If Someone BETRAYED Your Trust In A Relationship , WATCH THIS! - Jordan Peterson

How long have you been married? Is the whole damn thing a lie? Is every relationship you've ever had a lie? Are you a complete doormat? Are you blind beyond capacity? Have you married someone who's psychopathic or narcissistic? Do you have a pattern of associating with people like that? Those are all questions that are going to plague and should plague you in some real sense when something like that happens. So the first issue is, well, what the hell happened? And man, that could take a thousand hours that should have been spent in discussion with your wife before this happened, trying to get to the bottom of it. People are often traumatized by that kind of revelation. And the reason they're traumatized is because, well, imagine you have a committed relationship with someone. So you might ask, what is the basis of the commitment? And there's a hierarchy of commitment in that some commitments are more fundamentally important than others. And those are the commitments upon which all other commitments rely. And so when you set up a household with someone and you move towards a permanent intimate relationship, and hypothetically in the direction of, let's say, having dependent children, then you're doing all that based on the presupposition that the person is faithful to you, because that's one of the defining attributes of the relationship itself. And so when that axiomatic presupposition is shattered, then everything dependent on that is now questionable. And that not only includes the present, what the hell is going on now, the future, what are we going to do? Who am I with anyways? But also the past itself, because you were living, let's say, in something approximating a fool's paradise, and nothing that you thought to be the case was in fact the case. And so that's a dreadful problem. And how you cobble something like that back together is a very, very difficult problem. I would say the first thing you do is open yourself up to the admission of the magnitude of the problem. What's the problem? Who am I anyways? That this happened to me. Who are other human beings that they could do this to each other? Right? So those are fundamental questions about the nature of social relationships themselves, or even about individual identity. Very, very unsettling questions. Someone I loved has the capacity for that magnitude of betrayal. That's a dreadful realization, not least in part because it also implies to some degree that you also have the same capacity. Dante. Dante wrote a book, The Inferno. And The Inferno, it's from The Inferno that we derive many of our ideas about hell, our poetic, imaginative representation of the domain of, the underworld domain of darkness and catastrophe. At the bottom of hell, Dante put Satan himself, but one rung above that, he put those who betray. And betrayal is the inversion of trust, right? You can't betray me unless I've trusted you. And trust is the precondition for all social relations. And so to betray someone who deeply trusts you is to demolish the foundation of the relationship itself. And so that's why Dante placed it way deep down in the substructure of hell. And so when betrayal occurs, then you're faced with all those problems. In a therapeutic environment, I would walk the person through their marriage. Let's lay out the story and see if we can figure out where things went wrong. And I wouldn't presume to know as a therapist at all, because each person's catastrophe is very particularized and singular. And all I would be able to do in that situation is to listen to the account of the past, let's say, and to ask the person to clarify when I didn't understand and to see if I could evoke from them a coherent and plausible causal account of the pathway to the catastrophe. That was differentiated and detailed enough so that once they understood it, they would be less likely to repeat it. And that's how you recover from something like this. You recover from something like this by not being the sort of person to whom that will ever happen again. And that might be, and it could be, as I alluded to earlier, that now and then people get unlucky and they partner with someone who is fundamentally and malevolently unreliable. And that's brutal if that occurs. And you might think, well, there's no people that are fundamentally and malevolently unreliable. And I would say, well, you're either naive and you better watch out because one of these adventures is coming your way, or you've been unbelievably fortunate and have just never encountered someone like that. And so I would find out from the person just exactly what it is they think they've encountered. And to try to characterize that, they've certainly encountered the spirit of betrayal, no doubt about that. Have they encountered their own capacity for naive, willful blindness? Probably. All of that has to be rectified before this shattered reality can be put back together. And it has to be rectified. And that's an extraordinarily complicated problem. The answer to the problem is, how do I now move forward knowing what I know about my own capacity for blindness and the ability of others, even when trusted, to engage in deep betrayal? And that's... Are there general principles for that? There are. One thing you'll have to do to recover is to regain your willingness to trust. But it can't be naive, because look where that got you. It has to be wise and courageous. And so to recover from this, you're going to have to be able to trust again. But that'll have to be... Trust will have to be predicated on something like courage rather than naivety. And the courage is something like the courage all wise people have when they undertake a relationship, which is something like, I know perfectly well that you're chock full of snakes, just like me. But the best pathway forward, nonetheless, is for us to extend a hand in trust to each other and see if we can build a valid and solid and sustainable and iterable relationship, despite our mutual inadequacies and our proclivity for malevolence. And there isn't a better way path. There isn't a better pathway forward than that. And that pathway is predicated on the ability to adopt a posture of attentive trust. And so it's frequently the case that someone in this situation has to mature past their naivety. And that's a very painful thing to do. And then to regain their footing. Now, the final part of this is, can you do that with the person that you are now married to? And the answer is, well, you didn't do it the first time. So I wouldn't count on it. Does that mean it's impossible? No, but it's going to require a lot of courageous digging to get to that point. A lot of admission of rage, too. It's like, I am so upset with you that it isn't obvious to me that I could ever forgive you. I don't even know how I would do that. Can you help me figure that out? Well, then you have to trust the other person to convince you that they're now trustworthy. Well, that's, maybe they can do that. And you can, you know, you can, you can refer to your own resentment. One of the pathways to forgiveness is to have the person who's wronged you confess, right? And to confess is to give a detailed and compelling, accurate, differentiated, causal account of the betrayal. It's like, here's exactly what happened. Here's the multiple instances. Here's my entire set of motivations. This is why I was so angry with you that I thought that this betrayal was acceptable. Here's why I was so impulsive and shallow that I believed that the affair was justifiable. Like that has to go all the way down to the depths, to a depth that's as deep as the betrayal itself. And maybe once that confession has been made manifest, and a plan has been put forward that is indicative of the willingness and ability to change, that a reconfigured relationship can be newly established and move forward on that basis. But man, it's a tough road at home and it's highly unlikely. So there's a rule in this book, do not hide unwanted things in the fog. Yeah, well, people hide a lot of unwanted things in the fog in their relationships. And sometimes the consequence of that is a deep betrayal. And the medicine for that, the necessary antidote for that is to reveal all those hidden things. And God, in a relationship that's gone spectacularly wrong, that can be 10,000 things that weren't faced in the course of the relationship. And every single one of them has to be resurrected and thought through. So, you know, unfortunately, in some sense, that's fated as well. Because once you've been hurt like that, there isn't an alternative in terms of reconstituting yourself. There isn't another option. You have to face everything that made you vulnerable in that manner to begin with. That's a lot to face, especially all at once, especially when you've been avoiding it for maybe decades or maybe your whole life. It's rough, so good luck with it. And don't pretend. Here's a piece of advice. And as a therapist, I generally don't give people advice because that isn't the role of a therapist. Do not pretend to be better than you are in this situation. The fact that you're enraged, let's say, and you should be, is actually, that has to be fully admitted and worked through. Because otherwise, you'll reconstitute the relationship on unbelievably unshaky grounds. And some crisis will come your way that's not even very serious and blow you into bits again. So you'll be able to forgive the person if they can confess and transform deeply enough so that your rage is actually genuinely eliminated. And that's going to take a lot of effort and a lot of honesty, a lot of willingness to see that you are in fact that demolished and outraged. That's a vicious pit to contemplate. Sometimes you can come across something new that helps you reconfigure the way that you're living almost instantly in a more comprehensive and fuller way. But more common is the traumatic response, which is when the presuppositions of your world are shifted dramatically and you fall into the surrounding chaos. It's so hard on you that it actually does you psychophysiological damage. If someone goes after you at the good person level of analysis, and they just demolish you in the course of, say, a three-year relationship, hacking away at the idea that you have any moral worth whatsoever, this is what happens when you're abused, then that's going to knock you into pieces at a very complex and high level of abstraction. So that can undermine your entire worldview. If the person instead helps you retool the little behaviors and little microstructures that make you up, and if you're willing to participate in that, and if you're open to corrective feedback from the world, then you can continually adjust yourself at a small level. And then that makes the things in the hierarchy a little higher, a little healthier. And then that makes the aggregation of those things a little higher in the hierarchy, a little healthier, a little more complete. Then you can do this bit-by-bit retooling without ever having to suffer the demolition of huge chunks of your personality. So let's go back to the relationship where there's a betrayal. It's like virtually every time someone gets flipped upside down because of a betrayal in a relationship, after the betrayal happens, they say to themselves, there were all these signs I didn't pay attention to. So, and maybe the first sign is, who knows, your partner starts to flirt a bit more when you go out on a social occasion. And not a lot more, just a bit more. And you decide, because maybe you're timid, that that's okay. You're not going to do anything about it. But it's interesting that it happens. It grabs your attention and it means something. But what you decide is, it's not worth paying attention to. And so maybe the next eight times that you go out, the same thing happens, but it happens at a somewhat accelerated rate. And then maybe the person starts to go out without you. And so on, there's this progression towards the end state of betrayal. And every time you get a little hint, the world tells you that something's going on, you put it aside and you fail to take it into account. Well, you're foregoing your opportunity to adjust the relationship at micro stages, because maybe what you should have done the first time that happened is you should have gone home with your partner and said, what the hell's going on? This is what was happening. Why are you doing that? Here's how you should have behaved. And of course, that's going to be a fight. There's absolutely no doubt about it. But it might be a micro fight instead of the relationship is over fight. And in order to keep a relationship healthy, it needs to be retooled at micro levels constantly. And the same is the case with your own character. When you encounter something that's unexpected, especially if it's small enough to handle it, you need to extract the information from it, rebuild the world and rebuild yourself. And then maybe if you continue doing that, every time you get evidence of an anomaly or an error, or every time the world manifests some meaning to you, then you won't have to fall apart because the structure that constitutes you is going to remain viable and healthy from the bottom up. And if you don't do that, then those errors are going to accumulate. And when they finally do manifest themselves as unavoidable, like when your partner says, I don't want to be with you anymore, or I've been with someone else for the last year. There's no ignoring that. Then the whole thing comes crashing down. You're no longer in a relationship. You're no longer in a good relationship. And then all the other things become questionable. So meaning manifests itself so that you can retool being itself on a continual basis while simultaneously minimizing the risk of total collapse. And morality then becomes the act of paying sufficient attention and reacting sufficiently so that that corrective process occurs. Now, so you're inside one of these. You're going from point A to point B. And as you do that, things you want to have happen, and things you don't want to have happen, and things you don't understand happen. And let's say that you investigate the things that you don't want to have happen, and you investigate the things that you didn't expect. And you do that as soon as they come up. So then what happens? Well, partly what happens is you're going to change your perceptions a bit, and you're going to change your actions a bit. And what that'll culminate in over time is that this whole structural change. So instead of going from point A to point B, maybe you start shifting so that you're going from point A to point C. Because as you're gathering information, as a consequence of the inadequacies of the way you're looking at the world, not only are you improving your ability to perceive and to act, but you're also gathering information that helps shift your perspective to a better point B. Because you might say, well, where are you going and why? And the answer to that is, well, you have a plan. You're going to get your degree. I don't know what your long-term plan is. But there's no reason to assume that your long-term plan is correct, even though there's no reason to assume that you can do without one. So you're in this weird situation where you have to live within a bounded space, and the bounded space is going to produce errors, and it's also going to be wrong. But at the same time, if you use the bounded space, then you can transform it continually across time. Even when it's aimed at, and you can minimize the probability of precipitous collapse.