Partner & Family
Support for the partners and families of men in treatment.
If you are the partner reading this, you are probably not looking for a program. You are looking for a person who can tell you what is happening to you, whether what you are feeling is normal, and what comes next. This page is for you.
Whatever you were told or found out — today, last night, or six months ago that you have been carrying alone — the ground under your life has shifted. The reality you thought you were living in was not the whole story. That is one of the most disorienting experiences a person can go through, and it is a recognized clinical injury with a name: betrayal trauma.
You are not overreacting. You are not unstable. You are responding, appropriately, to something that would destabilize anyone. There is a path through this, and you do not have to know where you want it to end before you start.
What partners actually need in the first weeks
In the days and weeks after discovery, most partners are told to do three things: get to a support group, decide whether the relationship can be saved, and hold it together for the kids. None of those are wrong, but none of them are clinical care, and none of them address what is actually happening in your nervous system.
What partners need first is stabilization: an anchor in the middle of the chaos, a clinician who can name what you are experiencing without pathologizing it, and permission to not have every answer yet. That is what the first weeks of the Partner & Family Program are built to provide.
How the Partner & Family Program is structured
Weekly individual therapy with a clinician trained specifically in partner trauma. A weekly process group with other partners walking the same ground — not a general support meeting, a clinical group. Coordination with the man's IOP treatment team so that disclosure, stabilization, and any decisions about the relationship happen on a shared clinical timeline, not in isolation.
Your care runs on its own track with its own pacing and its own goals. The clinical work is not organized around whether the relationship survives — it is organized around whether you do.
The clinical framework we use
Programming is delivered under the Multidimensional Partner Trauma Model (MPTM), the framework developed by APSATS and considered the gold standard for clinical work with partners of sexually compulsive clients. MPTM treats betrayal trauma as a distinct clinical injury with its own arc — acute reaction, stabilization, longer-term reorganization — rather than as a symptom of someone else's disorder.
Care is led by co-founder Roxcy Brown, LMFT-A, CCPS-C, who trained in MPTM through APSATS and directs family programming at Iron Ridge.
Who this program is for
Partners of men currently in or entering Iron Ridge's intensive outpatient program. Partners who are trying to figure out what to do next, whether or not their partner is willing to seek treatment yet. Family members who are affected by a loved one's compulsive sexual behavior and want clinical support that is not a support-group meeting.
You do not need your partner's permission to start. You do not need to have decided anything about the relationship. You need clinical care, on your own timeline.
Reading, in Roxcy's voice
Written and clinically reviewed by Roxcy. Start wherever feels closest to what you are actually looking at right now.
Article · Roxcy Brown
Betrayal Trauma: What Partners Need to Know
Discovery is its own trauma. What partners are actually experiencing, why the symptoms are predictable, and what specialized clinical care looks like.
Clinical hub
The betrayal trauma clinical hub
The full clinical picture: symptoms, family system impact, couple work, recovery timeline, and where partner care actually belongs in this field.
For partners in the middle of it
What betrayal trauma looks like
Hypervigilance, intrusive thoughts, triggers, somatic symptoms, sleep disruption, rage and grief cycles, and eroded reality testing — named clinically, not judged.
First 30 days
Safety and stabilization
What clinical work actually looks like in the days and weeks after discovery, before any decision about the relationship.
The question you do not have to answer today
Should I stay or leave?
Why this decision is almost always premature at the point of discovery, and how clinical care creates the ground to decide from.
For couples
When couples therapy is premature
Why sitting down with a general couples therapist can make things worse in the acute phase, and what has to come first.
Family system
Talking to children about a parent's behavior
Developmentally appropriate framing for what to say, what to withhold, and how to protect a child's sense of stability.
Also for
For men whose partner was unfaithful
Betrayal trauma is not gendered. Clinical support for men who are the betrayed partner in the relationship.
When you’re ready, we’re here.
Every inquiry is read by a member of our clinical team. We respond within one business day.
Request a Confidential Consult →
If you are the partner making the call, tell us that when you inquire — we route those conversations to Roxcy's team first.