The Loneliness of Business Betrayal
“When it happens to you, it’s a lonely journey.”
Hannah* said that before I’d asked her a single question. She’d been betrayed by someone she trusted in her business, and the loneliness was what she wanted to talk about first, before the money, before the legal mess, and before the story itself.
One of the first discoveries entrepreneurs make after a betrayal is that almost no one in their life knows what to say. The friends who would normally listen try to fix it, or they offer advice that doesn’t help. “My friends love me, but they don’t always get the business piece of it,” Monique*, a product business owner, told me.
As a therapist who works with business owners after a betrayal, I hear about the loneliness in nearly every conversation, and it usually has less to do with being alone than with being around people who don’t understand the problem.
The colleagues who might understand are often the ones you can’t tell, because the legal situation isn’t resolved, or because the person who betrayed you still works in your industry. “You’ve got to be super careful who you talk to,” Hannah said, “because the only people who would really understand the nuances and layers are people that are in the industry.”
So the people most likely to understand are the ones you have the most reason to stay silent around, and the silence starts to feel like proof that something is wrong with you.
“I felt like I must be the only one,” said Nicole*, a practice owner. “There must be something wrong with me, because nobody else has experienced this.”
There’s a lot of writing about business betrayal, but most of it is by lawyers, for lawyers, about the legal steps to take next. Very little of it is for the person who can’t sleep and is starting to wonder why they can’t seem to get past it.
Researchers have measured what loneliness does to your health. One analysis, published in the medical journal Heart, combined studies that followed people for years and found that lonely and isolated people had a 29% higher risk of heart disease and a 32% higher risk of stroke.
Research on betrayal in close relationships shows something similar: people harmed by someone they trusted report more anxiety, more depression, more physical illness, and more severe symptoms of PTSD than people harmed by strangers or in accidents.
Betrayal also removes the exact people you would normally ask for help, because they’re the ones who hurt you.
Beth*, a business owner betrayed by her partner, described living with those symptoms. “I was on sleep medication for insomnia. My doctor gave me additional doses to take in the middle of the night when I was having a panic attack.” That was 5 years after the betrayal. “I think I’ve moved on, but there are times when I wake up with a panic attack and take medication to go back to sleep.”
If any of this sounds like your experience, you’re not alone, even though the silence around business betrayal makes it seem that way. As Paula*, another owner, put it: “Nobody I really know has escaped business betrayals. But nobody’s talking about it, either.”
The loneliness is part of the injury, and so are the symptoms that come with it. The sleepless nights, the panic, the dread when the phone rings are common responses to betrayal, and in some people they’re serious enough to be diagnosed as anxiety or PTSD, which means they deserve real treatment rather than a pep talk about lessons learned.
Friends can listen, and lawyers can handle the legal case, but a therapist who understands what betrayal does to a person, and to a business owner specifically, is the one who can treat the symptoms.
If you want to read about why business betrayal is different from a business lesson you failed to learn, I’ve written about that.
And to find out what recovery looks like, I run one-day intensives for entrepreneurs after business betrayal. You can read about how the intensive works by clicking the button below, or reach out to me directly with your questions.
*Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of the people interviewed for this series.