Partners Taking Turns Leaning In and Leaning Out: Trusting in the Healing Arc of Attachment Dynamics following Betrayal

Abstract

Betrayal trauma threatens pair-bond attachment relationships. Across a trajectory of repair and healing, offenders and aggrieved partners manifest distinct trajectories, with asynchronous progression and timelines. Without careful intervention, their colliding trajectories may preclude repair and healing, producing instead corrosive interaction and relationship disintegration. We focus on attachment-organized responses designed to safeguard the relationship as partners alternate “leaning in” and “leaning out” of the relationship. We specifically profile the situation of initial offending partner ambivalence. Our attachment-informed model of couple repair and healing following betrayal trauma describes four phases, key developmental tasks, and attachment dynamics related to couples’ asynchronous healing trajectories. Although betrayal trauma can lead to relationship dissolution, couples can heal (a) as both partners work together to navigate one partner’s “leaning out” with the other partner’s “leaning in” responses, (b) as offenders choose to be accountable, witness their partner’s pain, and make amends, (c) as aggrieved partners intentionally process the offense through benevolent indignation, and (d) as both address relationship deficits and needs. A clinical vignette depicts the couple experience, and we then discuss the associated relationship dynamics and suggest clinical responses related to each phase.

Keywords:

• Couples therapy
• attachment behavior
• models
• infidelity
• ambivalence
• healing
• relationship repair

Notes

1 For clarity, we refer to partners who commit an attachment betrayal as the offending partner (OP) and the non-straying partner as the aggrieved partner (AP); we acknowledge that this oversimplifies the systemic complexity of couples’ relationships.

2 We use the word repair to capture all elements of personal and couple behavioral change required to put a relationship back in working order following infidelity. We use the word healing to capture the elements of self-care and partner care essential to bring about the restoration of emotional, psychological, and spiritual wholeness and well-being. Together, repair and healing make attachment restoration possible, though reconciliation remains a matter of personal choice.

3 Although similar, containment and suppression are not synonymous. Suppression is a form of emotional management that denies experience to avoid conflict, whereas containment incorporates a temporary pause on emotional processing until readiness is evident. Containment is relationship-supportive, while suppression ultimately compromises correction, rebalancing, and healing in a relationship.

4 Butler and colleagues’ (2018, 2018, 2019) models of couple healing configurations and three pathways of anger further illuminate the complexity of couple engagement across the entire healing journey described in this paper.