Relationships
Rise: Releasing the Weight of Unresolved Betrayal
Embark on a journey from the shadows of betrayal to the light of understanding.
Updated January 6, 2025 Reviewed by Jessica Schrader
Key points
- Betrayal distinguishes itself from disappointment by its emotional impact and the challenges to trust.
- Healing involves safety, acknowledgment of loss, compassion, reclaiming power, and learning from experiences.
- Forgiveness is a choice to accept and integrate our experiences, not to forget them.
Betrayal can leave us feeling stuck in resentment and distrust, struggling to discern future betrayals from inevitable disappointments. Unresolved betrayal can leave us with maladaptive anger, irritability, blame, and a lingering sense of injustice, to name a few. These symptoms can dominate our lives, granting undue power to those who wronged us. Has unresolved betrayal weighed you down?
Rising Up
Healing from betrayal is a path marked by compassion, introspection, and, ultimately, empowerment. Here are steps, grounded in research and practice, that pave the way toward reclaiming your peace:
- Safety First: Secure your physical and emotional safety. This might mean simply getting space from the situation. However, if you or someone else is being harmed, you may need to take legal actions or seek support from a protective community.
- Inventory of Loss: Assess the damage. What must be grieved? Grieving involves fully acknowledging feelings of sadness, anger, fear, and guilt. What needs rebuilding? See what you can recover from the ashes in order to begin again.
- Offer Compassion: Embrace your pain without resistance. The RAIN (recognize, allow, investigate, nurture) technique can guide you through acceptance, allowing you to halt the spiral of avoidance and added distress.
- Reclaim Your Power: Reflect on your present and future, making informed choices to fulfill your needs while learning from the past. What matters most to you, and how can you honor those values moving forward? Betrayals point to our values. The more something hurts, the more we know it matters to us. What was the worst of your betrayal? This is directly pointing to something you hold dear. Is it safety? Justice? Personal accountability? Integrity? Joy? Teamwork? Compassion? Honor that now. “You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.” –Maya Angelou
- Learn from Betrayal: Explore your own risk management strategies so you can keep taking courageous steps to trust, while developing a more refined sensitivity to situations where someone is harming you. “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”–Maya Angelou
- Reconcile When Possible: You might decide that someone involved in your betrayal, including yourself, deserves a chance to earn back your trust. Not everyone will fit this category. Trust is dimensional and incremental. You might decide that violations of certain dimensions of trust are too critical for you to risk reconciliation. Even with those we might rate the most trustworthy, trust is a risk. As one researcher and expert in reconciliation, Dr. Fred Luskin, suggests, “It’s guaranteed that you will be hurt by the people you care about. The question is: Have you learned to grieve your losses? To feel the pain of disappointment without having to make somebody our enemy? Relationships involve pain. They also involve good stuff—but they’re painful. They require work. You are trusting another human being all the time. They’re going to let you down.”
Journalling Exercise: Perspective-Taking
Consider writing two letters (you are not sending them):
First Letter: Write to a loving compassionate moral authority you admire, detailing your experience and feelings of betrayal (they can be dead or imaginary). Tell that individual what happened in your betrayal. Describe your pain, your sadness, shame, guilt, and anger. Describe how this impacted you after all this time, and how it has kept you stuck.
Second Letter: Imagine this same compassionate person responding back. How do they understand your pain? How do they suggest you take your power back? What do they want from you going forward?
Mindfulness Exercise: Releasing the Prisoners of Your Mind
Close your eyes and imagine your betrayal, and the injustice of what happened. Imagine you have created a little prison in your mind to correct the injustice. Imagine putting all of the accused in the prison. While wanting to get justice, you have kept yourself guarding a memory, and have created an imaginary prison for yourself to guard.
In what way have you been stuck manning an imaginary prison? How long have you manned it? What purpose does it serve to keep guarding the prison? What does it cost to keep running the prison?
Imagine the prison door. How does it open? What do you fear will happen if you open this door?
Now imagine opening the door. What happens? What feelings does this elicit? What fears come up? What are you now free to pursue in the external world?
Reflection Questions:
- What is the very next step you need to take to release the burden of betrayal?
- How can you apply the lessons learned from betrayal to strengthen your values and relationships?
Maya Angelou said, “We have to confront ourselves. Do we like what we see in the mirror? And, according to our light, according to our understanding, according to our courage, we will have to say yea or nay—and rise!”
References
Brach, T. (n.d.). RAIN: Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture. Tara Brach. Retrieved January 5, 2025, from https://www.tarabrach.com/rain/
Litz, B. T., Lebowitz, L., Gray, M. J., & Nash, W. P. (2016). Adaptive disclosure: A new treatment for military trauma, loss, and moral injury. The Guilford Press.
Luskin, F. (2012). Fred Luskin on Overcoming the Pain of Intimacy. Greater Good. Retrieved January 5, 2025, from https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/fred_luskin_on_overcoming_the_pain_of_intimacy