Summary: Here at Betrayal Trauma Recovery, we hear many stories of women facing unimaginable trauma centered around betrayal and emotional abuse by their partners. Today, we are sharing one of those stories with you. Peggy is a professional Betrayal Trauma Recovery Coach with 20 years of experience. She helps individuals reach a place of peace and joy through guided meditation to dismantle trauma and remove sabotaging unconscious programming. Peggy is also a certified Journey Work Practitioner.<br> <br> Describing her experience, Peggy states, <br> "I was married at a young age and a year after the marriage the man I was married to told me he had same-sex attraction. I was like, okay we’ll ride with it because I knew that this was the man for me and I was very committed in the relationship and had a strong belief in our marriage together. So, it was about 7 years into the marriage when things started to really bubble up for him and he started to do some of his own healing and eventually, he became a prominent therapist who helped men overcome same-sex attraction."<br> Finding Out A Spouse Has Lied Is Traumatizing<br> Eventually, Peggy began to see the cracks growing within her marriage, she states, <br> "I continued my healing and unbeknownst to me the man I was married to was also doing men’s retreats and was very involved in helping men to heal and what I didn’t realize at the time was his focus, he was gone a lot, he didn’t focus on me a lot and there was a lot of pain in that. There were really good times and there were really awful times. We went through pornography issues and alcohol and cocaine, which I didn’t find out until later. He led me to believe that they were just forays into addiction and that he was healthy and long story short, what I realized towards the end of the marriage, it was a 34-year marriage, was that he actually never really did his work. He did it initially just enough to get to a point where he was respected and where he could see enough that he could create things and help other people and kind of be the top dog in the community."<br> Peggy continues, <br> "He had admitted that he had narcissistic tendencies and what I discovered was he was a covert narcissist because the narcissism thing as I was looking at it was: “Oh, he’s not overtly that way” but covertly he’s totally a covert narcissist. He was the one that came to me and said I want a divorce and it crushed me, I was devastated, but I learned so much in that process. I learned that he was a covert narcissist, that he actually was probably a sex addict, and I started to see the abuse that was happening. I started to wake up to it. The emotional abuse. Since the divorce, I learned that I actually was emotionally abused through the whole marriage, which is a lot to take into my body."<br> Dishonesty Is Abusive, Even When It is About Sexuality<br> Anne, founder of Betrayal Trauma Recovery, explains that emotional abuse is so often present, but unobserved as it is cleverly disguised, she states, <br> "My ex, when he was speaking about his recovery, he wanted to become a therapist and he really loved the attention of speaking out and having people think he was such a good guy. Now, I’m just so terrified of that because he really never was in recovery, now that I look back. He was abusing me the entire time and that’s really scary to think that we stood up in front of 1600 people and spoke about his recovery when he was actively abusing me."<br> Peggy agrees and describes how this same type of emotional abuse impacted her, <br> "Even the act of standing up in front of those people and speaking about it and lying was an act of abuse toward me. The same thing with your ex. Every single time he purported to love or care or whatever when he was lying or hiding things is an act of abuse and so then you chalk it up to 34 years of these covert abuse tactics. Then suddenly after a “lifetime of working and being healthy i...
