When we feel betrayed, it’s not because we trusted the wrong person or people, it’s because we probably engaged with those people in a way that produced disappointment for us.

Most of us have had experiences where we tried to trust a person or group that ended up being dishonest or dubious. When we feel betrayed, it’s natural to go through the grief of loss. A sizable chunk of that grief can include anger from the regret we feel for being duped.

We want to blame someone, and often times we blame ourselves. Yet, being kind to ourselves is much more helpful. We can value all of our experiences as a way to learn what works for us, and what we need to move on from.

We don’t have to beat ourselves up with that familiar self talk that says, “I should have known better.”

I’ve done this many times, and I’m writing about it so you might learn from my mistakes. The mistake isn’t trusting someone you shouldn’t have. The mistake is beating yourself up with self talk that makes you doubt your own judgement of character. The mistake is feeling “stupid” or even saying that we were at fault for not being able to predict the fall out.

I realized that there is no such thing as a “wrong person” for me.

I’ve learned something about myself from every experience with every person, and that’s necessary if I want to grow.

I realized that if we always instinctively go to regret when we get disappointed, we are going to end up thinking everyone who disappoints us is the “wrong person” to have trusted. From that perspective, I was seeing people as bad or good, right or wrong, based on whether or not they kept their word with me or whether or not they treated me with respect. I realized that my perspective was actually rather narcissistic, and that was not ok with me.

I had to change my perspective by admitting all of us are right and wrong at various moments throughout our lives. I do have high expectations on honesty from others, particularly in situations of love, close friendship and business. Yet, I realized that if I never spoke again to every person that was dishonest with me, I would probably have two people in my life to talk to. I also realized that we tend to make exceptions for anyone we really want to keep close to us. It might be easier to forgive a spouse than a sibling.

There are not “wrong” people and there are not wrong situations. We can’t expect to be perfect. We will make mistakes. That’s life. If I want to have a successful startup business, I am going to fail a bunch of times first. If we want to learn something, be good at something, enjoy our experiences – persistent practice and mistakes are going to be a part of the process and the journey, because it’s how we learn.

A better way to recover from disappointment is to frame it something like, “I will learn from this experience. Now I know more about what I don’t want, and I’ve learned more about what the right path is for me. The experience was valuable.”

The person in the experience who may have lied, cheated or abused is a symbol of a hard stop in your life. In other words, it’s a wake up call.

Feeling betrayed is our call to make better choices about how we engage others.

It depends on your perspective about how life works and your level of faith, and in my belief system I do witness that good choices lead to good outcomes. I also believe that when I make the wrong choices, I get outcomes that I didn’t want for myself. When I feel angry and frazzled, impatient and annoyed, I attract people and situations that further those feelings. What I focus on grows.

At times in my life when I have felt desperate to find the right job, or to seek approval from family, have a thriving small business or to really crave support from people around me – is when I made impulsive decisions to give things a try that were not in my highest good.

Attachment to an outcome was my downfall. I put on my rose-colored glasses, saw what I wanted to see, and went like a little Tasmanian devil in and out of experiences that were always intense and explosive. This was exhausting!! I knew I needed to change. I didn’t have to beat myself up in order to change. I could see that being hard on myself wasn’t helping, and it was a huge part of my problem.

It took a lot of experiences to gain the wisdom to know that it was my perspective that needed to shift. I knew that I did not have to stop being kind or generous, and I did not have to stop trying to reach goals or trying to support people around me. However, what I did need to change was the expectation that others would be kind, generous or supportive to me. I also realized I had to fill in that gap and be kinder to myself.

One of my biggest mistakes was expecting support and not realizing that the rest of the world does not wear rose-colored glasses. I would feel disappointed, and in some cases angry, that a person I supported did not support me when I felt it was their turn. I didn’t realize that the other person was perhaps looking at me like I was acting entitled for expecting their support. I decided to consider that perspective, and it helped me shift my own.

I realized I had placed people in a position where I expected their support and it was setting the situation up to be a test. I realize that we humans do this all the time, and that when others have done this to me, it actually makes me feel awkward.

For example:

A friend writes a new song and wants to play it for you. They’ve supported your band or project to the extent that they came to some shows and shared flyers Online. They want your approval. They are going to try to start a band and they want your support. You’re busy, you’re focused on your own goals, and when you give some of your time to hear your friend out, you have a few words of encouragement and you tell your friend you’re happy for them, and you have to go because you have someplace else to be.

You see the disappointment on their face. They want to keep you in their moment and you’re wiggling to try to get away to go do your own thing. If you don’t full on support this person, they may be extremely disappointed and it can cause a serious riff between you. Your are innocent in this example. So is your friend.

When interactions or relationships went wrong, I had to look at both sides. Take a past situation with the new boyfriend who lied to me, as an example. I was kicking myself for ignoring red flags. In reality, I was setting someone up for a test that they were never given a chance to study for. Getting to know the person before making them a boyfriend could have prevented me from being heart hurt and taking the lies personally. A person like him lies to everyone. Had I tried to be a friend first, I would’ve seen that, and I would have distanced kindly, not gone into a love affair.

In my wiser state of being, the man in my life now was a friend for years, first. This is the first time in my life I have been able to enjoy a healthy and supportive relationship. I wasn’t trying to make it happen. It came into alignment naturally, and I’d already engaged this man in the right way, I engaged with him first as a friend. I knew he was a quality person who is honest before I ever became his partner. I knew what to expect and so did he. That doesn’t mean we are perfect, and we know it will still take time to get to know one another’s love language.

I made a better choice on the type of man that I’ve made into boyfriend and life partner. This taught me a big lesson about family, friends and professional engagement.

The lesson I received was that when I expected a level of support, respect or honesty in advance – I was going to feel betrayed and that is not good for me or anyone around me. It’s also not really true that a betrayal occurred in most cases. I simply made my own choice to engage the person in a way that meant I needed to be able to trust them to follow through on upholding my value system without considering that it wasn’t the same as their value system.

When we are let down by someone else, it’s usually not because they were wrong, it’s because we expected them to be something they are not.

If we expect someone who is self-serving to be supporting us in our biggest endeavors, we are the one who is mistaken. If we expect someone who is very generous to fund our project just because we need funding, we are the one who is naive. Why? Because each individual makes their own choices and their world does not revolve around our expectations. Whether they are selfish or generous, morally correct or morally corrupt, has nothing to do with us.

We can unintentionally put a lot of invisible pressure on those around us to come through for us, even in small ways. A lot of times, I found, that people around me never even knew that I needed a tiny gesture of support or that little bit of encouragement at a moment when I felt unsupported and discouraged. There were also numerous times when the other person was exhausted from their own challenges and disappointments, so they didn’t have anything to give.

I realized I was coming to resent the outside world and then, of course, I started to attract more of the same. I also realized that expecting anything or anyone in the “outside world” to be your support or foundation is a recipe for disaster. I knew, from years of being in wellness and healthcare, that healing comes from within. I also knew that turning inward is a big part of the practice of meditation, self-growth through introspection, and they key to creating the life of my dreams.

It was never right to expect someone else to be the key to creating the life of my dreams. Where I got confused in my past was thinking that there was a set of people or circumstances, the “right” people or circumstances, that would swoop in like a magical dragon and carry me through to help me easily set up businesses and a homestead at warp speed. It’s called magical thinking. It went great with the rose-colored glasses. And it set me up for many disappointments.

It seemed like if I was disappointed there had to be someone to blame! But what if nobody could be blamed? It was a hard thing to accept. In my mind, for a long time, if trust was broken, that’s because someone was dishonest. Like a detective, I needed to uncover who was responsible. I had to ask myself – “why am I disappointed?”

Asking my self that question redirected me to my own goals. I was disappointed because I wanted to succeed at something and after working hard to get it, it turned out to be something other than what I was going for in the end.

For example, I had an online magazine for a moment and tried to go to print with very little help. I did not have the financial support. In the end, I was unable to sustain a print magazine. I ended the project. For a while, I resented several people who really could have helped, but who actually made decisions to turn their back on me. I was disappointed because I could not find the right help at the right time.

The people that I had around me to help me ranged from those with little to no experience in journalism, to those who were already employed in the field, but no one had ever really started their own magazine from the ground up. And there wasn’t anyone there to be able to work as hard as I was with very little income and no guarantee they’d have a job in the future, because most startups fail and print was dying at the time I made the poor decision to go ahead with it.

My disappointment was because I really didn’t know what I was doing, and I didn’t have the proper guidance or a support system to undertake the huge endeavor. It was a learning experience. It did me no good to be holding onto resentments and grudges against some of the people who set me up to believe they’d be a member of the support system, but when it came time they didn’t have the support to give.

If I wallowed in that feeling of betrayal and thinking that I made terrible decisions on who to trust, I would have never tried to start another project or business, and would have sunk into a deep depression. I learned from it and now, 10 years later, I am impressed with myself that I even tried that as a one-woman show. I became a journalist, editor, designer and publisher for one year with no prior experience in journalism. It was an experience, and that is all it was. When I see it this way, it makes sense that life is full of experiences to learn from.

Forgiveness and compassion are key components to moving forward with optimism.

Once we’ve been let down it can be very easy to give up on trusting anyone again. It can be easy to doubt our own sense of judgement on who we trust. The key here is understand that no one is perfect and that many failures come on the way to success.

I did go through a long period of being single because of feeling afraid to trust again. I did go through years of thinking I’d never try again to have a business, especially not a startup. Yet, I have a good man in my life now and two local startup businesses up and running. I know that my circumstances can change, shift, evolve and blossom into even bigger and more fulfilling endeavors as I learn from all the prior experiences, especially the failures.

If I wanted to be able to carve out the life of my dreams, I had to admit to myself that I really wanted a partner who would support me. I had to be vulnerable to admit that I really needed help and support, because without it, I felt like I was swimming upstream. Then I had to realize that I had to lower my expectations and increase my compassion toward others if I wanted to open up to receiving support. I had to forgive myself and offer kindness to myself, to attract support and kindness.

I had to forgive myself for all the bad decisions I’d made regarding love and business. I had to be kind to myself in the process. I simply realized that I’ve come a long way and still make mistakes that I learn from. I had to consider that others from my past may have to go through the process of forgiving themselves for their own bad decisions. If I saw us as students of life and love, I was able to soften up enough to know that there was hope for me in finding success with love and business.

Kindness, tolerance, patience and persistence are virtues that needed to be brought into the forefront of my mind and my interactions with others. When disappointments come up, I’m able to consider the other person initially, instead of expecting something from them first. I also take a proverbial step back and see the situation from the outside by thinking about what I might tell a client if they were in this circumstance. This way, I am seeing the situation from a neutral position and it makes it less personal.

I can come to a conclusion that the other person has great qualities, and at the same time they aren’t ready to undertake what I would need from them to create a positive outcome. I can come to the conclusion that the situation has a lot of problems I would be unable to solve, and going into it would create a negative outcome. In these perspectives, I can distance without any anger. And even if there is a huge betrayal, I can still make the choice to see it as though I did the best I could with the information I had, and when I discovered this was not the outcome I wanted, I can change direction without being mad at myself.

With any major betrayal or fallout, there’s going to be a period of grief. Anger is a part of grief. This is normal. When we feel the anger, we can really sit in it and feel it. We can scream and cry. We can go for a walk or clean the house to keep busy in hopes to clear our mind. We will feel uncomfortable while we are processing through the loss and the anger. They key then is to let it go sooner than later. In other words, don’t hold a grudge.

Holding a grudge is bad for the person holding it. It causes us to build up tension and stress that sits in our core where we should be able to access stillness and peace. Our core is the core of us. So we need it to be calm, peaceful and stable in order to navigate through the world with confidence and the motivation to keep going. Grudges kill goals and dreams because we are putting negativity and anxiety into our core and more importantly, we are stuck there. Being stuck in a grudge means we don’t move forward, we keep circling around to the past.

Letting go, moving on and being kind to oneself helps us heal faster.

On the way to building the life of my dreams, there has been a huge lesson in letting go and moving on as quickly and smoothly as possible. This doesn’t mean impulsive moves based on little to no consideration. This means going all the way through an experience to come to disappointment, and then calmly mapping out a new direction and proceeding with caution from there. After stepping into the new direction, we don’t keep looking back, we keep moving forward with our plans. We look to the next phase of growth, the next goal and the next chapter of our lives.

It helps to know that we all go through betrayals. Everyone has had a time in their life where they feel let down by a person or circumstance. Most of us have experienced heart ache by the time we are middle aged adults. Some of us have been hurt more than others, but it is a normal part of life. We can also understand that nobody is perfect and nobody else thinks exactly like we do. There are all kinds of different people and personality types in this world.

We have to be kind to ourselves. We have to know that we are genuinely amazing, and we are going to grow and change and learn from every experience in life. We can recognize that everyone we meet is having the experience of life, and that means they are genuinely amazing, growing, learning and handling all of that in their own unique way. We can start to accept people at what they are, and not for what we want them to be.

Moving on and away from situations that don’t work for us and have caused us to stay stagnant, is the lightest choice we can make if we do this without negative self talk. We change our inner dialogue so that we can encourage and even compliment ourselves for all the effort we put in to exploring the possibilities. It takes courage and self confidence to be vulnerable and to try to connect with others to build anything from a family to a thriving startup business.

It takes persistence to try again when we hit a road block and have to change direction. In that mindset of healing and restoring the strength to try again, we are best to nurture ourselves with positive self talk, kindness to self, rest, relaxation and connecting with something we truly enjoy. We can honor ourselves by feeling our feelings and then letting them go. It helps us to let go if we circle back around to envision ourselves as we will be once we have met our next goal.

If we sit in the energy of our dream come true we can keep attracting that frequency to ourselves. That is really the key. The vibrational energy we put out, especially in the way of thoughts, will then come back around to us. That’s why it is essential for us to see our future successes and sit in the feeling of gratitude and self confidence that comes along with finally getting the life of our dreams.

Many times, the life of our dreams is to have peace and calm within, and to be able to ride out the storms with faith and confidence that even the challenges can be enriching experiences. Whatever it is that we want in our lives, we will arrive at that more easily if we are not weighed down by regret, grudges or insecurities. We can make the choice to travel light by letting go of our past and learning from it, thanking it, and moving forward with confidence into a wiser version of ourselves.

Once we let go and move on, we can thank ourselves for accepting what we could not change, and changing the things we could in order to come into alignment. We can be happy with ourselves and take a deep breath and celebrate how far we really have come.

Once I realized that nobody is the right or wrong person, I started to celebrate myself for being brave enough to keep trying all of my projects and adventures, knowing that I enjoy what I’m doing, and I grow wiser by the experience.