Gemma Speck

And this is the moment when you just have a bit more neutrality, not feeling nothing, but knowing that you felt everything, knowing more solidly that you weren't to blame, knowing more solidly their motivations and just being able to look at it just neutrally again.

Psychologists talk a lot about how in this stage it's really important to find meaning, right?

There is another very famous guy, David Kessler.

He wrote the book, You Can Heal Your Heart, which you may have read.

He also wrote a lot of stuff on grieving and he describes meaning when it comes to betrayal as how we learn to carry our grief and sadness differently rather than eliminating it.

Finding a way to put all the individual heavy parts of grief and betrayal into a bag and carry it with us.

Maybe even put it down occasionally.

Maybe even forget it's there.

It's basically how do we find a story that makes this make sense?

I think if I was going to give any advice to someone going through betrayal, it would be this.

Whatever makes the story of this moment special.

relevant, or makes sense to you, grasp onto that.

Whatever story, whether that is the story that everything happens for a reason, whether it is the story of rejection is redirection, whether it is the story of karma, whether it is the story of how this will allow you to help others in the future, the story that this is proof of your own capacity to love, whatever it is, find the story that makes this make sense, if you can.

Like find something that allows you to take those shattered assumptions and be like, here are new assumptions and they feel just as comfortable.

Finally, just remember, even though it was done to you, it wasn't about you.

I cannot stress this enough.

I have a friend going through this at the moment and the thing we keep discussing is this person isn't going to magically become a different version of themselves for whoever comes next or for their next best friend or for their next partner or for their next employee or for their next whatever.

They're not going to magically change.

This is part of their character.

Even if they do get help and they do change, whatever they do next doesn't erase the pain they caused in the past.