Dr. Dawn-Elise Snipes (therapist) explains the cognitive effects of betrayal in intimate relationships, emphasizing lowered self-esteem, activation of internal self-criticism, doubts about judgment, and hindsight bias. She gives practical guidance: separate the partner from the behavior, challenge internal negative voices (e.g., 'who says?'), use thought-stopping/distress-tolerance tools, review personal values to rebuild self-view, and learn from the episode without unfairly generalizing to future partners.
Chapters
Hey everybody, I'm Dr. Donnelly Snipes. Welcome back to part three 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 sabotaged. Maybe your partner has an addiction to sex or pornography. Maybe your partner has clinical depression and was trying to do something to 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 characteristics 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 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 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 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 distress 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 a betrayal existed, some things that didn't make sense before may make more sense now, and you can more easily put the pieces together, recognizing 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, 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. 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 going to 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 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 partners hostage. I hope that was helpful. And we will be back with part four.
