Gemma Speck

And this is how they explain what you will feel at different stages of recovering from an act of betrayal.

The one thing that they really emphasize, and we spoke about this in our trauma bond episode, if you listen to that one, go and listen to it after this, but betrayal doesn't eliminate grief.

No matter how horrendous this person was, the good memories, they kind of still linger like a pleasant smell.

And that can be really annoying at times, especially for interpersonal betrayal because there was, you know, it's hard because there was a time when everything was going really well.

And when they said that they loved you and they cared about you and they were an amazing friend, they were a great parent, they were an amazing lover, grieving that is important.

Your brain lived both experiences equally.

It lived the experience of being hurt, but it also lived the experience of before that, of feeling safe, and that is still resonant in your mind.

Because of that, healing from betrayal is so much like grief.

And it does often follow the stages of grief that were first developed by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross that you've probably heard of before.

But researchers have added a few extra stages in for betrayal trauma.

over, you know, grieving a dead person.

So let's unpack these together because even if you've heard of these stages before, they do look a little bit differently and they do even look a little bit differently from like the same cycle that's used for a breakup or used for a friendship fizzle or yeah, used for a death.

So stage one is the same.

I think anytime something deeply emotional happens, we react with shock.

This is what you're going to have to go through first.

There is horror at discovering what the betrayer has done.

And we kind of just feel like numb.

We are not really comprehending what happened.

Or maybe a little bit, but not fully and not deeply.

Various studies have suggested that shock actually, the reason we go through this is that it acts as like an emotional anesthetic.