| « A Dying Friendship | Home | Hanging With Shawna » |

How to Get Over a Friend’s Betrayal

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 at 2:53 pm

It can be hard making friends, and even harder to trust them. It’s very hard to find someone who really loves you and cares about you. Ideally, a friend is a person who offers love and respect and will never leave or betray you. It is very hard to find a friend who will stay and they can be easy to lose if they feel wronged.

With increasing corruption and disloyalty, it is difficult to find the right person to trust and accept as a friend. With so many people believing in gossip and cheap plots, betrayal of friendship has become very common.

People are so self absorbed these days that they do not tend to see whether the friends they have are trustworthy individuals or not. Worse are those people who betray true friends because of materialistic pleasures. Coping with a friend’s betrayal is quite hard, more so if you have no fault of yours. However, life goes on and you will make new friends. You will push away your hurtful past and hopefully learn a valuable lesson from it.

If you find yourself in a situation where a friend has seemingly betrayed you, try to follow these steps.

1. Determine if the whole thing was a misunderstanding. It is easy to get emotional (positive or negative) with friends and you may have rushed to conclusions. Make sure they really have done something wrong, and, if they have, find if they are apologetic.

2. Keep things in perspective. The whole situation may not be as bad as you think. This will make apologies and forgiveness easier to obtain.

3. Do not be afraid to seek help and talk about it to others. Betrayal by someone you love and trust is excruciating. Don’t be embarrassed to cry and scream. You have been hurt and you have the right to vent out your frustration. You will feel a lot better after you have cried your heart out for what has been lost. Seek out other friends, siblings or family. Tell them you have been hurt and ask them for solace. You will be surprised to see that help was just around the corner. All that you needed to do was ask. One thing that should be remembered is that these betrayals are experiences that teach you valuable lessons in life.

4. Be willing to forgive despite your anger. Forgive them for not keeping your trust and not knowing how to treat friends. You may need to forgive them, even if they are not sorry for what they did. This is key to getting past your anger towards them and not harboring grudges.

5. Consider whether you want to maintain a friendly relationship with the person. Many times, a friend that betrays once will do it again. However, this is also dependent on the situation and the person. If it is someone who has betrayed your friendship in the past already, they will do it again and again if you keep letting them.

6. If you find that you no longer want to be friends with this person, sever all ties with them. You do not have to be mean about it. Assuming you followed step 1, they already probably know that you are upset with them. This will make ending your friendship easier. There is no point in dragging along a friendship when you know you are not comfortable with it. End it politely and quickly and most importantly, don’t regret your action. If you start feeling sorry, you are putting yourself in a position to get hurt again by this person. Learn to trust your gut feelings and have confidence in your judgment. Try not to end the friendship with bitter feelings; it will just hurt you more in the end.

7. If you find that you want to maintain your friendship, make sure the other person understands that you feel they did something wrong and you have forgiven them and want to continue being friends — even if they aren’t remorseful.

8. Try to relax and take some time alone. Meditate, shop, dance, do whatever you have to do to make yourself happy. You are more likely to find a worthwhile solution while doing something you enjoy.

Tips:
1. Follow your instincts and experiences when it comes to trusting people. Obviously, there are some people you can never or should never trust.

2. If necessary, withhold some parts of yourself so you are not completely open to people. This is a tip of prevention, so you will not have to go through the trauma of betrayal.

3. If you want a true friend, be a true friend yourself. Real friendship looks at the heart, not just the “packaging.” Genuine friendship loves for love’s sake, not just for what it can get in return. True friendship is both challenging and exciting. It risks, it overlooks faults, and it loves unconditionally, but it also involves being truthful, even though it may hurt.

4. Never put someone you barely know above a friend who has proven he/she is true and loyal. Chances are the friend you are putting on the back burner would have been there for you for life had you not put the new person above them.

Warnings:
1. Human beings are sociable by nature. You cannot live your life without friends, so be very careful not to alienate all of your friends over a simple squabble.

2. Betrayal should not stop you from trusting people and making new friends. Not everyone will hurt you. There are true friends out there.

“Make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the other gold.”
Girl Scout lesson

True Friendship
“True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it be lost.”
–Charles Caleb Colton

How can we find true friendship in this often phony, superficial world? Friendship involves recognition or familiarity with another’s personality. Friends often share likes and dislikes, interests, pursuits, and passion.

How can we recognize potential friendship? Signs include a mutual desire for companionship and perhaps a common bond of some kind. Beyond that, genuine friendship involves a shared sense of caring and concern, a desire to see one another grow and develop, and a hope for each other to succeed in all aspects of life. True friendship involves action: doing something for someone else while expecting nothing in return; sharing thoughts and feelings without of judgment or negative criticism.

Trust is essential to true friendship. We all need someone with whom we can share our lives, thoughts, feelings, and frustrations. We need to be able to share our deepest secrets with someone, without worrying that those secrets will end up on the Internet the next day! Failing to be trustworthy with those intimate secrets can destroy a friendship in a hurry. Faithfulness and loyalty are key to true friendship. Without them, we often feel betrayed, left out, and lonely. In true friendship, there is no backbiting, no negative thoughts, no turning away.

True friendship requires certain accountability factors. Real friends encourage one another and forgive one another where there has been an offense. Genuine friendship supports during times of struggle. Friends are dependable. In true friendship, unconditional love develops. We love our friends no matter what and we always want the best for our friends.

After what I have been through with and Tamara the past week I searched for help getting over the feelings of betrayal. I found an interesting article on the topic and added some things to it that I have learned. This article was adapted by Jennifer Steele. The original is at www.wikihow.com

On this day..

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Related posts

Print This Post

Topic: Family & Friends, Thoughts

Digg!

Comments

2 Responses to “How to Get Over a Friend’s Betrayal”

  1. Chan on August 26th, 2008 9:49 pm

    Ok, here is my two pence worth of this situation…

    this whole betrayal thing is due to your “don’t touch my ex” rule (they only lied to you as they were worried about your reaction, which isn’t clever granted, but it isn’t the root of the issue) - why is this such an issue for you to have a friend go out with someone you have previously been out with (and who treated you badly at that!)? It may be a good idea for you to get to the bottom of that, and then calmly explain to them why it bothers you - at the moment, it’s all digs, and nasty comments etc, but if you actually explain calmly why it upsets you to them (once you have cleared it in your head), you may be surprised of the results. and then you can decided if the friendship(s) is (are) to carry on, if not, then follow the advice of Number 6. Try not to be nasty with it as at the end of the day, they are entitled to see who they choose. Yes granted it may be uncomfortable to have a friend go out with an ex, but it really isn’t the end of the world, and things have a tendancy to work themselves out - either it works great for them and they decide to get married, woohoo (I doubt this would happen in this case), or it all fucks up (oh well - lesson learnt) (yes granted, there is another option, and that’s that it finishes painlessly but in view of the track record, I doubt that would happen either!).

    When you wrote a post about your mate’s husband being after you and I said I couldn’t believe how she put up with it, you said her excuse was she was young. Well, she still is, don’t forget that, she still has some lessons to learn that she may have to learn the hard way (best way to learn). And she really doesn’t seem to have been lucky in love, and if you guys always hang around with the same guys, then chances are she will try her luck with them, and yes, maybe some of them will be your exes. and whilst on the subject, why do you hang around your exes so much? I personally have never really hung around with exes, unless I still had feelings for them, in which case, that was wrong, and the quicker I stopped seeing them the quicker I managed to get over them…food for thought…

    Hope you get through this ok…and for what it’s worth, I’m here for you…

  2. bipolarchick on August 27th, 2008 1:59 am

    Boy, that was a lot of food for thought.

    The thing that bothered me the most wasn’t their going out with each other… it was the fact that they did it behind my back and then lied about it. If they would have been truthful from the start then things would most likely be different. Yeah, I was a little emotional when Nick brought it up to me, but I would have been over it the next day… had I not found out later that night that they had already been sneaking around.

    What hurts the most about the situation is that Nick told me I’m his best friend and he cares a lot about me and all this other bullshit and then he goes and takes Tamara’s word over mine. I have never lied to him or betrayed him in any fashion whatsoever. I have been there for him when no one else was, with the exception of his mother.

    Nick was the shittiest boyfriend I ever had, but he was a good friend. I know that probably doesn’t make any sense, but it’s the truth. I don’t know why I become or stay friends with my exes. I guess it’s because at heart most of them have been decent guys and I was just too screwed up to handle a serious relationship with them.

    Tamara is young, but that shouldn’t give her license to hurt people. She knew what she was doing would hurt me, she just didn’t care. The night I found out about them she told me she wasn’t interested in Nick except as friends and she would tell him that. Instead she told him I demanded that she choose between the two of us. That lie really fucked things up between Nick and I because he didn’t even give me the benefit of the doubt. He just started name calling. That hurt me a lot.

    Later, he changed his tune and said he misunderstood her. I think He said that because he was trying to get me to stay friends with her and he also didn’t want to believe she would lie to him because that would tarnish his idea of Tamara being perfect. He wants to be in denial about her. Fine with me, that’s his own stupidity.

    I think continuing a friendship with Tamara would be a huge mistake. She has already screwed me over twice (and she’s trying to do it more). I know if I forgive her again she will just fuck me over again in the future. I love her, flaws and all, but I can’t risk her hurting me again. She is just going to have to remain exiled from my life.

    My friendship with Nick is on extremely thin ice. I’m not going to put up with his head games. I doubt we will ever be close friends again. He has proven pussy is more important to him than my friendship. At this point, I can’t exile Nick from my life because we work together, but I can severely limit our interaction, which is what I intend to do. He has hurt me a lot over the course of our relationship/friendship and I don’t want to give him the opportunity to do it again. He is well on his way to being just an acquaintance.

Leave a Reply




Subscribe without commenting.

Home

Top Of Page