Watch the full video below to dive deeper into understanding your complex feelings after betrayal, and to begin to learn how to heal attachment wounds from betrayal.
The Contradiction That Keeps You Up at Night
If you’re struggling with still loving the person who betrayed you, or if you’re terrified you’ll never be able to trust anyone again—or both at the same time—you need to know that these feelings don’t make you weak, broken, or confused. They make you beautifully, complexly human.
After betrayal, many people find themselves caught in an impossible emotional bind. The attachment wounds from betrayal create a painful paradox where love and fear coexist, where the desire for connection battles with the need for protection.
When Love Doesn’t Just Disappear
“But I Still Love Them”
If you still love the person who betrayed you, you’re not pathetic or weak. Love doesn’t simply vanish because someone hurts us, especially when that someone was deeply integrated into your life, your sense of safety, and your identity.
Here’s what makes this so confusing: The person who betrayed you and the person you fell in love with might feel like two completely different people. Your nervous system is trying to reconcile these contradictory realities:
- This person made me feel loved and safe
- This person is the source of my deepest pain
Your love for them isn’t crazy—it’s evidence that real connection happened. The betrayal doesn’t erase the good parts, and the good parts don’t excuse the betrayal.
The Emotional Cycling
You might find yourself moving between missing them desperately and feeling rage toward them, between wanting to save the relationship and wanting to burn it all down. This isn’t confusion—this is your psyche processing two contradictory truths simultaneously.
The hardest part? You might love them AND know that being with them isn’t safe for you. You might love who they were AND not trust who they’ve shown themselves to be. All of these feelings can coexist.
The Fortress of Self-Protection
“I’ll Never Trust Anyone Again”
On the other side, maybe you’re convinced that you’re done with vulnerability forever. That trusting anyone is just setting yourself up for more pain. This response makes complete sense—your nervous system’s primary job is keeping you safe.
These attachment wounds from betrayal often manifest as:
- Analyzing everyone’s motives constantly
- Looking for red flags everywhere
- Feeling suspicious of genuine kindness
- Believing that everyone lies eventually
- Feeling like you can never truly know anyone
This hypervigilance isn’t paranoia—it’s your nervous system working overtime to prevent future harm.
When Both Realities Coexist
Here’s what no one talks about: You can simultaneously love someone who hurt you AND be terrified of trusting anyone ever again. These contradictions don’t cancel each other out—they coexist because betrayal affects different parts of your attachment system.
Two Different Systems
Betrayal trauma impacts:
- Your specific attachment to the person who hurt you—this might still feel strong, might still pull you toward them
- Your general attachment system—your ability to trust and connect with people broadly—this might feel completely shattered
It’s possible to have hope for one specific relationship while losing faith in relationships as a whole.
Understanding Your Protective Strategies
Both responses—still loving them and never trusting again—are attempts at safety:
- Still loving them might be your attachment system trying to repair the rupture, seeking safety through reconnection
- Never trusting again might be your nervous system trying to prevent future harm through hypervigilance and isolation
Both make sense. Neither is wrong. And neither has to be permanent.
Holding Complexity with Compassion
Instead of trying to resolve these feelings immediately, what if you learned to hold them with compassion?
What if you could say: “Of course I still love them—they were my person, my safe place, until they weren’t. Of course I’m terrified of trusting anyone—I’ve learned that even the people closest to me can devastate me.”
The Path Forward Without All the Answers
You don’t need to have the answers right now. You don’t need to know:
- Whether to stay or go
- If you’ll ever trust again
- If your love for them is healthy or trauma bonding
What you need is time, support, and the capacity to sit with uncertainty while your nervous system heals. As your system regulates and you rebuild your connection to your own felt sense of safety, these questions might start to have different answers.
Developing Discernment, Not Blind Trust
The goal isn’t to trust blindly again—it’s to develop discernment, the ability to sense who is trustworthy and who isn’t. Healing from attachment wounds from betrayal can actually make you better at reading people, trusting your intuition, and setting healthy boundaries.
Real love requires discernment, boundaries, and the ability to trust yourself above all else. The capacity to love someone AND recognize when they’re not good for you might be the most sophisticated kind of love there is.
Moving Forward with Self-Compassion
The goal isn’t to stop loving them or to force yourself to trust again. The goal is to love yourself enough to make decisions from a place of wholeness rather than woundedness.
When you can feel grounded, access your inner knowing, and understand what’s happening in your nervous system, you can start making decisions from clarity instead of reactivity.
You Don’t Have to Heal Alone
Healing from betrayal requires support that can hold the fullness of what you’re experiencing—the love and the loss, the hope and the fear, the desire for connection and the need for protection.
Your complexity is valid, your contradictory feelings make sense, and you deserve compassionate support as you navigate this difficult terrain.
Ready to Go Deeper in Your Healing Journey?
If these somatic tools resonated with you and you’re ready to take the next step in your recovery, I invite you to visit my Start Here page where you can:
✨ Book a free discovery call to explore how personalized somatic healing support could accelerate your recovery
✨ Watch my free masterclass “Recovering After Betrayal” to understand the complete roadmap for rebuilding your life
✨ Access additional resources specifically designed for those navigating betrayal trauma
