Dealing with betrayal is one of the most challenging things that human beings ever have to do. When the bonds of trust are broken with someone you love, it’s hard to heal.
Fortunately, there are ways to deal with betrayal and put your life back on track. Here’s what you need to do:
Say How You Feel
In the immediate aftermath of betrayal, start by stating how you feel. Just writing down your emotions on a piece of paper can have a profound effect on your well-being and helps you get to grips with what you’re going through.
In the midst of betrayal, people go through a whirlwind of emotions. You might feel anger, fear, loneliness, confusion, surprise, and sadness. When someone disrupts your reality, you don’t have an emotional template to fall back on, so you must discover it yourself.
Avoid Retaliation
In many cases, people who have been betrayed have a solid urge to retaliate. When you think about what happened, you feel tempted to punish the other person, believing that they deserve punishment.
However, this approach rarely works in practice. It’s often just a way to prolong the heartache and delay healing. Plotting and planning your revenge takes up valuable energy that you could put into taking care of your own well-being.
Take Time Out
The next step is to avoid the person who betrayed you, taking time away from them if necessary. If your partner was unfaithful because of love addiction, there isn’t much you can do personally. Texting them every five minutes makes it much harder to deal with the fallout, and prevents you from spending time considering what happened.
Avoid constantly checking their social media. Tell them that you’re going to take a break from communication. Spend time with people who can support you and have your best interests at heart. If the person tries to contact you, ignore them or get someone to respond to them on your behalf. Make it clear that you want a break but that you will be in communication in the future.
Look At The Details Of The Betrayal
Betrayal can occur for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes it’s flat-out malice, but that’s rare. In most cases, it comes from a place of fear, weakness, or carelessness. Many people behave compulsively in ways they can’t control without ever wanting to hurt their victims.
Once you examine the betrayal, you’ll start to see the human side of what happened. You might also empathise with the betrayer’s actions, seeing why they did what they did.
Learn From It
Betrayal seems like a catastrophe and it is easy to place all the responsibility on the other person. However, learning from your experience is one of the best ways of coping with it. The more you can understand why the other person did what they did, the wiser you’ll become.
Betrayal haunts the naive. Therefore, if you can gain more knowledge of how the world works, then you can live more successfully in the future.
Betrayal is hard one and we don’t talk enough about it. How it feels and more importantly – how to cope, so thank you for opening this portal and giving us a moment to think about this topic and learn to break the cycle.
Thank you for your comment, it is so important to talk about these tricky subjects. Because they impact us all.