After betrayal trauma, one side of the coin is the constant fear that you will uncover another secret. The other side is the constant fear that you are never doing enough. Both are ways to combat anticipatory grief. Living in a constant state of anticipatory grief is exhausting and can prevent you from forming healthy friendships and romantic relationships.

Anticipatory grief is the collection of feelings and coping strategies that happen when you are anticipating a loss. It is often used to describe how people feel when a loved one is close to death, but it is equally useful to describe the symptoms suffering from betrayal trauma.

In my last post I talked about anticipatory grief in relationships. Today I will write about anticipatory grief with yourself and the one of the best strategies I have used to cope with it.

If you were betrayed as a child or teen, one way you might have managed the overwhelming hurt feelings is to convince yourself that you did something to cause the betrayal. While this is rarely true, it is a great coping strategy because it helps you to feel as though you have some power and control in a situation where you actually don’t. Having control is so important to humans. Not having it is a great source of stress.

If you believe that you did something to cause the betrayal, then you believe that if you change your behavior, you will be able to change the betrayal. So you keep trying different things to see if you can make a difference. For example, I regularly receive messages from teens on my Reddit forum who detail all of the ways they have tried to manage their parent’s affair, like stealing mom’s phone, or following dad after he gets out of work. In the short term, these actions can help you feel better, like you are doing something to help.

But in the long term, this pattern of behavior rarely changes the outcome of the affair, and only serves to make these teens feel as though they are powerless. Which can lead to trying to do more to stop the affair, which ultimately leads to feeling like they are never doing enough.

I want to distinguish between never doing enough and more importantly, never doing the right thing. One is an issue of volume, the other is an issue of choice. I often feel like whatever I am doing, maybe I should be doing something else. Like, the thing I am doing is not worthy or impactful enough. Like if I had just chosen more wisely, then I would have found the solution to whatever issue I am facing. While this is surely part of our always-on world, it has its roots in the anticipatory grief of my childhood.

There is no one perfect thing to be doing at any moment. There is only the next right thing to do, a strategy which has been heralded by teachers from Carl Jung to Glennon Doyle to Anna in Frozen 2. You can only make the best decision you can in that moment with the information that you have.

If you struggle to decide what is the next right thing, sometimes it helps to ask yourself, what is the loss I am aniticipating? What is the grief I am trying to protect myself from?

The betrayal was never your fault. You never had any control. Your coping strategies were good at one time, but you deserve to trust yourself and others now. Need more help? Ask me a question!