Healing After Betrayal: Using Intensives to Rebuild Trust
Being betrayed by your partner can foster a whirlwind of emotions. You’re perfectly entitled to feel pain, frustration, anger, grief, and everything in between. You have to decide for yourself what’s best for your well-being as you move forward.
No matter what type of betrayal you went through, healing is necessary. Sometimes, that means ending the relationship and starting a new chapter on your own.
Other times, however, staying is possible. If you and your partner remain committed to each other and want to heal and grow together, you can come out on the other side with your relationship stronger than ever.
That often takes a lot of work. It’s not easy to rebuild trust once you’ve been betrayed, but if you’re willing to take that step, intensives can help.
What Are Intensives?
Intensive couples therapy provides a comprehensive and focused approach to dealing with a particular crisis or challenge within a relationship. Unlike traditional couples therapy, you won’t simply attend weekly sessions for an hour where you work on skills to improve your relationship. While that will come with time, the goal of an intensive is to focus on the problem at hand.
As the name suggests, these programs can be quite intense. Sessions might last several hours and require you to come back for multiple days at a time. You’ll dig into the challenges facing your relationship, including the betrayal that might have triggered your appointments in the first place.
How Do Intensives Help with Trust?
One of the first things you’ll do in intensive couples therapy is address the betrayal. That’s not easy for anyone, but it’s a necessary step in the healing process. It allows you and your partner to process the pain your relationship is dealing with.
Intensives provide you with a safe space to share your feelings and work through challenges. You can speak freely without fear of judgment or rejection. This kind of safe space makes it easier to accept healthy ways of coping.
As you work through each session, you’ll go through skill-building exercises. These help with everything from enhanced communication to promoting accountability. It’s essential for the partner who committed the betrayal to take responsibility for their actions and to show genuine remorse for things to move forward.
Skill Building for the Future
You can’t simply work through a major issue in a few sessions and expect things to be perfect from that moment forward.
That’s why intensives typically dive deeper into practical skills you can take with you. Things like conflict resolution, healthy communication habits, and emotional regulation are all important skills to learn and implement in your relationship after you work through the pain of a betrayal.
These are all things that will build trust in your relationship, but they’ll also improve intimacy. You and your partner will learn how to open up and be more vulnerable with each other, creating a closeness you might not have experienced with them before. Not only can this develop more empathy in your relationship, but it can help you realize what may have been missing before.
Engaging in intensive couples counseling is a healthy and effective way to build trust after a betrayal. In addition to promoting healing and closeness in your relationship, it will make it easier for you and your partner to set boundaries in the future. That promotes a better relationship dynamic and makes the unspoken “rules” of your partnership clear.
If you’ve experienced a betrayal in your relationship, there’s no doubt you’re struggling with your emotions right now. However, things don’t have to end. If both you and your partner are committed to moving forward, I would be honored to help. Contact me today to learn more about intensives and whether it’s the right move for your relationship.