Feeling Betrayed? How to Think like a Buddhist for Quicker Recovery
Betrayed? Think like a Buddhist for Quicker Recovery. Right now, you might feel alone. When we struggle, we often feel alone hostile and wonder what happened. We work to accept and make sense of the situation and struggle to find compassion when we feel a loss of power.
A Buddhist philosophy on betrayal
We have to realize that sometimes, things happen. Maybe those things are related to pain or hate. Perhaps a story that makes no sense to you was played out, and you have to let it go to feel your truth. The point is that there are negative experiences related to your current quality of life right now.
There’s a new story being played out; a moment to moment, and until you release the pain ohttps://upbeat-architect-653.ck.page/844650da63f the past, the story will include a lack of peace that you need to find.
It isn’t easy being betrayed.
It isn’t easy to let go of the wrong, but we can practice the teachings and talk through the process for energy shifting and see what happens. Maybe as sentient beings, we search within the teachings and find the self that we felt was hidden or trapped.
Maybe you need to accept events that hurt you. Perhaps someone was cheating on you. Maybe your relationships were not as personal as you expected, or perhaps they never were even emotional from the beginning.
You might be wondering how a Buddhist would handle betrayal and create a space to forgive and find compassion if they were not treated with kindness, were the subject of angry talk, or were betrayed.
Perhaps you feel confused; you might worry about harming your heart or painful memories. Maybe you don’t understand what happened in your relationships? You feel that you need to let go of whatever went wrong, which might be a huge struggle. You are human, so don’t see this as a sign that you lost perspective. This is part of the human experience, having human feelings.
Betrayed? Think like a Buddhist for Quicker Recovery
The process may be lengthy, but the principal aim of releasing hurt is to free ourselves from suffering, engage in mindful living, and be present in the joy of each moment. Being injured is a part of life and will continue throughout our lives even after releasing current suffering, though we may better handle future sorrows more and more as we learn.
Antidotes to anger
The release process is an effective remedy against anger. You might find someone unreasonable or downright toxic. Still, if you can put a space between you and them, either emotionally or both emotionally and physically, that begins the release process.
The release might involve:
- Learning to trust.
- Lowering expectations if we have given others too high of expectations.
- Releasing our need to find fault, as we will always be let down as everyone has flaws.
You might also try to focus on forgiving.



How do you trust people?
Our lives depend upon people. There are places in which we believe in the right people and places that are less critical to trusting people. When you have been married to someone, perhaps it is important to have faith in them, but know that in a certain time or space you might need to focus on trusting yourself, or if on an airplane, it is more important that you trust the pilot.
So trust the other person at the same location. When we can see that we have a fluid response to trust, as per the example with the pilot, we can see that trust naturally and organically flows up and down, like a wave.
People live a lot differently than you do; some people will live similarly. If you want to continue your relationship with various people, you must trust them only in the realm of what matters for you at that moment.
Expectations and fault-finding
One other thing that one should also be aware of when dealing with betrayal or fear of betrayal is the lack of communication that might surface. Sometimes, we were promised that everything was going to be okay. If a spouse is wandering out of a relationship, maybe they have become neglectful.
When a person gets divorced from someone and has children, it is straightforward for them to neglect them, as there is so much else happening in their lives. These are not reasons for someone to be neglectful, but they are excuses that they give themselves that ultimately are betraying in layers—betrayal atop of betrayal.
When we can look at a faltering relationship and lower our expectations, especially if this person has betrayed us, we help free ourselves by seeing them for who they are, not who we wish them to be.
We feel the pain of loved ones as if it is direct, even when it is indirect.
As an example that you may have heard me use before, if you are a parent and your child is suffering, especially if you feel helpless in relieving their suffering, you begin to suffer. You feel their pain directly, even though you are only indirectly experiencing their pain.
Once you own their pain as your own, you take partial ownership of that pain. This doesn’t alleviate their pain. It only adds to your pain. When you increase suffering, you need to release your betrayal of yourself now, not only try to find ways to support them through their pain. Do you see what I mean, how we create some of our sufferings and need to release more and more?
Forgiveness is not forgetting.
The forgiveness of an emotion is a way of forgetting the situation. When you enter the world, wouldn’t it be fantastic if you could naturally release negative feelings to get you into the world fresh? Or every morning have a way to do this?
You could try to force forgiveness because you feel a good person “forgives,” or you could hold onto the anger or pain if that is where you think healing is for you.
True healing is more of a space of indifference; there is no space being taken by if you have or have not forgiven them. That isn’t easy to attain, but it is possible.
What do people expect from life?
- We are all tortured in many ways.
- We always try to keep reminding ourselves of this every day—all our lives.
- Most of our feelings of betrayal are because we thought they felt differently about us; we do not think that their betrayal makes us untrue to ourselves.
If they cheated on you and called you boring, does that mean you are boring or that they could not see your gifts? I would say the latter. You’ve been betrayed. They cheated, so that is on them. In reframing, while it hurts initially, we see that their behaviors are saying volumes about them and will stick with them until they learn to release. On the other hand, you are just observing their poor choices and you are cleaning up the mess of betrayal, who you thought they were, and moving on.
- We can instead think of a release as a recipe. We connect forgiving, lowered expectations, the release of fault-finding, and tapping into your self-trust as ingredients.
- Trusting is the simmering; trusting others become more easygoing and natural, rather than living in betrayal or fear of betrayal. This is where your worldview is tainted with anger or fear- which only serves to hinder love, peace, and release.
To begin this, we can imagine we are trimming the ego, the space we hold betrayal, fear, and anger, from a wild tree into a contained shrub that we then nurture back to strength with the nourishment of mindfulness.
If we have a large tree grown from a seed of anger or pain, then we grow rage or despair. It becomes wildly beautiful if we have a small shrub that we develop with trust and release.
Mindfulness is not just the act of ritual where you collect a cushion to sit upon, light incense, and perhaps play gentle music in the background. To get over feeling betrayed and to think like a Buddhist to get over the pain quicker; bring yourself back to the present moment.
If we stay present, it is hard to think about “what they did in the past” and how “we will feel in the future”. We eliminate or curb those thoughts and then create more space for now.
Forgiving or releasing, which may contain forgiveness, can help expand our world and experience by expanding the present moment. I have a short meditation on the podcast for this exact topic, please check it out by signing up below.
If you’d like to work through this on your own, here is a free self-healing planner
MUDDY PATH
(PODCAST + WEEKLY INSPO)
Sign up to connect to the weekly podcast, MUDDY PATH + weekly prompts, and lessons to inspire and bring you closer to love, peace, and alleviating the mud of suffering.