You will never see it coming.
One day everything is perfect, the next it all feels wrong.
One day it was mushy "I love you forever's" and the next it was sudden distance, a cold shoulder and loneliness. You don't know what happened.
You'd give anything to make it better, "just tell me so we can fix this".
Then the bomb drops.
You'll probably be confused, you won't want to accept what you already know is true. It's a process to try and make it straight in your head.
It's like a bowling ball is wedged in your stomach and there's a frog in your throat. You're in both shock and denial. Your legs are weak, you're cold but you're sweaty. You can't eat, you can't sleep. Constant nausea, you've cried your eyes dry. It's a sickness that you can't treat.
There is no worse pain than the heartbreak that comes from the betrayal of the person that you love most. It's crippling.
You will replay the weeks, months and years leading up to this, wondering what you did to make it happen. But it wasn't you, it never was. In your mind it won't make sense and it truly never will.
Being hurt by someone that you loved so deeply will leave you feeling lost and worthless. You'll spend far more time than you should blaming yourself and believing that you must have somehow deserved this.
You'll feel hideous and embarrassed and you can't even explain why. You'll feel dirty and distant and like you're stuck in a nightmare that you can't wake from. You keep wishing that you could.
It's a humiliating, debilitating kind of pain, carrying around a heavy heart that's also full of holes.
You feel ashamed, when people ask you what happened, you lie to cover it up because it's raw and you can't fathom it, you think you can fix it or erase it.
You'll be asking yourself how they could have been so careless, to crush you in ways you never could have dreamed after putting all of your faith in them.
How dare they do this? Who gave them the right?
You have put all of your trust in this person, you allowed them to see all the dark corners of your soul. You shared your laughs, your tears, the good and the bad. You built a life with this person and you offered them all you had.
You loved, you gave, you supported, you cheered and then you're repaid with the most ugly betrayal imaginable. How could they do this? How can they live with this? Who do they think they are? Just throw it all away?
Why? Why? Why?
You didn't do anything. No ones asks to be hurt like this. When you have spent years being, loving, loyal, supportive and committed you have absolutely nothing to appolagise for. You should feel no shame, you didn't do this.
People will tell you that you must forgive in order to set yourself free but I call bullshit on that!
Betrayal can absolutely be unforgivable, and you can still move on without offering forgiveness for the pain that was inflicted on you.
Recovery is about you understanding and accepting how you must move forward. There is no right or wrong answer when moving forward but at some level you have to accept that there is no changing the past.
You might feel like you need the perpetrator to do something, say something or admit something in order for you to move on and recover, but really it's just a matter of organising your thoughts and working out what you are willing to live with. How do you want to live this life? What makes you happy? And remember that you only get one chance to live.
Recovery comes down to following your own happiness. Following the good, warm feelings.
It means letting go of things that you can't change and situations that are out of your control.
It doesn't necessarily mean forgiving what has happened, but it does take acceptance and acknowledgement of what your heart has been through.
It's a rough road to come back from betrayal and whether or not you choose to trust the person again, you'll still have a guard up when it comes to them or others in your life. It's a scar that no one can see.
There's no greater pain than heartbreak and no greater loss than the loss of trust. It's grieving someone that's still alive although the part of them you knew is dead.
You will feel like you can never trust again. But you can because you can always trust yourself. If anything, that's the best place to start.
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