Ambiguous Grief After Betrayal: Honoring All You’ve Lost

“When will I feel better? This hurts so much. Why did this happen to me?” I’ve sat with many betrayed partners as they’ve processed the pain from their partner’s infidelity and the resulting impact on them and the relationship. I’ve seen the anguish, confusion, overwhelm, and deep ache they feel. There’s only one word to describe this experience: grief.

“Grief?!” you may ask. “No one’s died!” Yes, grief. What we are describing here is something called ambiguous grief, or “the feeling experienced from the loss of a loved one who is still living, accompanied by a change in or death of the relationship.” It’s different from what we typically think of as grief because there hasn’t been a physical death. But for betrayed partners, there has been a metaphorical death: the loss of the relationship as we knew it. Whether we choose in the end to stay with our partner or move toward divorce, our relationship and our life will never be the same. And this massive loss is accompanied by many other losses.

Losses From Betrayal

With the discovery of our partner’s betrayal, our reality and life as we knew them are completely flipped upside down. The metaphorical rug has been pulled out from under us, and it absolutely knocks the wind out of us. We may feel shock, anger, sadness, fear, confusion, and/or shame. All of these feelings are too much for a human to process at one time, so we first find ourselves in shock and crisis mode; we usually research betrayal, seek out individual and/or couples therapy, and try to stabilize our relationship.

As we take these steps and the dust begins to settle, we may notice a shift inside ourselves. We now have more emotional space to begin to feel the enormous impact of betrayal on all parts of our life. It’s like we’ve been through a massive earthquake, felt the initial aftershock, and then we’re looking around at the destruction left in its wake. We now have more capacity to confront the reality of our experience: “I’ve been betrayed by the most important person in my life, and that ripples out to touch all parts of my experience.”

As we begin to process the loss of what we thought was true about our relationship, it brings up many other losses that are deeply painful and difficult to process. Some common ones I hear in my practice are:

The Loss of Implicit Trust in Others

When the person I trusted most in the world betrays me, I not only lose trust in them but also begin to question whether I can trust others at all. If I didn’t see this betrayal coming, how can I know that others won’t hurt me? I may put my guard up in relationships, especially when building new ones.

The Loss of Trust in Myself

After betrayal, we scan back through the past, searching for signs that we missed. Sometimes we find flags that we ignored or let go of when our partner denied any issues, and we ask ourselves, “How could I have let that go? Why did I minimize this problem?” Sometimes we can’t find any clear signs of the betrayal, and we may ask, “How could I NOT know something was going on with my partner?” Either way, we often lose a sense of trust in our own “gut.”

The Loss of Identity or Sense of Self

Betrayal can take up all of our time, energy, feelings, and thoughts as we work on healing. As a result, we can feel a loss of connection to ourselves outside of being a betrayed partner. We may grieve the parts of ourselves that feel far away in the aftermath of betrayal, like being trusting, joyful, or social.

The Loss of My Self-Confidence

When our partner chooses to connect emotionally and/or sexually with someone else, it can rock our sense of confidence. We may think we aren’t enough or compare ourselves to other people.

The Loss of My Innocence

We may feel naive after betrayal and beat ourselves up for not expecting our partner’s betrayal. Underneath this is a deep sadness over losing our innocence. I’ve heard so many clients process their partner’s acting out, oftentimes saying they could never have conceptualized the possibility that someone they love would engage in behaviors they never imagined.

The Loss of Memories

It can be difficult to look back through photos and memories of good times in our relationships and families because all we can see is the fact that our partner was lying to us, hiding things, or acting out at that time. Even the good from the past feels tarnished.

The Loss of Dreams For The Future

After discovery, our past can feel lost as we reprocess it through the lens of new information, our present can feel lost as our world is turned upside down, and our future can feel lost too as our plans, dreams, and vision for life are put on pause. As we try to discern whether we want to and whether we can repair our relationship with our partner, our future, which once seemed so clear, now becomes murky.

The Loss of Sexual Safety

Sex is one of the most vulnerable and intimate parts of our relationship. After betrayal, this area that should be safe and meaningful can become fraught with triggers, fears, comparison, or loss of confidence.

The Loss of Friends and Community

After betrayal, we can find ourselves either isolating and pulling away from others or reaching out to friends and family for support. When we isolate, we can feel the loss of community, since we may not have the energy or capacity for connection or may feel like we have to wear a mask. When we reach out for support and share our experience of betrayal, our decision to stay or go, or our confusion and “limbo” as we discern what to do next, others may respond in unhelpful or potentially harmful ways. As a result, we may lose relationships altogether as we discern who is safe or unsafe, or we may feel relationships shift and change post-discovery.

The Loss of Time

Time is a valuable resource that we can never get back. We often look back on the months or years when the betrayal was occurring and being hidden and wish we could have known so we could recover that time for ourselves or our relationship. We may feel the loss of time after discovery, too, as grief and healing can take up so much time, space, and energy. We often long to feel “normal” again and wish we could hurry the process along.

As you finish reading this list, take a breath. You may feel the heaviness of this grief and loss as I name the many ways our lives are changed by betrayal, maybe even feeling a weight or tension in your body. Feel your feet on the ground under you, put your hand on your chest, and pause to honor your grief for a moment. This pain and these losses are real.

There are so many more losses that I could list that most betrayed partners would relate to, but there are also unique losses that will be specific to each person as they walk through healing from betrayal. Grief is layered and complex, and we may find ourselves overwhelmed with all that we’ve lost in this discovery. That is completely normal. Take a moment to offer compassion for yourself. This is really hard!

Stages of Grief

Similar to the grief that surfaces after someone’s death, we can experience different phases of grief after discovery. Each phase can play a role in our healing.

Shock and Denial

As noted above, we first find ourselves reeling from the overwhelm of discovery. We may avoid others and feel confusion, fear, and numbness. Engaging in denial, minimization, and rationalization serves to protect us from the reality of what’s going on in our lives; it’s just too much to process at once.

Anger

Anger is a protest of the betrayal and its impacts, and it names the reality that what is happening to us is wrong or unjust—which is true! Anger is an emotion that is action-oriented, meaning it heightens our awareness of what is and is not okay with us, readies us to appropriately set boundaries to self-protect, and moves us toward doing something to support ourselves. This is a very important phase of our healing. Notice if you tend to get stuck in anger or avoid anger—either reaction gives us information about what we need.

Bargaining

When we’re bargaining, we get pulled into the “what if” scenarios and rack our brains to understand what’s happened to us. We can get caught up in the possibility that this pain could have been averted as a way to distract us from what’s happened and what’s happening in the here and now. We may ask God or the universe, “Why did this happen?” We struggle to find meaning in what’s happened and may feel a pull to process and tell our story with others.

Depression and Detachment

Just as it sounds, when we are in depression and detachment, we feel overwhelmed, low-energy, helpless, and ashamed. Our body, brain, and heart are processing the reality of the loss and feeling the heaviness of it.

Acceptance

We may begin to experience acceptance as we process the different phases of grief. Acceptance does not mean the betrayal is not hurtful or that it was okay that it happened; it means accepting the reality of our partner’s behavior and its impact on us, our relationship, our family, and our life. We may begin to find meaning for ourselves in this experience, explore options, create a new plan for our life, engage in recovery practices, and make choices that empower us and strengthen our self-respect and integrity.

Return to Meaningful Life

Also called “Post-Traumatic Growth,” we are in this phase when we feel empowered, secure, confident in ourselves, and able to make meaning for ourselves. This doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten the betrayal or never feel sad again, but it’s as if the grief is no longer standing in the way of our ability to move forward and live our lives freely.

Something that is very important to remember in this process is that grief has no timetable and these phases are not linear. We can’t expect ourselves to “check the box” on each phase succinctly and quickly, move on to the next phase, and never return to the previous phases again. The reality is that grief is complex, and we will likely have some days when we feel like we’re moving between all five phases, some weeks when we feel stuck in a phase for a long time, or times when we feel like we’re ourselves again and hope we’re “getting better”—and then it all comes rushing back.

Be patient with yourself in this process. Just as we wouldn’t tell someone who lost a loved one to “get over it” quickly or try to rush them through their healing, we need to offer the same grace to ourselves to feel what we’re feeling.

What Gets in the Way of Grief

Other than the obvious answer that grief is difficult to feel and we may want to avoid it, what are other things that get in the way of grieving post-discovery?

Minimizing This As Valid Grief: If we don’t see our experience as grief from loss, we may criticize ourselves or experience misunderstanding from others about why we’re hurting for “so long.”

Pressure to “Get Better”: Because of the misunderstanding of this experience as grief, we may feel pressure from ourselves, our community, or our partner to feel better and move forward.

Lack of Rituals or Support Around Ambiguous Grief: While a physical death comes with ways to process the loss collectively, like a celebration of life or a funeral, there is no culturally accepted form of grieving betrayal. Most people in our lives may not know there’s even BEEN a loss. Either way, no one gets a casserole after discovering their partner betrayed them.

Constant Triggers That Resurface The Grief: Every trigger that comes up post-discovery carries the weight of loss underneath it. When we feel like we can’t watch a TV show without being triggered or feel frustrated when we get anxious and wonder what our partner is doing on his phone, underneath this is a deep sadness that we have lost how things used to be. We feel reminded of this seemingly all the time.

External Hope: When someone we love dies, as much as we wish that person could still be with us, we are acutely aware of the reality that it is not possible. When grieving the loss of the relationship as we knew it while continuing to interact with our partner, we may find ourselves hoping that things aren’t that bad, that we can return to how they were before, or that our partner will change—even when they are not showing signs of working toward recovery and healing. This focus on external hope can keep us stuck in prolonged grief because it prevents us from facing the reality of our loss. While we can get to a future that is better than we can even imagine, to be able to move forward, we must confront the reality of our loss.

How to Grieve Our Losses

So how do we grieve in a healthy way and not get stuck?

Name The Losses: We can’t grieve what we haven’t named. A great exercise is to create a loss list and write out all the different types of loss you’ve experienced since discovery. Get support in this process by talking with a therapist or a safe, trusted friend.

Offer Self-Compassion: Rather than criticizing ourselves for feeling grief, offering ourselves compassion helps us acknowledge and process our emotions. This can help us move through them rather than getting stuck in them.

Face The Pain Rather Than Avoid It: Our tendency can be to avoid and run away from painful emotions. When we do that, however, it keeps us stuck in our grief. Emotions will not go away until we give them space to be felt. At the same time, we all need a break from grief and will need fun, healthy distractions and breaks from processing. This is healthy and good, and it is not the same thing as avoidance when paired with acceptance of our emotions and processing when we need to.

Increasing Internal Hope: Rather than only focusing on external hope—“Will my partner change? Will we repair? How can I get him into recovery?”—nurture internal hope. This is the kind of hope that focuses our attention on the present instead of the future and encourages us to explore what steps we are or can be taking to heal. It’s grounded in the reality of the present and feels more empowering since internal hope is actually within our control.

Reaching Out For Safe Support: Grief is such a painful and isolating experience, and because of this, we need support and to feel seen by safe people in our lives. David Kessler, a grief and loss expert, wrote, “Each person's grief is as unique as their fingerprint. But what everyone has in common is that no matter how they grieve, they share a need for their grief to be witnessed.” Identify who those people are for you and seek them out for support; tell your story of grief, and allow yourself to receive their presence, attention, and care.

I’ve seen many betrayed partners take these steps to walk through grief and come through the other side into acceptance and post-traumatic growth. It is possible, and there is hope.

In the meantime, grief is so hard to navigate; don’t let yourself do it alone. If you need support from someone who can understand the ambiguous grief that surfaces after betrayal, please reach out to our office. We would love to connect you with someone who can witness your pain and help you process your grief.

About the Author

Kirstin Franklin is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Certified Clinical Trauma Professional. Kirstin helps clients examine relational patterns, get in touch with their emotions and needs, and practice expressing themselves with greater vulnerability, connection, and authenticity.