Betrayal is one of the deepest wounds a human can carry — not just because of what happened, but because of the energetic imprint it leaves behind.
When betrayal comes early, it doesn't just teach the mind something — it teaches the body, the heart, and the nervous system. When the betrayal has come from our caregivers the very people who were supposed to love us, keep us safe, and foster our sense of belonging in the world, it teaches that connection isn’t safe, that trusting others is dangerous and that perhaps maybe, trusting myself is dangerous.
The very parts of us that long for closeness are forced to adapt. They learn to duck, weave, armour up, or disappear. They do whatever it takes to avoid feeling that devastating rupture again.
The Energetic Imprint of Early Betrayal
Betrayal creates a deep rupture in the fabric of trust and it doesn’t go away. For many people, the pain of betrayal doesn’t start in adult relationships. It begins much earlier, in the formative years of childhood or adolescence, when someone they relied on — a parent, caregiver, or close friend — didn’t show up in a way that felt safe or consistent.
When betrayal happens early, it etches a kind of template into the nervous system. One that says: “People can’t be trusted.” Or “I have to protect myself because no one else will.” These imprints often live just beneath the surface subtly shaping how we engage, withdraw, or defend ourselves in relationships.
In human terms, that energetic scar can show up as:
Hypervigilance, constantly scanning for signs of disloyalty or danger.
Emotional ducking and weaving , avoiding directness for fear of being hurt.
Self-sabotage, abandoning ourselves or others before they can abandon us.
Self-betrayal , silencing our needs and instincts in an effort to stay “safe.”
Avoidance of connection, having relationships that are light or transactional to avoid getting hurt.
Constant fawning an over-functioning to stay safe within relationships, over attaching, ignoring our own boundaries to avoid further harm.
At a body level, betrayal activates the primal fear of annihilation: "If the people I'm attached to hurt or abandon me, I might not survive." Many people with this wound feel misunderstood and lonely in relationships.
Early friendships and our first lessons in trust
While early caregiver betrayal leaves a profound mark, it's important to recognise that peer relationships — especially in late childhood and early adolescence — can also create powerful energetic imprints.
Many years ago, I was at a Trauma conference lead by Bessel van der Kolk. We were talking about how tween years developmentally, are important when it comes to relationships because they are the first experience we have with betrayal. He explained that the 9–12 year-old stage for kids and girls in particular, is a crucial time for learning about trust, loyalty, honesty, and boundaries. During this time, friendships often become intense and emotionally charged. Young people are testing the waters of emotional intimacy, authority, and social belonging outside of their families for the first time.
He said, ‘12 year old girls are the meanest people on the planet’, we all giggled because we could all relate at some level. This is not because they are inherently cruel, but because they are instinctively testing how far loyalty stretches, what betrayal feels like, and where their own boundaries begin and end.
These early friendship betrayals — being excluded, gossiped about, shamed, or losing a "best friend", can leave scars just as deep as familial betrayals. You may be thinking is there any way we can prevent this? Developmentally, these early close friendships give tweens practice for navigating their first intimate relationships in their teenage years. What is important as parents, is that we offer containment for our teenagers during these years so they are able to process these emotional experiences in a healthy way and they do this through our co-regulation. When you parent teenagers, you will find that what they need is a lot of containment to help them feel all the big feelings they are having which are often overwhelming because of their hormonal surges.
When they don’t receive that co-regulation and containment, they are left out on a limb to navigate this on their own and their nervous system will most likely be quite overwhelmed by this. They may develop unhealthy adaptive strategies to cope and what they will learn is that trust can be dangerous, speaking the truth gets you abandoned and ignored, and your vulnerability can be used against you.
For many women especially, these early relational wounds create an energetic template that later influences teenage romances, adult friendships, and even professional relationships.
Unless tended to, these imprints can quietly guide our choices, our trust levels, and our capacity for authentic connection, long into adulthood.
What happens when betrayal wounds show up at work?
Betrayal doesn’t just haunt our intimate relationships — it shows up everyday in our professional lives too. Most organisations lack any psychological safety and one of the reasons for this (there are many more) is that many people carry an unconscious expectation that colleagues, bosses, or teams will betray them.
As a result, they hold back: not speaking up in meetings, withholding ideas, disengaging from group dynamics, or interpreting neutral interactions through a lens of mistrust. Some may skip meetings or avoid collaborative projects altogether — not out of laziness, but because their nervous system is protecting them from what it perceives as a relational threat. The workplace becomes a battleground of unhealed childhood and teenage wounds, silently shaping how we show up or don’t.
What is the impact of our younger parts taking the lead in our adult relationships?
When betrayal wounds go unhealed, younger parts of ourselves — child parts, teenage parts — often step in to lead adult relationships.
These parts don’t have the skills for mature communication. They know how to survive, but not how to thrive. They know how to protect, but not how to open.
So we might find ourselves communicating indirectly, lashing out, withdrawing without explanation, testing others unconsciously, or assuming we’ll be misunderstood before we’ve even spoken. Our inner child has no place running our adult relationships and when it dominates our behaviour and decisions it often leads to poor choices and outcomes.
Poor communication is not just a skill gap; it's often a symptom of an unhealed betrayal wound.
How betrayal wounds shape who we draw in
One of the most painful patterns is that unhealed betrayal often pulls us toward people who cannot meet us, as friends, lovers or partners, unless they’ve done their own deep healing work.
Without realising it, we may magnetise:
People who are unavailable, distracted, or unreliable.
People who cannot understand or hold our unspoken pain.
People who, energetically, mirror the early betrayals we experienced.
It's as if the energetic wound keeps echoing outward, unconsciously seeking resolution, while simultaneously protecting itself from getting too close. This will keep happening until we do our own healing, the pattern tends to repeat.
What most people find when they do the healing work on these relational wounds, is that they charge they felt when connecting with people who couldn’t meet their needs goes away. They start being attracted to a different type of person.
