming with the people that are important in your life and have proven themselves to be relatively trustworthy. And through this, you want to engage in honesty with them. You want to be honest about how you're feeling what you're thinking, what your needs are, you want to use awareness of yourself and them. You know, being aware in a relationship of their needs, of their wants, of their feelings, but also of yours is important. You know, respecting those boundaries, communication in relationships is really important and that does go with honesty. That open communication. Talking about, honestly talking about what you feel and what you need. Not talking about this only the superficial stuff, but really talking about everything as it's appropriate. And using love languages, communicating with people using their love language so they feel loved and accepted. Kindness, well, that doesn't really need explanation. If you are giving kindness in relationships, it can feel scary, especially after you've been betrayed, because you are making yourself a little bit vulnerable by doing something kind for somebody else, but trying that out. And again, I encourage you to start out with known relationships so you can reinforce your knowledge that those people are safe and those people love you and can be counted on emotional intelligence and that is being able to identify your feelings and manage them as well as identifying feelings in others and respond appropriately. Practicing identifying emotions, practicing identifying non verbals with the people in your life can help you feel safer and help you recognize that sometimes a particular non verbal may actually not mean what you think it means. And finally, respect for yourself and others and the schema reprogramming means respecting your feelings, your thoughts, your needs, your boundaries in relationships and not shooting yourself to death, but also respecting other people and not holding them hostage for what other other people have done in the past. Respecting that every person is unique and every person deserves a chance to be able to earn your trust and show show them show you that they're safe. Help us continue our mission of making practical tools available to everyone. Support the channel@docsnipes.com donate join the YouTube channel@doc snipes.com YouTube or purchase a super thanks on any videos that are particularly helpful. Infidelity and betrayal causes a devastating emotional trauma that causes the person to feel unsafe and disempowered. Recovery begins with identifying what you need to feel safe and empowered in the present. The negative and positive impact to the situation. And I know that sounds a little weird, but recognizing the opportunities now that you're not in that dysfunctional relationship can also be helpful and recognizing the destructive self talk and alternatives to that destructive self talk so you can feel safe in your own skin and empowered in your own skin in order to interface with the rest of the world.