Personal relationships can be very complex. And if many problems can be overcome, then the betrayal of a loved one is a completely different matter. This fact turns the whole world upside down. How do you deal with the pain of what happened? And what to do next?
After the betrayal of a loved one — especially if it took us by surprise — we are tormented by anxiety, anger, fear and longing. We are exhausted and cannot understand who can be trusted at all now.
If a friend, colleague, relative, or loved one breaks a promise, the shock we feel when we learn about it sends a signal to us (body, psyche, and soul) that we are no longer safe. This is a severe wound that sometimes takes years to heal.
The most difficult thing to endure is the betrayal of those with whom we have invested the most effort. It causes deep injury for several reasons:
- We understand that for the person we trusted, his desires and needs turned out to be more important than ours.
- This is a deep shock in the body and psyche, leaving a deep imprint on all levels.
- The trust that underlay relationships with other people is now destroyed.
- We have reason to begin to doubt the correctness of our own decisions in other areas of life.
Betrayal activates the stress response and causes a cascade of physical, mental and emotional symptoms — adrenal and digestive problems, fatigue, confusion, fog and chaos in the head, depression, anger and rage, a feeling of deep humiliation.
Our self-confidence also suffers: we are tormented by a feeling of insignificance, we feel abandoned and rejected. We are terribly hurt that a loved one took advantage of us for their own purposes, without caring about us.
The problem is that if we try to deal with each symptom individually, healing may take longer than we would like. In addition, by focusing on the symptoms, we ignore the underlying causes of our condition. So there is no real healing.
What to do?
Many simply do not realize what a colossal blow the incident dealt to their body, psyche and entire worldview. Betrayal survivors often try to treat each symptom individually because they are afraid that if they admit what is really going on inside them, people will judge them or become overly sorry.
But isolation from others only exacerbates the problems. In times like these, we need support more than ever. Without it, it will be very difficult to leave the experience behind and move on. After all, healing trauma, we re-learn to trust others, feel safe, love and open our hearts.
Debi Zilber, psychologist and author of The Resolute Woman: 4 Steps to Recover Your Body, Mind, and Life After a Crisis, conducted the study. Within its framework, it was found that for women, healing from betrayal usually takes five stages:
- Ignoring intuition. We choose to ignore the thought that something is wrong, focusing on the physical rather than the emotional.
- Just betrayal. We are caught off guard and suffer.
- Survival. We think only about how to live this day. And tomorrow, another one.
- Adaptation. We begin to adapt to a new life and reconsider our behavior.
- Renaissance. We are freed from experiences and gain a new view of the world.
Some get stuck in Stages XNUMX and XNUMX for many weeks, months, years, or even a lifetime. But the only way to rebuild yourself mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually is to go through all five stages at your own pace. And change the worldview to become stronger.
If we consider all the consequences of this trauma in our lives as part of one deep spiritual wound, we can gradually move away from pain and shock, starting the healing process.
On a physical level, we will feel lighter, more alert, stronger and healthier.
We can sleep soundly and sleep well. And on a mental level, we will stop constantly tormenting ourselves with memories and thoughts about what happened, we will focus on positive thoughts and ideas. On an emotional level, we will become calmer and more confident.
But most importantly, having healed from trauma, we will no longer let the betrayal we experienced rule our lives. What happened will still remain one of the significant chapters of our life history, but it will no longer control its development.
We realize that this experience helped us a lot. We will learn to set clear personal boundaries and begin to surround ourselves with good people — those who support us, help us develop, but accept us as we are. Our greatest crisis will be our greatest gift.