Reade Saunders

Betrayal in families rarely announces itself with drama. More often, it arrives quietly – through omission, reframed memories, strategic silences. It grows in the spaces between what was said and what was never allowed to be spoken.

For the betrayed, it begins as confusion. Something doesn’t add up, a strange withdrawal, a coolness that lingers. Then one day, the truth surfaces in the form of a document, a conversation, an alignment that can’t be undone. A parent, perhaps. Or a sibling. Someone who once claimed loyalty now standing at a distance, watching them fall.

He never expected it to come from her. Not really. Even with everything that came before – the instability, the rewriting of emotional history, the buried guilt – he hadn’t believed she would cross the line. Not this line.

But the line meant different things to each of them.

Psychologically, betrayal functions as a mechanism of self-preservation for the betrayer. Often, they rewrite the narrative to reduce internal conflict, to avoid the shame of their own failings. They cast the other as unhinged, unsafe, controlling, ‘psychopathic’ – whatever story is needed to relieve their cognitive dissonance. In this case, it was her son who wore the costume she tailored for him.

She believed herself justified. She had to. To believe otherwise would mean acknowledging her absence, her misjudgment, her own complicity.

And for him, the aftermath wasn’t anger, not at first. It was derealisation. A flickering uncertainty about what was real, who he had been in her eyes, whether he had ever been known at all. It’s the psychological residue of betrayal: a collapse of narrative continuity, what some clinicians refer to as identity fragmentation. When those who defined your earliest reality deny your integrity as an adult, the scaffolding of the self shudders.

He questioned himself. Maybe he had imagined things. Maybe her support of the person trying to destroy his family was… concern? Maybe she was protecting someone. Maybe she had to choose sides and simply chose wrong.

But the deeper truth was harder to sit with: she had seen what was happening, and still chose to stand elsewhere.

The betrayed, too, face a choice. Whether to pursue reconciliation, or to let the fracture remain. Whether to forgive or to protect. Whether to pass on the blade, or bury it.

He had known what it felt like to carry blame that wasn’t his. Now he was learning how to carry the absence of someone still alive.

In therapy, they talk about betrayal trauma – a wound inflicted by someone on whom survival once depended. It’s not just pain. It’s disorientation. It’s grief without a funeral. And it leaves questions that rarely find answers.

He hadn’t always been the innocent one. In other parts of his life, he had betrayed, too. Moments of retaliation. Misplaced rage. Failure to hold up the right mirror to someone who needed to be seen. But in those moments, at least, he now knows he was doing harm.

That’s the crucial divide: whether the betrayer acknowledges the wound – or disappears into their own moral logic.

She never saw it. Or couldn’t bear to. And so, for his own survival, he walked away.

He did not hand the wound to his children.

He held it.

Named it.

And began, quietly, to let it scar.