What do you do when someone you encounter every day - a friend, a colleague, or a cousin - has betrayed you? Or to be precise, made you feel betrayed. You might have expected them to stand up for you. You might have expected them to reciprocate your care and attention in a certain way. Or maybe they hid a fact from you, which changes the foundation of your relationship.
But then these are people you have daily business with at work and home. Practical relationships that require you to communicate with them. You can't cut them off, but you no longer feel like a team with them, like you belonged with them, that you were kindred spirits. What happens when a chasm enters? One way to respond would be to confront them on why you are hurt. If you trust the relationship enough and you value the person enough, you can take that path. Another way would be to reduce your interactions with them to the bare minimum. Well, all these could be legitimate ways of the response given how you are feeling vis-a-vis the other person. What one also needs to examine is why one feels betrayed. How one gained so much power over you, that they could betray you. At what point did you start harbouring expectations from them?
The feeling of betrayal, whether from a parent or a friend or a lover, comes from the same wounded place - the worst of all wounds, the pain of abandonment. If you have experienced abandonment early on in your life, you will not easily forgive even minor betrayals. Because to your mind, it is the reinforcement of the same belief - that you can't trust anyone else and that you alone are responsible for your well-being.
While this defence would make you draw up high walls around you, a pragmatic way of dealing with the feeling of betrayal is to have a more reasonable bar of expectations from others. People will make mistakes, they will end up rubbing you the wrong way without even knowing you. The result cannot be complete detachment or a full-blown confrontation.
The answer lies in the recalibration of your expectation from people. You might have ended up reading that person the wrong way. They probably were not the friend you were expecting them to be. There will be disappointments. But the solution is not in wallowing in self-pity but in rewiring the very structure of that relationship.
To judge someone harshly and develop spite against them affects our humanity. The only solution then is to give people a second chance, not dump your frustration on them. Allow yourself the time to de-cloud your thoughts and see the same situation in a different light and then take a call. It's possible, a new way of interpreting the event will make you feel less rejected or betrayed.
Finally, do not set a set bar for your relationships. There are no black and white relationships. All relationships need recalibration because we need to judge people over some time. No feeling is final for a person. Enter any relationship with a lot of scepticism and don't come to conclusions too soon. And even if you do, don't feel ashamed of changing them without breaking all ties.
People are necessary. We are going to be cross with them for one or the other reason. Wisdom is managing our expectations from a relationship and learning from the cues that the other person is giving.
