A loved one’s betrayal can alter your world
As well as being emotionally throttled, you also may have suffered some financial losses. When the person you once trusted the most has run up your credit cards or taken from you for years, you may feel that you were living a lie the entire time.
What many people can’t seem to take into their minds is that when we lose the person closest to us, our entire world is also lost. The simple tasks become impossible; our hearts are so broken we can trip over the pieces that made us who we thought we were. No one can be expected to function fully when this happens.
The death of a loved one is very hard for most people. Perhaps the only thing more difficult is betrayal. When you find out that your lover is a liar and a cheat, your entire way of looking at the world is altered. When you have trusted someone for years, and end up feeling used and abused, you just can’t take enough showers to get the creepiness off of you. Ugh.
As well as being emotionally throttled, you also may have suffered some financial losses. When the person you once trusted the most has run up your credit cards or taken from you for years, you may feel that you were living a lie the entire time.
When this happens to older people, it can lead to financial devastation as well as emotional loss. This kind of financial abuse often goes unreported because the victims are embarrassed because they let this person who pretended to love them into their lives. The truth is they fell prey to one of the fastest-growing crimes, senior financial abuse.
Please, if you suspect this is going on with someone you know, step in and say something or call the authorities.
The mental disconnect and confusion about what happened can be overwhelming.
Some people go manic and start building a dossier to somehow get even; others give up because they are unsure of what to do and don’t want to deal with “the system,” for that process is also very taxing on the soul.
It can take time to recover. How long it takes will depend on what was taken from you. The loss of a loved one under these circumstances is quite a hard pill to swallow, and many people try to just forgive and forget.
But please consider that if someone did this to you, they can do it again, perhaps to you or to someone you know. Your story, told to the proper people, can stop this person from hurting others.
That said, sometimes reporting on what happened is part of the healing process, and sometimes it’s not. Look for peace where you can find it, and hopefully you have a couple of friends or family members who can give you their support.
This is not an easy thing to go through, and the older you get, the worse it is. I hate the idea that old friends cannot be trusted, so I will continue trusting, but I will also be more careful in the future. Dr. Barton Goldsmith, a psychotherapist in Westlake Village, Calif., is the author of "The Happy Couple: How to Make Happiness a Habit One Little Loving Thing at a Time." Follow his daily insights on Twitter @BartonGoldsmith