CHAPTER EIGHT

How Trust Is Rebuilt:
Seven Steps for Healing

The Promise of Renewal

Chest aching, stomach churning, Roberta splashed water on her face as she fought back tears of shock, horror, and deep hurt. She could not believe what she’d just heard. She honestly thought she and Daniel were totally aligned. What a way to find out they weren’t!

The company president had given Roberta the responsibility of overseeing the design and development of a major building complex. Roberta had asked Daniel to work with her on developing the proposal outlining the approach to the project. She had tremendous respect for Daniel’s skill and talent, and they had worked well together in the past.

Roberta felt that she and Daniel had developed a solid proposal and looked forward to reviewing it with the president. At the start of the review meeting, she could not believe her ears when the president mentioned that Daniel had stopped into his office that morning—behind Roberta’s back—and announced that he had major concerns about the proposal and about Roberta’s ability to oversee the project. Roberta was flabbergasted.

Trust is always vulnerable, even in high-trust relationships. Letdowns, hurts, and betrayals simply come with the territory of opening ourselves up to other people. The disappointments we experience in these partnerships can cut deep and knock us off our feet—or they can seem more like blips on the radar of “business as usual.” No matter the severity, however, all betrayals have the potential to accumulate into confidence-busting, commitment-breaking, and energy-draining patterns.

Few of us know how to deal with the emotional pain of broken trust because our culture doesn’t encourage reflection and genuine expression of our feelings. Yet, the impact of unresolved breaches of trust can be devastating to people’s health, careers, and personal relationships. When we wrote the first and second editions of Trust and Betrayal in the Workplace, we received tremendous feedback from our readers, asking for more detail and direction on each of the Seven Steps for Healing to rebuild trust. Recognizing that people needed and wanted to deal with their betrayals—big and small—and proactively work through them, we wrote an entire book on the steps, which we call Rebuilding Trust in the Workplace: Seven Steps to Renew Confidence, Commitment, and Energy. The chapter you’re about to read is an overview of our steps for renewing trust. For more detail about each of the steps, we invite you to read our second book.

The framework we provide in this chapter—and in Rebuilding Trust in the Workplace—will help you learn to trust again with compassion and courage, and help you respond to others appropriately when you’ve let them down.

Betrayal is universal. If it hasn’t happened already, at some point in your life you’ll be called upon to support a friend, colleague, or loved one whose trust has been broken. Embracing the Seven Steps will enable you to lead others through their hurt, disappointment, and pain toward a place of renewed trust—both in others and in themselves. This renewal can happen on an individual basis, within your team, or across your organization. You can use the steps at home, in your church, or within your volunteer groups. The Seven Steps are just as powerful and universal as betrayal itself.

You Have a Choice

You want trusting relationships. You want to grow, understand, and be able to move through hurts to a place of hope and confidence. Yet, you struggle with how to get there. How do you deal with disappointment and betrayal? How do you make sense of what happened? How do you learn to trust again?

Your journey toward renewed trust begins with you and your choice about how you respond when your trust has been broken. Whether you’ve been betrayed intentionally or unintentionally, you may feel helpless and hopeless. You may feel as though you have no control over what was “done to you.” It’s true that you don’t have control over what others do. You do, however, have control over how you choose to respond. Imagine that you’re hiking in the woods and you come to a fork in the trail. A sign gives you the option to go down the path of anger, bitterness, and resentment, or you can take the path of healing, optimism, and renewal. The path you take is up to you. How do you want to move forward—mired in patterns of energy-draining distrust or buoyed by awareness and compassion?

 

You can’t control what others do to you.
You can control how you choose to respond.

 

When you choose to hold onto betrayal with clenched fists, you become the victim of your experience and shut yourself off from the opportunities that rebuilding trust provides. You miss out on the insights, the lessons, and the chance to transform your experience in your own head and heart. Instead of healing, you become consumed by what someone “did to you” and allow another’s actions to eat away at your spirit and self-confidence.

Alternatively, when you choose to embrace the pain of betrayal with courage and compassion, you embark on a journey of renewal in which you replace anger with restored belief in yourself and faith in the spirit of human relationships. You learn to understand your hurts and work through them. You may even ask yourself if you contributed in some way to what occurred—an honesty that’s rewarded with deepened respect for yourself and your future relationships. You learn to trust again, and you feel whole.

The Seven Steps for Healing help you move through your pain and reframe your experience of betrayal with compassion and forgiveness. You allow betrayal to teach you about yourself, about your relationships, and about life in general. You become empowered to let go of your fear, doubt, and insecurity in order to reclaim your boundless energy, potential, and creativity. You open yourself—heart and mind—to what still can be rather than remaining shackled to thoughts of what should have been.

Whether you are feeling betrayed, coming to terms with having betrayed another, or simply trying to help others through their hurts, the Seven Steps will help you realize the renewal and peace of mind you and others seek.

The Seven Steps for Healing

The Seven Steps for Healing are not simply an academic theory. They are tested, proven, and universal. The steps emerged out of Dennis’s own experience with some of the most basic sources of betrayal: broken promises, dishonesty, and abandonment.

“My world came crashing down,” Dennis shared. “I came back from a four-day doctorate research session and discovered that my wife had been having an affair with a co-worker for six months. I was stunned, confused, and disoriented. I was angry and upset. But most of all, I questioned myself. How could I not have noticed?

I loved my wife and our two little boys. For the year and a half after discovering the affair, I did whatever I could to hold the marriage together. I went to counseling to work through my issues and the pain of my failing marriage, but my wife was not willing to join me in this effort.

We worked out an amicable divorce agreement and were awarded joint custody of our boys. Although I had my boys on alternating weekends as well as some holidays and vacations, I lost the life with them I had cherished.

A very painful part of the early years after the divorce were my long, sad rides home after dropping the boys off after their weekends with me. I cried so hard I often had to pull over to the side of the road because I couldn’t see straight enough to drive.

This intense pain continued for quite some time before subsiding. What I was grieving was the loss of my daily life with my family, the loss of what could have been but would never be. I missed tucking the boys into bed every night and rubbing their backs as they dozed off to sleep. I missed making them breakfast and putting them on the school bus.

In my grieving, I needed to allow my feelings to surface, to release my anger, my hurt, and my deep pain. And I did, again and again. Although living this chapter of my life was a nightmare, years later I was able to see its enormously redeeming value. A powerful lesson for me was that although I felt victimized, I certainly did not need to remain a victim. I chose to work through my pain and learned a lot about myself. I became more sensitive to others in pain and discovered how I could help them heal.

Through my healing I was eventually led to my future wife—and business partner—Michelle. Together, we developed the trust-based work that we do today. And my healing gave birth to the framework of these Seven Steps for Healing.”

As Dennis worked hard to understand the reasons why bad things happened to him, integrate this awareness into his life, and forgive himself and his betrayer, he was able to let go and move on. He released his energies from dwelling on the negative impacts of the betrayal itself and was able to nurture a deeper grasp of the intrinsic nature of trust, a seed that eventually evolved into the Seven Steps for Healing.

The steps are intended to help you work through the painful feelings you experience when your trust has been broken and help you move toward renewal. Although they’re numbered sequentially, you don’t necessarily work through them in a linear fashion. You may be in multiple steps at the same time, or you may have completed one step and moved on to the next, only to re-experience aspects of an earlier step. Feelings come in waves while working the Seven Steps; there are highs and lows, ebbs and flows—yet there is overall movement toward renewal and restored trust in yourself and your relationships.

Each of the Seven Steps represents a phase of the process that can be applied to rebuilding trust on the individual, team, and organizational levels. For teams and organizations to recover from betrayal, individuals need to heal first—though eventually, renewal needs to occur at all levels and in every corner of your workplace. You have a part to play in that healing. Rebuilding trust is a choice. Rebuilding trust begins with you.

Step 1: Observe and Acknowledge What Has Happened

“I couldn’t ignore what had happened,” said James, a mechanical engineer. “In spite of the fact that I wanted to run away from it all and just work harder and harder, I couldn’t ignore the deep pain I was feeling. It was as if someone had punched me in the gut and ripped out my insides. I was hurting, I was angry, and I hated my co-worker for stealing credit for work I had done and then lying about it to make me wrong.”

Moving through the pain of a breach of trust or betrayal to renewal starts with self-discovery and awareness. It’s important that you take time to acknowledge what happened to you and its impact. What behaviors led to the betrayal? What impact is the betrayal having on you—on your daily life both at work and at home? What did you lose when your trust was broken?

Acknowledging the details of betrayal is the first step toward rebuilding trust. After all, you can’t heal what you can’t see. In this first step, you benefit from mustering the courage to look at your experience honestly; consciously observing its silhouette and impact, almost as if from the outside. From this perspective, you don’t judge your reactions—or ignore or deny them. You allow them. You pay attention to the sources of your pain and ask questions about the feelings they evoke. You hush your inner critic, lift your mind into a neutral zone, and tap the well-spring of your inner perspectives and emotions. You don’t need to probe too deeply to understand or analyze your thoughts or feelings in this first step. You simply need to acknowledge that they exist, recognize their impact, and prepare yourself to begin addressing them.

 

Acknowledging betrayal and its impact is the
first step toward rebuilding trust.

 

Step 2: Allow Feelings to Surface

“I was livid!” said Maureen, a stylist, in a trendy salon. “I hated the person for what she’d done to me, and I hated myself for being so naive that I didn’t see it coming. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, my stomach was in knots, my head was throbbing—I ached all over. All I wanted to do was wallow in self-pity. ‘Why me?’ I said. ‘I didn’t deserve this!’”

When you’ve been betrayed, you hurt. You feel drained from the emotional upheaval the betrayal creates in your life. It’s vital you dig down and give yourself permission to feel your hurt—all of it. When you respect your pain, you honor yourself and your perceptions of your experience. Those perceptions and the feelings they generate are valid and deserve to be recognized. You may feel distracted, uncomfortable, or unsettled. Or you may be devastated, horrified, or depressed. You may feel a bit uptight, or you may struggle to suppress your rage. Regardless of their intensity, the only way to work through your emotions is to acknowledge them. Only then can you begin to release them with compassion.

Unfortunately, no one else can do this work for you. Betrayal robs you of your time, your energy, and possibly your opportunities and hopes for the future. You need to grieve this loss. You may be able to delegate other tasks in your life, but grieving isn’t one of them. This is your work. The only effective way to experience true renewal is to work through your grief. But take heart: for those willing to embrace their emotions, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Renewal awaits you. Healing provides deeper value and meaning to the pain you are experiencing, though that may be hard for you to believe while you’re in it.

 

You may be able to delegate other tasks in your
life, but grieving isn’t one of them.

 

You may find that you need to create quiet time alone to get in touch with your feelings. Or perhaps physical exercise or writing in a journal would be more helpful. What’s important is not what you do but how you do it. Choose an activity that helps you get in touch with your feelings rather than escape and avoid them.

In releasing your emotions, you must also release your guilt. An act of betrayal may occur only once, but you may relive it in your mind a thousand times. If you’re hard on yourself, you become riddled with guilt over what you did, or you may or replay over and over again the injustice you suffered. By doing so, you hurt yourself even more. Although it’s important to feel in order to grieve, guilt and worry are not helpful emotions for restoring broken trust. They drain your energy, cloud your thinking, and clutter your emotions. Let them go.

Step 3: Get Support

“I need help! I can’t go on trying to do my job as if nothing happened, feeling like this,” Trent, an accountant, said. “I need to talk with someone—someone I trust—which isn’t too many people these days. I can’t confide in my co-worker Tammy; she would blab it all over the department. I can’t go to my supervisor, Tom; he may use it against me in my performance review. Who can I rely on that I can have confidence in? Maybe I should look for help outside the organization, maybe a coach or counselor.”

Moving through betrayal is difficult to do alone. You need support to help you fully observe and acknowledge what happened, to allow your feelings to surface, and to understand them. Yet it may be difficult for you to reach out and ask for help. When you’ve been deeply hurt, you feel vulnerable, and your instinct may be to draw back.

Although it’s understandable you’d be reluctant to seek out help, this is the time to be kind to yourself. You don’t need to go through this painful journey alone. You can turn to a colleague, friend, or family member. You can connect with a counselor, member of the clergy, or professional coach. You may feel safer talking with a loved one who knows you very well, or you may prefer hearing the thoughts of a neutral third party.

Regardless of whom you ask for help, remember that the role of your supporter isn’t to judge, criticize, or help you heap blame on your betrayer. Although those actions may seem attractive in the short term, they’ll only trap you in your pain and throw up obstacles on your path to restored trust. The best confidants provide you with perspective and help you gain a more nuanced understanding of your experience. They help you recognize what you’re feeling and thinking, and lead the way to uncovering the betrayal’s deeper lessons. It’s not always easy to receive these insights, but not hearing them may lead to more significant hurts in the future as your trust continues to unravel.

 

The best supporters provide you with perspective.

 

Your supporter can also help you create clarity around your needs and desires, refine your expectations of others’ abilities to meet those wishes, and ultimately view your experience—and your betrayer—with compassion. You can work together to recognize the choices you have in moving forward after the betrayal and consider the ramifications of those choices. Remember, although you cannot change others’ behaviors, you can choose how to respond.

Step 4: Reframe the Experience

“Why did this happen to me? What circumstances led to this betrayal? What messages do I need to hear at this time in my life? What lessons do I need to learn?” thought James after hearing his co-worker had taken credit for his hard work.

When you reframe your perspective on betrayal, you’re able to transform it from a trauma to an opportunity for learning and growth. Instead of locking the experience into a hurtful place in your mind that drains your self-confidence, you allow your curiosity to take root and open yourself to imagining the bigger picture at play in your relationships—and in your life. Your hurt and pain become stepping-stones to renewal and a deepened Capacity for Trust.

To begin reframing your experience, place it in a larger context. Think about the circumstances that surrounded your betrayal—both those within your control and those outside your control. Shift your focus from one of defeat and victimhood to one of proactive understanding. Ask yourself guiding questions that will help you see the betrayal differently; see why it has power over you. Take yourself to a place of stillness. Listen to your inner voice; it knows how to answer these questions through the lens of compassion, if you let it.

Reflecting on these questions helps you sort out your thoughts and emotions and arrive at greater insight. As you reframe your experience, you gain wisdom, inner strength, and resilience. You begin to see life’s experiences as opportunities to transform your understanding of yourself and those around you. And you receive new trust in your ability to overcome life’s challenges. Remember, that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger!

Step 5: Take Responsibility

“What was my role in this experience?” Marjorie, a staff trainer, asked herself. “What did I do or not do that contributed to this betrayal? What could I have done differently?”

When you’re in pain, it’s normal to project your feelings onto others; to lay blame and step away from responsibility. In order to rebuild trust, however, it’s important you take ownership of your role in a betrayal and consider the choices you made that may have contributed to it. This might be hard to do. After feeling betrayed, you may want to point your finger or get revenge. Although understandable, there’s simply no benefit to this perspective.

When you allow yourself to continue patterns of justifying, defending, and explaining your own behaviors in your relationships, you begin to take others’ trust in you for granted. Even if you’re not at fault in a given situation, others need to see—and you need to see—that you’re willing to do what it takes to learn from a situation and move forward in a stronger way. The moment you stop showing up with this level of humble commitment is the moment you lose trust—both in yourself and with others.

So rather than dwelling on who’s at fault, you’ll find greater energy in pinpointing which behaviors to practice moving forward. You may be partially at fault for the betrayal, you may be fully responsible, or you may be completely innocent. Regardless of how you did or didn’t contribute to a breakdown of trust, you are responsible for your response to it. Only you can stem the energy drain that holding onto betrayal creates in your life. The choices you make today create your tomorrow.

Step 6: Forgive Yourself and Others

“I need to forgive myself—mostly for being so naive,” said Cynthia, a young intern. “I was working hard and doing all I could to keep up, and I was blindsided. Now I know better. I may forgive George because carrying the anger is wearing me down. But I will never forget the lessons I have learned—nor should I. They are too darn valuable to forget.”

Forgiveness is a gift you give yourself. When you don’t forgive, you cling to your anger, resentment, and bitterness like a security blanket. You close off your heart, deplete your spirit, and interfere with your trustworthiness. You bring yourself to your relationships with fear and prejudgment and create the very circumstances in which betrayal can thrive. Learning to forgive releases you from this pattern of behavior and allows you to approach others with compassion and understanding.

The first step to being able to forgive others is to learn to forgive yourself when you betray them. Breaking trust doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. Most of the time you slip up because you’re rushing around, trying to do more with less time, energy, and money. The more self-aware and compassionate you are, however, the more you feel the pain you cause others, and the more you need to forgive yourself when you stumble. Forgiving yourself is a gift you give others, too.

 

The first step to forgiving others is to learn to forgive yourself.

 

Not everyone sees forgiveness this way. Some view it as letting people off the hook. With a major betrayal, sometimes people hurt so much they hate their betrayer and want them to hurt as much as they do. They want to get back. They want to get even. With a minor betrayal, people simply may not have the energy to wish the other person well. Though none of us wants to admit it, when you hate, it is extremely difficult to heal. To shift from hate to healing, it’s important that you shift your focus from your betrayer to your wounded self, that you detach from the person who hurt you in order to let go. It’s important to essentially choose yourself, so you can begin to recover.

When you forgive you’re able to heal more rapidly. You no longer hold yourself hostage, waiting for an apology from the person who betrayed you. An apology may certainly be warranted and may support your healing, but you can move through the Seven Steps in the absence of it, if you choose.

When Michelle’s father, Jack, was seventeen, he enlisted in the army and was sent to fight in the Korean War. Months later, Michelle’s grandparents received the telegram everyone lived in fear of receiving—their son was missing in action. They later learned that Jack was alive, but had been taken prisoner by the Chinese in Northern Korea.

Korea is one of the coldest places on the planet. Temperatures reach minus 40 degrees in the winter. The captives of war lived in huts with dirt floors within the prison compound. The men had louse-ridden mattresses and blankets. At night, they lined the interior of the huts like sardines and slept close together for warmth. They wore thin sneakers made from canvas. Each prisoner got one bowl of maggot-infested porridge twice a day, morning and evening.

In those conditions, people do things they wouldn’t ordinarily do. In the middle of the night, some prisoners would die. When morning came, the living prisoners would prop up the dead and huddle close to them so it looked like everyone was there and accounted for. For the living, that meant an extra bit of porridge to share.

One day, Michelle’s father ripped the corners of his tattered blanket and put them into the tips of his threadbare canvas sneakers so his frostbitten toes would have some warmth. He tucked the ends of the blanket back into the cot so no one would see the torn corners. The next morning during inspection, a prison guard came directly over to Jack’s cot and pulled out the blanket. Jack was brought to the camp commander for interrogation. He stood up to him and fought back. He said they weren’t following the Geneva Convention and men should not have to go to such extremes to stay alive. They said he had destroyed government property and would be punished.

And punished he was. They put Jack in a cell dug six feet into the ground. It was cold, dark, and damp. They kept him in that hole for ninety bitter cold days. When Jack came out, he learned that the Chinese had discovered the torn blanket because a fellow American soldier snitched on him for an extra bowl of porridge.

After close to three years held in captivity, the war ended and Jack was returned to American custody. Only 57 of the 363 men in his battalion survived. Jack weighed 78 pounds and was severely ill, barely hanging on to life. He was hospitalized for six months before being allowed to go home.

Later, when Jack had returned to active duty with the army, he was asked to testify in a court-marshal hearing of the man who had betrayed him. He said he would do so if ordered, but respectfully asked not to. With some distance, Michelle’s father could feel compassion for and forgive the man who had betrayed him. Jack came to understand that in his suffering, the man first sold himself out before he betrayed Jack.

With compassion, you can choose to look at your betrayer differently. You can see him as a person who is struggling in his own pain. You may offer him benefit of the doubt: Is it possible that he lost his sense of himself? Is it possible he betrayed himself in the process of betraying me?

When you can do this, you’re able to see those who betray you as people with needs, feelings, and vulnerabilities rather than demonizing them as evildoers from the dark side. When it comes right down to it, we are like our betrayers and they are like us. Your betrayer may have been stressed and up against a wall. Maybe she was doing the best she could and simply lost her footing, just as we all have many times. Forgiveness doesn’t mean you condone the betrayal. Forgiveness just means you understand it.

The next step in healing occurs when you invite the person who betrayed you back into your life. You both have to be willing to come together and listen to each other, and the betrayer needs to be ready and willing to acknowledge and honestly apologize for what happened. You need your betrayers to understand the depth of the pain you suffered and make new promises he or she intends to keep.

If, however, the person who hurt you isn’t ready or willing to talk with you openly, you still can heal within yourself. How do you know forgiveness has occurred? When you can think about people who betrayed you and wish them well, and feel gratitude for the lessons you learned from the experience.

Step 7: Let Go and Move On

“It’s time to let go and move on,” said Rosa, an experienced chef. “I’ve learned some lessons—difficult as they were to come by. I’ve spent enough time, energy, and emotion on this experience for a lifetime. I wouldn’t want to go through this again, but I’m grateful for the experience and the lessons it provided me. It has strengthened me, and I’m glad it’s over!”

The process of forgiving, letting go, and moving on is the final step in restoring your Capacity for Trust. How do you know you’re ready to let go? When you’re able to reflect on the betrayal and experience inner peace. Yes, you may still recall the pain, but you’re able to claim a deeper sense of its role in your life.

In this final stage of the Seven Steps, it’s helpful to look back over your experience, reflect on what you learned, and think about what you can carry with you into the future. How will you behave differently the next time? How will you continue to build trust?

You can always choose to act differently in the quest to build more trustworthy relationships. Like picking up any new skill, learning to relate to yourself or others in different ways with heightened awareness takes practice, time, and patience. Start with small steps. Experiment with new behaviors and see what works. Focus on what is in your power to control. Trust in yourself and in your newfound awareness of compassion and courage.

As you let go and move forward, you benefit from the increased energy that arises from focusing on the present. We all spend so much time thinking about the future—the mountain of tasks, projects, and big decisions that will get us to where we want to be. We often forget to reflect on what kind of person we want to be along our journey and once we arrive. As you tidy up the remnants of your passage through the Seven Steps, remember: trust begins with you.

 

We spend so much time focusing on the future that we
often forget who we want to be along the way.

 

The Seven Steps Help You Heal

Going through the pain of betrayal and rebuilding trust in yourself and your co-workers takes a lot of hard work, courage, and compassion. Healing is neither spontaneous nor swift. The process of forgiving, letting go, and moving on, however, realigns you with your sense of self. By being more fully aware of who you are, you expand your Capacity for Trust in yourself and in others, and reap the benefits of the boundless energy that renewed trust brings.

Each of us works through the Seven Steps in our own way. Some of us need to spend more time on some steps than on others. Remember, intense feelings come in waves, so you may progress through several steps only to go back to earlier steps as additional feelings surface. Working through one experience may kick up the pain from previous experiences, and you may need to work on multiple steps at once. The order you work through the steps isn’t important. What’s important is that you, in your own way, go through the entire process with honesty and integrity.

By facing betrayal in a conscious way, you can move toward greater understanding of the value of your experience and develop a greater Capacity for Trust in yourself and in others. Only in this way can you find value and meaning in your pain and enrich your relationships in the future. Only in this way can you embrace the gifts that rebuilding trust offers.

Trust Building in Action

Reflecting on Your Experience

1. Think about the last time you were betrayed. Can you see ways that you contributed to this breach of trust?

2. Think about a time when you let down someone else. How did you deal with the impact of your actions?

What needs to happen for forgiveness to take place?

What do you need the most in order to rebuild trust?

What do you think the person you betrayed most needs from you?

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Trust Tip Life’s most painful experiences provide life’s most powerful lessons if you are willing to look, listen, and learn! The choices you make today create your tomorrow.

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