Rebuilding After Betrayal: Lessons from Seattle Grief Counseling

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The definition of betrayal (according to Merriam-Webster) is: “violation of a person's trust or confidence, of a moral standard, etc.” It can also be described as: “revelation of something hidden or secret.” How betrayal plays out in real life can be messy and complicated.

What comes to mind when you think of betrayal?

Betrayal is by nature relationally focused. One or more people may discover something hidden or secret that creates a breach of trust or confidence. This can happen in all kinds of relationships, friendships, familial ties, romantic relationships, and on a societal or communal level. There might be times in your life you’ve felt betrayed by your own mind, body, or actions. That’s still impacting your relationship to yourself and to others. People often think of infidelity as one of the most common kinds of betrayal, and this is one example, but there are many other forms that can be highly damaging.

Examples of Betrayals:

·      Lying

·      Secrets

·      Physical infidelity

·      Emotional infidelity

·      Disrespect

·      Gaslighting

·      Abuse (physical, emotional, psychological, sexual)

·      Avoidance/Neglect of a relationship

·      Rumors

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·      Breaking Promises

·      Selfishness

·      Addictions

·      Harmful disclosure

·      Stealing

·      Personal betrayal (acted against your interests, feeling like your body has betrayed you)

Chances are, you’ve experienced betrayal at some point in your life. The impact can vary, however, at the heart of it is relational trauma. The path forward varies depending on whether you want to heal that relationship or move forward without the person or multiple people that caused the betrayal.

First Steps Towards Healing From Seattle Grief Counseling

The first step in healing from a betrayal of any kind is to grieve and allow space for all your emotions around the betrayal. Anger and sadness are often the initial emotions. Over time, you may have more questions and seek answer to complicated questions. As humans, we love to ask ‘why’ when many times a clear answer isn’t available. You may want to conceptualize what happened as a form of understanding. Getting information can be helpful to a point. Chances are that having more information isn’t going to take away the pain and emotions have to be experienced rather than ‘fixed.’

The irony of pain is the more you try to avoid it, the bigger and more intimidating it will become. I have yet met any human that hasn’t been hurt by other humans. Unfortunately, it is part of our existence. The hope is that when you know you’ve been the instigator of a betrayal that you can do what you can to repair that relationship (if it’s important to you).

Grief Counseling in Seattle for Betrayal: Engaging ‘The Betrayer’ in Therapy

Therapy can look a lot different whether the person who precipitated the betrayal is involved or not. The benefits of having that person in the room is that they can answer questions, provide clarification, more closely examine their actions, show remorse, and work to rebuild trust. Trust and confidence within yourself and other people takes time and opportunity. Therapy can be a helpful place to work on that in a contained way. If that person isn’t available or doesn’t want to engage in therapy, many of those pieces aren’t there. When you do individual work, much of the focus becomes on processing emotions, especially grief, anger, and sadness, establishing a healing context, coping skills, and a plan forward.

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Both in solo and relationship therapy, it’s important to discover the context in which betrayal occurred and how the affected parties can build more supportive/protective contexts. In my experience, generally people don’t intent to hurt others but do so when they get so buried in their own pain they no longer have the capacity to hold space for other peoples’ experiences. Betrayal of yourself may have been you trying to protect yourself in an unhealthy context or your body breaking down after supporting you through a stressful time. Understanding the context both with yourself and others can provide insight and guidance.

Grief Counseling in Seattle For Relational Pain: It’s Not Your Fault

One-way relational pain or betrayal is so painful, is that it leads you to create unhelpful narratives about yourself. You might ask yourself, how did I not see this? How did I trust this person? The reality is that the person or people that betrayed you did so out of their own pain, personal challenges, or self-centeredness. Whatever that person did had more to do with them than it did you. Of course, you ended up feeling the impact. It’s so important to understand just as you exist in a complex context, so do the people you care about. Intent and impact are both important. Someone may not have been intending to hurt you, but if they did, they need to know how it’s impacted you. If someone did intend to hurt you, healing will probably be better on your own and you’ll seek out safer more supportive relationships. Therapy can be a good start. 

The impact of a betrayal is rarely straightforward. It can bring up other pains from your past that you thought were in the far distance. No matter what form of betrayal you are dealing with, considering looking into therapy to help. As someone who works with individuals, couples, families and friends, therapy can be a safe space to explore challenging topics. You don’t have to face this pain alone, schedule a free consultation today.

About the Author: Seattle Washington Therapist, Chelsea Kramer LMFT PMH-C

Chelsea Kramer is a Seattle Therapist who works with individual and families facing grief, anxiety, reproductive and medical mental health concerns.

Learn more about Chelsea’s specialties: grief, anxiety, infertility, pregnancy loss, chronic illness, menopause, medical trauma

Learn more about Chelsea

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