15 – The Hazards of Love, part 2

There’s nothing like love—nothing so wonderful, and nothing so potentially hurtful. What do you do when the reality of love isn’t even close to the dream of it? Join us for today’s podcast—a follow-up on last week’s podcast—as we explore the cause, struggle, and solutions for the third, and most difficult, hazard of love.

Show Notes

Hazards of love, Unhealed Wounds

We long for love, we search for love, we anticipate the presence of love in our lives in a romantic relationship. And then often times, when it happens, it may be great at the beginning or it may not be great at the beginning. It may be that the reality of love is just so much more difficult than what we had hoped it would be.

So what do you do when the one that you love, the one to whom you’ve given your heart, the one that you trust with all of who you are, has hurt you or betrayed you?

In Webster, it defines betray as to hurt someone. That someone who trusts you such as a friend or a relative hurts you by not giving help or by doing something morally wrong. For us, betrayal is when somebody takes that trust that we’ve put in them, our hearts, and they do something so opposite of what real love is that we can only look at them and wonder how we ever loved them to begin with. So when betrayal comes into play in our romantic relationships, when betrayal becomes a part of love and living the love relationship, it can be extremely difficult to recover from that. To be able to move back into that same relationship–the one that caused you hurt–and feel as though anything can heal it, anything can bring you back to a place of trust.

 

How do you heal from betrayal or how do you even start?

Obviously in a 15-20 minute podcast, there’s no way we’re going to unearth the way to heal from these things, but there are a few tips that we can give you if you’ve been hurt, if you have the sense that you’ve been betrayed, or if it’s very clear that the person who loves you, and that you love, has betrayed you. There are some things that you can do to prepare your heart and mind to move into healing and forgiveness and restoration.

 

One of those things is realize that restoration takes time.

Healing takes time. It’s a process. It’s not a one and done. It’s not like you can sit there and say, okay, I forgive you and then everything’s good and then you move on. Even if in your heart you purpose to forgive, even if you make the conscious decision to forgive and to move forward, that hurt is buried deep in your heart. Often times, it’ll just pop up when you least expect it. And when that happens, when it pops up, it can seem as devastating as the first moment you were hit with that betrayal. It’s so easy to want to punish back.

 

This leads us to another step in how to heal from it: Resisting the urge to punish.

Its tempting to make the other person suffer because you suffered, or to do little things to let him know he screwed up. But that only drags out the process of us moving on.

Another aspect of punishing is that you withhold. You withhold your trust, you withhold relationship. You withhold even the small actions of forgiveness or relationship. You withhold yourself from being a part of their life again. We’re not trying to say there aren’t consequences when someone betrays us, because there are. There is a difference though between the kind of natural consequence and us deliberately making them pay as retribution and deliberately withholding. Sometimes maybe we can’t help it, and that part is what takes time. But we can’t make that deliberate choice to with...