“For her, the discovery and disclosure of your actions feels like an explosion with the debris blown in every direction, and she is left not knowing how to put herself and life back together.”
- Discovery Trauma
In the onset and much long after Discovery Trauma, a woman loses her sense of guidance and intuition to navigate the direction of her life. She is confused as to what is real and what is not. “Is this a dream? Will I wake up from this nightmare?” She can barely make it through each day and hold herself together. Doing the familiar routines and tasks that are required of her as a mother and working woman take every bit of energy she may have. Her ability to make good choices for the benefit of her family is non-existent. She is hardly holding on to herself and needing safety, guidance, help, counseling, and support.
Jaime was abused emotionally and sexually as a child, and unfortunately, the emotional and physical scars made it difficult to discern healthy versus unhealthy relationships. Jaime endured far too much in her marriage. She first discovered her husband’s indiscretions twenty years into her marriage. Her intuition and awareness of unhealthy boundaries then suffered even more, although she wanted a loving and protective husband and family. She wanted a chance to break through the trauma and evil she had been through with her family of origin. But more betrayals, discoveries, loss of her marriage, and suffering came through the court system as she sought help and protection. “I started my journey in the court system, a place where I’ve experienced intense fear, anger, and helplessness,” she told me.
“I am a loving and intelligent woman who was loyal to my marriage. I discovered that my husband of almost two decades finally admitted that he watched porn every day of our marriage. He stated, ‘I might be a sex addict.’ He agreed to start therapy with a certified sex addiction therapist. I never got a disclosure. He left sex addiction therapy after two weeks. He came home one day and unexpectedly hit me, the last in a long line of increasing abuse from a man who said he loved me and our children. I called the police, and he left. Several days later, I mustered the courage to obtain an order of protection. My hands were shaking so badly the lawyer had to type up the incidents of abuse. I was sweating and couldn’t remember everything.”[1]
Jaime’s hope to repair and restore her marriage after discovery ended with the police involved. She never got a therapeutic disclosure. She needed to muster every ounce of courage and strength for her children and self to move forward and create a new life for the children and herself. She suffered over twenty years suspecting her husband’s porn addiction and infidelities before the big reveal. Finding out about his indiscretions as they continued to trickle in did so much damage to her and the children. Her healing process had to be on hold, while she was trying to make sense of her new reality and do life without the false sense of stability and security she thought she had. “How do I take care of and support my children? Where will we live? Can I afford an apartment?”
The big scary truth about trauma: there is no such thing as “getting over it or forgetting it” The five stages of the grief model mark universal stages in learning to accept loss, but the reality is, in fact, much more significant: a major life disruption leaves a new normal in its wake. There is no “back to the old me.” You are different now, full stop.
When your partner is experiencing any hyper-vigilance, hypo-vigilance, mood swings, flashbacks, or other signs of trauma, it’s like she’s waiting for the other shoe to drop. Trauma is not predictable; it’s stored in the memories of every cell in our bodies. Be quick to know this is your opportunity to put on empathy and develop it as a learning moment in helping her heal.
- Disclosure Trauma
Disclosure trauma is a specific type of traumatic discovery. Once the initial discovery is exposed and more incidents are revealed to your partner, because you purposely or accidentally forgot, she will continue to experience and re-experience trauma. The trickling of new information continues to set back her healing experience.
Each disclosure is critical and can be a trauma-inducing experience. A disclosure, as we talked about in the previous chapter, is a process of being told the secrets, lies, and deception of the sexual integrity issues. Going through one disclosure is difficult enough; however, there can be many, including the formal therapeutic disclosure, the trickling in of new information, or an impromptu disclosure that is not organized or planned. And when that happens, partners can be so desperate to know the whole truth and are demanding you tell them. One of my clients, Nora, wrote the following words in her impact letter, detailing the effect that her husband’s disclosure had on her:
“I desire to take this awful situation and turn it around for good. Other than the obvious difficulty in hearing what happened, I was hurt that a few more specifics had come out that you had not told me before. You cannot begin to imagine what I felt like. I was in complete shock, and my heart was pounding so fast I thought I was going to vomit. I had to keep taking in deep breaths because I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I am trying to find solace in you telling me that you never wanted to replace me or leave me for these people or anyone, but it’s devastating because the mere fact that you were acting out in these ways made you risk me leaving you. I hope we can close this wound/rupture and develop a stronger and more intimate relationship. I love you; please take care of my love for you, and don’t take it for granted.”
Nora stated that she could barely breathe, an indication of a full-blown trauma reaction, and yet, as she worked so hard to hold onto her faith, she wrote: “I do believe that God brought us together. I don’t think that it is a coincidence that we’ve been attacked by the enemy, especially with us having a great marriage and other people viewing it that way as well. Satan does not want us to succeed.”
Her world had come to a crashing halt after discovering Bill’s interaction with pornography and online activity with other women. She felt the attack on her self-esteem; not good enough, not pretty enough, and not sexy enough.
For Bill, disclosure was a relief. “It was good for me to do that,” he wrote. “I released so much stress, and I was able to tell the truth. It was not good for you. However, now, you have to deal with all the betrayal and lying I have done. But it led to this point, and I feel it will make me better and us better. I hate what I did, but I am so glad that I got caught and did not just give up and not tell you. This is hard, but it’s so worth it, and I will keep fighting the fight to make us right. I am so glad you feel the same.”
Client quotes used by permission.
[3] Minwalla, https://minwallamodel.com/