If you've built something, you've been let down by someone. The partner who was all in until it got hard. The buyer whose promises didn't survive the closing. The team member who said the work was done when it wasn't. The customers who told you they'd never go anywhere else, and then did.
One of those is a bad week. A string of them, over years, with different people, starts to feel like a verdict on people in general. I know, because I reached that verdict myself. I sold a company I'd poured fifteen years into, to people I trusted, and what was promised didn't happen. I built a second enterprise and handed real authority to leaders who walked away when the weight got real. By the time the pattern had repeated a few more times, in smaller ways, I had a sentence running in my head that I'm not proud of: people are liars.
I don't believe that sentence anymore. Getting out from under it took the hardest and most useful inner work of my career, and it's what I want to share here, because I meet founders standing exactly where I stood.
The pattern has a name
Carl Jung had a word for the thing that makes disappointment so much worse than it needs to be: projection. His insight was that we never meet people as they are at first. We meet them through images cast from our own psyche. When you meet a potential partner, a buyer, a promising hire, part of what you see is real. Part of it is your own longing, made visible in them. The rescuer. The one who finally gets it. The loyal crew that will carry the vision with you.
Disappointment is the moment the projection falls off and the actual person shows through. It happens inside your business and outside it, with a buyer or a partner just as easily as with a friend or a family member, because the projection travels with you. It feels like betrayal, and sometimes it is. What happened in the sale was real. What my leaders did was real. But when the same story keeps happening with different people, in every part of your life, the one constant is you, and the hope you keep handing out.
Jung put it bluntly. Whatever we refuse to make conscious inside ourselves, he said in substance, comes back to us from the outside and looks like fate. For me it never looked like fate. It looked like proof. Every time it happened, I turned it inward: there must be something I did, or didn't see, or didn't do, that made people treat me this way. When I finally sat with Jung's idea, I could see that the self-blame and the "people are liars" were the same mistake wearing two faces. Either the world was broken or I was. Neither was true. I had been placing the same hope on new people, over and over, and the hope was the thing that needed looking at, not my worth.
Where the pattern comes from
Here is the honest part. For many of us, the pattern is old. It was formed long before the business existed.
I was raised to believe that life would respond to me. That if I gave fully, the world would give back in kind. That people would keep their word, come back when they said they would, and value what I put in front of them. That is a beautiful thing to be told as a child, and it is an early promise the world never signed.
So when someone broke their word to me, it wasn't just disappointing. It broke the promise again. Each break piled onto the last until the only story that made sense was that people couldn't be trusted. Marie-Louise von Franz, Jung's closest collaborator, described a related pattern: a life spent waiting for the real thing to begin, idealizing every new beginning, then collapsing when it turns out to be ordinary and human.
If you recognize yourself here, you are not naive, and you are not broken. You are carrying a promise, and nobody told you it was yours to carry.
Betrayal as initiation
The post-Jungian writer James Hillman wrote an essay called "Betrayal" that I wish every founder could read. His argument is that betrayal isn't only damage. It is an initiation. It's how the childlike trust that expects the world to be safe gets broken, so that a more mature trust can form: one that knows people fail, and chooses to love and work with them anyway.
Hillman also named the dead ends. After a betrayal we tend to go toward revenge, or denial, or cynicism, or a defensive watchfulness that keeps everyone at arm's length. The worst one, he said, is self-betrayal: giving up on what you value because trusting it hurt. I watched myself head toward cynicism, and every time I landed there it made me more upset. I couldn't accept that the lesson in my pain, the thing that was supposed to make me stronger, was to stop trusting people. That was never the lesson. It was the wound talking.
The way through, Hillman said, is to find what the betrayal meant, and eventually to forgive. Not to excuse. To put it down.
How the pattern heals
This is the work I did, and the work I now do with the founders I mentor who are struggling with this. It isn't quick, but it is clear.
Withdraw the projection. For each person who let you down, ask: what did I need this person to be? The loyal one. The one who sees my worth. The one who sticks around. Then ask the harder question: can I become that for myself?
An example from my own life. The partners who backed my second enterprise promised me a majority stake and the freedom to spend what the vision needed. What I needed them to be was patrons: people who would carry the risk so I wouldn't have to. So I never asked the uncomfortable questions. What happens if the money runs out? Who is holding the bill, and what does it cost me? When the bill came, my power went with it.
Becoming that for myself turned out to be very plain. I am the one who reads every line. I am the one who asks what happens if this goes wrong, before I sign, not after. No one's reputation and no one's promise stands in for my own eyes anymore. That isn't suspicion. It's the loyalty I had been waiting for someone else to show me.
When you can be that for yourself, even imperfectly, you stop needing other people to be it, and you start seeing them clearly. The hire is just a hire. The partner is just a partner. They can be good at their jobs without having to save you.
Lower your expectations of people, not your vision. Mature trust sounds like this: most people won't come back, and the ones who do are mine. Expect warmth and inconsistency at the same time. When you hold both, disappointment becomes information instead of a wound.
Here's a small example. A guest leaves glowing, says they'll be back every week and will tell everyone they know. The old me took that as a promise and felt the sting when they didn't return. The current me enjoys the warmth fully, in the moment, because it's real. Then I set the promise down, because it was never mine to hold. If they come back, I've gained a regular. If they don't, nothing was lost; I had a lovely evening with a stranger. The vision of a place people love doesn't shrink. What shrinks is the amount of my heart riding on any one person keeping their word.
Look at your part without blaming yourself. In my case it was overgiving out of sheer eagerness and excitement, ignoring early signs because I didn't want the excitement to end, and not asking for clear commitments in writing. That isn't fault. It's the machinery of the pattern, and it is the one part you control. It's why I now tell every founder I work with that trust is earned and verified, never assumed.
In practice, that looks like this. Before you hand someone the keys, hand them one room. Give a new partner, hire or vendor a small, real piece of responsibility with a clear finish line and a date, then watch three things: did the work actually get done, not just reported done; did they tell you early when something slipped; and how did they behave in the first hard week, when it stopped being fun. Someone who hides a problem at a small scale will hide a bigger one later. Someone who brings you bad news before you have to ask has just earned the next room. Widen their responsibility only as fast as the evidence arrives, and put the agreement in writing before the handshake, not after. None of this is distrust. It's the structure that lets you trust someone with your eyes open, and it tells the people around you something important: you are not living in an illusion. The ones worth keeping find that reassuring. The ones who don't were counting on the illusion.
Grieve what actually happened. Losses that haven't been mourned keep reopening. I had two that I'd treated as business lessons when they were also griefs. Naming them as grief changed everything downstream. The exercise below ends with a simple way to do this.
An exercise: map the pattern, then mourn it
Part one: map it. Take a sheet of paper and write down five times you were deeply let down in your business. For each one, fill in four columns:
- What I expected from them
- What they actually were
- The early signs I didn't want to see
- What I gave without asking for anything clear in return
Then read across all five and finish this sentence: The hope I keep handing to others is ______.
That sentence is the projection. Once it has a name, you can start carrying it yourself, and the next person who crosses your path gets to be who they are instead of who you needed.
Part two: mourn it. Pick the one loss on your list that still has a charge when you read it. Write that person, or that venture, a letter you'll never send. Say what you hoped for, what you actually lost, and what you're still angry about. Don't edit it and don't be fair. Then read it out loud, once, somewhere you feel safe, and notice what your body does. That's the grief, and it has been waiting for a turn to speak. When it's done, do something with the paper that feels like an ending: burn it, bury it in the garden, fold it into a drawer you won't open. As an expressive arts therapist I've watched this take twenty minutes and undo years of reopening. It won't change what happened. It changes whether what happened is still happening to you.
You don't have to do this alone
If you've reached your own version of "people are liars," I understand it, and I don't judge it. I also know it's a crossroads, not a destination. One road leads to a smaller, guarded life and a business run from behind a wall. The other leads to a trust that isn't naive, and to the people who will actually stay: the ones who pull their weight, keep their word, and add to what you're capable of instead of draining it.
That road is easier to walk with someone who has walked it. If you'd like to talk, book a free 15-minute call. Or, if you'd rather start quietly, take the free Rooted Check-up and see what the pattern looks like in your enterprise.