How to Find Yourself Again After Betrayal: Why Keeping the Peace Erased You

Teresa Zuvela, LMHC, CSAT, CPTT  ·  Stage: Reclaim

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Keeping the peace rarely feels like losing yourself. It feels like being a good wife, a good mother, a reasonable person.

On Tuesday I told you about Bridget, who sat in her therapist’s office and said, “I don’t know who I am”. Today I want to explain how that happens, why it was never weakness, and how to find yourself again, one concrete thing at a time.

How Keeping the Peace Erases a Woman

It almost never happens in one big decision. It happens in small ones.

A preference you stop mentioning. A friend you stop calling because he doesn’t like her. A hobby that falls off the calendar. An opinion you swallow because the argument isn’t worth it.

Each one makes sense in the moment. Together, they add up to a woman who can’t remember what she likes.

Researchers have a name for this pattern. Psychologists Dana Jack and Diana Dill built a scale to measure self-silencing: how much a woman quiets her own feelings, needs, and opinions to keep a close relationship safe, and puts her partner’s needs ahead of her own. Their work linked that pattern to depression in women (Jack & Dill, 1992).

Bridget described it in her own words: little bits of herself, tossed away so a man could have his peace.

Four Ways a Body Keeps the Peace

Bridget named four ways she had hidden herself. Each one is a survival response, something a nervous system does to stay safe and stay connected.

• Appeasing. Smoothing things over, agreeing, giving him what he wants so the tension passes. This is sometimes called the fawn response.
• Freezing. Going quiet and still. Not saying the thing, because saying it feels dangerous.
• Fighting. Pushing back hard, then often being told she was the problem.
• Running. Leaving the room, staying busy, disappearing into the kids or the house.

None of these are choices made from a calm body. They are protection. But each time, his needs and the family’s needs moved into the space where she used to be.

Why It Was Never Weakness

Bridget gave up her needs with love for her family, every single time. That love was a strength. Her husband took advantage of it.

When she did stand up for herself, he gaslit her, until she second-guessed what she knew. Sociologist Paige Sweet, who interviewed women about gaslighting in abusive relationships, found that it works by drawing on old stereotypes of women as irrational or “crazy,” so a woman starts to doubt her own perceptions (Sweet, 2019).

That matters here. It is hard to know what you like when you’ve been taught not to trust what you know. Once a woman stops trusting her own perceptions, her preferences are often the next thing to go.

The Layers: More Than One Betrayal

When Bridget said “I don’t know who I am,” she saw more than her husband’s betrayal. She saw layers.

• Her husband, who cheated and gaslit her.
• Her parents, who taught her that keeping the peace came first.
• Her church.
• The friends who didn’t get it.
• A patriarchal culture that told her, long before she married, that a good woman doesn’t make waves.
• And herself.

Researchers Carly Parnitzke Smith and Jennifer Freyd use the term institutional betrayal for times when trusted institutions, including churches, harm the people who depend on them for safety (Smith & Freyd, 2014). Naming that layer isn’t a statement about faith. It’s about the people and systems that asked her to stay quiet.

The last layer is the hardest to hear. “I betrayed myself” can sound like blame. I think it is more accurate to call it self-abandonment under pressure. She learned to leave herself to keep the peace and hold her family together. And what you leave, you can go back for.

Grief and Resentment Belong Here

Seeing all of this brought grief. Bridget felt it as a heaviness in her body she couldn’t deny anymore. That grief is for the years, and for the parts of her that went quiet.

Resentment came, too. That makes sense. Your emotions are information, and resentment often points to something that mattered and was taken.

For Bridget, it became a vow. She would stand up for herself now. If he got upset, that was his to deal with. He had his own therapist and his own group for support. She was done compromising herself.

She didn’t need to become someone new.

She needed to go back

for the girl at the public pool.

How to Find Yourself Again, One Concrete Thing at a Time

You find yourself again the same way you lost yourself: one small piece at a time. Here is how Bridget began.

• Ask her therapist’s question. What did I love before? Before the marriage, before the kids, as a girl. Write down whatever comes.
• Start concrete. Bridget named swimming, riding bikes, and time with friends. Things you can do, not who you think you should be.
• Notice your body as you remember. For Bridget, hope rose in her chest. That lift is a signal that something is yours.
• Pick one and give it a place in your week. Bridget joined a water aerobics class.
• Let it include people, if you can. Bridget made new friends there. Connection helps rebuild what isolation took.
• Let someone else’s upset be theirs. If someone is unhappy that you’re taking time for yourself, that feeling belongs to them.
• Keep the list going. Bridget knew there were many more parts of herself still to find. She started with three.

When she did, a confidence and freedom she hadn’t known in years came back to her.

None of this decides anything about your marriage. Women who stay and women who leave both have to go back for themselves. This part of the work is yours either way, on your own timeline.

What Comes Next: Where to Find Help

You can find yourself again. Not by inventing a new woman, but by going back for the parts you set down to keep the peace.

Next week I’ll talk about how to listen to yourself again: how to tell the voice of fear, the voice that wants to please, and your own quiet knowing apart.

Calm is a boundary choice, and for Bridget, it looked like a class schedule, a swimsuit, and a promise to herself.

My free guide walks you through the first stage of the Woodland Pathways Model, Stabilize, so your body has somewhere steady to stand as you start making room for yourself.

If you are ready for more direct support, a Stabilization Intensive is a focused, two-day way to begin this work with a clinician who specializes in betrayal trauma. You do not have to have decided anything about your marriage to start.

Frequently Asked Questions

Teresa Zuvela, LMHC is a Certified Sex Addiction Therapist (CSAT) and Certified Partner Trauma Therapist (CPTT) providing telehealth betrayal trauma therapy in Washington State.