The betrayal happened. That is not in dispute.
What is in dispute — even if you are not yet ready to dispute it — is the meaning you have assembled around it.
The human mind, in the aftermath of betrayal, moves with extraordinary speed from the event to the interpretation. From what happened to what this means. And the interpretation, if left unexamined, becomes the operating system through which all subsequent experience is filtered. Every new relationship assessed for the hidden knife. Every offer of trust evaluated against the memory of the cost.
This is the second wound. The first was inflicted by the other person. The second is self-inflicted, sustained, and often more damaging than the first.
You are allowed to be wronged without making the wrongness the central fact of your existence. These are separate choices, and most people only notice they had the second choice much later than they should have.
The Stoic teaching on this is precise. Epictetus: it is not the things that disturb us but our judgments about them. He did not mean this dismissively — he was beaten as a slave. He meant it as a technical observation about where suffering lives. The event lives in the past. The suffering lives in the story you are telling about the event, right now, in the present.
The Vedantic addition: the one who was betrayed is not your deepest self. The Atman — the witnessing consciousness — was present through the betrayal. It was not betrayed. It cannot be betrayed. The personality was hurt. The person was used. But what you are, most fundamentally, was untouched.
This is not an invitation to minimise what happened. It is an invitation to locate it correctly — in the story, not in the self.
Betrayal teaches you something. Usually about your assessment of character. Sometimes about your own needs and blindspots. Often about what you were willing to overlook because the relationship served something in you.
These are useful lessons. The anger that guards them is not the lesson.