She sat in the car for eleven minutes before she considered going in.
Inside were friends. Women she’d prayed with, cried with, and celebrated life’s moments alongside. The same women who had prayed over her wedding and brought casseroles after her babies were born still didn’t know.
She watched the lights through the window. Easy laughter lilted on the breeze.
With one last look, she turned the key and drove home.
If you’ve been there, wondering how your life changed so quickly, you are not alone.
Betrayal trauma wounds reach deep into your being. These wounds don’t just break trust. They reach back to every memory you treasure and poison them, one by one. The beautiful moments become evidence for a trial you didn’t know you were in.
And if you believe God holds marriages together, there’s a second wound underneath the first. A question surfaces at 2 a.m., one you’re almost afraid to finish forming:
Does God even see what happened to me?
But before we talk about how, I want to sit with you here for a moment. Sometimes what you need first isn’t a plan. It’s someone to pull up a chair beside you and say, “This is real, and you are not crazy for not knowing where to begin.”
What betrayal trauma does to you.
Betrayal trauma isn’t just heartbreak. Researchers and the women who’ve lived it describe the betrayal as more like a shattering. The person you trusted most became the source of your deepest injury. Your nervous system, which is wired to detect danger, now can’t figure out where safe is. Hypervigilance. Intrusive thoughts. Difficulty sleeping, eating, and concentrating. Moments where you feel nothing at all, then moments where the feeling is too large to hold.
And the spiritual dimension doesn’t get talked about enough.
You made a covenant, stood before God and people you loved, and meant every word. And now that faith you’ve relied on raises hard questions about what you believe, decisions you’ve made, and a God you trusted to protect your marriage and keep your husband devoted to you.
I remember sitting in my favorite chair staring out the window after I finally understood the full weight of what Dave had done, thinking, “I don’t know how to pray right now. I don’t know what to say to him.” Not to Dave. God.
That is not a faith failure.
That is your wounded heart crying for help.
Healing from betrayal trauma doesn’t begin with a plan. It begins with permission.
The women I work with often ask a version of these questions: What are the steps? What did I do wrong? How do I get him to stop?
While I understand these questions rising from your broken heart, here’s what I’ve learned:
Healing from betrayal trauma begins not with a strategy but with permission. Permission to feel what you feel. To be in the place you’re in. Permission to not be further along than you are.
The prophet Elijah, after the greatest victory of his life, collapsed under a broom tree and told God he wanted to die. Bone-tired. Ready to give up.
God didn’t correct him.
He fed him. Let Elijah sleep.
“He looked around, and near his head there was some food baked on hot stones and a jar of water! So he ate and drank and lay down again.” —1 Kings 19:6 (NLT)
God met him in the exhaustion before he asked him to trust once again.
God will meet you in your brokenness, too.
Some gentle places to begin healing from betrayal trauma.
Here are a few places to start. It’s not a checklist or a program. Just some small brave steps you can take.
- Name what happened. You can talk with a trusted person, write your thoughts in your journal, or talk to God. Betrayal thrives in silence. Speaking it even once begins to loosen its grip. You don’t have to tell the whole story. Start with one true sentence.
- Tend to your body. Trauma lives in the body, not just the mind. Take a short walk outside. Drink water. Take ten deep breaths before your feet hit the floor in the morning. These small steps signal your nervous system that you are still here, safe, and being cared for, even if by yourself.
- Find one safe person. Someone who will sit with you in the not-yet. A trusted friend, a counselor, a coach who specifically understands healing from betrayal trauma. God doesn’t want you to carry this alone, and you don’t have to.
- Allow Scripture to comfort. If the Bible feels cold right now, that’s okay. Don’t force it. Let yourself engage with God the way David did, not tidied up, not performing, but honestly. One of my favorite psalms during this season says, “I am worn out from sobbing. All night I flood my bed with weeping, drenching it with my tears. My vision is blurred by grief.” —Psalm 6:6-7 (NLT) Come with your honest questions, like: God, I don’t understand. God, where are you? God, I need you to show me you’re still here. He will meet you there. In the mess.
Dear one, healing from betrayal trauma is not linear or rushed.
There will be days when healing from betrayal trauma feels like progress and days that feel like starting over. Both are part of the journey. Neither means you’re doing it wrong.
What I know from my own healing and from walking alongside hundreds of women in theirs is that God does not waste this. He is working in the places you can’t see yet, strand by strand, putting something back together that betrayal tried to destroy. Not the same as before. Something more authentic.
You are not too broken for this.
You are not too late.
You’ve taken the step to get here. Let’s talk about what healing could look like for you right where you are.
Let’s talk.