The worst thing you can do when you’ve been betrayed
by Mira and Charles on August 28th, 2009Nothing hurts more than betrayal. It’s like experiencing your own personal earthquake: what you thought was solid ground under your feet turns out to be vertigo-inducing jelly. You feel you don’t know who this stranger is who’s taken over the body of your spouse. But in the midst of all that fear and pain, people often do the worst possible thing:
They give up hope. We think that because our spouse has cheated on us, or lied, or lent money to his brother even though you told him not to—just because of that, all possibility of redemption are gone. The hero turns out to be a villain, and that’s it.
It’s not conscious. It usually happens because we gnaw and gnaw on our fears and pain. We can’t let it go, and we really don’t want to let it go. And in a way that makes sense. We’ve been so hurt that the only way we can think to make ourselves safe is to hold on to the pain as a way to prevent ourselves from ever being hurt again.
We have, in effect, thrown hope overboard for fear it will sink us.
This is all natural and normal. The question is, is it helpful?
It isn’t helpful. When someone you thought was a good person does a bad thing, there are three possibilities.
1. He really is a good person. But he (or she, of course) was just thoughtless or confused or was doing his best to deal with his own pain. There are lots of reasons why good people do bad things. But here’s the thing: when a good person realizes the pain he’s caused and the damage he’s done, he won’t do it again. And I’ve seen it countless times. A guy cheats on his wife, for example. She is devastated. And when he sees what he’s done, it’s unthinkable for him to ever do it again. And he never does do it again. And the same holds true for all the ways we betray each other.
2. He really is a bad person. Sadly, this is true sometimes. Not usually, but sometimes, maybe 15 percent of the time. Here’s what I mean by this. A bad person is basically a sociopath, that is, someone who doesn’t care about the damage he does, except as it affects him. You’ve been betrayed, you’re hurt, and yet your pain simply doesn’t register with him. It’s quite simply not a consideration in his thinking, except that it causes you to make a fuss, and he doesn’t like that.
Now here’s where it gets a little confusing for some people. Many people when they’ve been betrayed immediately conclude that their spouse is not a good person but a bad person. But of course it is usually hard to end a relationship. Plus their spouse is the parent of their children. It becomes harder and harder to think he really is a bad person. So they go back to thinking he’s a good person.
Except that there is a third alternative.
3. He really is a good person but he can’t help doing bad things. It’s called “I can’t help it” behavior. It’s sometimes mistakenly called some kind of addiction. But it isn’t an addiction. That’s what makes it so confusing. The person is capable of stopping the behavior but for some reason usually very hard to fathom the person really does try to stop but just can’t. We can all relate to this. We all have things in our life that we try to stop doing but can’t manage to stop. Now the problem is that a good person who “can’t help” doing something that hurts you is, from your point of view, no different from a bad person. The hurtful behavior will keep happening, and it really doesn’t matter why.
But here’s why it is so important for you to maintain hope when you first find out you’ve been betrayed:
You don’t know what category your partner is in. And the only way to find out is to hang in there with what we call “as-if trust.” You have to act as if you trust him and work to rebuild the relationship. That is the only way to determine in the long run which category your partner is in.
You see, when you’ve been betrayed, you risk making one of two mistakes. You could give up on a person who is really good. Or your could stay with someone who will keep doing things to hurt you. Both are bad mistakes. But with the second mistake, the worst thing that usually happens is that you lose a little time—once you see that the person really won’t stop hurting you, you leave. With the first mistake, you lose a relationship with someone you love, who loves you, with whom you really can be happy.
So if you’ve been betrayed, do this. Commit to working to healing the hurt and rebuilding the relationship. Give it maybe six months. Act as if you trust the other person. Have hope.
There is a very good probability that you will find out that your hope made sense. If not, all you’ve lost is some time. But if your hope does turn out to make sense, won’t you be glad you gave hope a chance?
In our next blog, we’ll talk more about as-if trust and how to use it to heal your relationship.
(For more things to do if you’ve been betrayed see this blog. And for a lot more help, particularly in the case of an affair, you must consult When Good People Have Affairs, which has an amazing section on how to rebuild your relationship after an affair.)
