Women who have discovered their husband’s lies often wonder, “What if I can never trust my husband again?”

The first step to knowing if you can trust your husband again is to determine the truth about what’s going on. It may be that he’s using invisible emotional abuse tactics. To uncover if his lying is emotionally abusive, take our free emotional abuse quiz.

This episode follows Shelly’s Story
Part 1: What If I Can Never Trust My Husband Again? (THIS EPISODE)
Part 2: How To Recover After Being Cheated On

Getting Support While I Determine If I Can Trust My Husband Again

Most women need support as they work to figure out what’s going on. To get support from women who understand, attend a Betrayal Trauma Recovery Group Session TODAY.

Transcript: What If I Can Never Trust My Husband Again

Anne: I have a member of our community on today’s episode. I’m going to call her Shelly. She’s here to share her story of wondering what if she can ever trust her husband again? Welcome Shelly.

Shelly: Hi, thank you.

Anne: So Shelly has experienced betrayal trauma in multiple relationships. Let’s start at the beginning.

Shelly: Okay, so I was actually born into betrayal trauma. I didn’t know that until recently. But my biological father cheated on my pregnant mother. So literally all that stuff in her body, all those hormones, feelings, and emotions when she was pregnant with me were going into me too, with so many me too examples. She sank into deep postnatal depression after my birth. And then, and obviously, betrayal trauma.

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And she couldn’t fully take care of me. My mother neglected me as a baby, not through any fault of her own. Because she wasn’t able to cope emotionally with what she was going through. When I turned seven, she met my stepdad. Who I didn’t trust. I had this sense that there was something wrong, even as a child.

And later, when I was in my teens, he was also leading a double life. He watched pornography, and made advances towards some of my male friends. When I was a teenager. This led me to jump out of the frying pan and into the fire. Because a much older man groomed me in his forties when I was around sixteen. I believed I was in a relationship with him, but now I understand it was not, I was his victim.

Teenage Trauma & Abuse

Shelly: He abused me on every level you can imagine. He was an addict. And chose to use explicit material every day, like degrees beyond comprehension. He made no effort to hide this and was completely open about it. He humiliated me. I had betrayal trauma from infidelity. I was a young teenage woman, and he took photos of me and showed them around. Even now, I know they’re still in the world. Years later, after leaving him, I found out from friends that he’d shown them.

He tried to make money off those, I don’t doubt that. I got pregnant at 19, and left him to protect my son. He beat me while I held him, this wasn’t unusual at all. He worsened the violence when I was pregnant. So when I had my son, I think I’d just turned 20, I was in the hospital for a week and he was having sex with someone else.

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I was with him for a very short time after that. And then I fled, and I left all my family and friends behind. And I left the county to try and find safety for my son. While learning to be a mother, I was also going through what I didn’t understand was PTSD, which I now understand. It was only years later that I understood this.

Anne: Have you ever considered yourself a victim of trafficking with that man who took pictures of you and disseminated it as online?

Shelly: I do now,. I was not comfortable. Because I saw the photos that he was like parading around, and you can see how uncomfortable I was. I have a son who’s not much younger than I was now.

Grooming & Exploitation

Shelly: I was a child, and he was friends with people in that world. I remember him saying to me, I could have you in prostitution if I wanted to. He said it like, I look after you so well, I’m not putting you into that world. Look how well I treat you. There was definitely the whole relationship, grooming, it was an abusive relationship. It was someone preying on someone who was young and naive. There are so many types of exploitation.

Anne: Your story sounds similar to trafficking victims. They’re not aware of grooming. They think it’s a relationship, but they don’t realize he’s targeted them for this purpose.

Shelly: A hundred percent, yeah. I’m aware of that now. But it took me a few years to, in fact it was fairly recently. I actually looked back and was like, that wasn’t a relationship. I was just, it was like trafficking. He used me and my body in any way he desired. He cheated me, lied, and now I’ve heard he’s in the industry.

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Shelly: Yeah, so I don’t have any contact with him. I disappeared, feared for my life, and ran away.

Anne: He now is, but it sounds like he was at the time too.

Shelly: Yeah, and he was around a lot of people in that sort of lifestyle.

Anne: The exploitation business.

Shelly: Exactly, he completely exploited me. I stayed there for four years with him through mental, emotional, physical, he’d used humiliation. He used to enjoy humiliating me in that way. It took a long time to get over. But then you can’t heal them.

Finding Safety & New Relationships

Shelly: You fall into another relationship and you’re abused again.

Anne: I’m so sorry. That sounds awful.

Shelly: Yeah, it was years later. So since I had my son, I was looking for a safe family. I just wanted to bring my children up in a happy home. So I fell into another relationship with a man I believed I loved. Later, I found out he’s a complete pathological liar. He wasn’t violent with me. So I thought I was safe, because of my experience before. I didn’t recognize what he was doing to me as abuse, but he was verbally vile to me a lot.

He broke my identity apart. He told me who I was and who I wasn’t, and chipped away at me. He’d go out all night, not come home, be full of lies. I knew, my heart knew he wasn’t loyal to me. So because of my past, I thought I had trust issues. And the men I’ve been with have propagated this idea. They’re like, oh yeah, you’ve got trust issues. This is the damage that you’ve got because of your past.

Anne: Did he tell you you had trust issues as a way to manipulate you?

Shelly: Yeah, completely. At the end of the relationship, I turned into a detective. And found out I was still breastfeeding my daughter when he had an affair with someone else. And the way I found out was so horrific. I got an itemized phone bill, and there were thousands of the same number.

My instincts told me something wasn’t right. So I got this itemized phone bill. I rang and a woman answered, and I just knew.

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He Tells So Many Lies

Shelly: When I confronted him, the gaslighting went, like, through the roof. He pulled out all the stops. And so I called her with a completely open heart. And believed my husband lied to her too. Because I knew he was a liar, he was good at it. I’d seen him lie to people around us, and just think, like, why? I don’t understand why you’re lying about this stuff, when there’s no n