How to Make Sense of a Relationship Betrayal

In a close relationship, whether with a romantic partner or a friend, you expect to be treated honestly. If the situation requires this person to stand up and support you, a normal response should be that they do so without missing a beat. However, what happens when the person’s behavior falls short of this expectation?

Perhaps you are very close to a coworker with whom you’ve made an arrangement that, when the two of you are in competition for the same outcome (such as landing a promotion), the other person will step aside and put you front and center into the number one spot. The deal is that the next time an opportunity arises, you will reciprocate. Much to your surprise, your friend puts themselves in the running now for that prized outcome. Making things worse, this person claims to anyone within earshot that you lack the skill set and don’t deserve this advancement.

Betrayal and Anger

According to Gansu University’s Chao-Zheng Huang and colleagues (2024), betrayal is a form of deception, or “self-serving decision-making in which individuals are more likely to lie when the benefits outweigh the harm to others” (p. 1). Your co-worker's behavior clearly fits this definition. Theoretically, people rarely engage in this form of deception with people they consider their close friends. However, as Huang et al. propose, anger can get in the way and throw logic to the winds.

“Changes in external circumstances and psychological pressure” are conditions that can provoke emotions of anger, anxiety, and tension, the authors suggest. In your case, the change in external circumstances would be the provocation for the betrayal.

Anger could ruin the calculus that would have let your original agreement stand. Enraged about the possibility of losing out or just anxious that the next promotion will never materialize, the fact that you were supposedly friends now seems less relevant to your back-stabbing ex-buddy.

Testing the Anger-Betrayal Connection

The Gansu U. researchers presented their 50 participants (average age 24 years old) with an onscreen coin estimating task in which participants interacted with a partner at different levels of closeness (friend, acquaintance, or experimental assistant). The participant and the partner had three seconds to estimate the number of coins in the image of a jar. Participants saw clear images and their partners saw blurry ones (for only one second). The rewards of the two were contingent on the accuracy of their guesses.

The experiment was set up as a “win-win” situation in which deception meant that the participant lied on behalf of the partner to maximize both of their gains. The closer the relationship, the more the participant should lie to benefit the partner.

To bring emotions into the study’s design, the researchers instructed participants in the “anger group” to write a narrative recollection of a recent event that made them angry; the control group wrote about a neutral event. Following this induction, participants completed a positive and negative mood scale. The question then became whether anger would alter the tendency to lie to benefit the partner.

The findings showed that, when angered, participants did, in fact, engage in behaviors that reduced the benefits both received when the partner was a friend, even though they also lost out on potential rewards. In explaining this finding, which the authors label as “kill the familiar,” they reason that anger ruins a person’s ability to think clearly, which caused participants to think less about their own gains and also to try to undercut their friend. Part of the destructive effect of anger is to decrease levels of trust, cooperation, and willingness to share.

Reinforcing this explanation, participants in the control condition whose written recall involved a neutral event were more likely to try to benefit their partner regardless of social distance. When both stand to gain and no anger is involved, why not tell a white lie to help someone else too?

If Anger Causes Betrayal, What’s Next?

These findings provide a clear-cut explanation of why you were undercut by this person you thought you could trust. Something about the competition with you for the same reward, which you thought of as a “win-win,” made this person so angry that all bets were off. Indeed, based on the negative remarks they made about your abilities, you could assume that something was going on that made this person so angry they sought to attack you.

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Whatever the explanation, though, the fact of the matter is that you lost not only an opportunity, but a friend. Additionally, the attack on your qualifications by someone who was supposed to be an ally makes you not just sad but insecure. You start to wonder if you did something wrong, or if you lack the qualifications you thought you had.

To help get you through this worrisome outcome, consider reframing it by neutralizing your own emotions. In the first place, by saying something nasty about you to other people, this person has made themselves (not you) look bad. Second, if anger was at the root of their behavior, again, this is not your problem. The fact that they went out of their way to try to wrest the promotion from your hands might also suggest that they saw you as a threat, which means that maybe you are the more capable one after all.

The whole incident might also become a teachable moment for you. Before entrusting another person with an important decision that could affect both of you, make sure that any possible negative emotions are set to rest ahead of time.

To sum up, it never feels good to be betrayed by someone else, especially someone you consider(ed) a friend. Using this experience to move on, you can get a better sense of whom to trust, and when.