Helping Couples Heal is an empowering workshop for couples committed to rebuilding intimacy, trust and stability in their relationship. This two-day workshop is designed to educate recovering couples about the traumatic impact of sex addiction and infidelity through psychoeducation, experiential practice and group process. Participants will gain an understanding of how the model radically changes the systematic treatment of sex addiction and betrayal trauma and learn how to effectively integrate the information into their personal recovery and relational healing.

Recognizing trauma changes how we view and treat the partner, the addict and the couple. Using the Partner Trauma Model as its foundation, the goal of this workshop is to provide a framework to help couples heal from relational and betrayal trauma. Because trust is the foundation for a healthy relationship, broken trust is the most critical injury for couples recovering from betrayal trauma.

Partner Trauma Model

The Partner Trauma Model views many of the behaviors and emotional responses seen in partners/spouses after the discovery of infidelity as a natural and expected response to trauma and an attempt to restore a sense of reality and safety. While partners/spouses sometimes exhibit what some may call “codependent” behaviors such as “snooping” or “playing detective”, the trauma model frames these reactions as “safety seeking” rather than as efforts to control and/or divert attention from focusing on one’s own healing.

The trauma model does not pathologize spouses/partners or conceptualize their reactions as symptoms of their own dysfunction or addiction. On the contrary, it recognizes emotional and behavioral reactions as attempts by the mind and body to survive and adapt to a dangerous situation. The betrayer’s behaviors (e.g. continuing to act out, minimizing or denying the destruction caused by sexual acting out, ongoing secrets and lies and failure to take actions to restore safety in the relationship) and environmental cues (e.g. driving past a particular location, billboards, images or media) can be triggering and cause “flashbacks”, which can temporarily re-traumatize a partner and create a rupture in the experience of safety in the relationship.

When trauma is left untreated, the couple is often left in a state of despair and helplessness. Therefore, it is crucial that the partners’ traumatic wounding be addressed before the couple can begin to look at and work on healing relational issues separate from the betrayal. To neglect partner and relational trauma is to create further dysregulation and crisis for the couple in later stages of recovery.