What Business Betrayal Does to Your Body
“I was losing my mind. I started losing my hair. I couldn’t even show up in any professional way because I was so beside myself.”
Vivian* ran a successful business before someone she trusted betrayed her. When she describes the aftermath, she doesn’t start with the money she lost. She starts with her hair.
When business owners tell me about a betrayal, the financial and legal damage comes first, because those are the parts with numbers attached. But a few minutes in, almost every one of them starts describing physical symptoms: the sleep that never came back, the appetite that disappeared or doubled, the stomach that dropped every time the phone lit up.
“I lost a lot of sleep. My mind was racing,” Christine*, an online coach, told me. “And I gained weight. I think I gained between 20 and 30 pounds.”
“I wasn’t sleeping. It was really scary, and it just lingered for so many years,” said Bonnie*, a group practice owner.
One founder I interviewed ended up in the hospital when the sustained stress of repeated betrayals overwhelmed his health, and he was away from his company for months afterward.
If this is happening to you, you’re not imagining it, and you’re not being dramatic. Research on betrayal has found that people harmed by someone close to them report more physical health complaints and more sick days than people who experienced other kinds of harm, and in those studies, betrayal predicted the physical symptoms where other types of difficult experiences did not.
The symptoms happen because your body treats reminders of the betrayal as present-day danger. A contract, an unexpected email, the sight of a person who resembles the one who hurt you, each of these can start the same physical stress response the original betrayal did, and a stress response designed to last minutes ends up lasting months. That response controls your sleep, your appetite, your digestion, and your energy, which is why the symptoms show up there first.
Ruth*, a business owner betrayed by her partner, still sees the person occasionally in public. “I feel like every time I see her, I kind of have this panic attack.” That was five years after the betrayal ended. The legal case closes, the money gets written off, and the physical symptoms continue anyway.
And they continue because of how your brain stored the betrayal.
Your brain keeps two records of an experience like this. One is the story, the facts and the timeline, and that record lives in the part of your brain you think with. The other is the alarm, the physical reaction itself, and that record lives in an automatic part of your brain that reacts before your thinking starts.
Waiting it out, pushing through, and explaining it to yourself are all strategies aimed at the thinking record, and the alarm was never stored there. I’ve written a full explanation of these two systems, and why insight alone doesn’t resolve betrayal, in why you haven’t fully moved past your business betrayal.
When the betrayal gets resolved at the level where the alarm is stored, the physical symptoms are usually where people notice the difference first. Tanya*, a business owner several years past her betrayal, described what that felt like: “It took a long time for my body to get to a place where it was like, I don’t need to be on alert every time I see my phone. Every time I think about going to work. I don’t need to dread it anymore.”
Sleeping through the night, eating like yourself, opening email without your chest tightening: those are usually the changes owners came looking for in the first place, whether or not they had words for them.
And if part of what makes the symptoms worse is that nobody around you understands what you’re going through, that experience has a name too. Almost every owner I interview describes it, and I’ve written about the loneliness of business betrayal.
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 with your questions.
*Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of the people interviewed for this series.