Hi there. Thank you so much for joining this training, What Nobody Tells You About Healing From Infidelity. I am Rebecca Stone. I'm a psychotherapist, a coach, and a trainer, and I've helped dozens, by now hundreds, of couples heal from betrayal. I've run groups and retreats that have transformed lives and leave couples feeling more connected than ever before. I've seen couples go from sleeping in separate rooms for eight months to renewing their vows. I've seen betrayed partners go from checking their phones forty seven times a day to forgetting their partner even has a phone. And I've seen people who stayed stuck for years finally get clarity about whether to stay or leave and feel peace either way. So let's talk about how this happens. There's a reason that things feel so stuck and painful and helpless right now, hopeless and helpless. Both of you, you and your partner, if you're still trying to make it work, are simultaneously in acute states of trauma. In trauma states, we become more self protective, more reactive, hypervigilant, constantly scanning for danger, less capable of vulnerability, less capable of flexibility, less capable of offering support to ourselves or to our partner, and much less capable of effective communication. So being in a traumatic activation at the same time means that the relationship is trapped in a negative cycle. My needs and feelings trigger you, your needs and feelings trigger me, and there's no way to ground. So we're gonna do a deep dive on betrayal trauma and how it lives in the betrayed partner and the betrayed partner's nervous system and how it lives in the partner who's strayed. So, betrayal trauma in the betrayed partner looks like complete nervous system dysregulation. So physical anxiety, short breath, heart racing, muscle tension, insomnia, loss of appetite, panic attacks. Intrusive thoughts replaying the discovery or imagined scenes of the affair over and over and over again. Relentless negative thoughts about self and or partner. Checking behaviors. Right? Hypervigilance. Feeling the need to constantly check the partner's phone, email, text, asking the same questions over and over and over again to try to make sense of details. This is hypervigilance, and hypervigilance can also become rage attacks. So you're constantly on the lookout for any indication of more secrecy, changes in your partner's feelings, etcetera, and then losing your mind, losing control, getting so furious that the only way to be in control of your body is to kind of let it out and let it rip. Then, of course, and this is the worst part for betrayed partners, is complete loss of self trust, recurring self blaming thoughts of how did I let this happen? How did I miss the signs? Why didn't I stop it sooner? Also, what's wrong with me for staying? And I'm broken and unfixable. The fact that I have these symptoms makes me broken and crazy and unfixable. So here's what I really want you to hear from me. You're not crazy. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it's designed to do when it registers a threat to survival, which is to prevent further harm at all costs. And here are common beliefs that the betrayed partner usually holds internally, consciously or unconsciously after betrayal. My partner's not capable of changing, right, which means that I'm an idiot for staying. What's wrong with me? That I'm even considering trying to reconcile. I can't trust my own judgment anymore. I'll never feel safe again. I'm not enough. I'm not desirable enough. I'm not lovable enough. That's why this happened. Or I'm too much and I pushed my partner away. There's something fundamentally wrong with me. I'm broken and unfixable. These beliefs feel true because your nervous system is in survival mode. They're not facts, they are trauma responses. And we don't just challenge these beliefs cognitively, we help your nervous system experience something different when we do deeper somatic work that gets to the root of working with these negative beliefs and helping your nervous system regulate again. Betrayal trauma in the cheating partner is actually similar. They're two sides of the same coin. So the partner who strayed is is also now a mess. Right? If they weren't before post discovery, their world has fallen apart and collapsed. The person that they love the most in the world sees how much damage that they've caused. The person that they love the most in the world, they have shattered. So they're also in physical constant panic, insomnia, anxiety, so much shame. They're shame spiraling all the time. They have intense paralyzing self loathing. They feel fundamentally bad beyond redemption. The shame can be so overwhelming that it causes defensiveness and blaming. And by the way, this is why most couples therapy for infidelity backfires, because if you're the cheating partner, you're drowning in the feeling of I'm fundamentally broken. So then to sit next to the person that you hurt so badly and to be questioned about the harm you caused often puts the cheating partner into a deeper freeze response. Physical tightness, verbal shutdown, more emotional withdrawal. There's no way that you can show up effectively for repair from that place. So first what we have to do is help you stay centered and regulated, teach you how to stay in connection even when you're confronted with your actions and your partner's suffering. Another thing that often happens, and this is the extreme of withdrawal, of a withdrawing strategy, which often the cheating partners employ, right, is just the shut down, numb out, leave the room, is dissociation. Disconnect from the actual actions, difficulty accessing feelings, going numb, freezing during difficult conversations, inability to answer questions even when they want to. Sometimes that even presents as difficulty remembering, I don't even remember. It's all a haze. They're also hypervigilant. They can become preoccupied with their partner's feeling state, bracing for the next confrontation. And then they want to control because they feel so out of control, and they continue trickle truthing to avoid consequences. Right? They want to control their partner's access to the truth and information because they're so scared of the shame and feeling out of control and being at the whim of their partner's anger, panic, etcetera. And then often also for the the partner who strayed, there's so much grief. There's a loss of self-concept as a good person. Right? I thought I would never do this. I swore to myself I would never do this to my family. How could this have happened to me? They're also losing their main coping strategy. It's like an addict, right, who all of a sudden can't use a substance anymore. And now they're confronted with facing all of the pain without the escape mechanism. And sometimes it can present as ambivalent about whether they can stay after having caused so much pain. A lot of them have said, I really love my partner, but I've shattered them so much, I don't see how it's even possible that we can ever feel okay again. And sometimes, the affair itself is such an escape. It's such a right? It's such a fantasy world that the cheating partner doesn't really feel anything except for exhilaration or thrill or whatever, and they're completely disconnected, fragmented, compartmentalized from the reality of what they're doing to their partner and their family, etcetera. But most of the cheating partners that I work with report that they're in torment during the affair. They're losing weight. They're not sleeping. Sometimes they're taking Ativan. Sometimes they're taking ******. Right? It's not actually a hot passionate escape. It's lesser sex, they consistently report to me. And it's so much anxiety and so much guilt, and they actually don't know how to get out of the spin. And they keep doing it because they're trying to escape from the shame, the self loathing, the anxiety that they feel, and so they don't really feel like they can get out. But it feels terrible. A lot of them report that when they're caught, it's a relief because they hated being in it so much that it actually felt better when their partner found out. So here's what betrayal trauma in the cheating partner sounds like in terms of their negative beliefs. There's something fundamentally wrong with me. I'm broken. I'll never be forgiven. I don't deserve love. I deserve rejection and abandonment. If a parent has cheated, right, what's so painful to them is I swore I'd never be like my father or mother, and here I am. I'm just like them. And often, it touches this very deep, deep fear. If people really knew me, they'd leave. If they really knew me, they'd be horrified. And the important thing that we do in my affair recovery model is teach and work with cheating partners to understand that when you're drowning in shame, it actually keeps you from doing the work that helps your partner heal. Shame immobilizes us. It sends us straight into a free state. Accountability mobilizes us. It moves us from freeze into, I'm a good person, and I am showing up for my partner, and I am going to heal this because it does not define me at my core. So, the work that we do in the My Affair Recovery Model is we help you learn how to tolerate your shame, how to love yourself and offer yourself self compassion, how to regulate your nervous system, understand where these patterns come from originally in childhood and beyond, and so that you can show up for your partner in ways that actually rebuild trust. So let's talk about why you feel so alone. If you're the betrayed partner, often, you don't wanna tell your friends because you don't want them to hate your partner forever if you're trying to reconcile. You don't wanna tell your family because it changes how they relate to your partner and how they see your marriage. You you probably really don't wanna burden your children with this, right, especially. So you're carrying a secret that's eating you alive. And if you're the one who cheated, then either friends judge you or they minimize what you did. You probably wanna keep it a secret too. And so there's nowhere for you to be honest and get help. Be honest and get support for accountability. Right? And so the shame and the secrecy and the stigma keeps you stuck. And healing from this specifically, especially, requires real support. And stigma creates isolation that just allows the pain and the rage and the shame and the self loathing to grow. So here is what I found when I was training in couples work and working with betrayal, in couples therapy, and also with my individual clients who are on both sides of it. Our current field, therapy field, and what modern psychology is missing is that this specific issue, infidelity and infidelity recovery, is a serious trauma. It's complex trauma, and therapists are not actually prepared to work with it. And here's what's really wild about the research. Therapists report that it is the number two most damaging issue that they face after physical violence in the home, yet it's the issue that therapists also report feeling least prepared to treat. Seventy four percent report inadequate training. They do not feel equipped to deal with this. Seventy four percent. Yet almost fifty percent of the couples out there are going to experience this at some point in their monogamous relationship. That is wild. The the mental health field does not have what it takes to meet the current couples challenges of our time. So here's why. Number one, there is no real specialized training in this. There's no couples therapy that dedicates an entire segment of their training to specific infidelity recovery. There's no specialized training that teaches about infidelity in trauma modalities. So most therapists are receiving zero coursework, zero postgraduate training, specifically on infidelity and how to help clients actually heal. Number two, because it's typically treated in Couples Therapy, it's looked at the same way that any communication issue is looked at because that's what Couples Therapists are trained to treat. So it's treated as a relationship problem. So standard Couples therapy training says, let's look at what both of you contributed, which completely re traumatizes the betrayed partner who already feels responsible and somehow like they brought this on and it's their fault. Right? And the truth is that it's not actually a relationship problem. Every relationship has negative cycles and ****** dynamics. Every relationship. But the difference between someone who cheats and someone who doesn't cheat is what their attachment patterning is, what their wounding is from childhood, and how equipped they feel to work with their pain without escaping. That's what differentiates between cheating in relationships and not cheating in relationships. There are many other ways to deal with problems as a relationship arises. Talk therapy doesn't reach the body, so your nervous system is injured, and talking is not gonna stop three AM spirals. Right? And most therapists are trained as talk therapists. Tell me how you feel, and then they validate. But that doesn't help. You already know how you feel. What you can't stop is being in a hypervigilant fight, flight, freeze response. And so we need different modalities. We need trauma focused work to actually help you heal. And also, most therapists that couples go to about this or individuals miss the root causes. The root causes are childhood wounding and attachment wounding, sexual abuse history, family patterns, parents cheating, right? And most therapists don't ever ask about that. And then the last is you're still isolated. Aside from your therapist, you're alone in the pain and the struggle because of the stigma. And again, isolation is where the pain and the wounding festers. It's where shame grows bigger. So here's why my approach works for so many people when others have not. First, I work with both sides. Most specialists work with betrayed partners or those who cheated. I work with both separately. There are two separate tracks where each partner gets exactly what they need, and then we bring the couple together for much more effective repair and communication. Two, I go to the root. We don't just work on communication. We address everything that I just talked about. Childhood wounding, sexual abuse histories, family systems patterns, attachment injuries, and unconscious loyalties. I'm not save your marriage at all costs. I help you decide if you want to stay. Some people heal and rebuild something better. Some people heal and realize, you know what? This relationship has run its course. I was already unhappy. My partner is not changing the way I need them to. I'm out. Both are completely valid. All I want is for you to heal and feel like you can live your best life after this, that your life is not over, that your joy is not dead. Individual work has to happen in my approach before the couples work. You cannot do couples therapy when both people are drowning in their trauma responses and drowning in pain. Each partner has to heal themselves first, and then we bring you together. And this is a year long container, not a quick fix. Healing takes time and you deserve support for all of it, not just the first few months. And then last, we do this work in a community group setting because community breaks the isolation. You finally hear truth, validation, understanding, compassion from people who have been through the exact same thing as you, without the stigma and shame that keeps you stuck. So, here are the four pillars of our model. The first that I've spoken at length about is nervous system regulation. Your body is stuck in fight, flight, freeze, we need to help you with somatic tools, breath work, bilateral stimulation, grounding practices, basically trauma processing, to help your nervous system feel safe again, to help it actually release the trauma, the cortisol, the adrenaline that is stuck in your body right now. This isn't about calming down. It's about giving your body proof with the most evidence based modalities in our current field that the threat is over and that you can release it. The second, maybe my favorite in a way, is transforming negative beliefs and limiting patterns. So we help you understand how the beliefs and patterns that are driving your pain predate this relationship. Why did these beliefs have such a grip on you, such a hold? Right? When you see these patterns and these negative beliefs clearly, when you understand where they really come from, then you are free to make new meaning about this affair, this what's happening in your current relationship, and you can see that it has nothing to do with you. And you can respond to this stress from a place of grounding and wisdom, from a new perspective where you're not blaming yourself. The third is healing intergenerational burdens. Many of our behaviors and beliefs originate in the traumas of our ancestors and the way that it is passed down to us energetically, psychologically, and genetically. We help you trace your behaviors back to their origins. You'll see, you'll learn how you are unconsciously repeating patterns from your ancestors that were never yours to have to repeat. And we teach you how to release what you've been carrying so that the cycle stops with you, so that your kids don't inherit it too. And then the fourth is relationship repair. Only after individual healing do we rebuild attachment, restructure communication, and create a relationship that's more connected than before the betrayal. So these four pillars are why couples who have tried everything else, years of therapy, other groups, retreats, books finally get traction with us. So where you are now versus where you could be, let's walk through it. I find them when they are having intrusive thoughts twenty fourseven. They're hypervigilant, checking everything, feeling crazy, broken, not enough. They can't trust themselves or their partner. They're in constant fight or flight. They feel isolated, ashamed, and alone. Two, here's where we bring them through our work, this program. Regulated nervous system, understanding your patterns, making choices from power, not panic. Reclaimed agency, feeling like I am in control of myself, my life, my body. Tools for triggers and clarity on what they want. So imagine six months from now, you're at dinner with your partner, they get a text, and your heart doesn't race. You just continue eating. Or imagine this, you've made your decision to stay or leave. It feels like power, not trauma spin. You get to choose from clarity and inner knowing and peace. That's what's available to you if you do the right work with the right support. So here is what transformation actually looks like. Sarah was the betrayed partner. She was checking her husband's phone forty seven times a day, literally. She couldn't sleep more than two hours a night. She lost fifteen pounds in three weeks. Her kids kept asking them, Why is mommy always crying? Six weeks into the program, she said, I didn't know my body could feel calm again. I forgot what that was like. She hadn't checked his phone in two weeks, and she wasn't white knuckling it or forcing herself not to check. Her nervous system finally actually felt safe. Michael was the partner who strayed. He was drowning in shame when he first started my program. He could not look his wife in the eye. He'd been sleeping on the couch for eight months. He felt like a monster, that his family would be better off without him. After uncovering that he was unconsciously repeating his father's pattern and releasing that loyalty, he could finally show up for his wife's pain without collapsing into freeze. Fourteen months after starting the program, they renewed their vows and they wrote me from Hawaii. Jennifer had been working on the marriage for three years. She was exhausted, resentful. She felt like she'd be abandoning her kids if she left. After doing the program, she said, for the first time in twenty years, I trust my own judgment. I'm not running away. I'm walking toward myself. She was able to leave in a place of clarity and inner peace, not panic. The program works for you whether you stay or leave. The goal is not to save your marriage at all cost. The goal is to save you and get you back to strong, resilient, Here's what the data from prior cohorts tells us when we ask for feedback and we do pre and post surveys. First, the average distress levels would go from about a ten to a three. Right? Ten out of ten to three, that's a sixty five percent reduction in the first twelve weeks of doing our program. Fifty seven percent of our participants report even lower distress than three. They go from one to three out of ten by the end of the program. Ninety five percent of people who do our group report reduction in intrusive thoughts. A hundred percent report shifts in their core beliefs and sense of self. I now trust that this had nothing to do with me. I am lovable. I will be okay no matter what. And one hundred percent say that being in community with their fellow group members has been a lifeline and they could not imagine healing without it. What you're seeing here is the evidence that this program pays for itself many times over. But behind these numbers are real individuals experiencing real change, finding relief from symptoms and cycles that were prolonging their suffering so much longer than it needed to be. They're sleeping again, getting their health back, saving money on endless therapy, and either avoiding unnecessary divorce and all that costs, or approaching separation with calm and confidence. Here's what clients actually say. One session with Rebecca has been more helpful than all of the couples therapy we've had. It's exponential. I feel that we made so much more progress than we would have in months worth of other therapy. Rebecca's masterful guidance not only moved us light years ahead in the healing and repair process, we have been through so much therapy, read every book, followed everyone on social media, but no one has been able to help us the way Rebecca has. This is true healing, not just steps and check ins. So disappointed by the number of therapists who have a checklist, and as long as you meet the items, they move right on. The Experiential exercises in the program are more powerful than any book or talk therapy. Rebecca's expertise in this field is unmatched. Here are the options for work together. I have an incredible team of coaches, and we have a twelve month intensive coaching program. In that twelve month program, you get twelve weeks, which is eighteen hours of live group sessions with a cohort that you're gonna become very close with. Included in that are weekly ninety minute calls in a small intimate group where we actually do the experiential work, the nervous system regulation, the Negative Belief rescripting, the Intergenerational Healing that I've been talking about. This is deep Experiential Healing that gets to the root of what is causing your pain. Then you also get four individual coaching sessions with a coach, not only trained by me, but typically someone who has actually been through my entire program from start to finish with their partner and has healed through this methodology. So, not only are they trained as a coach or a therapist, but they have been through it and healed themselves. You get a private WhatsApp community for daily support. Your cohort will become your lifeline. You will have a place where you can say the truth and get support at three PM or three AM and by met be met by people who get you, plus ongoing support from your coach and from me in the WhatsApp group. Then you get ongoing support with me and my team for a full twelve months. After the twelve week intensive, you don't just get dropped. You stay in a year long coaching container directly with me where we continue somatic regulation work, family systems and intergenerational healing, and ongoing Q and A and coaching so that you are supported through all of the aftershocks, decisions, the anniversaries, the setbacks, the hard conversations that come up over the year. For couples who are ready to go all in together and really heal together, we have the Couples Recovery Intensive, which includes everything I just described for each of you, plus twelve couple sessions with a couples coach who has lived through this experience and is deeply trained in my model. Twelve. That's basically an additional three thousand dollars worth of service without any increased price. And if you love your coach and you continue to want to work with them for a year or two years or three years, you can continue to work with them for as long as you need for a standard coaching rate. So, here are some questions that you might be asking. Can't I just do couples therapy or regular individual therapy? And here's what you've probably already heard me say. If both of you were drowning, one in betrayal trauma and one in shame, you cannot do effective couples work. You'll just keep having the same fight, but now in front of a therapist. Both partners have to stabilize their nervous systems and heal the belief and the patterns underneath this before a couple sessions can actually do the repair work that it needs to do. That's why we do individual and group work first, and then we only bring you together in a structured way after that foundation is set. What if my partner won't do it with me? Your healing does not have to depend on your partner. Many people join my program alone. They regulate their nervous systems. They get their clarity back. And then either relationship transforms because one person has changed so fundamentally or they leave from a place of strength instead of panic. The goal is not to save the marriage at all costs, the goal is to save you. Can't I just figure this out on my own? Most people who find me have been trying from one to three years to figure it out. They're still checking phones at three am. They're still having the same fights. They're still looped in the same intrusive thoughts. Even if they've read all the books and done all the podcasts, and even if they've been in therapy for all that time. When your nervous system is this hijacked, time alone will not heal it. In fact, the longer you wait, the more entrenched the patterns become. The smartest, kindest thing that you can do for yourself is to take the right approach sooner rather than later. I hear this a lot. I don't know if we can afford this right now. And I take that seriously. This is a significant investment, but I want you to consider the real cost of staying where you are. Another year of three am spirals and health consequences from chronic stress. Another year of your kids sensing that something is deeply wrong, even if nobody's speaking it out loud. Another year of spending thousands of dollars on therapy that may be helping you cope and tread water but isn't actually moving the needle on healing the trauma that now lives in your body. Each of you in weekly individual therapy at two hundred dollars to three hundred dollars a session, then a separate couples therapist at two fifty dollars to three fifty dollars a session, maybe a random support group if you're lucky, but nobody's talking to each other. The therapists aren't really coordinating. There's no shared map. And no one's actually trained in betrayal trauma as its own specialty. Over a year, that is easily twenty thousand dollars to thirty thousand dollars or more. And most of the couples who land in my programs tell me that they've already spent somewhere between eight thousand dollars and fifty thousand dollars on therapy that has not moved the needle. And for many couples, the alternative to recovery is a divorce process that can easily run twenty thousand dollars to fifty thousand dollars or more in legal fees, moving costs, divided assets, and years of co parenting conflict. In that context, dollars five thousand five hundred per person or eleven thousand dollars per couple for a year long, tightly held, research informed container that has already helped hundreds of people is actually a pretty conservative investment. So if this training resonated with you and you're ready to stop trying to figure this out alone, Here's what happens next. You'll submit a short application. We review every single one carefully, and we want to make sure that this container is the right fit for where you are and what you need. If it seems like a good match and you're gonna be invited to schedule a call with Jenna from my team who's really wonderful, you'll talk to her. That call is not a high pressure sales conversation. It's a chance for you to ask questions, for us to understand your situation, and for both of us to decide together whether this is the right support for you and your family right now. If it does feel like a good fit for both of us, then what I can promise you, and I have dozens of testimonials to back this up, is that this healing journey will likely be some of the most powerful, deep, and transformative healing you will ever do in your life. I'm so honored that you spent this time with me today. I hope you learned a lot. And whether you work with us or not, I hope that you are walking away with the following message from me. You are not broken. Nobody can break you. Neither of you, you or your partner are broken. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it's supposed to do. And there is a path through this that can lead to clarity, peace, resilience, wisdom. And for so many people, it can also lead to a kind of love, connection and repair that they never even thought to be possible. Your healing does not have to depend on your partner. It does not have to depend on them changing. It depends on you choosing to stop abandoning yourself. Thank you so much. I hope that you apply for our next round of group coaching programs, and it was a real honor to spend time today. Hope to hear from you soon.