Feeling Betrayed By a Family Member? Here’s How To Cope

Social rejection by someone close to you can feel as acute as physical pain. If you felt as though your heart broke, or you’d been punched in the gut, that’s because social rejection and physical pain share the same neural circuitry in the brain, according to research by Naomi Eisenberger, a professor of social psychology at UCLA.

From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes sense: As social animals, we benefit from avoiding rejection. “To the extent that social rejection or exclusion is a threat to survival, feeling ‘hurt’ by these experiences may be an adaptive way to prevent them,” Eisenberger wrote.

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Write a letter but don’t send it. If the situation is too toxic to touch, then write your letter, but keep it to yourself. The act of writing will help you process your feelings and give you a sense of control that your father-in-law took away. And because you are not sending it, you can be as caustic as you like!

Similarly, you could try writing about the trauma for 15 to 30 minutes for three to five days straight. This is a type of therapeutic writing, developed by James Pennebaker, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, that has been shown to improve emotional well-being and help people create a more cohesive narrative about a troubling event. The instructions are simple: Let go and explore your deepest feelings and thoughts about the betrayal. Write continuously and don’t censor yourself.

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