Autism and Betrayal: Why Broken Trust Hurts so Deeply

A SHATTERING OF REALITY

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, in a way to make sense of our world that aligns with our internal structure and processing.

When other people deceive, betray, manipulate or cause harm to us without acknowledgement or accountability, it can shatter our internal worldview of the built safety and trust that we truly believed we had created in relation to this person. It creates a cognitive and emotional dissonance, that is not simply “this person hurt me” it’s more like “this breaks the rules of reality as I understand it to be”.

The aftermath of being betrayed by who you believed was your ‘safe person’ can create shock, deep confusion and lengthy rumination. This amplifies 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 both unsafe, unjust and fundamentally wrong.

A soul violation

When we naturally feel emotions intensely and have strong internal moral codes, it makes sense that betrayal can hit harder and stay longer. It’s not just that the behaviour was hurtful, it’s that it doesn’t make sense. The mismatch between our inner truth and external reality can be profoundly destabilising. It is often described as being a violation of our soul or a desecration of our sacred inner world, especially when we had previously held immense trust in the person who hurt us.

Layers of trauma

On top of this, many autistic people grow up feeling misunderstood, often being told their reactions are too much, too sensitive or too rigid. So, when something truly unfair happens and it’s invalidated, dismissed or minimised, it triggers old unresolved wounds. We are not just processing the current betrayal, we are experiencing an amplification of many previous imprints of relational trauma in addition to the current pain, all at once. No wonder it hits hard and feels so overwhelming.

Secondary invalidation

When we share our experiences with friends, family or seek professional help, we hope to be validated and finally understood. Sometimes, even when people mean well, your experience and pain can be further invalidated or dismissed by a lack of neurodivergent understanding. 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 a bond, they were part of your inner world, the part of you that believed in and wholeheartedly offered connection and trust. 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.

Healing 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.

Which healing therapy is most effective?

The autistic experience is highly diverse, the first place to start is by understanding you own internal processes and matching a therapeutic modality to your natural neurology. Which is why finding neurodivergent affirming support is so important.

For example, if you have a strong need to intellectually understand what happened or are highly visual, it is counter-intuitive to completely ignore these neurological needs. Modalities such as IFS (Internal Family Systems) can help you build narratives through your inner world that intrinsically make sense to you, whilst also guiding you to the somatic (physical body) responses where emotions and traumatic imprints are held.

Above all else though, studies consistently show that the therapeutic relationship will always be more important for healing than the modality used. It is important to work with someone who does not pathologise neurodivergence or see it as disordered and will take the time to understand how you process in a way that works for you.

Healing doesn’t mean forgetting that it ever happened, it involves weaving and integrating the experience into your new reality in a way that makes sense to you.

Neurodivergent-affirming counselling sessions available to book online below