I was in a training programme earlier this week, and a participant asked me a real visceral question. She asked if I could help her recover from betrayal at work.
Her question was so full of emotion and hurt. I offered my insights by recounting how I have had to deal with such situations in my work, businesses, and in my personal life.
Betrayal comes in many forms.
At work, you might feel blindsided or undermined by a colleague, or disempowered by a leader. In business you could be cheated by a trusted ally. And, in your private life you may have experienced duplicity by your spouse, best friend, child or even your parents.
With your personal interactions, regardless of the type of relationship, be it spousal or romantic, friendly, or between parent and child, an essential ingredient is trust. All of us need trust. It defines every interaction in a relationship, it builds closeness as well as tenderness, and it strengthens bonds.
Without trust no personal relationship can thrive.
Unfortunately, even in your closest relationships, at times, people do not cherish trust. Often, you give it away quite freely to those you care about. And as a consequence, it also is easily taken for granted. When that trust is broken, it breaks relationships, and it can be very hard to earn it back.
In your workplace, betrayal feels like personal and professional deception. It is stressful, and disappointing. More importantly, it lowers your morale, and destroys your personal efficacy.
Before you take any action, it is prudent for you to have an understanding of the circumstances surrounding the perceived betrayal. This way you can cope, deal, and recover from this.
The first step is always to evaluate the situation, and figure out the circumstances, because sometimes what you consider a betrayal might be seen as just an innocuous mistake by others.
You have to define the parameters of what happened, and ask questions if the issue is unclear.
For instance, if you find your name left out from a report that you worked on, you must first establish if it was premeditated or an administrative lapse. This requires you to communicate directly with the person responsible to register your concern and to give them an opportunity to explain.
Sometimes you will feel that a colleague took credit for your work, or cut you out, or seemingly set you up to take the blame for some calamity, or even allegedly made some disparaging comments about you, behind your back.
How you deal with this is based on your relationship and history with that person.
If that person has never exhibited such deceitful behavior in the past; a forthright and honest conversation is necessary to determine what went wrong on this particular occasion.
However, if you have had past experiences and altercations with this person, and their deceptive tactics are progressively scaling up, then you must escalate the dispute to your line leader for intervention.
In your private life, betrayal has an even more devastating effect.
You never feel betrayed, if you don’t trust someone in the first place. And often, we have deep trust in the people closest to us.
The biggest defeat you feel when you are deceived by someone you care about is the loss of an illusion.
Frequently, you develop in your mind, ideas of how things "should" be. But then the reality doesn't correspond with your thinking. With the people you trust so deeply, you get terribly disturbed when their actions break your trust.
This is what happens when you discover that your spouse has been unfaithful, or when a trusted family member turns on you. It becomes extremely difficult to face this reality.
Because of your closeness, when you are deceived, you will also often have two conflicting emotions to deal with.
You want to wound the person who hurt you, and at the same time, you know you must rise above the duplicity, and get on with your life.
Here are a few things I have done to overcome betrayal of all sorts, which may be useful for you at wo
rk or even in your personal life.
The first thing I aim to do is to get some detachment. I stand back and view myself as a “solution-partner” to my own hurt. This enables me to move away from feeling like a victim, myself.
This frame of mind helps me to work through my issues with my colleagues, and even my family, and it helps me with emotional recovery.
Many people do not realise how emotionally distraught a person can get when a work colleague deceives them. The recovery plans starts once you acknowledge that you have been hurt.
This allows you to then set out to heal that emotion.
Remember to only acknowledge and do not dwell on the deceit. Once you understand why you feel betrayed, you can take steps to recover and stop obsessing about how you were wronged.
The faster you move on, the better your life becomes.
Shankar R. Santhiram is managing consultant and executive leadership coach at EQTD Consulting. He is also the author of the national bestseller “So, You Want To Get Promoted?”