My Seven Stages of Recovery From Betrayal

Over a decade in the making, but better off on the other side

Welcome to the latest entry in The Workaround. You’re in good company with thousands of fellow entrepreneurs and innovators!

I’m Bob, your host. My mission here is to share personal, behind-the-scenes stories of the ups and downs of my career leading tech startups and corporate innovation.

I write to make you think, smile, and discover a shortcut to success or a trap to avoid.

Here we go…

This post is inspired by my friend Ameet, who suggested I sprinkle in posts that tackle deeper life problems and challenges.

Well, I might as well go all the way and share how I’m continuing to recover from betrayal by my closest friend and business partner.

Plus, I can’t retain my brand promise as the “business guy who tells stories” without sharing the story that had one of the largest impacts on my business+life…

It’s been well over a decade since it all went down. I will hold off on my usual storytelling details, which are too personal for multiple people. So, I’ll share the journey I’ve gone through since, which is less heartbreaking but more beneficial.

I believe my experience working through this jarring life event will provide value to those who have or may face a similar situation.

(Deep breath…)

Setting up the letdown

If you’ve worked closely with people, pushing business boundaries long enough, you’ll have some drama, breakups, and maybe a betrayal. When you take your work seriously and own the business, everything about it is personal.

I’ve had my fair share of close encounters with jerks in business. Multiple investors in my companies have lied to my face. I’ve been ghosted more times than Shirley MacLaine. And I’ve fired a couple of people for sexual harassment.

This is about a serious betrayal, which I define as (1) Committed by someone you have been very close to for many years—someone with whom you have had absolute trust and shared your deepest self; and (2) The person does something that destroys trust—taking advantage of you and others for personal gain and resulting in direct harm and long-term suffering.

Fun Fact: People who have betrayed those close to them get a ticket to the lowest level of Hell in Dante’s The Divine Comedy. “Trapped in the ice, each according to his guilt, are punished sinners guilty of treachery against those with whom they had special relationships.”

“The people I’ve seen that have been really hurt have suffered from deceit. People can handle earthquakes, cancer, even death—but they can’t handle betrayal, and they can’t handle deception. They can’t handle the rug being pulled out from beneath them by people they love and trust. That just does them in. It hurts them…but more than that, it makes them cynical, bitter, and resentful. Then they act that in the world, and that makes it worse.—Jordan Peterson, psychologist

This was the third time it had happened in my life. The first was in adolescence, and it put a hurt on me. Each came with a long recovery and added fear of it happening again. This fear can create an overreaction that harms other relationships. The biggest conflict in my 28 years of marriage has come from irrational fears that my wife wasn’t on my team. Fortunately, she was by my side through most of these betrayals and knows it’s not the real me reacting. (Thanks, babe!)

The story I allude to here started with a close friendship, led to a close business partnership, and ended with a bombshell betrayal.

There is much truth in recovery models, including the Five Stages of Grief and Six Stages of Trauma Recovery. However, they tend to lack specificity around betrayal and fail to detail what acceptance and integration look like over the very long run. So here’s one guy’s journey:

Stage 1: Pain

I finally learn the truth—and that I was the last one to learn it. Or at least the last to accept that the rumors could be true. I felt blinding, nightmarish pain in the moment of realization.

How could you?

How dare you?

You’re not supposed to!

Fuck you!!

A massive lie, supported by months (maybe years?) of countless little deceptions, spun into a web that violated the company’s most sacred rules, played people off each other, shredded the culture of trust that powered our business success, and threatened the acquisition we all hustled to achieve for five brutally long years.

I had resigned from the company weeks before learning this truth, but he pressured me to stay for a few additional months—which I would later learn was another tactic to cover his schemes. But I don’t bother showing up at work the next day…or the days after.

A few weeks later, one of my team members asks me to come in for a send-off party. I vaguely recall wandering into the office like a zombie. All color is drained from my view of our once-vibrant office. It’s all bullshit now. I force a smile and go through the motions of accepting co-workers’ warm wishes and parting gifts.

My former friend stands in the back of the room—too ashamed to get involved, yet unable to read the room and G.T.F.O. It’s not what I had imagined my last day would be like.

Stage 2: Connecting the Dots

With the truth finally exposed and time on my hands, I become aware of the many signs I ignored. Words that I trusted with friendship are now obvious plots and feints—or just his natural jerk-ness amplified by his position of power.

I had been a sucker for years.

I was an idiot to trust him without question for so long, and I’ll never make that mistake again.

This brings further pain and suffering. I feel foolish. I worry that people suspected I knew all along—that I was covering for him.

Stage 3: Dead to Me

He emails a message that is a list of excuses—an un-pology. In each word, I now see the manipulation of an actor, trying to play me and control the narrative one last time. I angrily reply. He follows suit. Then, I’m done. He’s dead to me.

I delete every social media connection. Phone numbers are blocked. Gmail filters route any email straight to Trash.

Stage 4: Seeking Justice

In the weeks and months that follow, people ask me what happened. I go out of my way to tell the story. I don’t want to be linked with him, and I want to prevent others from being manipulated and hurt. Friends and strangers in our small city and overlapping networks hear my version of the truth.

“If an old person dies, that’s natural, and a good long life is all you can ask. But if you are betrayed by a friend, that’s not natural. Then you have to wonder what’s really real. It hurts.”—Red Moon

I shake when I share the story and probably scare a few people in the process. Today, I see how I craved validation and sought shoulders to cry on. I was hoping for some cocktail of justice, schadenfreude, and revenge.

A few months later, I settle into a new job with fresh challenges, learning opportunities, and friendships.

Stage 5: Self-Reflection

Months and years pass. I build bigger businesses with a new team. But the scars are still visible, and memories are vivid. Gradually, I can reflect on my behavior and reactions at the time and uncover what the pain exposed about me.

I realize that specific childhood incidents made me react more negatively. He touched a nerve that was exposed many years earlier. Maybe most other people, without my particular background, would have felt less pain and moved on faster.

Through reading, research, and discussions, I learn that this experience negatively impacted my next business partnership. I had lost confidence—feeling I wasn’t good enough to be a CEO. Thankfully, my closest friends encouraged me to go for it when the time was right, and I freed myself from another tether to this past.

I see that I take work much more personally than most people. The legacy and value of our company culture were important to me, but they were more of a means to an end for him. The end was maximizing the return to shareholders—including me. Isn’t that the bar every CEO is held to today?

And I now understand that my desire for friendship included a shadowy selfishness. I sought to work with smart, successful people who would boost my chances for success. I realize now that I frequently enabled him to run over me—suffering through humiliation for strategic gain.

A deeper epiphany arrives as I continue peeling the onion of my mind: My actions were trying to correct an error I saw my father make multiple times in his career. Finally, I can admit my responsibility for the actions and resulting pain.

Stage 6: Forgiveness

I read and think more about forgiveness. This F-word sticks with you until you finally, fully deal with the memories. I’m now there.

We forgive because it permits us to move on. Forgiveness ties a bow on the experience and fully heals your pain. As Ghandi said, “We forgive because we are strong.”

Forgiveness is more like Acceptance, and it has two parts. First, we accept that the other person is flawed and never meant to harm us directly. We are collateral damage in their pursuits—which often come with a karmic price eventually.

That said, I do not wish that karmic debt—to me or the wider Universe—is re-paid through their pain and suffering. I hope that this person achieves a breakthrough in self-realization. I hereby tear up any debt or plea for forgiveness “owed” to me.

I’m not religious in the traditional sense, but I bookmarked this quote from Luke 23:34: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Dudes like Jesus, Buddha, and Socrates continue to show us the way.  The human experience hasn’t changed much in the past few thousand years. And stories of betrayal seem to occupy a majority of our holy books.

Second, we accept that everything that happens is part of the human journey. We can’t stay locked in a room for our entire lives. We get out there and put our butts on the line. And we get kicked in the butt—by fate, by the market, and sometimes by best friends. Our hearts will be broken—but without heartbreak, we haven’t taken all the rides this amusement park of humanity offers.

But forgiveness and acceptance are different from reconciliation—which requires a genuine apology for real damage done. There’s no need for a meeting to move forward, though. You “forgive” the bear that attacked you on the hiking trail. It was just following its nature. But you still want that bear relocated out of harm's way—and you don’t try to shake its paw afterward.

Stage 7: Integration

Today, my old friend continues to appear in my dreams—sometimes in screaming matches, other times just tossing a football. Photo apps earnestly recommend our old memories. I can’t smile at them yet, but at least I haven’t deleted them.

I still mourn our dead friendship, feeling sorry for what was lost. I’m sad it turned out this way.

Just this morning, I read the following in David Brooks’s book, The Social Animal:

“When you look deeper into the unconscious, the separations between individuals begin to get a little fuzzy. It becomes ever more obvious that the swirls that make up our own minds are shared swirls. We become who we are in conjunction with other people becoming who they are.”

When a good friend dies, a piece of ourselves goes into the grave with them. It’s different when a friendship like ours dies the way it did. It’s nearly impossible to separate and treasure the good times. But each person permanently carries around a piece of the other. And we are still out there, bumping around in the same social networks.

But then I think about how many new, fantastic friendships I have made since then. So many other interesting people now occupy my mind at each moment. I get to keep growing through them and accept the risk of another conflict.

My newest level of perspective allows me to be glad that this tragic drama took place.

I understand and appreciate the positive things I learned from him. I still use these good things daily and pass them on to others.

As you progress, you feel a sense of pride or confidence in knowing you made it to the other side in one piece.

But mostly, it’s part of an overall life realization: Everything happens for a reason, and I’m a better person because of it. I broke out of his shadow, went out on my own, and have grown as a business leader and human in ways I would not have if we still worked together.

He played a key role in that act of my life story and exited stage right when it was time for me to move on.

I’m now glad this happened. It made me…me.¹

Conclusion

A few weeks ago, a thought came to my mind…

I pictured the two of us in the afterlife, meeting up after death. With that round of human life over and our silly egos cast aside, we embraced in a big hug and laughed off everything that had happened. Ironically, this is usually how friends in the real world make up after a fight.

This ended up being another one of those posts I’ve written for my benefit as much as yours, dear reader.

One of the returns on the investment of keeping a daily journal since 2007 is being able to go back and watch my progression through the steps above. Each time I write, I gain a better perspective. It’s like pulling back on the airplane stick and seeing more of the world.

If I can help you talk through a similar issue, please do not hesitate to click the office hours link below and grab some time. Life is a journey that is best taken together.

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BONUS: Cool Content of the Week

A little something I found meaningful. You might agree…

How to respond when someone pisses you off

Thankfully, we rarely face the big hits from others, as I described above. We are much more likely to get cut off in traffic and receive the finger for our troubles. But these frequent, minor conflicts still raise our blood pressure and leave us wondering what’s wrong with our species.

I felt better after reading Michael Thompson’s story of how a NYC taxi driver put bad drivers in perspective:

“Many people are like garbage trucks. They run around full of garbage, full of frustration, full of anger, and full of disappointment.

As their garbage piles up, they look for a place to dump it. And if you let them, they’ll dump it on you.

So when someone wants to dump on you, don’t take it personally. Just smile, wave, wish them well, and move on.

Believe me. You’ll be happier.”

How to respond when someone pisses you off — courtesy of a very smart taxi driver

I guess repetition leads to enlightenment, which gives hope to us all—in issues far beyond city traffic. Remember that conflicts and anger are almost always about them, not you. And we are responsible for how we allow our minds to react. So keep your cool…and get out of their way.

1. I’ve had one other significant dream that I believe was a moment of breakthrough and healing…A few months ago, I woke up in the middle of the night out of a dream and took the opportunity to use the bathroom. As I settled back into bed, I suddenly “heard” a voice in my mind that sounded like a child, crying, “They hurt me so bad.” I felt like the betrayals spawned it. I consciously soothed the voice, saying: “They didn’t know they would hurt us…We’re OK, it’s all OK.”