The Betrayal Bind: Why Infidelity Leaves You Feeling Stuck, Conflicted, and Unable to Move on

If you have experienced betrayal, you know the feeling of being stuck. You feel trapped between the desperate need to leave and the desperate need to stay. You feel like you are going crazy, unable to make sense of your reality or your reactions.

This is not a defect in you. This is the Betrayal Bind.

Betrayal traps us in an impossible paradox: we are wired to seek connection to the person who has caused our suffering in order to find relief from the very suffering they caused. This traps us in a conflict between our deepest longings and our deepest fears. We long for safe connection with ourselves and with others—to be seen, known, and loved—yet betrayal awakens our deepest fears of rejection, abandonment, and loss of self.

The very closeness we crave is the closeness we now fear, leaving us caught in an impossible bind.

Fracturing Identity and Belonging

At its core, the betrayal bind fractures our two most essential attachment-based needs: the need for identity and the need for belonging.

These are reality-based moments that are acutely painful and perilously risky. Because healing requires the possibility of more loss, our internal coping strategies kick into high gear to avoid it.

• Identity (self-coherence): This is the ability to experience ourselves as a whole, consistent, integrated person across time, situations, and relationships. It creates a sense of grounded trustworthiness inside us, meaning that our thoughts, feelings, values, and actions align in a way that feels steady and recognizable to us. Simply put: “I am me, and I can trust who I am”.
  
• Belonging (safe connection): This is the ability to connect authentically and securely with others. It’s the felt sense of safety, acceptance, and connection that allows us to rest in our relationships.

In healthy relationships, belonging and identity reinforce one another. We can be connected to others and still be our authentic selves. But when betrayal enters a relationship, both belonging and identity are immediately threatened and fragmented.

The War Within

As our sense of belonging and identity collapse, the betrayal bind creates conflicts within key parts of our bodily-based experience: the nervous system, our survival instincts, our attachment needs, and our identity.

Our nervous systems become overwhelmed because we need both safety and connection but can’t find a way to have both at the same time. Closeness feels dangerous and revs our fear, but separation and distance feel unbearable and amplify our distress.

This sets off a war between our survival instincts: our instinctual drive for safety through self-protection (threat system) and our instinctual drive for safety through connection (attachment system) clash within us, causing us to feel conflicted and confused by our rapidly changing reactions.

Ultimately, we are caught in a heartbreaking dilemma:

If I hold onto me, I may lose you.
If I hold onto you, I may lose me.

Honoring our own needs, values, and truths may create relational disconnection and loss, which is terrifying. But clinging to the relationship may mean abandoning our authentic selves. We lose our sense of self and our ability to trust ourselves, becoming someone we don’t recognize.

The Severity of the Damage

Notice how core and essential each of these elements are to our ability to operate as emotionally healthy and psychologically whole humans.

Imagine what would happen to your ability to function in your home and take care of your family if the water, electricity, and air quality were all compromised at once. This is what happens with betrayal. The core capacities that help us feel secure in the world are handicapped as the binds of betrayal ensnare us.

The betrayal bind is the “mother of all these binds”. It is where betrayal trauma does its deepest damage—by severing our ability to feel both whole in ourselves and safe with others.

It is important to understand that this primary conflict splits into multiple sub-binds that pit identity and belonging against each other: fear, shame, powerlessness, and vulnerability. Each of these binds creates its own complicated emotional and relational labyrinth that must be clarified and navigated to heal.

Understanding the anatomy of this bind is the first step toward untangling it. You are not crazy; you are injured in the very places where you need to be whole.

This post includes adapted excerpts from The Betrayal Bind by Michelle Mays, LPC, CSAT-S. For a deeper exploration of this topic, see the full book.