Navigating Shock and Self-Trust: The Science of Healing Betrayal Trauma

How Does Neurotherapy Help With Betrayal Trauma?

Your safe person became unsafe, and your nervous system took the hit. We unpack how betrayal trauma scrambles the brain’s threat circuits, blurs memory and focus, and leaves you bouncing between panic and shutdown—and how targeted neurotherapy helps restore calm, clarity, and self-trust you can feel. With Dr. Heather Putney’s background in marriage and family therapy and certification in sex addiction treatment, we connect the dots between attachment rupture, gaslighting, and the physical toll of chronic stress, including brain fog, sleep loss, and autoimmune flare-ups.

We walk through practical steps for regaining stability: establishing real safety, understanding when the body can accept regulation, and using vagal nerve stimulation to exit survival mode. We talk candidly about timing—why neurotherapy can struggle if discovery is ongoing—and offer a framework for when to start, pause, or pair it with separation to protect your system. If your partner is showing consistent recovery but your body won’t stand down, we explain how neurotherapy helps your physiology finally align with the facts.

You’ll also hear how we measure progress with baseline and follow-up brain scans and heart rate variability, revealing trauma signatures that quiet over a series of sessions. We share the changes clients notice first, from deeper sleep to steadier moods and sharper thinking, and how these gains make therapy more effective. Whether you’re rebuilding together or healing after separation, the aim is the same: repair self-trust, reclaim attention, and move forward with a regulated nervous system that supports your choices.

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To learn more about Transformative Neurotherapy visit:
https://www.TransformativeNeurotherapy.org
Transformative Neurotherapy
570 Lincoln Ave. 
Bellevue, PA 15202 
412-204-7397  

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to the Transformative Neurotherapy Podcast with your host, Dr. Heather Putney, founder and executive director of Transformative Neurotherapy. This is the place where healing happens faster. Because let's face it, your brain doesn't come with an owner's manual until now. Here we take a holistic approach to brain health, bringing together science, mind-body harmony, and the tools you need to optimize your well-being. Whether you're a high performer, executive, athlete, longevity hacker, or just someone tired of your brain working against you, Dr. Button is here to help you unlock your full potential. From brain fog to chronic stress, we're covering it all. So you can finally experience brain health, mind heart, and total well-being. Ready to get on stock? Let's get started.

SPEAKER_02 0:58

When trust is shattered, the brain bears the weight. Neurotherapy helps restore safety, clarity, and peace. Welcome everyone. I'm Julie Schwenzer, co-host and producer here in the studio with Dr. Heather Putney, founder and executive director of transformative neurotherapy. Dr. Heather, it's always great to be with you. Thank you for joining us.

SPEAKER_01 1:20

Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 1:21

So, how does neurotherapy help with betrayal trauma?

What Betrayal Trauma Looks Like

Gaslighting And Chronic Stress Fallout

SPEAKER_01 1:27

Yes. Before I get into that answer, or to kind of help explain that answer, let me give a little bit of background about how I got into this work and working, you know, quite a bit with clients and with betrayal trauma. So I started out as licensed marriage and family therapist, as a couples therapist. And in my last episode, I talked a lot about sex addiction. So more the angle from the addict side. But in this session, we're going to talk about, you know, the impact on the partner side. So from the get-go, I've always been kind of like a systemic thinker. And when I started seeing sex addiction coming up in my in the office, I re I realized it was more than just bad behavior or just an affair, and I didn't know what I was doing. And so I went and sought additional training. So I became a certified sex addiction therapist and then later a supervisor in that field. And I've been working with that since 2013. So we've been working, so been doing a lot of work helping, you know, couples and individuals heal from the impact of sex addiction and betrayal trauma, which goes hand in hand. And so betrayal trauma is kind of a unique experience. Um it is uh, you know, it is when you find out that the person that's supposed to be your person, the person that you are supposed to trust the most, you know, like your secure base and attachment theory. Basically, when you find out that that person is no longer safe, when you find out that your reality isn't what you thought. So there's this, there's this really huge kind of um rupture in in your life because you interpret, like we are meaning-making creatures. So we interpret all the behaviors and everything we see and do and experience through this lens. So this lens that I think that my partner's safe, I think that, you know, that my life looks a certain way, that my, you know, that things are supposed to be a certain way, plus all that dreaming for the future, you know, and when they end up with this discovery, they can find out all kinds of all kinds of traumatic things, you know, that their partner's been doing this thing. They've spent a lot of money, you know, that they thought was their their safety egg. And so there's a lot of financial betrayal, there's sexual betrayal, there's lying, there's hiding, there's gaslighting. Um, and depending, and you know, it looks very different from couple to couple and partner to partner. Some partners are really are the addicts really good at hiding things and they really are hit out of left field. You know, they really have no idea. Some partners feel like there's something wrong, but there's a lot of gaslighting going on. There's a lot of flipping it maybe sometimes back on the partner. We call that Darvo, you know, which is like defend, attack, and reverse victim and offender. So there's a lot of like crazy making that can happen with the partner. So sometimes they're thinking like, I know something's wrong, something's going sideways here, but they might think it's them, especially because the addict and trying to hide what they're doing, prevent discovery, can can flip that back on them. So they're going through a lot of stress, there's a lot of crazy making, there's a lot of like my gut's telling me one thing, but then they're telling me something else, and it feels really confusing. So they can live in this kind of chronic stress state for a while, which can actually, so those clients can actually have some more chronic health conditions. You might see some autoimmune stuff, you might see fibromyalgia, you might see uh GI issues, uh, because they're living in this kind of like heightened, heightened state, but they don't really know what the issue is, they just know something's off, you know? And so there's like I said, there's we see just a variety of partners both on what the story looks like, but D-Day, which is Discovery Day, it's when the it's when the smoke and mirrors collapse. It's when we finally when we realize what our true reality is. And like I said, that is incredibly jarring to all of a sudden think you know the world is flat and find out the world is round and all the ramifications for that. So go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 5:22

Oh no, and how does neurotherapy help regulate the brain's response to the like the shock that you were talking about to the system?

Regulating A Dysregulated Nervous System

Safety, Timing, And Treatment Readiness

SPEAKER_01 5:32

Yeah. And like I mentioned before, in this situation, it's this is you know, your partner's supposed to be your secure base, your attachment figure. So when this rupture happens, this is like it's like your safety system is pulled out from underneath of you, right? So it's super jarring. And what happens is the nervous system, you know, goes goes haywire. You know, you the sympathetic nervous system gets you know really aroused, but also the uh the parasympathetic, you can go from you know, super anxious to almost like depressed, collapse, can't get out of bed, back to super anxious. Like it's like everything's you know, everything's in chaos, you know. So it's it's just super dysregulated. You know, partners can feel really guilty uh frequently. There's kids involved, their ability to function reduces. They have brain fog, they're leaving their keys in the, you know, in the fridge, in the milk, you know, in in the cupboard. And, you know, they just you know, they can't show up for their kids in ways that they wanted to because they just they're not functioning. The brain fog is off the off the roof, their nervous system is on high alert, you know, they don't trust themselves anymore. I would say one of the worst impacts of betrayal trauma is that the partners lose that sense of trusting their gut, you know, and their confidence in self. And one of the things that we work on a lot, both in psychotherapy and then, you know, over time with the neurotherapy, is that kind of connection back with self and learning to trust self. So, so yeah, that's a that's a really key component. So one of the things that we do with partners is to help regulate the nervous system. And neurotherapy is a is amazing for that. We've got vagal nerve uh stimulation, which um regulates the the vagus nerve. So that kind of helps kind of shift out of that over aroused, sympathetic thing is and when people are so overroused, we can be trying to do talk therapy, but we but we're in this panic state so much we can't really, you know, maybe let some of the stuff in. You know, I'm hearing some things, but I can't let that felt sense of any kind of calmness in, you know, and so it's so with the neurotherapy, it really can kind of help calm them, help reduce some of the brain fog, maybe help them sleep better so they can think more clearly. You know, I will say there's a caveat here in the sense of working closely with these partners and the referrals and the timing of doing some of this work. You know, if the partner's still in, you know, in a situation where maybe the addict's not in great recovery or they're still in a situation where it's not entirely safe, even trying to do neurotherapy, their system's going to say, I'm not letting this in because I'm not safe yet. You know, I can they're not going to let down their guard because they they're because they're really not in a safe situation. But one, and so sometimes it's like they might need to have a a separation period so they can be, so they can create some safety, so they can kind of re-regulate and and you know, be able to think through through things more clearly. Or what happens is if their partner is showing really good recovery, but their body has trouble letting that in, then this is a great time to kind of come in because maybe there's pretty well established, like that, like the partner's kind of gotten the gotten the memo, they're doing all the right things, there hasn't been a lot of acting out, they've got good sobriety, but their body can't shift out of high alert. And so they're still in the state. And this might be months or years later, after there's you know, some pretty established recovery. So there's a lot of different ways to work with it. There's a lot of different timing, there's but there's some um complex factors that have to be taken into consideration when we get these referrals and figuring out what's going to be best for the for the family system and maximize the the results for the partner.

SPEAKER_02 9:10

Do you see clients too that maybe they did go ahead and divorce or separate and they want to heal so they're through neuroth neurotherapy, so they're ready for their you know new partner?

SPEAKER_01 9:21

Oh, absolutely. You know, not all partners, not all couples stay together, you know, in this in this process, you know, of trying to heal. Not all not all addicts get it together. Not sometimes the the impact's just too much to heal. And so sometimes that, you know, doing neurotherapy is part of their own self-care and to kind of like process through, you know, the the heartache, the the trauma, so that that doesn't carry forward into the next relationship. So this this can help them heal, you know, in kind of in any context, regardless of whether or not they, you know, want to stay in the marriage or whether or not they want a new start and they want to, you know, be their best selves moving forward.

Brain Scans, HRV, And Measurable Change

SPEAKER_02 10:04

So, Dr. Heather, could you please tell us about what the brain looks like or the brain scans at this point when you're treating someone with betrayal trauma?

SPEAKER_01 10:13

Yeah, there are some telltale features of trauma that we can see in the scans. Sometimes we see like a hyperactive and kind of extra energy in this like T6 area of the of the brain. And we can also see some dissociative features and things like that in the brain that kind of lets us see the impact of what, you know, of what has occurred to them. And so we can see that this is, you know, that yeah, their brain really is still reeling from what happened. What's really cool though is that we will, you know, do a baseline scan and do treatment. And then after, you know, between 15 and 20 treatments and more or less, we will do a rescan and we'll compare. And it's so interesting to see like that trauma marker kind of dropping back to normal, you know, and we're also tracking symptoms like how are you sleeping? How's your anxiety? How's your emotional regulation? And we see those, we see those numbers improving. We see them, you know, their their system kind of letting down. We also track their heart rate variability, which is that kind of coordinates with their brain, and we're kind of seeing like, and that helps us see more of their autonomic nervous system balance. And so we see things that kind of like are super out of balance on the sympathetic, or sometimes they're super out of balance on the depressed side, like they're they're parasympathetic, almost like in that collapse mode when they first come in, you know, and so they kind of move out of that and the systems become more balanced in the scan. So I probably enjoy doing the rescans and comparisons, probably even more than the than the baselines, because we get to see and they can see, and they can maybe sometimes trust that in addition to what they're feeling that yeah, you know, this this was horrible, this was not, this wasn't great, but I can heal.

Closing And Next Steps

SPEAKER_02 11:57

Well, that is a great way to wrap this up. Thank you so much, Dr. Heather. Um, you took us through this healing journey of dealing with betrayal trauma, and we appreciate you.

SPEAKER_01 12:08

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 12:11

You've been listening to the Transformative Neurotherapy Podcast with Dr. Heather Pundi. Remember, your brain isn't supposed to hold you back, it's supposed to power you forward. So stop letting it crash your party and start letting it do its job. If you are ready to optimize brain health, sharpen your focus, and age like a fine wine, schedule your free consultation today at Transformative Neurotherapy.org. Or call us at 412-204-7397. Because here, healing happens faster. See you next time.