Gemma Speck

And the study found that in nearly every single case, individuals had lower self-esteem, they had an increased sense of future relationship anxiety, an increased sense of hypervigilance, and they almost, I think it was all of them, found it harder to imagine ever trusting anybody ever again.

I think the reason why this is

is because almost all at once, when somebody betrays us, we are forced to shift our perspective on what people are capable of.

It's not to say we were ignorant before, not at all, but we kind of all like to live with the assumption that people are as kind as we are, are as empathetic as we are, and that if somebody loves somebody else or somebody cares for somebody else or makes a promise, they will not break that promise.

They will not hurt them.

That is like the social contract that we need for society and for relationships to thrive and to continue.

And so for that contract to suddenly be revealed as incorrect, jeopardizes like all that we think we know about humanity and how we think humans operate.

The social psychologist, Ronnie Janoff-Bullman, I think the name was, she calls this exact experience the shattered assumption experience.

It is a phenomena where something traumatic,

occurs and you cannot readily assimilate that into the previous worldview that you held and that creates a lot of psychological and emotional chaos and confusion.

Essentially the shattered assumptions theory is that in that exact moment when we realize when the curtain is lifted our whole narrative about other people and their behavior is like disturbed in an instance and

And the reaction this creates in us also has a name.

It's called systemic mistrust.

And it also creates systemic vigilance or hypervigilance.

Basically, it

creates this reaction where now we question everything, even things that don't need to be questioned.

We assume the worst in everybody.

Like we cannot help it.

We don't ever want to feel this way again.

We don't ever want to be hurt again.