Living with Betrayal

Feeling that you have been betrayed can be one of the hardest experiences to overcome.  It can rock our world because it upends our beliefs and shakes our trust in ourselves and the world around us.

Forms of Betrayal
For most of us the word invokes thoughts of relationships where someone has an affair and is then found out.  However there are many other discoveries that can feel equally traumatic.  Any time we have been encouraged to believe something which turns out not to be true can be experienced as a betrayal.  

Realising that adults do not always have our best interests at heart; discovering that friendships are not what they seem; seeing leaders we admire exposed for not embodying the values they espouse; as well as finding out that people do not feel the same way about us as we do about them. 

Any betrayal can cause trauma that might need to be normalised and a sense of loss that might have to be mourned.

Rules for Living
As children many of us are told of the importance of working hard and not breaking the rules and how we will then be rewarded with a happy and successful life.  Those of us who experienced a less stable childhood may have come to believe that if we behave well and do not wilfully hurt others than we will be kept safe.  

To avoid living in a state of anxiety we need to feel safe and secure.  To achieve this it helps if we can believe that the world around us is based upon fairness and justice.  We might even base this on a bargain we make that rewards what we believe is good behaviour.

What is Lost?
The pain of betrayal is often felt so strongly because it reaches to the heart of our belief system and challenges the foundations upon which we have built our lives. 

When someone betrays us they give us proof that our perception of them, and perhaps the world as a whole, was wrong.  They are not as honest as we thought they were, they are not as strong as we thought they were, they are not as loving as we thought they were.  Who is responsible for these misconceptions?  Were they always this way or have they changed without us noticing?  Did they fool us or did we fool ourselves?

Not only is the world, and the people in it, not as we believed them to be but we must now question our ability to understand and correctly evaluate the actions and motives of those around us.  The mechanisms that we have developed to guide us through life have failed us and it can feel like we have to go back to the beginning and start again.

In addition to the trauma of having our beliefs fundamentally challenged, we have also lost the future that we imagined for ourselves as whatever we decide to do things will never be the same again.  Part of our recovery may well include mourning this loss.

What did I do Wrong?
People often talk about feeling foolish after a betrayal as if they should have known what was going on.  Others may struggle to accept the unfairness of it and may begin to question whether there is something that they have done that might have brought this about.  For many of us it can be easier to blame ourselves than another.

While they have let you down by reneging on any promises they might have made, perhaps we do need to take some responsibility for having imagined they were capable of something that they were not.

Explanations not Excuses
Betrayal is often seen in terms of victims and villains with emotions to match, but this risks us failing to appreciate the complexity of the situation.  Once the initial shock has subsided, exploring the reasons for the betrayal can help to put it into context.  We can begin to appreciate why it happened and also gain a clearer understanding of our role in the drama. 

This could be useful in deciding to what extent, if any, we colluded with any cover-up or ignored signs that things were not as they seemed.  It may also help us take a view on whether it was a one-off or is likely to be repeated.  This is not about excusing the betrayal but trying to understand it.

Rebuilding Belief
While personal betrayal is a very painful experience it takes us from a world of assumptions to a closer reality of who we are sharing our life with.   We now have a more accurate understanding of who they are so that any decision about the future is based upon lived experience rather than assumptions.

In order to move forward we may need to revise our view of the people around us and decide how much we will allow them to affect our lives.  This does not mean that they can continue to be their worst self and we must accept that.   We now know what they are capable of and can take a more informed view of any commitment they may make in the future.

Our trust in ourselves and our ability to assess how trustworthy others might be may also need to be restored.   Some conclusions about ourselves and the world we inhabit have been shown to be false.  Depending on the extent of the betrayal we may need to take time to reconstruct our view of the world.  Alternatively it may be that we can simply accept our fallibility and allow this to become part of our new world view.

Counsellors can support people, both individually and as a couple, in understanding the detail of why things happened and help us to decide how we wish to move forward.

© 2018 Michael Golding