How To Heal From Betrayal, Cheaters, Manipulators And Liars

Being cheated on, lied to, manipulated, or betrayed is a very sensitive topic. Unfortunately, in relationships, these elements have harmed or hurt many people. According to some research, 75% of men and 68% of women admitted to cheating in previous relationships.

Yet there aren’t many resources available to help you heal from betrayal. This is a problem, since it can damage so many relationships. If we’ve been betrayed or manipulated, it can cause us to not trust our partners or ourselves. If you’re single, it even impacts how you put yourself out there when dating. 

So let’s walk through a 10-step process to help you heal from betrayal and open yourself to love again.

1. Understand Why People Cheat

Many people have been cheated on. In fact, cheating is still the leading cause of divorce. Perhaps your current partner cheated on you, but you stayed. Maybe you've left that partner and moved to a new relationship. Or perhaps you're single because you're too afraid to go out and meet someone for fear of being cheated on again.

We can classify cheating in different ways. It might mean: 

• being intimate with someone else
• kissing someone else
• romantically or sexually talking to someone else

However you classify it, cheating can have a very profound impact on relationships. It undermines how we trust people. Many people who have been cheated on blame themselves. They wonder, “maybe I should have lost more weight. Maybe I should have worn the sexy outfit more, maybe I should have stopped nagging”. Etc. The victim of cheating jumps straight into, “Was it my fault? Was it me?”

The short answer is no. That person made a choice to do that. That makes it their behaviour, and their actions. Not yours. You didn't make someone do that. Your partner, or ex, was accountable for their own behaviour.

Self-Sabotage
It is worth digging beneath the surface to find out why they cheated. Sometimes people cheat as self-sabotage. They have created an identity that says, “I can’t have anything good, I can’t have anything nice. This is too good for me”. When the relationship is going well and making them happy, they’re driven by a need to ruin it. This justifies their belief that they can’t have anything nice—even if they cause that. 

Commitment Issues

People may have things in their childhood, or issues like mother enmeshment, that can cause commitment issues. Even if a person commits to a relationship, they look for a way out because they had a fear of commitment. 

Maybe they didn't feel good about themselves, so they needed to be validated by someone else. As a partner, you are not the one who needs to validate your partner. You're not the one who has to make your partner feel good. If you’re pushed into that position, that’s a codependent relationship. It's really important to understand that because this is where you start.

2. Forgive Yourself

Don’t worry that I’m going to tell you to forgive the person for doing what they've done. That’s up to you.

But you do need to forgive yourself for what you've been through.

I remember how I felt when I found out a former partner cheated on me. I took the blame until I realised I had to forgive myself for trusting this person and getting it wrong. 

I’d put so much pressure on myself to keep myself safe. I’d promised myself someone would never hurt again me. 

But here’s the thing. You don’t let someone hurt you. They choose to hurt you. 

You also can’t promise yourself that and keep it. Not unless you put a stone wall around yourself for the rest of your life and never meet anyone or talk to anyone. 

Forgive yourself for trusting the wrong person. All you did wrong was trust someone. 

But when we go through something that upsets us, our logic changes. Instead of seeing the situation as it is, we insert ourselves into the story of how it happened.

This leads to us focusing on “maybe if I’d done X, they wouldn’t have betrayed me”, rather than the truth of what they’ve done.

But not everything is about you.

Maybe the person lied because they didn’t want to upset you. And maybe they did this because when they were a child, their mother would beat them if they upset her.

It doesn’t make what they did okay, but it helps you see it was never about you. So you can forgive yourself.

3. Break Down Beliefs

As part of forgiving yourself, you need to break down any beliefs you’ve created around their betrayal. If you’re anything like me, you’ll ask yourself things like “maybe it's because I got too fat”, or “maybe I didn't do enough in the relationship”.

If you weren’t doing enough, your partner should have communicated with you about it. Not cheated on you. Whichever way you slice it, it’s still not your fault.

Your only job in a relationship is to be you. 

So let’s break down your negative beliefs. Get your journal and write about these questions. Give yourself plenty of time to let the answers come through. If you hate journalling, discuss your answer with a trusted friend who’ll let you process your feelings out loud.

• If you can't be loved for you, is it the right relationship to be in?
• If you can't be treated respectfully, is it the right relationship for you?
• Is that the relationship that you want? If not, what do you want?

4. Accept The Truth about Rejection

Surprisingly, you can’t actually be rejected. I know, I know, that probably goes against everything you’ve ever heard about rejection. It took me a long time to get my head around it too!

But here’s why. If you're being ‘rejected’, then is it something that you actually wanted?

Here’s what I mean. If you end up in a relationship with someone that doesn't want you, is that the person who you want? Do you want to be with someone who doesn't want you?

I’m going to guess ‘no’. And someone you don’t want can’t reject you.

It’s also important to acknowledge that we don’t grow without pain. Pain inspires us to look at the discomfort and to move as far away from it as possible. That’s literally what growth is.

So while you don’t have to enjoy feeling used or betrayed, you can also look for the hidden growth opportunity within it. That person has shown their true colours about how they feel about you. It hurts, I know. But now you get to find someone who will love and appreciate you.

5. Stop Punishing Yourself

When we go through something that really hurts, we love to punish ourselves. It goes back to childhood. You know, we've all been in that situation where we've seen a child be naughty, and we're like “ma'am, or miss”, and ask the teacher to tell them off.

We do a very similar thing as an adult. When we feel angry with someone, it's often from fear, but also because we feel like they haven't been punished. 

When someone does something wrong, we talk about topics like justice and karma. We rarely get the chance to feel like justice has been served, and that can be difficult to get over. 

Having someone mistreat you and avoid punishment for it can send you into a thought spiral that you can’t keep yourself safe. They used and betrayed you; they got away with it. This can feel disempowering. This is often what prompts people to step away from dating and avoid relationships.

Trouble is, if we feel that need for punishment towards ourselves, our subconscious steps in and goes “okay, I’m gonna have to punish you. I’m going to have to make you feel terrible about this situation, because I feel you did something wrong.”

It's really important to understand when you’re doing that because we can be our own worst enemy.

It’s also why it’s really important to understand that someone else's actions are not our responsibility. Justice is not your responsibility. You are your only responsibility.

6. Understand and Communicate Your Expectations

People value different things in relationships, and they also expect different things in relationships. This is why you need to communicate your boundaries. You can’t expect your partner to know what yours are if you don’t tell them.

So if you’re in a relationship with a different partner, then you need to have that difficult conversation about what you class as cheating. Without these discussions, you'll struggle to work within each other's boundaries.

As an example, let's say that for you, cheating is having an intimate relationship with someone else. But for your partner, they might believe that if you love someone emotionally, the physical stuff doesn’t matter. 

Here, you have very different viewpoints and beliefs and expectations about relationships. It’s important for both of you to know this if you want to have a healthy relationship, to understand where your expectations, values, and beliefs lie. Working within those creates trust.

Having these conversations also helps you to realise that everyone's wired differently. This is how we understand that someone else's actions are not our responsibility, and they're also not our fault.

Healthy relationships come from accountability, communication, compatibility, and consideration.

They don’t come from you figuring out how much can you do for your partner to make them like you.

7. Know WHAT to Heal

If you've been in a relationship where your partner hasn't shown up, cheated on you, or manipulated or used or betrayed you, that's on them, not you. You may need to have a deep discussion with yourself and ask, “What am I blaming myself for? Why am I actually feeling bad? What responsibilities am I taking on board that I shouldn't be?”

Feel into it. What upset you the most? Was it the fact that your partner:

• didn't meet your expectations? 
• made you feel bad? 
• didn't consider you? 
• didn't care enough about you? 
• avoided punishment for what they did?

The more specific you can be about what made you feel bad, the easier it is to heal from betrayal.

You also need to realise you're able to heal. You can heal your trust in your decision-making. Often, when someone hurts us, it makes us ask what we can change, or learn, to stop it from happening again. 

The problem with this approach is that it forces us to continue focusing on us, rather than on them. It makes us look for what is in our control, when the other person’s behaviour is out of our control. This approach also feeds confirmation bias, so the brain will automatically look for every negative or drawback in every situation. Yes, it’s only trying to protect you, but let me be clear, this will not help you heal.

Flipping that mindset actually builds our confidence and trust again. Instead of looking for the negatives so we can protect ourselves, look for the positives in your life.

What are you working towards? What are your goals? What are you proud of? What are you excited about? What's the emotion that you want to feel? 

Applying this to your life helps you to reorient yourself as the centre of your life, not your partner, and put the focus back on you. It also helps you to reprogram your confirmation bias, so it sees positives, not negatives. The momentum of this helps to pull you out of self-protection mode.

8. Let Yourself Desire Your Next Relationship

The same thing applies to relationships. When we’ve had negative relationships, it’s easy to focus on what you don’t want next time.

If you want to heal, focus instead on what you do want, and how that’ll make you feel.

What is it you want? Is it that commitment? Is it the spark? You’re allowed to want chemistry and passion, as long as it’s with a compatible partner.

Do you want a partner who wants the same things as you? Someone who wants to work towards the same goals as you create a beautiful life? Try journaling about this for deeper insights.

When you look at what you desire, that you really love, that you feel excited about, you realise that don’t want the things that have hurt or upset you. They have nothing to do with what you desire and want in the first place, so you can let them go.

9. Start the Healing Process

Falling in love with the wrong person who doesn't love or appreciate you fully is self-sabotage. It comes from not loving yourself enough, from not having high enough standards for yourself to grow and to enjoy life fully. 

If you're going into relationships where you don't feel like you have your needs met? I can guarantee the same is going to be true for you within your career, and also with your family.

You will repeat this again and again until you heal the root cause. So finding and healing this original pain will have a fantastic knock-on effect in all areas of your life. Who wouldn’t want that? This is why coaching is so valuable because you can find these underlying issues, heal them, and uplevel your whole life at once.

Remember that if you want to improve your relationships, you also need to heal the relationship that you have with yourself.

Be prepared that it’s going to take time when you're healing deeper elements of yourself. It’s not about picking up a self-help book and hoping you'll be completely different when you’ve finished it. It's not about seeing a coach once or twice and thinking you’re cured. If you really want to see lasting change, you need to heal the core elements of yourself and take the time to integrate that fully.

10. Spring Clean Your Life

Finally, look at what you’re allowing into your life. What are your standards like? What will happen if you spring clean your life? What needs to change? What are you throwing out? What are you bringing in?

Don’t lower your standards. We both know you’re meant for so much more. But you need to claim it, you need to say “this is what I want. And this is what I’m going to get in my life.” You need to believe in yourself.

Allow yourself to be treated better. You can teach people how to treat you through the way you treat yourself. So if you always go along with decisions to keep the peace or people-please, then people learn you don’t think your opinion matters. Or that you matter. They’ll treat you accordingly. So start putting yourself first.

You need to stop punishing yourself over the past. Let it go. Realise you're an amazing person, you did everything that you could to make that relationship work. But you can't make a fantastic relationship with someone who doesn’t want to contribute. 

And allow yourself to choose love.

Yes, You Can Heal from Betrayal

Being betrayed, manipulated, lied to, or cheated on hurts. We won’t pretend it doesn’t. And while it makes you feel powerless, you’ve got a lot more power than you think. You have the power to stop blaming yourself and to find a rewarding love that lasts with someone who appreciates you.

You can heal from betrayal! Follow these 10 steps to give you a starting point. It all begins with realising that it’s not your fault. 

If you feel you need deeper support in healing, rebuilding your relationship with yourself, and finding new love? Then you’re going to love the Love With Intelligence Academy. You’ll learn everything you need to heal past trauma, see the truth about your relationships (and future partners), and find a genuine love that lasts.