Areas of Focus
Betrayal
Home / Areas of Focus / Betrayal
“Betrayal by a trusted other sends shockwaves reverberating not only forward into one’s future but backward into one’s past. One’s personal history is retroactively reconfigured: What has been becomes undone.”
“Sometimes we seek the gaze of another not because we reject our partner, but because we are tired of ourselves. It isn’t our partner we aim to leave, rather the person we’ve become.”
Betrayal need not involve sexual infidelity; emotional affairs also count. Acts of betrayal produce difficult feelings in both parties. The betrayed typically experiences anger and confusion. The betrayer may feel guilt and shame, though not always.
Repair requires genuine remorse, atonement, and behaviour change from the betrayer. Forgiveness, however, is unlikely to come easily, and the slowness of it can elicit anger and defensiveness from the betrayer in turn. A central question is whether the betrayal reflects a dysfunction in the relationship or something in the betrayer's psychological make-up.
Remaining in a relationship marked by repeated betrayals may indicate “betrayal blindness”, a largely unconscious defence that uses rationalisation and denial to preserve the safety and connection the relationship still provides. An affair may be excused because "it didn't really mean anything." Betrayal blindness is the refusal to see fully what is there to be seen.
For the betrayed, therapy addresses the loss of trust, the disturbance to one's sense of reality, and the longer task of deciding whether and how to remain in the relationship. For the betrayer, therapy examines what the betrayal expressed about the relationship, about the self, and about what could not be brought into the open by other means. Without that examination, behaviour change tends not to hold.
References
Freyd, J., & Birrell, P. (2013). Blind to betrayal: Why we fool ourselves we aren’t being fooled. London: John Wiley & Sons.
Rusbult, C., Olsen, N., Davis, J., & Hannon, P. (2004). Commitment and relationship maintenance mechanisms. In H. Reis & C. Rusbult (Eds.), Close relationships: Key readings. New York: Taylor & Francis.