26.232 - A Better Direction Is Not a Betrayal
“We must stop asking people for directions to places they’ve never been.”
Glennon Doyle, Get Untamed: The Journal (2021)
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Glennon Doyle - Untamed
Glennon Doyle fits this theme because her work examines what happens when an inherited or socially approved life can no longer contain what a person knows to be true. Untamed is often read as a declaration of self-liberation, but its more demanding contribution is the question beneath that liberation: what happens when belonging has been purchased through self-abandonment?
Self-trust, in this context, is not permission to treat every obligation as captivity or every desire as instruction. A changed direction becomes credible when it permits more honesty, fuller responsibility, and a less divided presence in one’s relationships. Other people may be attached to the version of you that made their lives more predictable, and refusing that role can be disruptive without being cruel. “Untamed” names a self no longer governed entirely by approval, but still answerable for how freedom is practiced. Doyle therefore brings us to today’s difficulty: how do you choose a truer direction without treating relationship as collateral damage?
When the New Direction Disappoints the Old Agreement
Yesterday’s reflection separated a mistake from the shame that tries to turn it into an identity. Once the lesson becomes specific enough to use, another difficulty appears. Learning may require a changed direction, and that change may affect people who were counting on the old one. The first plan may have been revised. The shame may have loosened. Yet guilt can remain because a new course does not unfold in private. It alters expectations, roles, routines, and futures that other people believed they understood.
That guilt should not be dismissed. Some changes are handled carelessly. A person can rename avoidance as freedom, call impatience intuition, or leave others carrying consequences that should have been shared. A promise does not become meaningless merely because keeping it has become inconvenient. If people arranged their lives around your word, their disappointment is not proof that they are controlling. It may be evidence that your decision has a cost, and responsible change requires you to see it.
But guilt is not a verdict. It is an emotional signal that can arise from several different sources. It may point toward harm you have caused, an obligation you have neglected, or a conversation you are trying to avoid. It may also appear because you have violated an expectation that was never truthful or sustainable. You can feel guilty because someone is hurt, even when preventing that hurt would require you to remain in a role that is making your life less honest. You can feel guilty because you are disappointing a person, even when the only available alternative is continuing to deceive them about what you can give.
This is why the moral question cannot be reduced to whether change feels painful. Pain accompanies betrayal, but it also accompanies necessary truth. The better question is what the change is serving and how you are carrying it. Are you moving toward a life that asks more honesty, responsibility, and participation from you, or merely away from discomfort? Are you naming the effects clearly, or leaving other people to discover them? Are you accepting the responsibilities that survive the change, or treating a new direction as permission to erase the road behind you?
Sometimes guilt appears not because you have betrayed the truth, but because you have stopped betraying yourself. That possibility deserves examination, not automatic celebration. Self-abandonment can become so familiar that ending it feels like wrongdoing. The task is to distinguish the guilt of causing avoidable harm from the guilt of becoming less available for an arrangement that depended on your falseness.
The Social Comfort of a Predictable Self
People are often rewarded for being recognizable. Families organize themselves around stable roles. Institutions depend on reliable participation. Relationships accumulate agreements, many of them never spoken aloud, about who will lead, who will yield, who will remain, and who will absorb the discomfort that keeps the system intact. A predictable person reduces uncertainty for everyone nearby. When that person changes direction, the disturbance can be interpreted as disloyalty before anyone has considered whether the former arrangement was just.
The pressure becomes stronger when a role has been praised as character. The accommodating person is called generous. The dependable person is called strong. The person who never changes course is called committed. These descriptions may be accurate, but they can also conceal the price of maintaining them. Generosity becomes self-erasure when it requires permanent consent. Strength becomes emotional conscription when one person is never allowed to need support. Commitment becomes stasis when new evidence is treated as a moral defect.
Public identity intensifies the demand. Personal branding encourages a stable account of who you are, what you believe, and where you are going. A clean narrative is easier to communicate than a revised one. The old decision remains visible, while the private learning that changed it may be difficult to explain. People who knew you through the earlier version may experience your revision as inconsistency, hypocrisy, or proof that your former conviction was never sincere.
That conclusion ignores how honest conviction develops. A choice can be sincere and incomplete. A role can be meaningful for years and still become too narrow. A relationship can contain real love while its current form no longer allows either person to live responsibly. Revision does not automatically discredit what came before. Sometimes the earlier direction brought you far enough to see what it could not become.
Sunk costs make departure harder. Time, money, reputation, sacrifice, and shared history can begin functioning as arguments for continuation. The more people have invested, the more threatening revision feels. Yet investment establishes consequence, not permanent correctness. It tells you that change must be handled carefully. It does not prove that the existing path should govern the rest of your life.
Loyalty is distorted when it asks a person to remain false so that others do not have to adjust. At the same time, authenticity is distorted when it becomes indifferent to what others must absorb. A mature change holds both truths. You are not required to preserve a role that depends on self-erasure, and you are not entitled to pretend that leaving the role affects only you. Other people may need explanation, transition, repair, time, or boundaries of their own. Their reaction does not decide your direction, but it belongs to the reality of the decision.
Fidelity Can Change Its Form
Betrayal is not synonymous with change. Betrayal involves a violation of trust, truth, care, or responsibility. Sometimes staying can commit that violation more thoroughly than leaving. You may remain physically present while withholding the truth that would allow another person to make an informed choice. You may continue performing a role while resentment corrodes the care the role was meant to express. You may preserve an agreement in appearance while abandoning its purpose in practice.
Integrity asks a more demanding question than “Did you stay?” It asks whether your conduct remains aligned with what you know, what you value, and what you owe. That alignment can require persistence. Many worthwhile commitments pass through periods of boredom, conflict, grief, or uncertainty. A difficult season is not proof that the direction is wrong. If every discomfort becomes evidence that you should leave, self-trust collapses into appetite.
A better direction becomes ethically credible when it can survive a fuller examination. It should not depend on contempt for the old path or caricature of the people attached to it. It should make you more willing to tell the truth, not less. It should clarify which responsibilities remain and which promises must be renegotiated. It should increase your capacity to participate in life rather than merely offering temporary relief from tension. It should ask something of you beyond escape.
This is the difference between deeper fidelity and abandonment. Deeper fidelity carries the original value forward even when its expression changes. You may leave a position while continuing to serve the work that first drew you there. You may revise a family role while preserving care and refusing secrecy. You may change the structure of a relationship while remaining honest about history, impact, and responsibility. The visible direction changes, but the truth beneath it becomes more fully expressed.
Others may still experience the change as betrayal. Their judgment cannot simply be dismissed, because they may see costs you have minimized. Listen for the specific claim beneath the accusation. What promise was broken? What information arrived too late? What burden was transferred? What repair is possible? Then separate those legitimate questions from the demand that you remain unchanged for the sake of recognizability. Accountability can alter how you make the change without requiring you to abandon the change itself.
Course correction without shame is not a declaration that every new desire deserves obedience. It is a commitment to revise without converting revision into proof of moral failure. A changed direction can be an act of deeper fidelity when it brings you closer to truth, responsibility, and life. It becomes trustworthy through the manner of its enactment: clear speech, proportionate repair, patience with other people’s adjustment, and refusal to make the past contemptible merely because it is no longer sufficient.
The path becomes honest by being revised, not by pretending it was always pointing here. Leave what has become false without needing to despise what once helped you survive, belong, or begin.
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Practice: The Fidelity Check
Use this practice when you are considering leaving, revising, or redirecting a commitment that affects other people. You will examine what you are leaving, what deeper truth or value you intend to honor, who will carry consequences, and which responsibilities remain. You will finish with a concrete way to change direction without contempt, concealment, or unnecessary harm.
Scientific Context & Summary
Research on autonomy helps correct a common misunderstanding: directing your own life is not the same as rejecting relationship. In self-determination theory, Deci and Ryan (2000) describe autonomy, competence, and relatedness as distinct psychological needs. Autonomy refers to experiencing one’s actions as volitional and personally endorsed, not to independence from every obligation or influence. Their article is a theoretical review, so it should not be treated as proof that any particular act of redirection will improve well-being. It does, however, provide a useful framework for asking whether a decision is genuinely chosen while remaining connected to others.
Hodgins, Koestner, and Duncan (1996) examined autonomy in naturally occurring social interactions through two daily-recording studies. Greater autonomous orientation was associated with more positive and honest interactions, while a more controlling orientation was associated with defensiveness. These findings are associative, but they challenge the assumption that self-direction necessarily weakens connection. A person may be better able to relate honestly when approval is not governing every response.
Research on authenticity offers a similar qualification. In a study of 62 heterosexual dating couples, Brunell and colleagues (2010) found that dispositional authenticity was related to healthier relationship behaviors, which were in turn associated with more positive relationship outcomes and greater personal well-being. The sample was modest and culturally limited, and the design does not establish that authenticity caused those outcomes. It suggests that being truthful about one’s experience can coexist with trust, disclosure, and constructive accommodation rather than functioning as their opposite.
Bowen’s concept of differentiation adds the family-systems dimension. Differentiation refers to maintaining a coherent sense of self while remaining emotionally connected. In an actor-partner study of 118 heterosexual Spanish couples, Rodríguez-González and colleagues (2019) found that higher self-differentiation predicted better family functioning within individuals. Because the evidence is correlational and population-specific, it cannot prescribe what any reader should do. It supports the broader distinction between thoughtful autonomy and emotional cutoff.
Together, these sources suggest that mature redirection is relational work. The relevant question is not whether you choose yourself or choose other people. It is whether you can act from a direction you genuinely endorse while remaining honest about impact, open to dialogue, and accountable for responsibilities that do not disappear merely because the form of a commitment changes.
Bibliography
Brunell, A. B., Kernis, M. H., Goldman, B. M., Heppner, W. L., Davis, P., Cascio, E. V., & Webster, G. D. (2010). Dispositional authenticity and romantic relationship functioning. Personality and Individual Differences, 48(8), 900–905. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2010.02.018
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1104_01
Doyle, G. (2021). Get untamed: The journal. Clarkson Potter. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/690795/get-untamed-by-glennon-doyle/9780593235652/
Hodgins, H. S., Koestner, R., & Duncan, N. (1996). On the compatibility of autonomy and relatedness. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 22(3), 227–237. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167296223001
Rodríguez-González, M., Schweer-Collins, M., Bell, C. A., Sandberg, J. G., & Rodríguez-Naranjo, C. (2019). Family functioning, family structure, and differentiation of self in heterosexual Spanish couples: An actor–partner analysis. Journal of Counseling & Development, 97(2), 209–219. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcad.12251
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