If You’ve Been Betrayed, You Should Focus on Your Own Growth

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If you’ve experienced emotional betrayal and can finally move on, then that process is growth.

So, when facing emotional betrayal, don’t just focus on the outcome of the relationship. Instead, think about what you’ve gained and how you’ve grown during the process.

However, many people don’t understand what real growth is or how to achieve it through betrayal.

What is growth?

First, you need to have your own cognitive system: your understanding of emotions, marriage, and betrayal.

If you haven’t experienced betrayal, your understanding of emotions, marriage, and betrayal might be fixed. But after experiencing betrayal, many of your perceptions will change. For example, emotions aren’t everything in marriage, and marriage isn’t the only thing in life. Marriage can’t protect emotions, and emotions can change.

Betrayal is even more so. Many people have never built a cognitive system for “betrayal” in their minds. When faced with betrayal, they’re easily brainwashed or influenced, thinking that betrayal is their own fault or trying to win the other person back with flattery. These are all cognitive problems.

So, the growth after emotional betrayal is to rebuild your understanding of emotions, marriage, and betrayal, and make it objective and correct. You need to give yourself an explanation and confirm it. This process is crucial because, without correct understanding, you can’t truly solve problems.

The second aspect of cognition is to re-examine yourself and the other person.

Let’s talk about the other person’s perspective first. In a long-term marriage, you’ve formed a fixed “image” of the other person, which is usually perfect and positive. But after experiencing betrayal, if you still look at the other person with the same eyes, you’ll increase the possibility of being deceived and betrayed again.

Many people who’ve experienced betrayal still have biases in their understanding of the other person. They make excuses for the other person, thinking they’re not that bad, just temporarily lost, or good in other aspects, but not in this one thing. This is looking at the other person with your old understanding.

To solve this problem, imagine you’re an outsider looking at your own story. How would you view it?

In growth, the most important thing is self-reflection.

There’s a concept you must understand: when something bothers you and makes you miserable, don’t ask why it happened, but why you can’t solve it. Look for a breakthrough from within yourself — this is the most important growth.

When we encounter problems, if we can think like this, we’ll make a qualitative leap in growth.

Mature people always focus on “what to do” when faced with problems, not “why.” But in reality, many people analyze why they’re experiencing these things, and their analysis might make sense, but when you ask them what to do, they have no answer.

So, at this point, you need to think about a question: those who can solve problems aren’t unaware of the difficulties, but they’re willing to take on these challenges or try to overcome them — this is the difference, and it’s a crucial turning point.

When facing betrayal, if you didn’t have this mindset before, but changed and formed a “problem-oriented” mindset, that’s huge growth.

There’s another crucial question: why do some people say they understand the principles but can’t put them into practice? Yes, understanding the principles but not being able to practice them is also growth.

It’s like when you experience emotional betrayal, you have two choices: continue or end the relationship. Both choices have difficulties and unsolvable emotional knots. Some people can’t bear, overcome, or solve these problems, so they “can’t do it.” But some people can, and that’s “doing it.” So, the essence of growth is to challenge and break through yourself.

The best analogy for growth is a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. To become a butterfly, you must break free from the cocoon first.

In this article, we’ve only discussed some basic questions or superficial problems in growth after experiencing betrayal. In the next article, we’ll explore deeper issues.