Have you ever realized that someone you trusted—or something you believed in—wasn’t what you thought it was?
Disillusionment occurs when your beliefs shatter against your reality: like when you find out that a leader you’ve admired for years has committed terrible harms.
Or when you discover that someone you’ve deeply trusted is capable of deceit.
Or when the career you’ve spent decades dreaming about turns out to make you miserable.
Disillusionment is one of the most overlooked and isolating forms of grief, because technically, the “external thing”—the person, the leader, the institution—isn’t dead or gone.
But the relationship you had with it is.
The belief you had in it is.
The version of you who trusted it is.
And the story of your life that you had before is.
Disillusionment is the plot twist we never asked for, and tends to usher in a new chapter of life. In this month’s newsletter, I’m giving voice to disillusionment—the experience of it, the impact of it, the many layers of it—and sharing how we can slowly begin to heal when the world we believed in falls apart.
This year—at dinner parties, in bookclubs, while scrolling the headlines with friends—I keep hearing different versions of the same grief:
I believed in this and built my life around it—
but I don’t believe in it anymore.
Collectively, many of us are watching institutions we once trusted fail us, in more shocking ways than we believed possible (see: the Cornell 7, the Epstein files, the diminishment of due process, etc. etc. etc.). We were taught that hard work would lead to stable and fulfilling careers, but skilled workers are being laid off, it takes the average unemployed person 5+ months to find work, and even those with reliable jobs are confronting another broken promise: that success and achievement don’t actually make life feel meaningful.
These collapses of collective belief leave us feeling unmoored and unprotected—and experiences of disillusionment in our trusted relationships can be even more acute.
Last year, I learned that my deeply trusted partner of nearly four years had been living a double life…. a staggering betrayal. In a previous newsletter—before I found out about his double life—I wrote of him:
My partner was a beautiful man with a gentle heart and brilliant mind. I’d supported him through heart surgery, major depression, and the death of a friend. He’d supported me through burnout, chronic anxiety, and the death of a family member. Over the course of our relationship, we’d shown each other a degree of safety and love that neither of us had believed possible before. I’d never been treated so gently—with such tenderness.
I’ll never forget the alarming quiet when I read the message revealing his deception. The scream of the silence. The blood rushing in my ears. The total numbness, which transformed quickly into white-hot rage.
My vision blurred and, like a child’s flipbook, years’ worth of memories flashed before my eyes, all being rewritten in real time.
I’ll share more about this betrayal in next month’s newsletter, but for now, I’ll offer that the worst part—for me—was the cognitive dissonance: reconciling the story I’d believed with the painful truth.
For four years, I had trusted in my partner’s goodness viscerally. The hardships in our relationship—the sacrifices I’d made for it—had felt worthwhile, because I was fighting for a love that felt pure and beautiful.
Now, I lost not only my belief in his goodness—I lost the meaning of my memories. I lost the story of this great love of my life.
In the year since, as I’ve shared my experience with others, I’ve been astounded by how many people have offered kindred stories:
My long-time mentor had been sleeping with his students.
My husband was cheating the entirety of our marriage.
The career I’d spent a lifetime dreaming of felt terrible.
My priest was abusing children in the congregation.
My best friend had been lying to me for decades.
The common thread that linked these many stories together was the layers of loss: of belief, of self, of trust, and of story.
The Layers of Disillusionment
Disillusionment is like an iceberg: only some of our losses are visible above the surface. The majority remain in the dark, isolating us in sorrows we struggle to find language for.
Recognizing these layers of grief can help us move toward understanding and healing. When you experience disillusionment:
You lose the belief you held.
This is the visible portion of the iceberg. You believed in this person or institution, and now, that belief—in all its potency and familiarity, in all the ways it anchored you—is gone. What felt like a core pillar of belief has been kicked over, and your reality feels shaky and unstable.
You lose trust.
If one person or institution you fundamentally trusted turns out to be harmful or deceptive, who’s to say that the others can’t, too? Distrust is like a contagion; your heart, which one felt so beautifully open, may harden with vigilance and skepticism. You may begin to wonder if the trust you gave was naivety. Self-judgment can be your mind’s attempt to regain control in a situation where you were made to feel powerless: “had you seen it, you could have prevented it.”
You lose the version of you who trusted it.
I remember the version of me who fundamentally trusted my partner. In an increasingly chaotic world that offered a new emergency every day, I had a relationship was a place where I experienced unwavering conviction, love, and safety. In that place of trust, I was open. I gave grace. I believed in goodness as a quality and fact of life.
Since the betrayal, that version of me feels like a distant stranger. I’m much, much slower to trust. I’m far more vigilant and boundaried. In some ways, these protections feel like an appropriate response to being deeply hurt. But in other ways, I miss that open-hearted, deeply trusting person. She died when her belief died. She’s become someone new.
You lose your memories.
When we lose someone to death, treasured memories can make the pain more tolerable. Though you’ve lost someone precious, your heart finds an existential sort of solace in the beauty you shared—in the fact that this soul was a part of your story—in the fact that it happened at all.
But in the case of disillusionment—particularly if your experience involved ongoing deceit or dishonesty—even your memories are tainted. All along, there was crucial information you did not know, tainting all of your memories in red.
You lose a myth that gave shape and direction to your life.
Strong belief in a person, a faith, or a version of success gives our stories a narrative arc. When we believe in something—really believe in its goodness, its beauty, its integrity—we build our lives around it. We devote our time to it. We create routines around it. We take risks for it.
These devotions feel meaningful when they’re in the name of what we believe in. But when we lose that belief, the legitimizing reason for the ways we gave of ourselves is no longer true. The story we told of our journey—and the role that journey played in the overall arc of our lives—shifts dramatically.
“The great love of my life” becomes “the betrayal I learned to survive.”
“Achieving the goal of my dreams” becomes “struggling to find meaning beyond success.
“Being part of a trusted community” becomes “finding the courage to speak out against the very people I once looked to for belonging.”
The (Non-Linear) Road to Healing
How do we heal from disillusionment? And what does life look like afterwards?
The journey is non-linear, but for many, a crucial first step is being witnessed in the gravity of our losses. It can be painfully isolating to try to explain that we haven’t just lost a relationship or a belief—we’ve lost the meaning of our memories, a version of ourselves, and a story of our lives.
We need space where we can be seen in the contradictions we’re holding: the love we held then, alongside the fury we hold now; the beautiful memories, alongside the painful new information. Being with someone who can hold those conflicting realities can create space to feel, and alchemize, the wound of grief.
Anger is essential, here, too. Whether a trusted lover or teacher deceived you—or whether you were betrayed by our culture’s false promises—it’s meaningful to feel rage about these betrayals, and rage at what believing them cost you.
Unfelt anger hardens like armor around the heart. Like I wrote in my book Stop People Pleasing, “Anger can feel like a destructive force: urgent, ruinous, and vengeful. But even when anger is the fuel that powers our engine, we are still the ones in the driver’s seat: we still get to decide where we go.”
I’ve watched my clients channel their anger into healthy personal boundaries; into advocacy for reparations and systemic change; into the desire to help others heal.
Gradually, alongside our grief and anger, new meaning begins to emerge from our story.
Disillusionment is the plot twist we never asked for. At first, it feels like it renders our past futile—but if we look closely enough, for long enough, we can find new meaning growing in the ashes of what was.
Personally, I never, in a million years, would have chosen this betrayal. I would never wish this experience on anyone.
I also know that this experience has increased my discernment and my non-negotiable bottom-lines for transparency and honesty. It made me effortlessly protective of myself in a way that even years spent healing from people-pleasing never touched. I also developed a diverse web of intimacy and meaning outside of partnership—from friends, to art, to stillness and nature—and my life is more well-rounded now than it’s ever been.
We don’t need to be “grateful” for what happened, or “glad” we suffered the way we did. I’m certainly not. But this process of finding meaning, or seeds of value, in a life-altering experience of disillusionment helps us regain agency after feeling grossly disempowered.
It helps us make sense of an otherwise senseless experience—and helps us remember that we can’t control what happened, but we can control how we react to it.
In this way, disillusionment often slowly—even imperceptibly—ushers in a new chapter of life.
I’ve watched disillusioned lovers reeling from divorce slowly rebuild vibrant lives with themselves at the center.
I’ve watched disillusioned achievers step back from the hustle, re-evaluate their sense of meaning, and embrace careers that may look humbler than they would have imaged—with more time for nature, family, stillness, and peace.
I’ve watched those reeling from a collapse in faith emerge from that dark night of the soul with a newfound sense of purpose in new places—art, love, connection.
Each time, a new belief. A new version of you. A new story of your life.
If you’re experiencing disillusionment, there are two ways I’d love to support you:
For those who are disillusioned in the realm of work, burnout, and success, Early Bird Enrollment for the Hustle to Heart Bookclub ends on November 1. We’re an intimate bookclub of achievers seeking meaning and fulfillment beyond success. Through thought-provoking reads and rich conversation, we support one another as we trade burnout and achievement-chasing for presence, meaning, and vitality. Learn more and join us here.
As a transition coach, I work with many people who have experienced disillusionment in relationships, faith, work, and beyond. Together, we help you process and grieve what’s ended; find meaning and purpose in this chapter of your story; and slowly envision, and step into, a more vital, self-trusting chapter of life. You can learn more about my transition coaching work, and apply to work with me one-on-one here.
Sending all my care,
Hailey
PS: I’m considering offering a small, facilitated, 6-month discussion/coaching group for women who have experienced disillusionment and betrayal in close relationships (partnership, family, friendship). If this is something you’d be interested in, send me an email at hailey@haileymagee.com and let me know. You don’t need to share your story unless you want to; I’d simply love to know whether this kind of space would feel valuable to you.