Why is betrayal so distasteful in a relationship? How does it affect the world you live in as the betrayed party? Dr. Jordan Peterson shares his views on how betrayal alters real-life experiences and shatters your whole world.
Dr Jordan B. Peterson is a psychologist, author, online educator, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto. He taught some of the most highly regarded courses at Harvard and the University of Toronto for twenty years while publishing over a hundred well-cited scientific papers with his students and co-authors. His podcast has frequently topped the charts in the education category.
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“So let’s say you’re in a long-term intimate relationship and you get betrayed. What is it that you see when you see Your partner at the moment you know of the betrayal.?”
If you are in a romantic relationship, betrayal is one of the most devastating losses you can experience. For there to be a possibility of betrayal, you first must have unwavering trust in the betrayer. It is impossible to be betrayed without trust since you do not trust the person. Therefore, betrayal is termed as a violation of trust.
“It rattles your unconscious up because you don’t know anything anymore. You don’t know what the past was, and it’s supposed to be real and all of a sudden you don’t know what it was. And so, you come up with wild ideas of what it might have been and what it represented, and then you don’t know what’s the future’s going to be anymore.”
Once betrayal occurs, everything in your life becomes chaotic since nothing makes sense anymore.
Betrayal destroys a person’s self-esteem and ability to trust again. It will make you question your worth and everything the betrayer does or says.
“And so all of a sudden, not only is everything in chaos inside your mind, but everything is in chaos in your world.”
Once you have gone through betrayal, you start to live in constant fear of being betrayed. This can significantly stand in the way of forming meaningful relationships in the future.
If you have recently been betrayed by a significant other, you need to seek help and find a way to move on with your life with a healthy mindset.
You’re just shattered, and then you go talk to a therapist for like two years, and you think, “what happened? What was the reality? I’d better figure out who I was, who that person was, what we did together, and what it meant.”
The steps to healing include acknowledging the betrayal, spending time apart from the betrayer, going through the grief process for lost trust and relationship, and avoiding the temptation to get even with your betrayer.
Seeing a specialist is one of the best ways to make sense of the betrayal and prevent it from completely consuming you.
“Because I do not want this to happen again. And so you’re healed when you get to the point where you’ve grasped the bloody moral of the story and how to not have that happen again.”
If you are a man who recently experienced betrayal in a relationship, Mensgroup is an online men-only forum where you can find all the advice and support needed to overcome betrayal. Here, you will meet like-minded men ready to offer guidance and advice through life’s journey.
