The Braving Hope™ Treatment Model provides a clear attachment-based path to healing partner betrayal.
The need for a fresh perspective regarding sexual betrayal cannot be overstated. Both those impacted by sexual betrayal and treatment professionals struggled to understand and address the complex emotional dynamics and behavior patterns that emerge following betrayal.
The Braving Hope™ Treatment Model addresses the acute need for a demystifying paradigm and a clear treatment path through…
- Introducing a new attachment-based model that presents new language, concepts and imagery to explore the crucial relational dilemma that betrayed partners face when their significant other is unsafe to connect to, yet connection is the key to healing.
- Prioritizing the relational nature of sexual betrayal, recognizing that even the best guidance and help can fall short without a thorough understanding of how an attachment system in distress functions and alters relationships with the self and others.
- Re-focusing the work of recovery toward learning how to come back into a state of connection after experiencing the profoundly fragmentation experience of disconnection through betrayal.
The Braving Hope™ Treatment Model is rooted in research examining the nature and role of betrayal in traumatic experiences.
Betrayal creates immediate relational disconnection. This experience of disconnection lies at the root of all the symptomatic behaviors that betrayed partners display in the aftermath of betrayal.
Without understanding this core issue – how a partner’s attachment system functions in the wake of sexual betrayal – we are missing a vital element in understanding why partners do the things they do and how to effectively treat them. We also miss the key to unlocking true long-lasting transformation: relational connection. Because if betrayal happens in relationship, then it makes sense that our healing and restoration must also happen in relationship.
The Braving Hope™ Treatment Model identifies three overlapping injuries at the heart of sexual betrayal:
- the attachment injury
- the emotional and psychological injury
- the sexual injury
These three injuries weave together, creating an overlapping, intertwining kaleidoscope of betrayal that often touches the nerve center of all three experiences simultaneously.
The Seven Betrayal Binds
These binds are the relational dilemmas that are created when betrayal occurs at the hands of our most significant other.
1. Heart Bind
The relational dilemma that betrayed partners face when their significant other is unsafe to connect to, yet connection is the key to healing.
2. Attachment Ambivalence Bind
When betrayed partner’s fear and attachment systems fire in response to the threat of betrayal sending simultaneous messages to both move away and to move closer to the cheating partner creating an impossible choice
3. Attachment Shame Bind
When shame attaches itself to the betrayed partner’s need for both connection to and disconnection from the cheating partner including decisions to stay or leave the relationship.
4. Betrayal Blindness Bind
When betrayed partners go blind to a reality that is too scary to connect to yet staying grounded in reality and awareness is necessary to heal.
5. Fear of Loss Bind
When sexual betrayal is discovered, it creates a cascade of losses. To heal betrayed partners must implement skills and tools that each contains the risk of experiencing more loss as they gamble with the uncertainty of the cheating partner’s response.
6. Powerlessness Bind
To move out of powerlessness into empowerment, betrayed partners must first be able to tolerate their powerlessness over the cheating partner’s choices and behaviors.
7. Sexual Carried Shame Bind
When the cheating partner’s sexual behaviors creates shame that attaches to the betrayed partner’s sexual functioning, desire, preferences, self-esteem and body-image.
The Braving Hope™ Treatment Model provides a clear attachment-based path to healing partner betrayal.
This path moves through six phases: devastation, realization, stabilization, reimagining, creating, and flourishing. Each phase of The Braving Hope™ Treatment Model has its own goals, tasks and outcomes.
Each of these phases outlines the specific skills, tools and relational abilities that, when developed, will move betrayed partners out of pain and confusion in a place of connection, empowerment and wholeness.
