Blaming the Victim
By Chris Jones
In the previous article, we explored the acute trauma responses that often follow the discovery of a secret sexual reality within an intimate relationship. We examined how the collision between the partner’s believed reality and the hidden reality of the secret sexual basement can create a profound psychological shock.
When we understand this experience through the lens of trauma, one crucial principle emerges: the partner’s nervous system no longer feels safe.
This lack of safety is not simply a belief or an idea. It is a physiological state. After an acute traumatic event, the nervous system often shifts into survival mode, constantly scanning the environment for potential threats. This hypervigilance is a natural protective response.
Once we understand this baseline, another key dynamic becomes easier to recognise: safety-seeking behaviour.
Why Safety Seeking Is a Natural Trauma Response
When a person feels unsafe, the natural response is to seek safety. This instinct is deeply embedded within the nervous system. In the context of deceptive sexuality trauma, safety-seeking behaviours can take many forms.
Some are self-directed. For example, a partner may begin avoiding certain places, situations, or people that might trigger reminders of the betrayal. This might include avoiding particular social environments, locations associated with their partner’s acting-out behaviour, or situations that feel emotionally overwhelming. These forms of avoidance can create temporary relief by reducing exposure to perceived threats. However, they can also lead to a constriction of the person’s internal and external world.
Many safety-seeking behaviours, however, are directed externally toward the partner who maintained the secret sexual basement. Understanding these behaviours is especially important, because they are frequently misunderstood or misinterpreted.
The Need to Reconstruct Reality
After discovery, the betrayed partner is often desperately trying to reconstruct her shattered reality.
The discovery of deception does not simply reveal painful information — it undermines the entire foundation of what she believed to be true about her relationship. As a result, there is often an intense drive to understand what actually happened. This may take the form of repeated, intense questioning about the hidden behaviour:
- What exactly happened?
- How often did it occur?
- Who was involved?
- When did it begin?
- How could you do this to me?
These conversations will inevitably be emotionally charged and frequently expressed with high levels of anger and rage, with the same questions asked (and often very specific details requested) repeatedly over a long period of time. When viewed through the lens of deceptive sexuality trauma – especially when we consider the high degree of hyperarousal and reactivity in the nervous system – this reflects an understandable attempt for the betrayed partner to reconstruct her reality and to regain a stable sense of psychological grounding.
Safety-seeking can also take the form of boundaries or requests for transparency. For example, the partner may ask for changes in behaviour that help her feel safer — such as avoiding certain environments associated with past behaviour, avoiding contact with certain people, limiting exposure to various types of media, or increasing accountability around daily activities. In many cases, this will also involve location-sharing technology or other forms of transparency.
From a trauma-informed perspective, these behaviours are not attempts to control the other person. They are attempts to restore a sense of safety after the collapse of trust.
When Safety Seeking Is Pathologised
Unfortunately, these understandable reactions are often misinterpreted or pathologised.
Instead of being recognised as trauma responses, the partner’s behaviours may be framed as attempts to control the person who engaged in the hidden behaviour. Language such as “she is trying to control him” or “she needs to stop playing detective” may be used. She may be told she is “pain shopping” when she continues asking questions about the betrayal.
Her anger, rage, and reactivity – normal responses to any kind of acute trauma – might also be seen as signs of her own pathology rather than being seen through an empathic and trauma-informed lens.
These interpretations frequently stem from earlier frameworks in the sex addiction field that labelled partners as codependent. Within that model, the partner’s attempts to understand or monitor the behaviour were seen as unhealthy patterns of controlling the addict or trying to manage the addict’s recovery.
When this co-dependency framework is applied uncritically, it can result in victim blaming. A person who is responding to trauma by seeking safety may instead be portrayed as the problem.
The Role of Ongoing Harm
Another critical factor to consider is that the harm occurring to a betrayed partner often does not stop at the moment of discovery.
Earlier in this series, we explored the concept of Integrity-Abuse Disorder (IAD) — patterns of deception and manipulation used to maintain the secret sexual reality. These behaviours frequently continue after discovery through mechanisms such as partial disclosure, minimisation, defensiveness, or ongoing manipulation of information.
If deception or manipulation continues, the partner’s sense of instability may persist or even intensify. In these circumstances, safety-seeking behaviours become even more understandable. The partner is not only responding to past trauma but also navigating the possibility of ongoing harm.
This is an important distinction. Many types of trauma involve events that occurred entirely in the past. In deceptive sexuality trauma, however, the individual may still be living within the same relational system where the harm originated.
Understanding DARVO
Another particularly important dynamic to recognise in these situations is DARVO, a pattern commonly seen in abusive contexts.
DARVO stands for:
- Deny
- Attack
- Reverse Victim and Offender
In this pattern, the person who caused harm denies their behaviour, attacks the person raising concerns, and ultimately portrays themselves as the victim.
Because deception-based abuse often operates through subtle forms of manipulation, this reversal can sometimes appear convincing. The partner who is seeking safety may be portrayed as unstable, controlling, or unreasonable.
Without an understanding of the broader dynamics at play, observers — including professionals — may mistakenly accept this narrative.
The Risk of Colluding with Harm
When clinicians or others that are turned to for support misunderstand the safety-seeking behaviours, there is a risk of unintentionally colluding with ongoing harm. If the partner’s trauma responses are perceived as the primary problem, attention shifts away from the patterns of deception or manipulation that created the trauma in the first place.
This can lead to situations where the person experiencing harm is encouraged to change their behaviour, while the underlying patterns that caused the harm remain unaddressed.
In the context of deceptive sexuality trauma, recognising the two-part nature of the problem — both the sexual behaviour and the integrity-abuse system that protects it — is essential to avoiding this mistake.
External Safety and Internal Healing
Ultimately, long-term healing requires the partner to develop a sense of internal safety — a nervous system that is grounded and capable of returning to regulation. However, this process cannot occur while external threats remain present. It is unrealistic to expect someone to cultivate internal safety while they are still exposed to deception, manipulation, or uncertainty about the truth.
In the early stages of recovery, external conditions often need to support the rebuilding of safety. Boundaries, transparency, and honest disclosure can create a more stable environment that allows the nervous system to begin settling. Over time, this stability can provide the foundation for deeper healing.
Creating the Conditions for Healing
It is also important to recognise that even if the person who caused the harm stops acting out and stops engaging in other harmful behaviours, this doesn’t suddenly make the partner’s trauma go away. The trauma has already occurred, and it cannot simply be erased. The healing of trauma is a slow and painful journey and can only happen within the right conditions.
The betraying partner therefore plays a critical role in creating those conditions where healing becomes possible. A helpful metaphor is to think about the way that a plant grows. A gardener does not make a seed grow into a plant. A gardener simply creates the conditions that allow growth to occur—adequate sunlight, water, and nutrient-rich soil. The growth itself then unfolds naturally.
In the same way, healing from trauma (especially within an intimate relationship) often requires conditions such as:
- Safety
- Honesty
- Integrity
- Accountability
- Empathy and remorse
- The willingness to face painful truths
These conditions cannot remove the trauma, but they can create an environment where recovery and repair become possible. In this way, the recovery journey for men who have engaged in deceptive sexuality is far more than just stopping the acting-out – in fact, that’s just the starting point.
Moving Forward
Understanding safety-seeking behaviours is an essential step in recognising the impact of deceptive sexuality trauma.
When these behaviours are misunderstood or pathologised, there is a risk of reinforcing the very patterns of harm that caused the trauma in the first place.
Recognising the two-part nature of deceptive sexuality — the behaviours inside the basement and the system that keeps the basement hidden — helps prevent this misunderstanding.
In the next article, we will shift our focus from acute trauma to complex trauma, exploring how repeated patterns of deception and manipulation can shape a partner’s experience over time.
If you’re interested in learning more or would like to explore support options, please feel free to get in touch.