Betrayal Is Not Just a Wound... It’s a Nervous System Event
A somatic reflection on relational rupture and what it takes to return home to yourself.
There’s a specific kind of silence that follows betrayal. It’s not still. It’s not peaceful. It’s the sound of the nervous system scrambling to make sense of what no longer fits; of love that turned sharp, of safety that proved conditional.
Betrayal is not only about broken promises. It often involves the withholding of information; information that, if shared, would have changed your choice, your consent, or your course of action.
As a Chartered Psychologist with training in somatics, many of my clients describe betrayal not through dramatic acts, but through slow, quiet moments of omission: not knowing a partner had doubts, not being told the full story, sensing something was off but being reassured otherwise. And when that truth is hidden, the rupture that follows doesn’t just live in the story. It lives in the body.
In somatic terms, betrayal is not just a relational wound. It’s a rupture of internal coherence; a breakdown in the nervous system’s ability to connect what we feel with what we know. It’s the moment our internal map, the one that says, “this is what safety feels like, this is how love should hold me,” cracks open. When that map is shattered, especially by someone, the body once softened and surrendered to the nervous system doesn’t just register pain. The nervous system loses its orientation.
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During my time as a therapist, I’ve sat with many people in the aftermath of betrayal. Some whisper their stories like confessions, ashamed of how long they stayed. Others sit upright, recounting events with precision, yet without breath, without a tether to their heartbreak. Some collapse mid-sentence, their voice faltering, their gaze vacant. Others barely want to speak at all. Their mind, body, and heart feel disconnected, not because they lack insight, but because their nervous system has lost access to the sense of stability, consistency, and co-regulation that once helped them feel safe. When that connection is broken, they also lose contact with the internal anchors that once helped them regulate. What follows is not just emotional confusion, but physiological disorientation.
However disconnected we are, the body is always telling the story. The nervous system speaks before the mind makes meaning.
What I wish more clients understood is that from a polyvagal perspective, betrayal activates a physiological double bind. Both the attachment system and the survival system are triggered simultaneously. On one level, the social engagement system—the part of the nervous system wired for connection, co-regulation, and hope is still online. It scans for cues of safety, clings to the possibility of repair, and keeps the relational bond alive even when that bond is under threat. But underneath, the defense systems of the body, fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, begin to mobilize. The muscles constrict. The jaw locks. The gut tightens. The heart pounds with anticipatory alarm.
This creates a profound state of physiological fragmentation. The body is pulled in opposing directions: one part reaching toward the person who caused pain, while another part withdraws, contracts, or shuts down to stay safe. Do I move closer to the person I still love? Do I pull away to protect myself? Do I freeze and pretend everything is okay, even when it isn’t? Do I keep offering care, even as I’m hurting? These questions are not just psychological they are somatic dilemmas, reflected in the body’s competing neural circuits. And it is this internal split, between longing and self-protection, that makes betrayal not only painful but disorienting.
This disorientation is why betrayal is so often followed by shame not because we did something wrong, but often because we did something right. We trusted. We believed. And I remind my clients of this often: there is nothing shameful about being someone who chooses connection. The world needs more of that, not less. But the nervous system doesn’t know how to reconcile love and harm when they arrive together. It cannot metabolize the intimacy of rupture. And without a clear internal map that says, “You didn’t cause this,” the body turns inward. It blames itself. Not because that blame is true, but because having the self-compassion required to hold complexity without collapse is rare, especially in a world that teaches us to equate pain with failure.
And so shame enters not as evidence of guilt, but as a response to the unbearable confusion of loving someone who hurt you.
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For many of my clients and for me, betrayal in adulthood rarely arrives as a standalone wound. It often echoes something older. A rupture that reminds the body of an earlier time when love was pain.. When affection came with fear. When connection was earned through vigilance.
The betrayal may be recent, but the nervous system doesn’t register chronology, it registers familiarity.
Betrayal can be loud or quiet, sudden or accumulative. But in my experience—both personal and clinical—what lingers is less about the act itself and more about how the body was left to hold what no one else could name.
For me, it goes back to sixteen. My best friend and my boyfriend, together behind my back. I couldn’t have named it then, but my body understood immediately. The nausea. The dizziness. The full-body heat. What looked like heartbreak was actually disorientation. A nervous system spinning without coordinates, trying to reconcile the inconceivable.
Not all betrayals arrive so loudly. Some unfold through absence: a parent who minimized your grief, a sibling who weaponized your vulnerability, a teacher who violated your trust. These may seem small, but the body does not measure impact by scale. It registers whether safety was there or not.
Even now, when something reminds me of that betrayal, I feel the echo throughout my entire body. That’s how the body works. It doesn’t separate past from present. It layers. Especially when the original injury was not metabolized with care. Even now, with that early wound processed and understood, my body still carries imprints. And those imprints are often reawakened not as thoughts, but as sensations: a tight throat, a dropped belly, the old instinct to turn inward.
This is exactly why so many of my clients respond to betrayal not with clarity, but with collapse. Their bodies blame themselves. I should have known. I should have seen it coming. I must have misunderstood. Maybe it wasn’t that bad.
But this isn’t a failure of insight it’s an act of preservation. The body fragments, fawns, freezes not because it is broken, but because it is trying to preserve the bond that once meant protection.
Especially when that bond was formed within a system family, school, culture, or faith that punished contradiction and made loyalty a requirement for belonging.
It took me years to stop replaying that moment, and even longer to stop blaming myself for missing the signs. What shifted wasn’t just understanding what happened it was learning to stay with the part of me that had once abandoned herself in order to be chosen. It meant recognizing that the betrayal wasn’t only external. I had betrayed myself in small, quiet ways overriding my instincts, silencing my discomfort, making myself palatable to preserve connection.
Over time, through body-based work, I began to reorient. Not by becoming more lovable, but by becoming more loyal to my own body. This is what it means to return to yourself—not intellectually, but somatically. Not to erase the betrayal, but to locate the self who lived through it. To make space for her truth. To let her grief be named. And to remind her that love, in its truest form, does not require disappearance.
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As a therapist today, what I adore about somatics is that it does not ask you to forgive the person who hurt you. It does not insist on finding meaning. It asks you to feel what you could not feel when the pain happened, when the hurt happened, when the trauma happened, when the betrayal happened, too. To breathe into the rage you buried. To grieve the fantasy that once protected you. To listen, finally, to the body you silenced in order to stay safe or connected.
Often, this is not a process of catharsis, but of slow, cellular repair. Of pacing. Of pausing. Of remembering how to notice without collapsing. Of tracking the moment when your chest tightens, your stomach turns, your throat hardens around the truth. And choosing—again and again—not to betray the wisdom of your very own body.
Because betrayal does not only sever us from others. It severs us from our own body’s wisdom. From our sense of coherence. From our inner map of what it means to feel safe in our skin. And embodiment is how we come back. Not back to the person. Not back to the past. But back to the part of us that never stopped knowing what was true.
If it made you think, I’d love to hear your reflections in the comments.
this spoke to the deepest parts of me, and what i’ve been healing through therapy, and alchemizing through my writing. thank you for so clearly and eloquently deciphering the layers of disorientation and rupture that betrayal inflicts on the psyche and body
We betray ourselves, we betray our innocent part. My sense of safety was damaged at an early age by my mother, and the betrayal from my partner was nothing compared to that one. My mother's wound was the one I needed to hear. Thank you for your post.