The Best Self Care Books For Women Healing After Betrayal

If you’re searching for self care books for women after discovering your husband’s betrayal, you’re likely not looking for a cute morning routine.

You’re looking for something to hold onto because your whole life feels different.

Even basic things—like getting out of bed, making food, or answering texts—can feel hard.

That’s why ordinary self-care advice can feel almost insulting after betrayal. You don’t need fluff. You need real support for your mental and physical health.

These self care books for women can help you feel less alone and more grounded as you begin to heal.

6 Self Care Books For Women After a Husband’s Betrayal

1. When You Can’t Understand Why Your Brain Feels Scrambled

One of the most confusing parts of betrayal is how physical it feels.

Your thoughts feel scattered. Your body feels on edge. You can’t calm down—even when nothing is happening.

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk helps explain why betrayal trauma doesn’t stay neatly in your thoughts. It moves through your entire body.

For many women, this book is the first thing that helps them realize: I’m not crazy. I’m traumatized. That realization alone can be a form of self-care.

2. When Your Whole Life Feels Like It Just Collapsed

There is a moment after betrayal when you realize you can’t go back to who you were before you knew.

That moment is brutal.

When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön is a self care book for women sitting in the wreckage of what they thought their marriage was.

It doesn’t rush you or pressure you to be positive. It meets you in the pain and helps you stay present without pretending this doesn’t hurt.

If your husband’s betrayal has made your life feel unrecognizable, this book can feel like sitting next to someone who understands collapse.

3. When You Keep Explaining, Hoping, and Getting Nowhere

After betrayal, many women spend months—or years—trying to find the right words.

The right way to ask. Or the right way to explain what happened or have the right conversation that will finally make him understand. And yet… nothing changes.

Trauma Mama Husband Drama by Anne Blythe helps shift your focus away from whether he “gets it” and toward what actually protects you.

That shift is a huge part of self-care after betrayal. Not because boundaries are trendy—but because women who have been lied to often need help figuring out what safety even looks like anymore.

*When You Need to Know You Are Not the Problem – my other book will be coming out soon.

4. When You Blame Yourself for Not Seeing It Sooner

If your husband’s betrayal has turned your inner voice against you, this matters.

So many wives think:

• “How did I miss this?”
• “Why did I believe him?”
• “What is wrong with me?”
• “Why am I still so upset?”

Self-compassion is not letting him off the hook.
It is refusing to keep punishing yourself for what he chose to do.

Self-Compassion by Kristin Neff gently interrupts that spiral.

This is one of the most important self care books for women to read—because healing gets harder when you’re carrying both his betrayal and your own self-condemnation.

5. When Trauma Has Destroyed Your Daily Routines

After betrayal, even basic tasks can feel overwhelming. Self-care can look like:

• drinking water
• getting dressed
• taking a walk
• making your bed
• remembering your medication
• rebuilding one tiny routine at a time

If your husband’s lies have disrupted your ability to function day-to-day, structure becomes essential.

Atomic Habits by James Clear can help you create simple, repeatable systems that support you when your brain feels overloaded.

6. When Everything Feels Urgent and You Don’t Know What Actually Matters

After betrayal, everything can feel like a priority. What to focus on? His behavior? The kids? The finances? Trying to figure out the truth?

It can feel unclear:

• What actually matters right now?
• What do I even prioritize?
• How do I stop feeling pulled in ten different directions?

This is where self-care after betrayal becomes less about doing more and more about doing only what truly matters.

Essentialism by Greg McKeown helps you sort through the noise and identify what is actually essential. Because self-care, at this stage, is not about adding more. It’s about finally giving yourself permission to focus on what actually supports you.

Why Self Care Feels Different After a Husband’s Betrayal

Self-care after betrayal is not facials, rest, or taking a break. Sometimes self-care is:

• reading one chapter instead of spiraling for three hours
• learning why you feel panicked
• recognizing manipulation
• writing down what makes you feel safe (and unsafe)
• hearing someone describe exactly what you’ve been living through
• realizing your symptoms make sense

That’s why the best self care books for women after betrayal do more than soothe. They validate, educate, and help you reconnect with reality.

If Reading About Self Care Feels Hard Right Now

It makes sense that many women experiencing betrayal trauma struggle to focus enough to read full books. If that’s you, you’re not failing at healing, your brain may simply be overwhelmed.

Try this instead: The Betrayal Trauma Recovery Podcast. You can listen while you walk. The other women’s stories will heal you.

Below, I share how many women are told they are damaged—when they’re not. Then you’ll hear from a woman who went through it, including four self-care practices that helped her navigate the confusion and pain.

Transcript: Self Care For Women After Betrayal

Anne: Before I get to today’s topic, which is from a Wall Street Journal article entitled Standing Against Psychiatry’s Crazies. And also give you a self care update about where I am in my self care situation. I want to talk about Betrayal Trauma Recovery Group. It is our daily support group. And we have 26 sessions per week in a four week month. That’s 104 sessions per month, which equals 156 live hours with a professional coach.

That is the least expensive professional live support in the world. That comes down to 80 cents per hour. And we built it that way on purpose. Why did we do it like that? Because we’ve been through it. When I went through it, I didn’t know how to pay the bills. I literally didn’t know how to buy groceries, because my ex cut off my bank account and didn’t give me money for groceries.

So I know that money is on your mind. And we wanted to ensure that you can get high quality support for very low cost. And we have professional individual sessions. Whatever works for you, works for us.

I also want to talk about why Betrayal Trauma Recovery Group is completely online. It is because I was a bit agoraphobic when the trauma first hit. I didn’t want to go anywhere, put my bra on, or get out of bed. I mean, I was having a hard time. So we wanted to remove all barriers to getting help and self care after emotional abuse.

Self care after BETRAYAL: Forming Real Connections Online

Anne: Some days have five sessions a day. You never have to get childcare, put your bra or makeup on. You don’t have to pay for gas, or need a car and can come online and talk to real people.

And even though it’s online, you can form amazing close relationships. So many other services out there, you’re texting a faceless coach, and they might not get back to you right away. You might be just watching modules or videos, but you’re not actually able to share your story and feel the love coming back to you.

Check out the Betrayal Trauma Recovery Group Session schedule, click on this link. We built this with you in mind, for you, to meet your specific needs for self care after emotional abuse based on what we went through and based on what our needs were. We don’t want any other woman in the world to suffer in isolation or to try and get help and get the wrong kind of help, okay.

Okay, on to today’s topic. So my amazing mother, who’s been on the podcast before, who you have heard, she is a reader. One of the things she reads is the Wall Street Journal and in an interview with Paul McHugh by Abigail Shrier, I hope I’m pronouncing their names accurately. It is entitled Standing Against Psychiatry’s Crazies.

Paul McHugh’s Perspective

Anne: In a nutshell, what this article says is that sometimes the psychiatric or therapeutic community doesn’t know what they’re talking about. And I’m thinking about betrayal trauma. Sometimes when others give women this awful diagnosis, this is an example of armchair psychology. Or they diagnose them as codependent. Or they tell them, you’ve got all these problems that you need to resolve.

When victims of abuse should be told, this is an abuse situation. This is going to be painful, but you will get better. Like, what you are going through is completely normal, and how you’re feeling is completely normal, and you are completely normal. As you work toward healing, you’re going to be fine. It’s hard to feel that when we’re going through it, but that’s the truth. Especially if we walk toward healing and self care after this kind of abuse. And this is what it says.

His contrarian roots run deep. He was a diminutive boy in the 1940s. When psychoanalysts had popularized the notion that physical deficiencies, including short stature, produced inferiority complexes. Especially in boys and men, he became a prime candidate for the experimental growth hormone therapies. But Paul’s father, a school teacher, decided against the treatments recommended for his son.

Shortness wouldn’t be the worst problem he’d have to face, the Elder McHugh reasoned. As it turned out, the animal derived pituitary treatments were ineffective. The human derived form sometimes carries infectious agents that cause Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Again, I don’t know if I correctly pronounced that, an incurable degenerative brain disorder.

Critique of DSM Checklist Psychiatry

Anne: He says, “I know my life would have been easier if I had four or five more inches,” says McHugh. Who now stands five foot six, but his childhood experience taught him a lesson that helped him become a giant in this field. Sometimes psychiatry’s cure is far worse than the disease.

McHugh believes that psychiatrists first order of business should determine whether a mental disorder is determined by something the patient has. A disease of the brain or something the patient is or something a patient is doing. Behavior such as self-starvation or something the patient has encountered a traumatic or otherwise disorienting experience.

Practitioners too often practice what he calls DSM checklist psychiatry. “Matching up symptoms from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders with the goal of achieving diagnosis. Rather than inquiring deeply into the sources and nature of an affliction. I came into psychiatry with the perception that it had not matured as a clinical science in which rational practices are directed by information on the causes and mechanisms of the disorders,” Dr. McHugh says.

Every other medical discipline has that. He still regards psychiatry is in need of organizing principles. “That’s putting it mildly,” says the author of the article, Abigail Schreier.

Self care after emotional abuse from Sex Addiction

Anne: So let’s talk about this concept in the context of addiction. What we see right now is a slew of words. Addiction, pornography addiction, intimacy disorder, intimacy anorexia, compulsive disorder. People are trying to figure out what to label these behaviors. At Betrayal Trauma Recovery, we’ve made it really simple. It’s called abuse. All these behaviors can be under the umbrella of abuse.

And these behaviors need to stop. The victim of these behaviors needs to learn a new skill, which is setting boundaries. But there’s nothing inherently wrong with her. She’s not codependent or crazy. She not in this situation because she had a messed up childhood, she’s just fine. And she will grieve, because she’s a victim of abuse, obviously. She needs to learn a new set of skills and self care that she hadn’t learned before because of emotional abuse.

It’s like if you were in a plane crash in the middle of the mountains, and you survived. But you didn’t know where you were, and you had to learn new skills in that moment. You might have to learn how to hike if you’ve never hiked before. You might have to learn how to. start a fire. And you might have to learn a bunch of different things. We’ve all seen survival movies. The most famous might be Cast Away, where when he lands on the island, he doesn’t know how to spear a fish.

He doesn’t know how to open a coconut. He doesn’t know how to make rope. And in the five years he spends on that island, he learns a ton of amazing survival skills.

Personal Self Care Journey

Anne: That’s how it is to be in an abusive relationship. There’s nothing wrong with you. Your husband victimized you, and now you need to learn new skills. And the skills that you’ll learn from this experience will benefit you the rest of your life. Just like the skills someone learned in a survival scenario would benefit them the rest of their lives.

One of the skills I’m learning I did well when I was single before I got married. So I got married when I was 30, and I had my oldest son 10 months later or-ish. I’m so bad with time. I was married in August and had my son in July, so I don’t know how many months that is. Immediately when I married, my self care sort of fell apart. Before, when I was single, I could work out every day. I ate well, I made sure that if I had an injury, I got into the doctor.

I’ve always loved extreme sports, well individual sports might be the better word, like skiing, mountain biking, rock climbing, rowing, those types of sports. And so I’d had several neck injuries from all my adventures and I had had a few neck surgeries. And so going to the chiropractor was important. When I did yoga every day back then, I was good at that.

But after getting married, it was like my whole world got off kilter. I gave up my entire life for him. So I left my job that I loved. I worked at the same school for six years and loved my friends there. I developed my own program, and my job was exactly what I wanted as a school teacher.

self care after emotional abuse: Husband’s arrest Pulled me out of a terrible situation

Anne: And I chose to leave all that and go on an adventure for my husband. So everything kind of got thrown off and I just basically gave up everything to be a couple or to be with him and to make our life together. And then everything centered around him and his moods and what I could do for him and, you know, all this stuff.

When he got arrested because of an abuse incident, he was suddenly gone. I needed to focus on myself, which I should have done before. I should have had that skill. But I was just in this vortex of abuse, and I was so confused and couldn’t figure out how to get out. One of the things that has struck me lately is that God literally like pulled me out of a terrible situation. I had been praying, I had been wondering what to do, and then my ex got arrested and I got the protective order, which I had never even considered.

And so then I held it, but I didn’t know how to do any of those things before that happened to me. So I’m not this amazing, like wise person who quickly got myself out of an abusive situation. Well, no, it was a disaster and a complete mess. And the only reason why I ended up out of it and seeing it for what it was, was because of that arrest.

And I am so grateful. It happened suddenly and it was super traumatic, but it was the right thing. Let’s talk about self care after emotional abuse. This has been hard for me for the past 10 years of my life.

Self care after emotional abuse: Atomic Habits and Daily Routines

Anne: So I recently read a book called Atomic Habits by James Clear, which I would highly recommend to everyone. It was an eye opener for me about how to structure daily habits in a way that works for me. In reading that book, I realized that part of the reason why it’s been so difficult for me to do daily self care is because I had to think about every little thing because I didn’t have any established habits.

So, making the bed was super difficult. Like, if I got it done, it was a miracle. Putting eyedrops in was a miracle. My eyes are problematic in many ways. And one of them is that I’m an impartial blinker, and there’s nothing you can do to control it. It’s involuntary. When the doctor told me I was like, Oh, that’s a good to know.

At least some part of me is impartial to something, because I have an opinion about everything. When I found that out, I knew I needed to do eyedrops every day, but doing that was difficult. Just basically getting anything done was hard. I could only do one thing a day. And I remember talking to my sister, she said, okay, what are the things you need to do?

And I was like, I want to read my scriptures every day. I want to pray every day. I’m pretty good at that. I usually get that done, but it’s not like always at the same time. I want to exercise, and eat right. Also I want to spend more time with my kids. I want to make my bed or, you know, whatever. And, we’d make these goals, and it seemed so overwhelming to add self care after this kind of abuse.

Structuring Habits For Self Care

Anne: I couldn’t do all the things. I could only do one thing. At the beginning of the self care process, I would be like, I made my bed today, and then everything else would fall apart. Or, I put eye drops in, and then everything else would fall apart. This book has helped me structure my habits so that I don’t have to think about self care.

Now I have turned the corner. I make my bed every day without much thought, which is awesome. I put eyedrops in. And I am exercising every day. Now I’m going to yoga. The dishes get done in a more easy fashion. So if you’re having trouble with the day-to-day tasks, or if the grief seems overwhelming to you. Or if your husband’s “addiction,” and all his recovery efforts, have completely swallowed your self care or identity. The whole goal here is to start taking care of yourself. That’s the goal here.

And if he chooses to stop being abusive, great. And if he doesn’t, either way, you are on the path to a happy and peaceful life. One of the things I decided to do is what I call a weekly self care power hour. And I’m going to cycle through six things every six weeks. And one of them will be a meditation from the Betrayal Trauma Recovery Workshop. That’s going to be a little different than my daily self care. I don’t know what self care will look like for you.

It might look like making your bed every day, it might look like meditating every day, it might look like praying and reading your scriptures every day. Those are all the things I do in my self care.

SElf Care Ideas For Women

Anne: Part of your self care might be attending a Betrayal Trauma Recovery Group session for your self care power hour. It might be an individual session with one of our coaches.

The theme of today’s episode is you’re not crazy. You are not sick. Your husband or ex lies about what happened in order to discredit you.There is nothing wrong with you. You are just in a survival situation, and the exciting thing is that the skills you learn right now will benefit you the rest of your life.

If I were you, and I’m listening, and it was me back four years ago. I would have wanted to say, this lady, I don’t like her. She doesn’t get it. She doesn’t understand how painful it is. That’s what I would have said four years ago. So if you’re saying that right now, it’s okay. I have been there, but I’m also feeling so good. Because I’ve come out the other side. And what helped me do that was an amazing network of women who understood. The education that came to me due to studying abuse led me to where I am now, and I’m so grateful.

Self Care For Women After Betrayal: Tia’s Tips

Anne: A member of our community is on today’s episode. We’re going to call her Tia. She let me know that she’s been listening to the Betrayal Trauma Recovery podcasts since the beginning. When I was crying into the microphone in my basement. I’m so appreciative to those of you who have supported me since the very beginning. Thank you so much.

Tia needed to practice self-care when her marriage began to unravel. As she shares a little bit of her journey to cope with betrayal trauma, I’ll be pointing out 4 self-care strategies that she used to help bring her peace every day. Welcome Tia.

Tia: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Anne: Self care is my favorite personal topic right now. As I am knee deep or maybe eyeball deep into self care. Now that I’m more healed and stabler, I’m able to really focus on it. And so before we start the conversation, I want to do a disclaimer to women like me. We’re going to talk about how in the middle of intense trauma, you can practice a little bit of self care as much as possible.

But don’t feel guilty right now if your self care is Oreos and popcorn and Netflix. There’s no guilt, no guilt. And any phase of your journey or anywhere you are is fine. It’s all okay. Let’s talk about finding self care the hard way.

Tia: Yes, had I been wiser, had there been more podcasts way back when, maybe I would have been smarter.

Self Care Assessment

Tia: But I remember seeing a counselor when things started to unravel, I was trying to cope with betrayal trauma and at that point she said to me, you need to up your self care. And she might as well have been speaking a different language. I had no idea what self care really was. I thought, hey, I exercise and I eat well.

And if you consider chocolate a health food. Yeah, then I absolutely look after myself. What’s your issue counselor? I have great self care. I honestly had no idea, and life continued to unravel until I got to such a dark place. It’s a little embarrassing now to talk about, but I’ve heard it from so many women that I know I’m not alone.

When you start wanting to get sick or looking for a way so that somebody will look after you. So that you’d have a day off, so expectations could be lifted. There’s something wrong. You need to pay attention to that.

Anne: Yeah.

SElf Care Checklist

Anne: So that’s self care strategy number one when you cope with betrayal trauma. Pay attention to what your body tells you.

Tia: And I unfortunately didn’t. I have a bigger and better mentality or faster and farther. And I ended up running, but then doing too much and stress on your body is stress on your body, even if it’s exercise. It’s supposed to be self care. If it’s too stressful for you, it’s stressful, just stop it. So self care means paying attention to your body and what’s going on there.

Like it all comes back to looking after what’s happening with you. I ended up with six surgeries in five years. This may sound bad, but I honestly looked forward to the surgeries, because it was a day or two of somebody just looking after me. They bring you food at regular intervals. They ask you if you want anything, water’s there, nothing’s expected of you. You can read, you can ring a bell and somebody shows up. And that should have been a huge clue that maybe I needed to up my self care game.

It got so bad that before one of the surgeries, I wanted to die. And that was my prayer at that time, God take me. I knew what I had to face in life when I woke up from that surgery, and I just thought, I just want to die here, now. And fortunately, that’s not a prayer he answered. This is a self care journey, learning to look after yourself before you get to such a dark place. There are people that need you alive. There are people that need you alive and well.

SElf Care For Trauma: Body Scans

Anne: And the most important person that needs you alive and well is yourself.

Tia: Yes, have you ever done one of those body scans? Where you sit and think about, you know, how does my head feel?

Anne: Yeah, in fact, I put that into the Living Free Workshop. So there are two sections where I teach women how to do a body scan. Yeah, we call it getting in touch with your sacred internal warning system.

Tia: Yeah, as part of this self care journey, I went to a women’s intensive in Minneapolis. They were doing this body scan, and they had us sit there. I remember probably for the first time feeling like, Oh no, my head hurts. Hey, my neck hurts, my shoulders hurt, my gut hurts, my chest hurts.

I had not been aware that everything hurt before that point. And then they finished the scan, and they said, okay, everyone open your eyes. And then they went on with the session. I was like, wait, now I’m aware I’m in terrible pain. What do I do? What do I do with this? And I actually put up my hand and asked, there was no good answer. The answer I’ve found since is that the answer is not to take away the pain immediately. The answer is to learn to live a life so that pain isn’t there.

Anne: That is profound, and it is such a process to create a life that’s not causing us pain. I remember one day I went into the closet and put a soft blanket over my head. And I laid in the closet and cried and cried. That was an intentional choice to cope with betrayal trauma.

Self-Care Strategy: Small Daily Rituals

Anne: So when we’re looking for strategies for how to cope with betrayal trauma, the second strategy is to pick one tiny thing. My suggestion is you go outside once a day at least. Even if it’s just for like, literally one second. Tia? What’s your favorite tiny self care ritual?

Tia: So I do have a favorite go to that anybody can do to pull ourselves back to our senses. I get a hot drink, and make sure it’s something you enjoy the smell of. I go to a window and look outside at nature. You mentioned going outside, nature is healing. Look outside and find something living. Look for trees, look for grass that’s moving, look for birds, see if you can hear them. And just take a moment and breathe out slow. You’ll always remember to breathe in.

So just stand there, and sometimes we don’t have a lot of time. But often a minute can be good enough. Just stand there, notice what’s happening outside your window, feeling the warmth of your drink. Inhaling it, tasting it, and if you can hum, we know oddly enough, humming helps activate the vagus nerve, which provides calming for us. And if it’s there for you, go ahead and hum a song that means something to you, but just take that moment. You’re using all five senses, and it only takes a minute.

Anne: Yeah, that’s perfect. We’re constantly told that self care is so important. Let’s dive into why.

Tia: Our body is a gift, and it’s amazing. If we cut ourselves, if we break our leg, it starts to knit itself back together again, which is an absolute miracle.

The Importance of Self-Care

Tia: I wish my car did that when I ran into something, that it would just fix itself. Supported properly our emotions and mental health, will do the same thing. We are meant to heal. Self care gives you the optimum healing space, where you can let things take their natural course and move towards healing.

I like to use the analogy of an airplane, that there can be a storm outside this airplane, and if you focus on this storm, chances are you’re going down. If you can focus on the dials in front of you. That’s your self care. Focus on what’s happening with you. You can keep your nose up, and you can get through this storm.

Anne: That’s a good example. Maybe you’ve heard this on the podcast before, but you’ve been in a plane accident. It’s not your fault, your plane has gone down in the mountains, and you’re all alone. Sure, you can hang out in that plane for a while, but eventually, if you want to survive, you’ll have to get out of the plane. Build a fire, find a river, and follow the river down to a city. You’ll eventually have to develop some survival skills.

And self care is that. It’s not just a survival skill, but a thriver skill. So we go from surviving to thriving. When you are severely injured, you’ll need a “critical systems only” phase. Just like in sci-fi movies, when a meteor hits the ship or an alien and it goes, mer, everything powers down and it’s quiet, not all the lights work, and you’re in this critical systems only phase. So that’s the third self care strategy, while we learn how to cope with betrayal trauma.

Self Care After Betrayal: Critical Systems Only

Anne: That is accept and embrace a critical systems only phase. A lot of women jump to that, I’m going to exercise a ton, and I’m going to go to every event, and I’m going to show him that I can get out of the house.

And they don’t realize they need to go into sort of a powered down self care critical systems only phase for a while. Yeah, your self esteem is so fragile when you’re traumatized. There is something to be said for that momentary comfort. If a whole bag of Oreos is helpful to you. Go for it, because guilt at this point or worrying about like anything other than survival is just not gonna help. It doesn’t have to be forever, nourishing yourself before you try to like power up all the systems again.

Tia: When these crises happen, we are down to ground zero of what we can do. But if we think through, what does a baby need to survive? They need predictable sleep, food at regular intervals, some sort of loving relationship. And they need some sort of movement or stimulation. Very basic, am I drinking some water? Can I sleep?

It’s pretty bare bones to begin with, and it comes, I like what you’re saying, in a progression. This doesn’t all happen at day one. I have a picture of a bird that’s being held on my wall. And one of the reasons is that I often compare this to birds flying along, and they hit a window. Nobody prepared them for that, and they’re stunned. But somebody needs to pick that little birdie up and move it somewhere where it’s safe.

Self-Care Book Top Tip: Do Whatever Works for You

Tia: We often don’t recognize the enormity of the trauma we face, especially when you have children. We just keep going. We just keep life as usual. You’ve hit a window, your plane is gone down, whatever metaphor you want, you need to take some space.

Anne: Fix the hole in your spaceship before you go into light speed again, is going to be a good idea. And that brings us to the fourth strategy to cope with betrayal trauma. Which is whatever works for you. Whatever works to calm your system down, to give you a break from the pain. That’s self care. My trauma was so intense at the time, I couldn’t read. I had an 11 month old baby, so I was having a hard time getting out of the house.

My injuries were so extreme, I watched all seven seasons of The Good Wife. I got a break from the trauma and intensity of it from focusing on something else. At that time, that was all I could do. I ended up adding an antidepressant to that, and then I actually got off the couch and started adding a little more. Talk about some things that worked for you that maybe other people are like, that’s not self care.

Tia: I put a playlist together. When I hear the first few bars, it does something good to my heart, walking my dog. With self care, often the whole bubble bath thing comes to mind. But for me, I found my brain was pinging off the wall. When I would sit in a tub, I would think I was doing self care because I was experimenting. I couldn’t never calm and relax. My brain was pinging all over the place. So, that’s not self care for me.

The Four Aspects of Self-Care

Anne: It can be an experiment, figuring out how to cope with betrayal trauma, right? Once I got on the antidepressant, that couch I would sit on, I moved it to a different area, and guess what I replaced it with? A treadmill, that has been an evolution, and now when I want to relax, I walk on that treadmill rather than sit on the couch.

If we’re committed to self care and willing to be gentle with ourselves, we’ll see what’s working and what’s not working. When I sat on that couch, I gained 30 pounds. Which was not great for me physically, emotionally or mentally. Do I feel bad about it? Not really. It’s fine. It was a coping skill that I used. I think the most important thing is your intention.

Tia: Yes, am I getting to know myself? I think that is the biggest gift of this journey. I have self care divided into four aspects: self soothing, self nurture, self discipline, and self compassion. Self soothing is what calms me down. What do I need at this moment? Really experimenting with yourself, and looking at your senses. The triggers are simply a sign that we need more self nurturing, being able to talk to ourselves with that more nurturing voice. I had to develop that. I had to learn that.

Today I need to get something done, self discipline. But when I start it, I’m in tears, and can’t do it. So then self compassion says, hey, it’s okay. It’s okay, just work at it for 15 minutes, and then call it quits. Yeah, self compassion is different than self pity. Self compassion says, yes, this is hard, and I’m going to look after you. I’ll get you through this.

How to cope with betrayal trauma: Creating Safe Spaces

Tia: Do I have loving people I can connect with? And that’s a hard one, but we always need safe people. That may even be a coach if your family system is broken down.

Anne: That’s exactly why I created Betrayal Trauma Recovery group sessions. To provide a safe place for women who can’t find safety anywhere else. So at the beginning, my suggestion was to go outside. Yours was to look out the window with a hot drink. I loved that. I want everyone to know that a number of years out, I’m doing yoga almost every day. And I am back to weightlifting. I’m skiing again. I paddle board. I love, love outdoor sports. I’m feeling more and more myself every day.

So if you’re listening and you’re like, this seems impossible. I can’t do this. So, I want to give you hope that two years out, four years out, five years out, 10 years out, things will get better. I know when people told me that I wanted to be like, you don’t know how bad it is. It’s so bad! But now it feels good. Like life is really good.

Why don’t we leave the listeners with one more practical self care tip. That any woman, no matter what stage of trauma she’s in, especially the women in intense trauma right now, could implement today.

Tia: Safety is so important, finding that safe place. We often end up hooked to our phones. And so I put together a photo file of people I love, my children, places I love. If you’re like me and half your world turns white and cold. I have pictures of summer so that I can remember that life returns to this barren planet.

The Power of Disconnecting from Social Media

Tia: Places I’ve walked, beaches I’ve been on. When I need to give my brain a break, I flip through and remind myself that there are some good things. There are great places in the world. I will get back there.

Anne: I just thought of one that helped a lot. And when I say this, most women gasp. They’re like, oh, you didn’t. But I deleted all my social media accounts. And I found that helpful. Because I didn’t have to have any of those conversations in my head. If I post this, what will he think? Do I want to look like I’m doing well? Do I not want to look like I’m doing well? Deleting them helped me not worry about how other people perceived me or what type of image I was projecting to the world.

And then, I never did it again. I don’t have any more personal accounts. I have the Betrayal Trauma Recovery organization stuff to run BTR. But I don’t have any personal stuff. I’ve loved it. Anything that works for you will be the right thing. And you can try something, and then you can try something else. It’s not like any one of these things needs to be permanent.

Tia: That’s right.

The Discipline of Taking Time Off

Tia: My favorite one goes under discipline for me, of forcing myself to take 24 hours off every week. The truth is, this may be a little crude, but we’re going to die with things left on our to do list. And taking 24 hours off each week gets me practiced for that. It can be left. The laundry can wait. Stuff can wait. I don’t have to be busy all the time, and then filling that day with things that I enjoy. Doesn’t always work, but it’s a goal.

Anne: Well, thank you so much for coming on today’s episode and sharing your insights with us.

Tia: This has been good. Thank you.