How to Deal with Betrayal in a Friendship
Whether it’s a friendship, relationship, business partnership, etc… anyone is prone to betrayal.
This is a setback that occurs in the social world.
Focus is unique.
Because you can never fully tell who is focusing & who is distracted.
Someone who seems distracted may be paying attention to every word.
While someone who seems to be paying attention to every word is distracted.
It’s a similar case with betrayal.
Humans may rely too much on the senses.
Going by what they can see, taste, touch etc.
That’s what causes them to get betrayed even more.
In this article, you will learn more about betrayal from friends, relationships, business partners…
And what to do about it.
Betrayal is a part of the game when building street smarts.
Meaning of Betrayal
The phrase “betrayal” automatically implies that trust was a predecessor.
Imagine if you heard that someone is a piece of shit.
You heard plenty of rumors about this person.
Heck, you could tell this person was grimy even if no one told you.
Something about their body language felt off.
If that was the case, would you feel betrayed if they did you wrong?
‘Not really.’
Why not?
‘Because I was expecting it.’
The keyword is “expect.”
Betrayal happens when you were not expecting it.
This is when you were blindsided.
It hurts to wave a permanent goodbye to someone who you thought you were going to know forever.
Yet, that’s the strategy of choice for betrayal.
Why You Shouldn’t Try to Change Someone
One of my first horror stories with business was getting scammed out of 2,500 dollars.
It would have been one thing if I was robbed from a shady course or teacher.
But that wasn’t the case.
It was by my own business partner.
A damn shame.
I’m not alone in this.
Plenty of the most successful people have a story like this.
Where they accidentally worked with someone with poor character.
It’s easy to throw out the quote:
‘Well, you are what you attract.’
This sounds nice.
But that’s not always the case.
The real world throws shady people at high charactered individuals every now and then.
‘Why?’
To test their character.
A poor thing to do in my opinion is to try to change a snake.
I call this “empathy gone wrong.”
‘It only happened once! Don’t worry, water under the bridge’ the foolish empathetic person says.
Changing ourselves is difficult as it is.
What makes you think it will be easy changing someone else?
Spotting the Difference Between Mistake & Malice
A betrayal in a friendship is not always personal.
At times, it happens because the other person prioritized themselves over you.
- They didn’t actively want you to fail.
- They just actively wanted themselves to win.
Other times, they actively wanted you to fail.
I knew this upcoming rapper in high school named, Nameless (ironic, I know lol).
He was a good rapper, but not great in my opinion.
He loved Lil Wayne but hated Jay Z.
Often, I would ask him why he despised Jay Z so much.
That’s when Nameless got personal.
‘Who the fuck is Jay Z anyways? Average rapper. How did he get Beyonce? The guy is a scumbag and ugly as shit!’
If Nameless ever got into a room with Jay Z, it would have been personal.
Jay Z reminded Nameless of his own failures.
These are the people with malice in their hearts.
They want to see others fail because their lives are not where they want it to be.
‘What’s the biggest difference between mistake and malice, Armani?’
The intention.
Mistakes accidentally happen.
- Bring it up to the person & it will be corrected.
Malice intentionally happens.
- Bring it up to the other person & I doubt it will be corrected.
The Power of Ignoring after Betrayal
Hatred is a tricky emotion.
You would assume that it would be an emotion that you want to stay away from.
However, the body has something different to say.
The body likes to hate someone.
‘What?? Yea right!’
Nope, it does.
Feelings of pleasure come from hating on the person who did you wrong.
Especially someone who betrayed your trust.
The act of hating has emotions. The body loves to feel emotions.
The only problem is that these emotions lead to charged thoughts.
A charged thought is rapidly implanted into the subconscious mind.
The subconscious mind is the database that the conscious mind generates futures thoughts from.
So, the more you hate on someone, the more you think about them in the future.
It’s a toxic loop.
In my opinion, ignoring & ghosting them is the smartest thing to do.
Ghosting someone is highly strategic because it does not reinforce more thoughts of the person.
Granted, depending on how deep the relationship was beforehand will determine if ghosting is even possible.
If your ex-wife of 25 years betrayed you, then ghosting may not be doable.
Especially if you have kids with the person.
I’m just providing the ghosting option because of the lack of emotional investment required.
It gets you thinking in the right direction.
Forgiveness is Selfish & Selfless
The readers of this blog are mainly entrepreneurs & engineers.
Entrepreneurs are typically prone to tons of betrayal.
They play a high chaos game with reality.
Innovation has a price.
But engineers?
They are prone to betrayal too???
Absolutely.
For them, it’s a game of office politics.
Imagine consistently being surrounded by a group of people at work.
The way nature is designed, at least one of them will resent your level-up process.
Ignoring is not doable if your job role has you interacting with the shady coworker.
That’s when detachment is key.
Be able to interact with them without letting them rile you up.
Easier said than done, I know.
But it is capable of being done.
A detached attitude is when you are unruffled.
Detachment can happen actively or as a byproduct.
The goal is to have a detached attitude be a byproduct of something else.
‘What is that something else?’
The more the mind is geared towards improving, the less real estate a snake has in your mind.
You know you’re leveling up when your bounce-back rate for overcoming a betrayal is reducing in time.
Battle-tested
Soft skills and street smarts are learned the hard way.
There’s only so much knowledge you can get from a book.
It’s all about going through setbacks and coming out even stronger.
Rep after rep.
Whether you had betrayal in a friendship, relationship, professional bond etc.
Doesn’t matter.
What’s done is done.
Either cut off the bond or be detached.
Revenge feels good in the temporary moment.
But remember what I said earlier:
A charged thought becomes implanted into the subconscious.
That’s a price to pay.
And hopefully, you don’t have the budget for that price.
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– ArmaniTalks 
