Discovering a partner’s sexual betrayal spins your world out of control.
When cheating, infidelity, or sexual betrayal shatters your world – the person you love becomes the source of your deepest pain – and everything changes.
Betrayal trauma spins your world out of control. In a split second, your sense of safety is shattered, your trust is gone, and everything you thought you could count on is in question. One moment, you believe you know your partner, your relationship, your reality. The next, everything feels upside down.
The Betrayal Bind, now fully updated and expanded in its second edition, is the essential attachment-based guide to healing after infidelity and sexual betrayal.
Whether you are facing an emotional affair, physical affair, compulsive sexual behavior, pornography addiction, or chronic cheating, this book explains exactly what happens inside you after betrayal, the hidden patterns that keep you trapped, and the pathway to breaking free.
You’ll learn:
- What happens inside your attachment system and nervous system when betrayal hits
- Why infidelity triggers such intense fear, hypervigilance, and self-doubt
- How to begin trauma recovery after cheating and quickly address your pain
- How to reclaim self-trust, emotional safety and your personal power
- What true healing looks like whether you stay in the relationship or decide to leave
Blending the latest research on betrayal trauma, attachment injury repair, and relational trauma with the lived experience of thousands of betrayed partners, The Betrayal Bind offers a compassionate, clear and deeply validating roadmap for understanding your pain and finding your way back to safety, connection and hope.
Michelle Mays is a Licensed Professional Counselor and expert in treating sexual betrayal and trauma. She is the creator of The Braving Model™ providing attachment-based counseling, coaching and training in healing partner betrayal.
Michelle Mays weaves personal insight, beautiful writing, current attachment science, and clinical expertise to share this gift with us. With gentle respect for the busy brain, The Betrayal Bind reaches her reader where the heart is, guiding us to a deeper understanding of why sexual betrayal is so devastating. Michelle helps us hold ourselves, our friends, our family, and/or our clients with the utmost compassion in the aftermath of betrayal. I recommend this book for not only those swimming in the deep water of sexual betrayal, but also for adults living with the intimate betrayal that happens when our first caregivers are abusive.
Michelle Mays provides a well-grounded process for healing and restoration following one of the most devastating life events possible: the intimate betrayal by a loved one. Such a trauma shatters everything, including a sense of self, sense of safety, sense of connection with self and others, and our higher power or God. Betrayed partners will find hope within this comprehensive book that provides well-grounded tools and a pathway toward healing and post-traumatic growth following betrayal.
In this landmark text, Michelle Mays provides a path to healing from the pain of relationship betrayal. She candidly shares her personal experience of recovery and renewal from the trauma of partner betrayal. This transformation provided her with the understanding and empathy she expresses as a therapist, speaker, and author. The Betrayal Bind offers new hope for individuals and partners seeking to move beyond the hurt of their past to experience the life and relationship they desire.
[The Betrayal Bind is] one of the most useful and comprehensive books on identifying and healing emotional betrayal. Michelle Mays’s examination of these painful issues is laced with generous doses of practical advice and hope for the future. Relying on her personal and professional experience, she has created a must-read for betrayed partners, cheating loved ones, and the therapists who treat them.
In The Betrayal Bind, Michelle Mays uses attachment theory to explain, educate and empower hurting partners. Through her compassionate use of storytelling, Mays shares profound insights, normalizes partner’s experiences and provides encouragement and support. It is a must read for any person experiencing betrayal.
Mays speaks the unvarnished truth about the impact of intimate betrayal with warmth and compassion as she guides the reader on a hero’s journey from pain to grace. She accurately describes the emotionally harrowing, complex experience of betrayal trauma without pathologizing either party. With neuro-scientific accuracy, Mays explains why fear, shame, and powerlessness drive attachment ambivalence and how to shift out of it. The Betrayal Bind illuminates a clear and empowering path forward toward creating safety, sexual healing, and reclaiming an authentic sense of self. This book is a must-read for the betrayed, betrayers, and therapists.
