Healing from Betrayal
When you’ve been betrayed, you will likely go through grieving about the loss of dreams and trust, perhaps you will question yourself and how you were fooled, you could wonder if everything before was a lie, and you might have any number of other troubling thoughts and questions. The basic stages of grief are
Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance
It’s important to know that grieving is normal when you’ve been betrayed. Your grief means that you aren’t emotionally shut-down or detached from yourself and life’s experiences.
One of my biggest barriers to healing from betrayal was my questioning if I was justified in feeling betrayed. My questioning the legitimacy of my feelings was mostly subconscious; but I observed it in
my continuously looking for proof of the hurtful behaviors
in attempt to be absolutely sure about what was going on
to make me feel like something in the situation was within my control
my ruminating about emotionally-painful things that happened and kept happening
in attempt to figure out and solve what was going on
to make me feel like something in the situation was within my control
my obsessively going over what it is that I value and stand for, and how I behave and choose differently than the other person (the “betrayer”) does
in order to try to convince myself I wasn’t being unrealistic, overly-sensitive, too particular, co-dependent, or otherwise dysfunctional
my relentlessly trying to justify, to the betrayer, as to why I felt hurt and trying to convince him/her to change his/her ways
my trying to convince others of how hurtful the betrayer’s behaviors were so they would validate that indeed my pain was justified
Step One:
Based on my own journeys with betrayal, the first step I would advise for dealing with betrayal is to believe yourself and what you feel: if you feel betrayed, that means you were, or are being, betrayed.
Until you’re further along in your grieving process, put aside your concerns about being unrealistic, overly-sensitive, too particular, co-dependent, or otherwise dysfunctional as a cause for your feeling betrayed. This will only detour you from, and prolong, the grieving process.
Even if you have emotional work to do, you still have the experience of being betrayed.
Step Two:
Allow yourself to simply feel the pain with self-compassion and understanding.
I tried to be the bigger, enlightened person and not feel hurt by the betrayer. I thought I could heal myself enough to be unaffected by the hurtful behavior. Believing this caused me a lot of harm, and detoured and prolonged the grieving process.
Step Three:
Validate your own feelings: Tell yourself, “I am completely valid for feeling hurt.”
You’re valid for continuing to feel hurt, even if you stay in the relationship. You’re valid for continuing to feel hurt, even if you now know the relationship isn't what you want. You’re valid to hurt, even if the relationship is over.
Step Four:
Validate your own experiences and soothe yourself.
Remember: You are on a higher mission in life than to spend precious time trying to stop others’ betrayal. You are worthy to be respected and valued; respect yourself by knowing the betrayal is the caused by a very dysfunctional person, and is not happening because you deserve it.
Stay present with who you are; what you want in your life; what you have to offer a healthy, respectful relationship; and how a healthy, respectful person would treat you and view your relationship.
Be aware of how you were looking to the betrayer to validate your feelings and to soothe the pain by admitting his/her hurtful ways and striving to be better (which likely will never happen). Be aware of how you were looking to others for their validation about your feeling hurt.
Instead of looking outside of yourself for validation and consoling, you need to validate your own feelings and soothe yourself by saying to yourself,
"In a respectful relationship, my person would not do that and I would not do that to my person."
Every time you feel the hurt, and every time you witness the betrayer doing hurtful things, declare this statement. This declaration is packed full of kindness, concern and high self-regard: it validates your feelings, who you are, what you are about, what you have to offer, and what you desire for yourself; it moves your focus away from being the target of the betrayal; and it calms the pain down. And then your stress lowers and you can function easier.
Remember: You do not have to force yourself to not be hurt by the betrayer. And you don’t need anyone but yourself to validate your feelings of betrayal.
Do you need coaching? Please contact me. I’d love to help you.