Being betrayed is an experience I don’t wish on anyone. All betrayals bring pain and loss into your life. When you’re betrayed, you lose part of yourself.
Affairs are traumatic enough. When the affair involves a supposed ‘good friend’ or family member, it takes betrayal to a new depth of pain.
That good friend may have been an old classmate, someone from church or a new addition to your social circle. They act friendly enough to gain your confidence and then betray that confidence by sleeping with your spouse.
Those events are ‘knife in the back’ kinds of betrayal. They expose your vulnerability and damage your marriage and leave you distrusting EVERYONE.
In such situations, you’ve been betrayed several ways at once. The idiom used in expressing this is referring to being betrayed “Six ways from Sunday.”
Your spouse betrayed you, your friend betrayed you and you feel like you’ve betrayed yourself for believing them. Betrayal at that level leaves you wondering who or what to believe about anything.
You may find yourself saying things like “I thought you were my friend…” or “How could you do something like this to me?”
When that so-called friend is from church, there’s the added dimension of feeling like even God let you down. The tendency is to blur the lines between the position the betrayer was in with God, which only adds to your pain and isolation.
When the world and God are against you, it gets pretty lonely.
This kind of betrayal is traumatic. It puts you into a state of emotional shock and disbelief. You may even wonder how this could be happening to you.
Coming to grips with such a situation is tough. Even after you acknowledge what happened it still doesn’t mean that you’ve come to grips with it. There’s an element of the whole situation being so unreal that it’s hard to believe.
That sensation of things being unreal is a sure sign of trauma reactions in your life. Getting past those reactions is an important part of you recovering from the affair. You may not want to save your marriage, but you still need to resolve the trauma related concerns.
In my video on “Overcoming Affair Trauma“, you’ll learn ways of getting yourself closer back to where and who you were. You’ll discover ways of self-soothing and calming yourself, even after the events that happened in your life.
You don’t have to stay in a state of emotional shock. You can move past the effects of deep betrayal in your life. It’s better to start taking action now than to hope it goes away on its own.
Putting off getting help only allows the pain to fester and worsen.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
