How to deal with ptsd related to infidelity
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Anonymous
Their response matters. Their ACTIONS matter the most. The amount of time they continue to do the work on their own without anyone telling them to do matters. The behavior they show at home matters. I have seen marriages grow stronger when the cheater is truly remorseful and accountable and willing to discuss it as long as the betrayed spouse needs to. They continue with individual therapy indefinitely and address the issues that allowed them to lie and betray. Some of these marriages when it was a midlife thing and out of character and the marriage was very happy prior come out of it much stronger. But, I agree, OP's situation does not sound like he's there. |
Anonymous
What is very sad is that betrayed men in the same situation (and there are many) don't reach out and get therapy even if they divorce. |
Anonymous
| #1 Stop calling it PTSD because you are minimalizing the experiences of those who truly have PTSD. |
Anonymous
STFU! |
Anonymous
+1. Repeatedly addressed and you’re incorrect. Recovering and clinically diagnosed C-PTSD patient. |
Anonymous
Mine only went away when I left him and wasn’t constantly worrying about him cheating again. |
Anonymous
How long before you trusted again? Are you committed now, and did you have therapy? |
Anonymous
Stop minimizing other people's pain and suffering. If you "truly" have PTSD I'm sure you would want to help anybody dealing with a similar situation. Stop trying to corner the market on pain and suffering. |
Anonymous
wut |
Anonymous
Oh, come ON. It’s not like OP is a Yazidi refugee. |
Anonymous
What do you get out of this? Seriously? I wonder about people like you. |
Anonymous
He/She is right. Language and word use matters. Infidelity can certainly be traumatic but it's not, PTSD. Every negative thing you experience in life is not PTSD. It's the third most over-used term on this site. |
Anonymous
So, I was waiting for someone to say this (or something like it). I speak as someone who worked with severely traumatized women who were raped, held prisoner, had family members disappeared, witnessed mass killings, and other crimes against humanity and war crimes. The thing is that every single person who is a victim of trauma says what you are saying -- I often heard them say my brother disappeared but I am still alive, I lost my home and was expelled but my kids are still alive, I was raped but I didn't get pregnant, etc. Every traumatic experience can be topped by something else. And every victim of trauma is silenced and shamed by someone, sadly. When you make this argument.... X was worse..... you are engaging in a form of minimization that denies the crime and the trauma. It is well known that complex post traumatic stress can stem from a wide range of incidents -- family incest, domestic violence, car accidents, institutional betrayal, intra-familial betrayal, etc. Infidelity, particularly infidelity that happens repeatedly over time, where the victim is trapped in some way (as many married women with kids feel they are), and the perpetrator engages in other forms of emotional or verbal abuse such as gaslighting, criticism and financial control, etc. I am a victim of such infidelity, and I say that even though I know many women who were kidnapped and raped as a consequence of war. We are all victims; the fact that the methods of misogyny vary doesn't diminish or eliminate our trauma. Please read up on trauma. Two classic texts are Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score, and Judith Lewis Herman's "Trauma and Recovery: the Aftermath of Violence -- from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror". It was Herman's books that made me see the connection between my own experiences with domestic violence and my exDH's sexual abuse of me and how it related to the political violence experienced by the women I worked with. Also, Jennifer Freyd has written a lot about betrayal trauma -- infidelity is one form of that. In general, trauma can arise when your normal expectations of how the world works and how or whether you are protected by institutions and people are broken. Please stop engaging in judgment as if life is some kind of pain olympics and the only people who deserve any sympathy or support are the ones who have lost so much it's difficult to see how they can even be alive. |
Anonymous
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And just to add to the above, please stop engaging in such pain olympics now in pandemic times. There are so many people who have lost loved ones to COVID, lost their jobs, their homes, their life savings or their businesses.
All those are traumatic experiences. Maybe even they got very sick and recovered, they can still have PTSD from the lengthy hospitalization and isolation. |
Anonymous
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+100000000%. ^^^^^^^
dp |