Grieving the Unseen Loss: Understanding Grief After Betrayal (Episode #110)

Something about you that I can't help but smile when you smile and laugh when you laugh.

Something's around you. All right, we'd like to jump into today's podcast. Dr. Kevin Skinner with MaryAnn Mykles, licensed clinical social worker. MaryAnn, we are just concluding the second annual Human Intimacy Conference. Incredible presentations, great feedback from those who are participating. And we're just so excited to say we are now offering that on our website, humanintimacy.com, where people who weren't able to attend can get access to it. So Marianne, what are your initial thoughts of the conference? And then we'll talk about how to get access to it.

There was so much information, Doc. And I know every session that I attended, I learned. And I also said, oh man, I hope this client's listening to this. Oh man, I hope this client heard this. Oh, I hope this person hears this because you know, I had a client say, you know, Marianne, you probably told me this multiple times, but Dr. Karen Strange, when she was sharing this, like it clicked, it made sense. And, and I think we often need to hear things multiple times or be in the right space and time and place before we, or to be able to be, to hear certain things. So different voicing can be really helpful, really important. It was so much information. What I'm hoping, what I'm asking my clients to do is to, if they can sit down with their spouse or partner and to go back through and listen together and then have conversations. How was this for you? How is this for me? Let's talk about it because we had that track for betrayed partner. We had that track for betraying partners, both running simultaneously. So then to be able to go back and share and explore and learn how does this fit for us. It just creates this new space of common ground and the Saturday sessions that were all really focused on the coupleship. There was just so much information there. There's so, so much.

Yeah, I honestly think, I mean, I know the price point is $200, but if you were to go to a session of therapy, you really had about all combined over 20 hours of incredible content from You know, really some leading experts. The feedback from those who participated was phenomenal. So if you weren't able to attend it live, you could go to humanintimacy.com and the 2026 conference is now available. We'd encourage you to do that if you haven't yet. And if you do that, you're going to be able to get access to everything that is available there. That includes the handouts that have been given to us and the PDFs. They're coming in. So as we get those, you're going to be able to see all the screenshots and slides and everything. As the professionals entered in.

And let me put that into context. You said 20, is that what you said?

20 hours of video sessions. Yeah.

Yes. 20 hours of video sessions. Obviously this isn't therapy. However, if you were meeting with a therapist once a week, it would take 5 months to go through all that, like 5 months of therapy to amass that information. And so having that available. In 2 days was just phenomenal. So much.

And you can consume it at your own pace. And the other part that's amazing to me, it's usually the expert's best presentation. I mean, when you look at it, it's something that they've been working on, something that they've been helping clients with. Everything from your presentation, which we're going to be talking about today, the grief and loss that goes with it, to the sexual reintegration. Dr. Karen Strange, Jeff Stewart talked about that. And then the rebuilding of the trust in the relationship. Our experts did that. Just a phenomenal— Michelle May's presentation, I really enjoyed her talk on empowerment, vulnerability, just really powerful. So phenomenal presentations. And so again, if you're watching or listening, humanintimacy.com, go find the 2026 conference. And we would love to have you participate in the conference, even though it's over, you could get a lot of benefit.

I think about Hal Stewart talking about shame. He presented shame in a way I've never heard of healthy shame. I've only heard of shame as being this thing that we want to avoid that sucks us in. And, and I've never heard of it presented in a way, talking about it as being healthy. And that was something that was surprising to me and shifts how I think about that. And that's what I love about these conferences is somebody sharing and going like, oh yeah, that makes sense. Shame actually can be positive. I think he said that it keeps us civil. It puts the civil in civilization. I think that's a quote that he said, and that sticks with me. So if you hear me saying that in the future, that came from Hal Stewart from this conference. And I love having takeaways that shift my paradigm.

And so Marianne, I want to now jump into your topic, which was grief. And I think it was so important that I'd like to just cover some of the core concepts from it, because not only did you do the presentation, you had some data that you shared during a lunchtime that we hadn't pre-planned. And that was phenomenal because people wanted to understand what is the research showing and what did you learn? And so Marianne, I'd like to just introduce that topic and have you just get us started on what have you been learning about grief after discovering sexual betrayal?

As you know, Dr. Skinner, we created the Grief After Betrayal Impact Scale and just to collect data. We knew this is an area that we wanted to talk about that needed to be addressed at the conference, but there is, there's just not a lot of research on it. There's not a lot of materials on it. I've been reading several books, anything I could kind of get my hands on. And Wednesday night of last week, you shared with me like, here's all the data that we've collected from the survey. And honestly, Wednesday night, I opened it up and I started to read. We looked at before and after, before discovery and then after discovery. And then we looked at health impacts and we looked at things like what was helpful, what wasn't helpful, just really trying to get a breadth of understanding about grief. And then we had some open-ended questions at the end. And I sat down Wednesday night and I started to read them. And I, I had expectations, but when I sat down and started to read some of these open-ended responses that were just raw pain, question after question after question, people responded with this deep vulnerability saying, let me tell you about my experience, the pain that I've carried with this, even 20 years later, 30 years later, even, even after I've done a lot of work, even after I've moved into another relationship and done a lot of work, there's still this really, really deep pain. And I looked at that Wednesday night and went, I don't know what to do with this. And I knew that I was presenting on grief and I didn't know if I was going to just add all of that in, but it didn't fit. And so we added that second session, which was Friday afternoon during the lunch hour, just saying, hey, I'm going to just share this data. And honestly, I just felt this like a burden. Like there is some really raw, important information here that needs to be understood and seen that there's a lot that we need to learn from this. And so for any of our listeners, if you haven't taken this, we would love to have you add to the data because we want to understand this. But it definitely opened my eyes, I think, a little bit differently. There were some surprises that we found there. And so I know we want to probably talk about some of that today. It was a really humbling experience.

And you say humbling because of what? What was it that you'd say, man, I had no idea that— finish that sentence.

I think I had no idea that people were maybe so willing to talk about it, almost wanting to talk about it. We talk all the time about PTSD. We talk all the time about feeling like you've betrayed yourself or abandoned yourself with betrayal trauma. At least I talk about those things all the time. I know you and I talk about these in reference. They're kind of our foundation of what we're doing in our work. But when I started to put together the data, I took one question that was open-ended that said, what was the most painful experience for you in the betrayal? And because I had so little time to put it together, I was just frantically trying to find anything that was a correlation. So I went through the, all these open-ended questions and I just looked for anything that said the loss of, the loss of, the loss of, and I pulled over those losses and I started just to put them in a column to say, okay, now let me figure out what's the biggest here. And the biggest loss that showed up was the loss of self, the loss of trust in self, the loss of identity. I've never seen it like research-wise quantifiably that this is the biggest loss. And so I think I'm humbled having this information saying, okay, now what do we do with this? And yeah, so that's the humbling part is having something and not knowing where it needs to go or what needs to be done with it, but knowing it needs to be honored.

And I think that first step is giving it a voice. That's why we're speaking on it today, right? Because when I first gathered the research on post-traumatic stress symptoms, I started realizing we really need to have a voice here. It really needs to be talked about because if we don't talk about it, then the assessments and everybody who's going through this, we don't have that common dialogue or that common language. I heard you say is like, now people are writing it in, because they want to give it a voice. And by the way, the reason why we chose this topic, I mean, I know you chose that topic. I don't know, months ago, we reached out to some people that we know and they're looking for more guidance and support. And I said to them, help us create a conference that addresses the topics you want us to address. And so we took that whole list and said, what do you guys want to talk about? And I sent it out to all the experts who are presenting. And that's the one that you really gravitated towards and you took on and man, you did a masterful job. Of pulling that information together, looking at grief, giving it a voice, because I really do believe that there is a— yes, there are the PTSD symptoms, and then there's this next part of it is how do I give a voice to the grief that I've been feeling? And interestingly enough, I think we could also do the grief of the partner who's acting out.

Exactly. There's two parts. And we haven't even looked at that. I feel like there's a space, and maybe it's a space that I'm in right now, But I'm trained as a CSAT, Certified Sex Addiction Therapist. I'm trained as a Certified Partner Trauma Therapist. I've been working with betrayed partners since 2015 in groups. And I cannot think of a time where I have been trained. I've been to a training where they've said, we've got to help betrayed partners or people who are betraying. I've never heard anybody say we need to start working on the grief. That has a whole part of a training that I don't know of a model for betrayal trauma that really, we talk about the trauma, we talk about the betrayal, we talk about the PTSD symptoms, but we haven't been bringing in that whole grief part.

I was going to say, it's there. You're gathering research. I mean, the first 60 people who completed the survey, by the way, if you have not taken that survey and you would like to, we will put it in today's show notes. Just so you can take the assessment and understand the voice of— give your grief a voice. Because I think those first 60 people are a starting point of, wow, we need more information on this topic.

Yes. So please do, because, because we need to start training as therapists. We need to have the tools. We need to have the data. We need to understand how to help. So we've had this big vacuum. Where I've worked with people and said, oh yeah, that's grief. You're going to need to grieve that. Not understanding, not having words. We haven't had words to say. Most people who have gone through this, they have really felt like this loss of identity, loss of trust in themselves, loss of their reality. It was also interesting. One of the high losses that I also saw was a loss in the way that I see my partner. That was a really, really big one. Like, I just don't see you the same way anymore. That's completely been gone. You were somebody who I respected, who I had so much esteem for, and I admired, or whatever that looked like, but that's been lost. And boy, that has to be grieved.

A term I've been using recently with clients is like a collapsed self, that lost identity of that self. Who am I? And I think that that's part of the solution. To help people with their grief is to come back to that true self. But then there's the loss of how I saw my spouse. I've heard throughout my career, I, you know, I had 'em up on a pedestal. I thought they were, you know, in some, I've even heard some cases say the knight in shining armor that took me away from whatever my childhood experience was. And now it's like, don't, I don't see the world the way I used to see the world. And I don't see my spouse the way I used to see my spouse. And I don't even see myself. The way I used to see myself. That's tremendous grief and loss.

Yeah. And that's that reality. And who am I in this new space? And as you alluded to earlier, and I know we didn't go there, if I used to be on that pedestal and if my spouse used to see me with a lot of respect and that is lost and the grief of knowing that And I know we, I see this oftentimes when I work with clients through impact letters, when a betraying spouse receives an impact letter, there is so much grief there of seeing here's all the damage that I've done. My spouse just shared that with me. There is so much grief. And that's, if we're rating like things that we've missed that we haven't addressed, that's a whole other area that I don't think we're hitting. I don't think we're really addressing very often. As therapists.

Yeah. So as we think about it, the grieving that occurs, it's not just an event, and often it's multiple events over time, and it hits it in different ways at different times. So maybe initial discovery, there's that initial grief, like, ooh, ow. And then 5 years later, or 10 years later, or 20 years later, it's even a different kind of grief because now I'm grieving what could have been over time. And I've seen that with couples where it's like, now I don't even know how to quantify this because it's not grief once, it's grief over years. And then as couples, my word is wake up, you know, it's like we're finally engaging in the work. We're finally doing something that engages both of us in a process. And now we're grieving what could have been, should have been, wasn't. And now trying to find that connection at this phase of our lives and working through that. I've seen couples do that and I admire them a lot because they're working through it together. They're grieving together, so to say. But Marianne, I think that begs your research, like, okay, so how do we help with that collapsed self so they can individually work through it and then as a couple work through it as well?

That's such a good question. And as I was reading so many books that I came across, they were about death and the loss that comes with death. So trying to find research, trying to find data on grief after betrayal, loss of betrayal, like that section.

It's probably, if you were to go to a bookstore or look at research articles online, you're probably looking at a big Zero.

Yeah, exactly. Which makes this so challenging, but I found that there are two frameworks that I found. There's one framework and I actually can't even reference off the top of my head where this comes from, but there's a framework of looking at grief in this space where they talk about there's the event that happens and there's all a lot of emotions around that. The second stage of that they call conflict stage where there's a lot of rage. There's a lot of confrontation about who am I, like looking at the loss of reality and self. And then they have an accommodation stage where they're kind of just, okay, now I'm learning to deal with it. I found a book that I'd had on my bookshelf for 10 years by Susan Anderson, talking about really taking it and realizing, yes, we can grieve with our partners, but before we can even grieve with our partners, We have to do a lot of work for ourselves. And she talks about when we have what she calls abandonment. And I think that that term can be applied here in so many ways, because when we're talking about betraying our partner, betraying our trust, it is, are you there for me? No, you're not there for me. You left this space that was our space and you went someplace else. And so there's the abandonment of the trust. Of the commitment. And when we're looking through this abandonment lens, it cuts right down to the very quick of our deepest, most primal fears. Are you there for me? Are you going to leave me? Am I all alone? The theory that she shares talks about, yes, there's a shattering period. Then there's a withdrawal period, which is a normal period where there's a lot of— this works with our body's fight, flight, or freeze system. We withdraw and then we internalize. And this is a really shut-down place. That we go to where we're frozen, we're not functioning very well. And then we go to what she calls rage, which is where we have to learn how to take the emotions and how to turn them into something more positive. But we're, we're shifting from I'm shut down and sucked in and I'm not functioning to now I'm making positive. Now I'm finding places to find my story. Now I'm finding support groups. Now I'm figuring out how to make sense of my reality. And it's just, reclamation of myself stage. And then that moves into what she calls lifting as well, where in that space now I'm, I've used some visualization. I've worked with some of my parts internally. I've allowed myself to go through all of these emotions and now I can start to do hard things. I can start to reenter my life in a new space from, from a new space. I think we have to do that individually. And I think we have to do that as a coupleship. There's both partners have to do their work. That's the coupleship. And I think this is a lifelong process. It doesn't end.

And what I appreciate about what you're describing is this process, the grieving process, not the grieving event, the process. And you look at all those different ranges of emotions that again, in that situation is probably the one who's been betrayed. But I think the pattern is true. Both partners have to grieve, but more important, when they do it as a couple, they can't expect that their partner's going to grieve at their speed. And we can't expect that, well, I'm ahead of you. So what's wrong with you? You're not doing your work. But when people are engaged in the process, you got grieving in a place where I'm aware of my own stuff, my own grieving journey. And that requires insight. It requires us to look at maybe patterns that we've maybe ignored in the past, and now we're standing up and saying, this has to change. And that too can be a grieving process, because what I thought our marriage was, it can't be that anymore. And now as we begin to change that, now it's like, what's this whole new marriage gonna look like? And so in some ways it is a death of that earlier marriage. And so I think there's many examples here where it's like, yes, you've been studying a lot about death-related grief and loss, but I think that's true of the relationship and maybe even a death of my former self. The way I was doing things can't be there anymore either. That's interesting to me.

Yeah. And I think on our RISE podcast, Hope and Healing After Sexual Betrayal, we've been focusing on grief. We did 4 episodes with different therapists just coming up to this. And then we've got— next week will be our 3rd one that we're doing with Daryl Brazel, really looking at some of the 22 rooms of Dr. Omar Minwalla's work. Understanding here's some other areas that most people haven't even really realized or looked at and saying, here's more, here's more grief, here's more. And I just think there's, there's so much that we haven't even looked at here. There are two points I want to make sure that we cover before we go to that coupleship. I want to make a basic kind of umbrella statement just about grief in itself. One is that normally we're looking at about 18 months with a death. It takes about 18 months before somebody's— like, we've got some markers, 6 months, a year, and 18 months are some big markers. Usually at 6 months, that's where maybe some of the numbness is maybe starting to wear off, where people who are saying, hey, I'm here for you, they've kind of gone back to their normal lives. And the trickiest part with betrayal is that nobody sees it most of the time, or they just expect you to get up and move on with it. And so we're suffering oftentimes in silence. So there's that going on. Now shifting, when we're looking at death in a family, if a family member dies, we can sit down a whole entire family system and look at them, and they will all be in different stages of grief. They'll all be having different reactions, even though they might've all heard the news at the exact same time, but they're in different places. So just as you were talking about earlier, not everybody goes at the same pace. That's normal for any, any type of loss that we're talking about. So when we take that to the coupleship, I need to feel like I can show up and say, I'm really having a really hard day today. This is really hard. And my partner needs to be able They don't have to be in that same exact place with me, but can they show up and say, thank you for letting me know, I'm here for you, and giving each other space and support in that process?

Because we won't be in the same places, rarely emotionally at the same time, unless we're really doing that work and we can share with each other where we're at, and that can bring us into that common space. Because we're being vulnerable with each other. But I really want to emphasize something here, whether that's with your spouse or whether that's with a sponsor or whether that's with a group, you often will find the grieving process, I believe personally, is accelerated when I have others who are aware of my pain and the grieving that I'm experiencing. And I think if we were to look at solutions for grieving, it's going to be in giving it a voice in a safe environment. I think that's going to— if we look at the research over time, I think that will be a lead indicator of those who work through that grief and those who stay stuck in it.

I agree with that. And coming back to some of the data or some of the data that we collected, this is just early data that we're still trying to make sense of, but oftentimes there's, there's that, there's a loss of faith, a loss of connection with a higher power. That was something that showed up. And interestingly, But you know, one of the questions we asked, where are all the places that you've turned to for support? And I think it was about 34% of people said, yeah, I turned to church, to my faith. And then when we asked and said, how helpful was this? 50% said not at all. Some said some or a little bit. I think it was about 73% when we totaled it all, but 50% right out of the gate said It was not helpful. So when I feel like when we look at this, people are experiencing this grief, they're turning to spiritual places and they may have had a breach or bonds of betrayal that have been severed with their higher power. They're turning, they're searching, they're searching for who am I, trying to make sense even existentially of all of this. And they're not finding that with their faith. That's really concerning to me in that we need to figure out how to educate, how to teach, how to help church leaders support and learn, understand this experience and to be able to provide support. Because there's a huge glaring hole that I wasn't there.

You know, Marianne, when I work with individuals, it's not uncommon for me to hear what you just described. So that does not surprise me at all.

Yeah.

But what I would say, something I firmly believe, that it is in giving it a voice in an environment where you feel heard and you feel safe. One of my favorite things is when I ask people, who is that nurturer to you? Who is that person that you can rely on? When I hear nobody, I'm gonna almost guarantee that that higher power connection has been damaged in some way or hurt in some way. No question about it. But now let me take it a step further. When I have somebody say, it was my grandma, it was my friend, it was this person I met at group, and I could turn to them and they hold me or they comfort me or they strengthen me or they send me a note. See, I believe that the grieving process is being able to say, this is the grieving I'm going through. This is my experience. The solution then is a person who is safe enough to be able to express that and be with you in that experience. Because if I grieve by myself, I'm going to guarantee that it's going to take longer. And the reason why is because I don't have anybody who's witnessing the pain.

We need validation there. We need someone to validate and say, yes, it makes sense. Yes, this is so painful. To help give us words or just to sit with us in it because we're not carrying it by ourselves.

And so maybe the answer, Marianne, is we need to educate society on how to be with us. I've heard so many people who've lost loved ones to death and said, oh, the things that people said. Well, I've heard the same true with betrayal trauma as well, the things people said. So part of it is we may need to educate people on when someone's dealing with grief and loss, you don't have to solve anything. You just need to be with them and show that you genuinely care.

You know, as we get ready to wrap up, I have a friend who I had, I was just trying to get this survey out to anybody I could. And so I put it on Facebook and said, if there's anybody who's experienced this, here's the survey. And one of my friends, she took the survey and then she reached out to me and she said, I'm in tears. I was crying all the way through and I'm in tears even as I'm writing you this email. I was married to my spouse for 20 years and betrayed. It's been 23 years since we divorced and I remarried and had a very, very happy, very loving relationship. And then that spouse died. But she said, I'm so shocked that I've done so much work, but I'm so shocked to find how poignant these questions were and how much this hit me. And then she said, and I would go to church and the things that people would say to me were so damaging. They were so hurtful. All I needed was for someone to say, I don't know what you're feeling, but this is really painful. I'm here if you need them. And just to, just to echo off what you were saying. We need to learn how to sit with each other, to sit with each other's pain. And we need to learn how to be more vulnerable, to be able to show up and say, I'm really hurting right now. Can you be with me? Because I do believe that deep down, all of us, because we're humans, there is a need that we have to connect. And when somebody's in pain, we want to stop and connect with them. But we've learned for whatever reason that I can't tell people, I have to keep this in. And that might be some of the shame that Hal Stewart was talking about in this conference. But I can't say enough about we need each other. We need connection and we need vulnerability.

There's so much more that could be said here, Marianne. And I really appreciate you taking the lead on this one and taking it and running with it, because I think it's going to Honestly, I think it's going to influence your career for years to come because I think it's that important. And so right now what you're witnessing to our audience is the budding start of what I think will be a long-term process of really engaging in how we can best help individuals through the grieving process. Well, Mary Ann, thank you so much. To our audience, thank you for being with us today. We're grateful that you are listening to the Human Intimacy Podcast. So for Dr. Kevin Skinner, Mary Ann Mykolas, thank you so much.

Much for being with us. Thank you.