When Betrayal Breaks Your Inner Compass

The useful part

Healing requires recalibration to bring renewed confidence in navigating uncertainty. The phone does not tell you to trust the reading harder or to stop navigating. Instead, it asks you to wave the device in a figure eight until it recalibrates.

How it works

• We tell people they have to learn to trust again, or to be more careful next time, watch the red flags, and listen to their intuition.
• Without those signals, forgiveness could have the opposite effect—a pattern they called the doormat effect.
• Other research has similarly suggested that greater forgiveness does not necessarily reduce harmful behavior when the offending partner continues behaving badly.
• Her task has been harder—learning how to trust a recalibrated one, and to discover where north is now.
• How to rebuild confidence in the judgment that betrayal made you question.

What to take from it

The sorting rarely finishes because some of the evidence belongs to people whose accounts are no longer trustworthy. Seven years later, the woman whose story I carry with me is not trying to recover the compass she had before the betrayal, because it belonged to a world that no longer exists. direct to your inbox There was a problem adding your email address.

Example or evidence

• Distrust after betrayal can be the mind trying to protect itself after discovering that its previous map of reality was terribly wrong.
• Research does not suggest that forgiveness operates in a vacuum.
• We could call the first injury the trust wound (I cannot trust you) and the second the judgment wound (I cannot trust myself to know whom to trust).

Details worth keeping

Compass | Psychology Today Skip to main content Changiz Mohiyeddini Ph.D. What happens when betrayal has made someone suspicious of their own intuition? Let me give betrayal a face, one that, almost seven years after the events that occurred, still carries the devastation.

Related coverage

• Psychologytoday: Friendship betrayal hurts, but like a weird, vague, achy, constipated hurt. But betrayal does not mean something is wrong. It means something is right.
• Psychologytoday: Some relationships stay peaceful only when you give in. Learn how to recognize the pattern and decide what level of connection works for you.