"If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole."
On a site like this most replies will take you at face value and try to comfort you. Alternative take: you are the common factor in all these supposed betrayals. If we asked the others, do you think we'd get different perspectives on what happened?
That's like what they said right after it happened: that I deserved to be treated like that. That it was my fault. And for along time I believed them. And I considered deeply how I could have done things that worked better.
In any situation, I am okay to take the blame and responsibility. So as long as as it's fair I'll own what's mine.
In this situations it took me a long time to see it wasn't fair. These people had exploited my willingness to own responsibility, and blamed their own actions on me, to disguise what they had done and avoid consequences for it. They also exploited their closeness to me, knowing that I would trust what they said, and likely shoulder blame they wanted to put on me. One reason I did that was because I just expected they would do the same for me in return, and we would each take responsibility and work out a win-win.
The hardest part for me was letting go of the idea that I could rely on these people. That took me a long time, one reason is because they were so close to me.
Now I've realized I need to be a lot more responsible with how I take responsibility for things, and not try to own stuff that's not my fault. And that I need to more quickly and robustly stand up for myself when people try to hurt me, and not let them dominate the narrative with lies. I used to think such things didn't matter, then I faced the consequences of being silent in the face of other people's bad behaviour and fake stories, and of trusting them to feel about me the same way I felt about them.
Anyway, it's good to take this opportunity to say this. It took me a long time to get to this point.
I didn't come here to out anyone, just to get some advice on how I recover from this emotionally and on strategies for protecting myself in future.
I've paraphrased the descriptions of the other people involved to protect their exact identities and relationships with me. The exact details reveal the worser extent of the betrayals.
I'm not going to out them here because it's not considerate of me to make the choice on their behalf, to expose who they are on HN.
On a site like this most replies will take you at face value and try to comfort you. Alternative take: you are the common factor in all these supposed betrayals. If we asked the others, do you think we'd get different perspectives on what happened?