Al Iman Family Services
Al Iman Family Services offers social, educational, counseling, and psychotherapy services rooted in Islamic theology to enhance the quality of life for families in need.
Rania had been married to Tariq for five years when two discoveries arrived within the same week. The first was a habit of pornography Tariq had carried since adolescence and had never disclosed to her. The second was a string of messages he had exchanged for several months with a woman from years earlier in his life, a connection quietly revived online during a season when a recent move and a stalled job search had left him feeling overwhelmed and unseen at home. Tariq did not fully understand, in our first session together, why he had done either.
Rania had not slept through a night since the discovery. She woke at three in the morning rereading messages she had already read a dozen times, searching years of memory for a sign she had missed, flinching at sounds and names that had nothing to do with any of it. “I am not imagining this,” she told me in our first session, before I had said a word about what was happening to her. She was right. Her body and mind were doing exactly what they were built to do when the person she depended on most had become, without warning, a source of danger rather than safety.
Their case illustrates a category of marital trauma that is rarely addressed directly. Trauma responses such as hypervigilance, intrusive memory and communication breakdown are often produced by wounds that originate outside the marriage and are carried into it: combat, abuse, an accident. Betrayal trauma is structurally different. It is produced by the marriage itself, inflicted by the very attachment figure the spouse depends on for felt safety. That difference in origin changes both the clinical picture and the treatment required, and it is the subject of this article.
Freyd’s foundational betrayal trauma theory, developed initially to explain the psychology of childhood abuse by a trusted caregiver, rests on a simple and consequential observation: trauma inflicted by someone a person depends on for survival and connection produces a different psychological response than trauma inflicted by a stranger or an impersonal event.1 The dependent party cannot simply withdraw from the source of the threat without also losing the attachment relationship itself, and this bind produces the specific symptom picture, hypervigilance toward the attachment figure in particular, difficulty trusting one’s own perception, a felt sense of unreality, that distinguishes betrayal trauma from trauma originating elsewhere.
Freyd and Birrell’s later work extends this theory explicitly to adult intimate relationships, documenting the same structural dynamic in spouses who discover an unfaithful partner: the betrayed spouse’s nervous system is asked to hold two contradictory realities at once, this is the person who is supposed to be my safety, and this is the person who has become my danger, and the resulting symptom picture closely tracks post-traumatic presentations even though the event was not combat, assault, or accident. Ortman’s clinical work with couples after infidelity documents the same overlap in different language, describing what he terms post-infidelity stress: intrusive replaying of the discovery, hyperarousal to relational cues, avoidance and numbing, and a disrupted sense of safety in the world that mirrors PTSD in structure while arising from a source the diagnostic manual does not yet name as traumatic in its own right.2
A clinically important refinement follows directly from Rania’s own account of her experience. The word post in post-traumatic stress assumes the danger has ended. Where a spouse’s transparency remains incomplete, where contact has continued after being promised ended, or where the same pattern has repeated more than once, what the betrayed spouse is living through is not accurately described as post anything. It is ongoing. Her nervous system is responding, correctly, to a threat that has not actually resolved. This distinction matters for treatment planning: grounding and stabilisation work can proceed alongside disclosure work, but it cannot substitute for the harder requirement of full honesty and months of consistent, verifiable behaviour, because a threat detection system does not stand down on reassurance alone. It stands down when the environment becomes reliably safe, repeatedly, over time.
None of this is a formal diagnosis. Betrayal trauma is not currently its own standalone category in the DSM, and it should not be presented, in therapy or at home, as though it were one. What it is, and what the research above establishes, is a coherent, well documented symptom picture that deserves to be taken just as seriously as any other trauma presentation, not the minimising it too often receives from spouses, extended family, and sometimes from professionals who have not encountered this literature.
A significant proportion of infidelity in Muslim marriages involves pornography rather than, or alongside, a secret relationship. Treating this as a single, undifferentiated problem serves couples poorly. Two distinct tracks of healing are needed, and they need to run at the same time, not one after the other.
The first track is trauma focused work with the injured spouse. Her task is not to be convinced that her symptoms are proportionate, they are, on the evidence reviewed above, but to be given the language and the support to process a genuine attachment injury. This track fails whenever a therapist, a spouse, or a well meaning relative implies that the response is excessive because the behaviour was “only online” or happened “a couple of times.” The felt injury tracks the secrecy and the broken trust, not the frequency or medium of the behaviour, and treating it as though degree of physical involvement determines degree of harm actively impedes recovery.
The second track is behaviour focused work with the spouse who caused the harm, treating pornography use as an addictive pattern rather than only a moral lapse. For many men, exposure begins in adolescence, well before marriage, and the brain establishes it as a reliable, low-cost method of stress relief. New stress after marriage, financial pressure, relocation, unemployment, unrealistic expectations of intimacy shaped by that earlier exposure, does not create the vulnerability; it activates a vulnerability that was already there. Understanding this origin is necessary and, on its own, morally insufficient: it explains the behaviour without excusing it, and the spouse who engaged in it remains fully responsible for the choice to do so, to conceal it, and for the harm that followed. Segal, Williams, and Teasdale’s Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy framework, the primary integrative approach used at AIFS, is well suited to this second track precisely because it works simultaneously with cognition, behaviour, and contemplative practice rather than treating any one of these as sufficient on its own.3
Both tracks need to run at the same time. A couple in which only the injured spouse receives support will see her carry the full weight of a wound that proper support could otherwise help her carry. A couple in which only the offending spouse receives behavioural help, without the injury itself being validated, will see compliance with a treatment plan mistaken for repair of the marriage. Neither track substitutes for the other.
Two specific minimising moves recur often enough across couples facing this to warrant direct attention. The first draws a line between physical and non-physical betrayal, texting, viewing pornography, an emotional connection, as though only physical infidelity constitutes the real injury. From inside that logic the distinction can feel factually defensible. From the injured spouse’s position it is experienced, almost without exception, as an attempt to reduce the size of what happened. This is because secrecy itself, not physical contact specifically, is what produces the attachment injury; a spouse who discovers hidden messages or a hidden habit experiences the same rupture in felt safety whether or not anything physical occurred.
The second minimising move treats a single instance as inherently less significant than a repeated pattern. A useful reframe, drawn from work with couples in this exact situation, asks the spouse who caused the harm to consider a comparison: a single car accident, not a pattern of reckless driving, that happened to be fatal. The number of occurrences does not determine what was lost. A single betrayal can shatter a spouse’s basic sense of safety as completely as a repeated one, and treating frequency as a mitigating factor, however unintentionally, communicates to the injured spouse that her experience does not yet meet some threshold of legitimacy. The useful move in both cases is the same: naming the behaviour as wrong in full, without qualification, and redirecting the couple’s energy toward rebuilding safety rather than adjudicating degree.
A pattern worth distinguishing from betrayal trauma itself, because it frequently sits alongside it, is a spouse whose warmth and agreeableness conceal an inability to hold a firm boundary with anyone, a colleague, a friend, a relative, and sometimes a person outside the marriage who offers connection without demand. This conflict avoidant style is not equivalent to concealment, but it produces comparable practical effects: open ended commitments, vague endings to encounters, and, in some cases, a slow drift toward whichever relationship asks the least of them.
Working with many couples facing this issue points to two overlapping pathways that account for most cases, and it is worth naming both plainly while being equally plain that neither one is an excuse.
Ordinary early marriage strain, met with an established coping habit. Adjustment to shared life, financial pressure, relocation, a stalled career, activates old, pre-existing patterns rather than new ones. Where pornography use predates the marriage, this strain reactivates unrealistic expectations of intimacy that no real marriage was ever going to satisfy, and pulls the spouse back toward a familiar habit rather than toward the harder work of honest disclosure.
A personality mismatch that leaves one spouse feeling chronically unmet. Where one spouse is naturally more assertive and the other more accommodating, the more accommodating spouse can, over time, come to feel more readily seen or received outside the marriage than within it. This dynamic can run in either direction and is a function of which spouse occupies the accommodating role in that specific marriage, not a fixed property of husbands or wives as categories. Communication style can make repair meaningfully easier or harder, and both spouses typically have real work to do here, but style is never the cause of betrayal and never reduces responsibility for it. The real task with the more accommodating spouse is building an actual, learnable skill: stating a boundary clearly, holding it under mild social pressure, and disclosing a stressor before it becomes a secret.
Naming either pathway explains how a betrayal came to happen. It does not excuse it. The responsible response to feeling unmet within a marriage is direct, honest conversation and professional support, not secrecy, and both pathways described above are worth working on directly, alongside, not instead of, healing from the betrayal itself.
Islamic scholarship distinguishes ghirah mahmodah, a praiseworthy and appropriate protectiveness over one’s marriage, from ghirah madhmumah, jealousy that has tipped into suspicion without cause. A spouse who responds to genuine disconnection with grief and heightened vigilance is exhibiting the former, even where its expression is raw, and that pain warrants acknowledgment rather than correction.
The Prophet (ﷺ) modelled precisely the response this article asks of the spouse doing repair work. Anas ibn Malik reported that when one of the Prophet’s wives, in a moment of jealousy, struck a servant’s hand and broke a dish that had been sent as a gift from another of his wives, the Prophet did not rebuke her or defend the injured party’s grievance. He gathered the broken pieces, redistributed the food among those present, and said simply, “Your mother felt jealous,” before arranging for a replacement dish to be returned in its place (Sahih al-Bukhari, Hadith 5225). He met visible jealousy with calm acknowledgment rather than argument or correction, and it is this pattern, presence and steady character over defence and explanation, that the spouse rebuilding trust is asked to reproduce.
قَالَتِ امْرَأَتُ فِرْعَوْنَ رَبِّ ابْنِ لِي عِندَكَ بَيْتًا فِي الْجَنَّةِ
“[Allah presents an example of] the wife of Pharaoh, when she said, ‘My Lord, build for me near You a house in Paradise.’”
Surah At-Tahrim, 66:11
Scholars have long pointed to Asiya as an example of a believer who preserved her own faith and integrity while living within a deeply unjust marriage, and her example is genuinely relevant to spouses enduring real hardship. It should be applied with care, however. Patience is asked of the person carrying the pain as a spiritual discipline, not deployed as pressure to endure indefinitely whatever a marriage produces. Divorce and separation remain, in this framework, a genuine last resort, but a real one, appropriate where a marriage is unsafe or where a spouse demonstrates no sustained, verifiable change over time.
A related principle addresses the injured spouse’s dilemma of how much vigilance is appropriate while trust is being rebuilt. Surah Al-Hujurat instructs believers to verify news brought by an unreliable source rather than react to it immediately, a principle directly applicable to intrusive suspicion and unproven fear.
يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا إِن جَاءَكُمْ فَاسِقٌ بِنَبَإٍ فَتَبَيَّنُوا
“O you who have believed, if there comes to you a disobedient one with information, investigate.”
Surah Al-Hujurat, 49:6
Not every suspicion needs to become an accusation. A helpful complementary practice, drawn from Islamic tradition on tawakkul, is for the injured spouse to consciously delegate what cannot be humanly monitored, another person’s heart and private conduct, to Allah, who alone is aware of it fully. This is not a substitute for reasonable transparency or honest boundaries within the marriage. It is a corrective to the exhausting and ultimately futile position of attempting to monitor a spouse’s every action, a position that rarely produces the peace it is meant to secure even when it succeeds.
The three-phase recovery approach used in trauma-informed couples therapy, safety and stabilisation, processing, and integration, applies to betrayal trauma as well, with a few additions worth building into the stabilisation phase in particular.
A concrete, voluntary transparency plan, in which the spouse who caused the harm discloses proactively rather than only under questioning, gives the injured spouse’s nervous system the foundation it needs before deeper healing work can proceed.
A brief plan for the moments when distress becomes completely overwhelming should be worked out in advance, not improvised in the moment. This level of crisis can happen to anyone living through this injury, including calm, capable people with no history of mental health struggles. The plan should name a safe space to go to, a support person to call who is not necessarily the spouse who caused the harm, a paced breathing technique, and a clear point at which to reach out to a crisis line or emergency care.
One caution is worth naming directly: it is not always realistic to expect the injured spouse to call her husband in the middle of a crisis like this, since he may be the source of the injury itself, and his own guilt can leave him unable to offer steady support in that moment. The safety plan should name a support person outside the marriage as the first call.
A short daily reconnection practice, protected from the day’s conflict and placed at its close, a few minutes of shared Qur’an recitation, or prayer in the last third of the night, does more to rebuild felt safety over weeks than repeated re-litigation of the disclosure itself.
It helps both spouses to understand what attachment researchers call protest behaviour: the injured spouse’s repeated return to the same grievance, which functions as the attachment system testing whether safety has actually been rebuilt, not manipulation or score-keeping. Naming this pattern for what it is changes how both partners respond to it, and often reduces how often it happens.
A real, ongoing commitment to individual therapy from the spouse who caused the harm, separate from joint sessions, is one of the clearest and most verifiable signs of sincere change available to the couple, particularly where the behaviour has an addictive dimension.
Tariq’s individual work proceeded on the addiction track described above, using a structured behavioural and cognitive framework integrated with regular salah and a renewed study practice, while Rania’s individual sessions focused on the trauma track, naming her symptom picture accurately, establishing grounding practice, and working directly with the intrusive rereading and checking that had become her primary coping strategy. Conjoint sessions were reserved specifically for rebuilding the couple’s transparency practice and were kept separate from each spouse’s individual processing work, following the two-track principle established above.
Eight months into treatment, Rania described the shift plainly: “I still remember what happened. I don’t think that goes away, and I don’t think it should. But I don’t wake up at three in the morning anymore.” Tariq’s continued individual therapy, maintained voluntarily well past the point either spouse considered the crisis resolved, remained, in Rania’s words, the single fact that let her trust the change was real rather than temporary.
Freyd, J. J. (1996). Betrayal trauma: The logic of forgetting childhood abuse. Harvard University Press; and Freyd, J. J., & Birrell, P. (2013). Blind to betrayal: Why we fool ourselves we aren’t being fooled. John Wiley & Sons. (The second title extends betrayal trauma theory explicitly to adult intimate relationships and infidelity.)↩︎
Ortman, D. C. (2009). Transcending post-infidelity stress disorder: The six stages of healing. Jason Aronson.↩︎
Segal, Z. V., Williams, J. M. G., & Teasdale, J. D. (2013). Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for depression (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.↩︎
Need support? Imam Ayman Al-Taher, RP offers Islamic psychotherapy and marriage, family and youth counselling in Mississauga and online across Ontario. Book an appointment.
