When Power Hurts You: A Path Through Betrayal by Leadership
Most of what I write is aimed at leaders. It's written from inside the role — for the person carrying the title, trying to lead well through a hard season, trying to get it right for the people who report to them. This piece is turned the other way around. It's for the ones being led, which of course still includes leaders, because every leader answers to someone too. A board. A bishop. A regional manager. A parent, even, in some seasons of life. Wherever you sit, there is very likely someone above you whose decisions shape your days, and this is for the times that person has let you down.
Perhaps you were passed over for a role you had genuinely worked toward, the one you quietly believed was yours, and watched someone else walk into it instead. I think, too, of a friend of mine who was recently dismissed from a senior management role over a concern he was blamed for — a concern he had actually raised repeatedly with his own manager, asking for help with a problem he couldn't fix alone, and was met with nothing. However it has shown up for you, the shape of the wound is the same: someone with power over your working life used it, or withheld it, in a way that hurt you.
For me personally, that looked like the time a leader threatened to disclose mistakes I'd made in order to suppress an opportunity she didn't want me to have — all while insisting it was "to protect me," and never once turning that same scrutiny on her own mistakes. It also looked like the time someone in a position of trust shared confidential information about me that they had no business sharing, and the fallout was devastating in ways I hadn't prepared for and hadn't earned.
If you are neurodivergent, it may have been that they never quite understood why you needed things done differently, and instead of curiosity, you got irritation. You watched them grow frustrated with the very things — the different pace, the need to ask again, the way your brain works — that a neurodivergent nervous system can't simply switch off.
Why this particular hurt cuts so deep
An ordinary disappointment and a betrayal by someone with authority over you are not the same kind of pain, and it helps to understand why. The psychologist Jennifer Freyd, who coined the term betrayal trauma, has spent decades studying what happens when harm comes from someone we depend on rather than a stranger. Her research on institutional betrayal extends the idea to organisations and the people who represent them: when a workplace, a church, or a leader we've placed our trust in fails to protect us, or actively uses information or power against us, the damage compounds. It isn't only the original event that hurts. It's the shattering of the assumption that this person or place was safe (Freyd, Betrayal Trauma Theory). That's worth sitting with for a moment if you're carrying something like this. The intensity of your reaction isn't an overreaction. It's a fairly precise measure of how much trust was actually there to begin with.
Others who forgave the unforgivable
Before the practical steps, I want to offer a couple of stories, because there is something steadying about knowing this has been done before — by people who had far more reason not to.
Corrie ten Boom's and her family hid Jewish neighbours from the Nazis and were sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp for it, where her sister Betsie died. In 1947, speaking at a church in Munich about God's forgiveness, a man approached her after her talk. She recognised him as one of the guards from the camp, a man who had stood over her and her sister in their most degrading moments. He didn't recognise her, but told her he had since become a Christian and asked whether she would forgive him. Ten Boom later wrote that she felt frozen, that her hand seemed to hang at her side "unable to move," and that forgiveness in that moment was not a feeling she could locate at all. She chose to raise her hand anyway, as an act of will rather than emotion, and only afterwards did something in her describe as warmth flood through the gesture (Guideposts, Corrie ten Boom on Forgiveness). Her own conclusion, one she repeated for the rest of her life, was that forgiveness is an act of the will, and the feeling follows the act rather than the other way around.
Nelson Mandela offers a story on a different scale entirely, though the mechanics are the same. After twenty-seven years in prison under a regime that had stripped him of decades of his life, Mandela didn't simply decline to seek revenge. He invited one of his former jailers to his presidential inauguration as an honoured guest, worked to integrate the very security forces that had oppressed his people, and established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission specifically to process the country's history without resorting to retribution. He is widely quoted as saying, "Forgiveness liberates the soul, it removes fear. That's why it's such a powerful weapon" (Beyond Intractability, Nelson Mandela). None of these three people forgave because what happened to them was small. They forgave in spite of its size.
A practical path through it
Forgiving a leader who has hurt you isn't a single decision made once and finished. It's a process with real steps. Psychological research into how forgiveness actually works gives us something more useful than a general instruction to "let it go." Here is a path drawn from that research, and from the stories above.
Name the feeling. Before anything else, put a precise word to what you're carrying. Betrayal. Humiliation. Grief. Rage. The simple act of putting a feeling into words — what psychologists call affect labeling — measurably calms activity in the amygdala, the brain's threat-response centre, by engaging the prefrontal cortex. This isn't a soft suggestion. It's a genuine regulation strategy, and it's the reason so many people feel calmer after saying out loud, "This is betrayal," or "What I'm feeling is grief," rather than sitting with a vague, unlabelled heaviness.
Let yourself feel the disappointment, tears included. You hoped for better from this person. You hoped they'd notice, protect you, keep your confidence, see your work, back you when it mattered. You didn't get it, and that gap between the hope and the reality deserves to be grieved rather than skipped over. The psychologist Pauline Boss, known for her work on what she calls ambiguous loss, has written about the damage done by rushing toward closure before a loss has actually been processed (Boss & Carnes, The Myth of Closure).
There is no prize for moving on quickly. Give the disappointment the time it needs.
Choose to forgive, even before you feel like it. This is the step most people get stuck on, because they're waiting for a feeling that forgiveness has arrived before they act on it. Everett Worthington, whose REACH model is one of the most researched frameworks in forgiveness psychology, draws a distinction between decisional forgiveness — a deliberate, willed choice to let go of the right to retaliate — and emotional forgiveness, which is the slower replacement of negative feelings with something more like empathy or peace (Charis Institute, Introduction to the REACH Model). Worthington's own research grew out of forgiving his mother's murderer, so this isn't theory built at a comfortable distance. Corrie ten Boom described precisely the same order of operations: the choice first, unaccompanied by any feeling at all, and the feeling arriving afterwards, if it arrives.
Is reconciliation a worthwhile goal?
Work out what is psychologically safe before you decide anything about the relationship. Forgiveness and reconciliation are not the same thing, and conflating them causes real harm. As the psychologist Lewis Smedes put it, "it takes one person to forgive, it takes two people to be reunited" (Psychology Today, Forgiveness vs. Reconciliation). You can forgive fully and still decide not to re-enter the relationship, and sometimes that isn't even a choice — the person may have moved on, or passed away, or simply be someone whose pattern of behaviour makes them unsafe to be close to again. Ask yourself honestly whether this person has shown any capacity to see what they did, or whether being near them again would put you back in harm's way. If the honest answer is that they're unlikely to change, protecting your own wellbeing by keeping your distance, or leaving altogether, is not a failure of forgiveness. It can be the wisest expression of it.
If it is safe, and only if it is safe, speak to them honestly. Where there is a real chance of being heard — where the person has shown some capacity for reflection, or the relationship still matters enough to both of you to be worth the discomfort — there is genuine value in saying plainly how their actions affected you. This conversation will very likely be uncomfortable. It also carries real possibility: the chance for the relationship to be repaired, and the chance for them to actually learn something about the impact of the power they hold. Not every leader gets that feedback. Being the one who gives it to them honestly, from a place of having already done your own forgiving, is a genuine gift, even when it doesn't feel like one to give.
Hold on to the choice to forgive, whether or not you choose to continue the relationship. Worthington's REACH model ends with exactly this: forgiveness has to be actively maintained, because old hurt has a way of resurfacing, particularly when you're reminded of the person or the situation. Deciding to forgive once doesn't mean the feeling won't return. It means you already know what to do when it does.
The bottom line
Being let down by someone who leads you is one of the more disorienting experiences on offer, precisely because it comes from someone you were entitled to expect better from. Corrie ten Boom chose the act before the feeling arrived. Mandela built an entire structure for a nation to do what he had already done in his own heart. None of it happened instantly, and none of it required them to pretend the wrong hadn't occurred. If you're in the middle of this right now, give yourself the same permission: name it honestly, grieve what you hoped for, decide to forgive even without the feeling yet, protect yourself where you need to, and speak up where it's safe to. The forgiveness is real either way. What happens to the relationship afterwards is a separate question, and you're allowed to answer it on your own terms.
If you're reading this because you're still in the thick of it — because the hurt is fresher than you'd like it to be, or you've tried to move toward forgiveness and found yourself stuck somewhere in the middle of it — you don't have to work through this alone. Sometimes what's needed isn't another framework, but a conversation with someone who can hold the process with you at your own pace. If that's you, I'd be glad to talk it through. You can reach out any time.
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