How to Move On After a Betrayal

I want to offer this to anyone who feels they have been betrayed.

You can choose to see it as a turning point to level up your life. You can choose to see it as a valuable lesson rather than a burden. You can use it to help you make better judgements, increase your focus, and show you where to trust your intuition quicker and easier instead of second guessing yourself. A betrayal can help you understand yourself better, and help you recognize what a safe, reliable, and healthy relationship looks like, and what it does not look like.

For many of us, the feeling of a betrayal itself is the worst part. You can choose to trust that eventually you will get over it, and soon the perpetrator will become irrelevant in your life and rarely enter your thoughts. You can choose to believe that you will continue to grow and thrive rather than allow the event to tear you down and keep you in a state of victimhood. You can choose to remain a good person who continues to trust others, just with greater discernment, instead of becoming jaded. You can choose to not allow the event to harden you, only strengthen you.

I recently went through a very public breakup with a former “business partner.” For weeks I debated whether or not to share what I had been dealing with for years for fear that people would think I was stupid for not seeing so many warning signs and walking away sooner. But when someone is in the act of intentionally betraying you, that person works very hard for you to not see the truth, and for you to see only what that person wants you to see. Being betrayed is never your fault. Being betrayed is never your fault.

What happened after I opened up publicly about realizing I was betrayed was an influx of messages from people offering support and sharing their own stories. Some people “woke up,” realizing they too were being played after seeing the parallels between my story and theirs. Some knew they had been betrayed in the past, but hadn’t found the words to describe what had happened to them until hearing my story, and up until that point they had felt alone in their experience. Others offered a simple “I believe you,” which is anything but simple, but immensely supportive and relieving when you’re still trying to make sense of it all. It got so much social media attention that the Philadelphia Magazine got wind of the story and interviewed me (you can read it here).