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Hello and welcome to restoring the soul, a podcast dedicated to helping you close the gap between what you believe and what you actually experience. I'm your producer Brian Beatty. Thank you for listening. Now in this edition of the podcast, Michael concludes his conversation with Julian Cusick about betrayal trauma. Today we'll focus on treatment barriers to healing from betrayal trauma. This is a follow up from our previous episode on barriers to overcoming betrayal trauma. Now, in summary, some barriers are continued evidence of the partner acting out gaslighting, which is lying that changes a person's perception, the partners inability or unwillingness to own their impact, and the partner's inability or unwillingness to open up and be honest about their healing journey. It was a highly informative episode that I encourage you to download and listen to, I'll be sure to put the link in the show notes. Now even if you feel this episode is far from where you are relationally there is a chance that you might know someone who is struggling in this way, I encourage you to lean in for today's important conversation. And if there's one thing that you'll learn from this discussion, the key takeaway is that we must address the underlying issues about the brokenness. We can't just move forward. So Now without any further delay, here's your host, Michael John Cusack. Welcome back to the podcast everyone. I am here with Julianne again. In our last episode, we talked about seven relational barriers to healing betrayal, trauma, and today we're sitting down and we're talking about a number of treatment barriers to healing, betrayal, trauma. And so Julianne, let's jump right in. The last conversation was was I hope very helpful for people. But it was also really illuminating to me to continue to hear your perspective as a wife. And of course, you do this work of healing, betrayal, trauma, but you also experienced it in our relationship 27 years ago. Hi, Michael. Yes, I'm glad to be back in the studio with you. And today we are talking about treatment barriers to healing trauma, healing, betrayal, trauma. So yes, I've had my own personal experience. Thankfully, I had really good therapy. And that really helped in my journey. However, sadly, one of the things I hear on a regular basis is heartbreaking stories of where treatment has not only failed, but left people wounded and injured, and sometimes even exacerbates their betrayal trauma. So let's back up by treatment barrier. We mean, the kind of counseling that you're getting or therapy, or psychiatric, psychological treatment, whatever it is for intervention and care for betrayal, trauma, there's certain kinds of it that actually keeps people stuck or makes them worse. Yes, unfortunately, yes. So what's the first one? Let's unpack that? Sure. The first one? Is treatment trauma that is focused or includes blaming the wife, or implying that she is somehow complicit in his behavior? What does that mean? What does that look like? I'll give you some four examples. They go in to see their pastor, and well meaning pastor asks about their sex life. And by implication, you know, is the wife engaging in enough sex in the marriage to quote unquote, keep him from going elsewhere? That's a fallacy. Sexual acting out is not about the wife and the marriage bed. It has much deeper roots in the husband. And so being blamed or being questioned about her involvement in his behavior. That is treatment trauma, that definitely will be a barrier to healing from betrayal trauma. And so with the example of the pastor who says that it may not be quote, treatment, or psychotherapy, but it's still a kind of care that is hurtful and keeps the the the focus in the wrong place. Yes. Another example of that. There's a lot of good material in 12 step and codependency recovery, enabling behaviors and learning about that and how to heal from that. That is, can be a very important part of work. My experiences and some of the research that I found that has actually looked at 12 step as a treatment to betrayal trauma says that it's not as effective in the first 12 months, that really it's after that first year, that that women can really gain some traction by using 12 step or the codependency model. And the interesting thing is, I believe the reason why it takes that time is that first year they're recovering from trauma, and so their whole system is imbalanced. It's really about regulating the nervous system that first year or more, whereas the codependency and the 12 step work is more about individuation, differentiate Yes. Becoming your own person. Yes, absolutely. Voice. Yes. So if we look at hyper vigilance, for example, somebody with the lens that's only a 12 step or codependent model lens might look at hypervigilance as a sign or symptom of codependent behavior, where somebody with a trauma background and a trauma lens would say, hey, this person has been traumatized. They're hyper vigilant, because they're trying to regain some sense of safety and stability. And so that the same characteristic, if you will, of hyper vigilance can have two very different origins. And if we miss read the origin, then we as therapists can unintentionally write inflict harm on our client. So if a wife is waiting for her husband to come home at 6pm, so that they can go to an event with the family, and at 630, and he's not called or texted. And if you don't have the trauma perspective, she's codependent and trying to find her security in his compliance and coming home on time. But if you see it through the nervous system, it's the amygdala and the Olympic system going I smell smoke and the smoke detector goes off. Yes, yes, absolutely. perspective change. Yes, yes. Yes, yes. So it really needs to be a good fit. So when, when dealing with betrayal, trauma, it's important to have a therapist, a pastor, a Stephens, Minister, someone who has a trauma lens, versus just an addiction lens. And what is the second treatment barrier? Julian? Well, that leads us right into insufficient treatment. And so this is not bad therapy, that's actually damaging the person by blaming them or saying their implicit, it's just that their approach is not quite what the individual needs, could be their level of training or experience. It's like going to the doctor isn't a bad thing. But it's the difference between going to your GP versus going to an oncologist. Right. So if you have a spot on your skin, you go to your general practitioner, then they refer you to your dermatologist, and then your dermatologist sent you to an oncologist or someone who can deal with with cancer. So it's insufficient treatment. It's somebody who is receiving basic communication skills, and they're not going deep enough into understanding the impact of trauma, and specifically intimate partner betrayal trauma. So somebody who might as a counselor or therapist be trained in being supportive, and helping a person to understand their story and to connect some of those dots, but not really going after the activation of the nervous system and the way that that's activating and dis regulating that wife so that she can't live in a place where she's grounded and peaceful and calm on a consistent basis. Yes, and I would say, a practitioner who has an understanding of addiction, but maybe not the impact of what an intimate partner betrayal is, whether it's sexual or not, that kind of broken trust that is so devastating. So getting beneath the waterline to some deeper issues, not just tune up issues. So what's the next treatment barrier? This one, this happens frequently and this is hard. This is premature couples counseling. This is when a couple very early on after disclose As your of, or discovery of pornography or an affair, they decide to go to couples counseling, and the therapist wants to work on the marriage going forward. But there is no readiness yet to do couples work. The husband may say, you know, he wants to do 5050 counseling, you know, he's 50% responsible, and she's 50% responsible. Well, that is true when a couple comes for couples counseling, when there has been intimate partner betrayal trauma, the bridge of the 5050 has now been blown up, and whoever the offending party is there now 100% responsible to do the repair work for blowing up the bridge, then once that's repaired, then you can go on to regular normal 5050 marriage counseling. And so when it's premature, you're, you're asking a wife to one look at her issues when she's still bleeding from the grenade that just blew up her life. The other part of that is, there's no context, the bridge of trust between them has just exploded. So there's no context to work on the marriage that soon after betrayal. So in light of a lot of marriage counseling being premature, where there's betrayal, then what is the work to be done? Oh, great question. One, the it's the the husband's work or whoever is the person who has acted out and broken the marriage relationship, doing their work, counseling, 12 Step, whatever that is, while the betrayed partner get support, that also might involve some counseling, but it would be counseling through a trauma lens, someone understanding the devastation of being betrayed by the person who is supposed to have your back. Another level of this is it's not the kind of thing when your husband betrays you, or if the roles were reversed, and the wife is, is the betrayer. It's not the kind of thing you just show up at at church or Sunday school or your book club, your neighbors, your friends at the gym, and you say, oh, yeah, what am I going through, oh, I just discovered, you know, my wife has a secret life or my husband has a secret life. And there's all of this financial implications or sexual relationships that I knew nothing about. And so to leave a person without support is a travesty. So we don't want to throw them under the bus right by blaming them and making them a part of what's happened. But we also don't want to leave them out there without any kind of support, to just keep going through the motions of of everyday life, going to work taking care of kids taking care of the house. So a lot of people will say, well, they need treatment. And I like to say they need support. They need support and understanding what's happened. And they need support to re establish safety, calm their central nervous system, get grounded, get their bearings again. So Julian, what are the indicators that a couple is ready to begin to do couples counseling, if it's so frequently premature? Well, one is time. And time is different for everybody. For some couples that may be three to six months. For others, it might be two years, just depends on their own individual work that they're doing. And past trauma, whether that's been addressed or unaddressed, and really a readiness and a willingness to move forward. Have you had the experience where couples, if they're doing their own individual work can jump into couples counseling? In other words, there's not a hard fast rule, there's not a hard fast rule, it's really gray. Sometimes I've worked with couples right on the heels of an affair or an affair still going on. And it's not that they can't do work. It's that the nature of the work is a little different. It's more individually focused, and versus rebuilding the marriage, it's more unpacking the sight of what just blew up. And that can be really, a really healthy part of the process is but the goals are different. So let me let me clarify by saying couples counseling that's focused on just the marriage going forward is premature, but couples work where they're unpacking the bomb that just went off and why it was there in the first place. And the impact of that, that can be very healing. That's an important distinction. Hey, you have one more treatment barrier, but we're going to take a quick break first. This is risk During the soul, hey, it's Michael. In my life, I've battled addiction and even blew up my marriage. I experienced childhood abuse and live for years with PTSD. And in all that I've experienced incredible restoration and healing in my life and marriage. Now my story is not your story. But there comes a moment for every one of us where we need something to change. At restoring the soul. We help couples heal their marriage, we help individuals restore their life and get their heart back. If you can't wait months or years to get unstuck. And out of that rut, you're in our intensive counseling process in Colorado allows you to experience deep change, real breakthrough and half day blocks over two weeks. Finally, you can heal from your trauma, overcome those compulsive behaviors, or heal what's broken in your marriage so that you can live the life you're meant to live. Visit restoring the soul.com. All right, we're back. And I'm talking with Julianne My Bride. And we're talking about the treatment barriers to healing from betrayal trauma. Julianne, you had number four. Let's jump into that. Yeah, so we just talked before the break about couples counseling that started too early. The second piece to that would be couples counseling that is inadequate or insufficient. And what I mean by that is it's not looking at the underneath story. If we think of the iceberg, and the top of the iceberg would be our actions and our behaviors and the presenting problem that brings us into therapy. It would be as if Johnny and Sue came into my office and said, Hey, I've been struggling with a porn addiction, and I had an affair and we just want to move forward. And I would just say, Great, let's move forward. That is what I mean by insufficient couples counseling, in order for it to be or inadequate couples counseling, either one, in order for it to really be helpful for couples counseling needs to be able to go underneath the waterline and look at issues of brokenness, not just in their marriage, but in particular, in each individual. What were the seeds that were planted in an individual's past? What's their belief and story about sex and sexuality? What are the coping mechanisms that they've learned? Or didn't learn for how to deal with life and stress, looking at attachment wounds, and how the failure to have those healed has then brought about addiction, acting out affairs, compulsive gambling, overspending, etc. So that inadequate couples counseling is just really a superficial come in, let's work on communication, let's work on, you know, matching our schedules up. And it's not really backing up the truck and saying, wait a minute, before we go forward, we really have to go back and unpack what's happened. really asking the question to use the word barriers, again, what are the barriers to connection? What are the barriers to authentic intimacy? Yes, so it's, it's if we're sitting in a room, and there's an elephant in there, and we're doing everything but addressing the elephant in the room, that would be inadequate couples counseling, so we have to address the underlying issues, about the brokenness. We can't just move forward. You know, what occurs to me is, first of all, that there's so much counseling and healing and reparative work that falls short of what's really needed. And there's a verse in Jeremiah, in the first part of that book, where God says through the prophet, you say to my people, peace, peace, where there is no peace, you have healed the wound of my people, superficially, and one of the things that we regularly see it restoring the soul and this is not an infomercial for restoring the soul, but certainly we believe our programs are life changing, but people who go to 12345 or more counselors over years, couples that have been married for decades and they've just not gotten the help that they need. And so there's this idea of the right kind of help at the right time. And understanding what that is, is really half the battle. Yes, it really is. So jewels all this boils down to a question of what does a person need to look for? To get the right kind of help the right kind of treatment and therapy for betrayal trauma. You know, I was talking with somebody recently, and they, they were getting some really good counseling in a certain area, but in other areas didn't feel like their needs were being met. And I said to them, wealth therapy is not a one counselor treats all approach, right? therapists have different personalities, we have different training backgrounds, we have different experiences, different models, different lenses with which we work through. So sometimes it's a multi prong approach of finding people that meet the different needs that you have. So some of it might be addiction work, 12 Step work, that can be very, very helpful. Another approach, which is an approach that you and I share is really trauma informed therapy, where we're looking at a person's whole story and the deeper issues, not just looking at behavior. And as I call rearranging the furniture, you know, changing the behavior on the surface. But taking a deeper dive and looking underneath, there's therapy like EMDR, which is a trauma protocol, a trauma therapy and eight phase psychotherapy, that can be very beneficial in treatment. And so it's finding more of a mix of treatments, and treatment modalities, that is really good fit for the individual, as well as for the couple. And it seems like it's important for a therapist to not only have a master's degree, but also to be a licensed therapist, which means that they have met a number of specific requirements. I know there are coaches, and helpful people out there that don't have that training, because they've been called into this. But if you're looking for therapy, in particular, a licensed professional, Well, yes and no, I'll give you some pushback, you happen to be married to somebody who for 20 years was not a licensed mental health professional, and yet who specialized in betrayal, trauma. So it can be the training, I would look for the experience. For example, I was at a higher level training a number of years ago, and there were all sorts of people that were there, there were people that are more trained in addiction, there were people that had never worked with any type of intimate partner betrayal, trauma, but had done trauma work. I was there as a kind of a lay person, if you will, having worked through churches and parachurch organizations, meeting with women, one on one, who, whose husbands had, again, had sexual acting out porn affairs, etc. And the interesting thing was that those therapist and professionals who were at this training that had previous experience and training with dealing with trauma, totally got this intimate partner betrayal trauma piece, where I witnessed those that really had more of dealing with drug and alcohol addiction, or just chemical dependency, you know, more of the the gambling, sex addiction 12 Step lens, which we would call like addiction work, or the addiction model, they kind of had a difficult time shifting to see the trauma for the partner versus seeing the codependency. Well, and I think part of that was your training there, in your referring to your training with Dr. Omar up in Walla and in Berkeley. And that was, what, seven, eight years ago and back then the recovery field and the trauma informed field were still very parallel and there wasn't a lot of overlap and ever so slowly those those fields are starting to kind of overlap. But I see that too. Yes. And thanks to pioneers in the field like Dr. Omar Minh wala, out in California, there are many others. When I first started researching and looking for books 20 years ago, I think the only one I found was shattered vows by Deborah Lazar. And now there's a handful, if not more of really good books that talk about the complexities of trauma, the impact on the partner, how to rebuild and restore trust, the process of forgiveness and the time that it takes. So it takes some interviewing on an individual's part to really find a good fit for therapy. It's worth the work to find someone who is a good fit and so I always encourage clients of mine are friends. was to interview therapists to call and ask questions about not just their training, but their experience. Like I said, there's a lot of people out there who have a gifting and have experience in this without having the clinical training. Julian, thank you for sharing your expertise, as well as the wisdom that you've gleaned through your story, our story, and can't wait till you're back in the studio and we sit down and explore another topic. Thanks, Michael. I look forward to being back with you. It was a pleasure to be here today. So thank you for listening to another episode of restoring the soul. We want you to know that restoring the soul is so much more than a podcast. What we're all about is helping couples and individuals get unstuck. You know how some people go to counseling or marriage therapy for months or even years and never really get anywhere. Our intensive programs help clients get unstuck in as little as two weeks. To learn more visit restoring the soul.com That's restoring the soul.com