Autism and Betrayal: Why Broken Trust Hurts so Deeply
A FOUNDATIONAL COLLAPSE
Many autistic individuals experience the world through a precise and personal framework, often constructed with founding values like integrity, truth, justice, and fairness. Our brains naturally seek patterns and consistency, to make sense of what we experience and how it aligns with our internal structure and processing.
Patterns and predictions
When someone who we feel close to breaks our trust, especially without acknowledgement or accountability, it doesn't just hurt, it can shatter our internal prediction system of what makes us feel safe. It causes a prediction mismatch that does not fit the pattern we had built in relation to this person.
For example, if you discover a close friend has been lying to you for months, it collapses the entire system of trust you have built with them, not just the thing they were lying about. For autistic people, trust is not casual, it is the foundation of the entire relationship, and it is built piece by piece over a long time.
The shattering of trust can cause our brain to spiral into detective mode, replaying every interaction in granular detail, trying to re-establish a sense of predictability. This leads us to question everything else in the relationship. What else have they been lying about? What other signs did I miss? Was anything true?
The damage caused
The aftermath of being betrayed by who you believed was a ‘safe person’ can create shock, deep confusion and lengthy rumination. This amplifies even further in situations where there is no possibility of repair or resolution, causing the loop to stay open and unresolved. The lack of closure can feel unsafe, unjust and fundamentally wrong, even affecting the sense of safety we have within our own system.
When we naturally feel emotions intensely and have strong internal moral codes, it makes sense that broken trust can hit harder and stay longer. The mismatch between our inner truth and external reality can be profoundly disorienting. It is often described as being a violation of our soul, especially when we had previously held immense trust in the person who hurt us.
A mismatch in morals, values and beliefs
With a deeply internalised sense of justice, rules, loyalty and honesty, autistic people often assume that everyone operates from the same moral code. It’s a shock to find out that people have vastly different values and beliefs. For example, some people genuinely believe it’s ok to lie if they think it doesn’t cause harm, others believe lying is acceptable as long as it gets them what they want, or if it protects themselves from getting hurt.
Secondary invalidation
When we share our experiences with friends, family or seek professional help, we hope to be validated in our feelings of complete shock and destabilisation of our relational framework. Phrases such as “your being too sensitive” or “just move on and forget about it” can feel minimising and completely mismatched to the enormity of how you truly feel.
How do we heal?
What was broken wasn’t just trust, they were part of your inner world, the part of you that believed in, and wholeheartedly offered connection. You held space for something that you valued and that in itself is beautiful. You trusted, you loved, and you let someone in, you didn’t do anything wrong, it’s not your fault that they couldn’t respect and honour that gift.
The healing work is focused on yourself and starts by validating your experience and how deeply hurt you feel. It helps to fully acknowledge the full range of your emotions such as grief for the person you thought they were, anger for how you were treated and sadness for the future vision you once held with them. It also involves rebuilding internal safety by reconnecting with your inner wisdom, gently untangling beliefs and past relational traumas, restoring self-trust and reconstructing your world view by integrating this experience in a way that makes sense to you.
Can the relationship be fixed after trust is broken?
For many autistic people once trust is broken, it is an absolute deal breaker, we are often either ‘all in’ or ‘all out’ of a relationship and it’s common to permanently walk away.
For those who choose to stay, it is possible to regain some level of trust but usually only when the betrayal is fully acknowledged, there is new stable and consistent pattern of safe behaviour and the moral mismatch has been addressed. We have to understand the ‘why’ behind the behaviour.
Even after all of that, your internal sense of safety may never fully revert back into what it originally was. Before the betrayal, you may have trusted with a kind of clean, uncomplicated innocence. Afterwards, even with full accountability there’s a quiet background knowing that they are capable of hurting you, it becomes part of your prediction file.
Ultimately, navigating trust, betrayal and repair as an autistic person is deeper and more textured than most others realise. It doesn’t make us too much, it simply highlights how deeply we value trust, honesty and safety. When we name these dynamics clearly, we honour our own boundaries and create relationships that are aligned with both our morals and our nervous system.
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