Offering individual, couples, family and group therapy in-office and online.
Approved to practice telehealth under PSYPACT and with NY State Residents.
Approved to practice telehealth under PSYPACT and with NY State Residents.
“They didn’t cheat on you because you aren’t worth it. They cheated on you because they aren’t.”
One day, you wake up, and nothing seems real. You’ve uncovered a secret life—one that shatters the foundation of what you thought was your relationship. The partner you trusted, the story you believed, the normalcy you depended on—it’s all been rewritten without your consent.
Maybe it was late-night pornography use that became a ritual of neglect. Or the discovery of massage parlors, hidden apps, or an affair that unraveled the very fabric of your connection. Maybe you’ve spent months or years being reassured that nothing was wrong, only to feel like you are losing your grip on reality.
Your partner is “working on themselves,” but what about you?
Addiction, whether to sex, porn, or any compulsive behavior, is a hard betrayal. It’s not about the sex—it’s about secrecy, deception, gaslighting, the rewriting of history. It’s about feeling discarded, replaced, or crazy for questioning what you know in your gut to be true. It’s about the slow erosion of trust and the sudden realization that the relationship you knew is not the one you thought you were building.
Relationships find an ending when the pain from the betrayal is unbearable or when there is no hope for recovery. Yet crises of this magnitude often signal an opportunity for change.
No longer underestimated is the impact of the betrayal trauma on the partner. The model of the co-addict depicted the partner as complicit in the dysfunction. We now appreciate that what you are experiencing is trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—sex addiction-induced trauma (SAID), or complex-partner trauma.
Betrayal trauma extends beyond intimate infidelity to substance abuse, financial deception, eating disorders, and hidden addictions. A rupture in trust so profound that it threatens your ability to feel safe in your own reality.
When an experience is too much for the ego to bear, we have trauma left unprocessed. The result: severe symptoms like extreme anxiety and variable emotional arousal (rage and flight reactions), numbness, hyper-vigilance, depression, flashbacks, and intrusive thoughts and images, as well as specific concerns and shame secondary to the nature of the trauma, all of which might continue to occur long after the initial trauma. Developmental trauma or current shock trauma poses a threat to our capacity for connection, attunement, trust, autonomy, love, and sexuality.
Partners need to face their own experience and find resolution in the betrayal trauma to heal, to reclaim yourself, to redefine what safety and connection mean to you. Couples too, can formulate a new relationship, different from the one that presented during and prior to the betrayal.
It’s not just about saving the relationship; it’s about saving yourself.
If you think your partner is the problem, think again.
Healing is not about fixing the relationship—it’s about reclaiming yourself.
It’s not about moving on—it’s about stepping out of survival mode and into clarity.
With some time and attention to yourself, anything can change. When you realize that unhealthy relationship(s) no longer serve you, you can do the work needed to change.
Processing the trauma of infidelity requires intention.
Some partners need a structured, intensive, or inpatient program. Others seek help from a qualified psychotherapist for:
Life or love brings no guarantees. But one thing is certain: the work requires a skilled practitioner, someone who not only understands the compulsive and addiction elements but the deeper emotional and psychological wounds.
You have come to the right place.
As a Certified Sex Addiction Therapist (CSAT), a Sexologist, an EMDR Certified Trauma Specialist, and a Couples Therapist, I specialize in the intersection of betrayal, trauma, and intimacy. You don’t have to stay frozen in your pain; there are other options.
I developed a program specifically for betrayed partners, which serves as an adjunct to individual therapy.
You don’t have to navigate this alone. But the first step begins with you.