How do you handle betrayals? Specifically when it happens through a close friend whom you trusted badly.
Being socially well versed could be a tough job if you are a serious PhD candidate as most of the times you are in a lab working on your experiments and research. Then you happen to meet somebody whom you think is your best friend. You feel happy. But then you realize the relationship is not good, because you are only investing it in from your side and the other party is just taking advantage of you. If the other party is much younger than you, you also tend to have parental feeling of love towards it, and you tend to ignore the non-investment from the other party saying ah its just a kid. But then suddenly one day you get a big jolt that oh, the other party simply took advantage of you and fooled you for your kindness.
So as a scientist how do you handle such situations? As a rational person you are aware of what is happening, but when the other party does not stop its low behavior it becomes difficult to accept the fact thinking, where is the morality and ethics? and how in the first place you allowed your self to be fooled in this manner even though you knew the signals, but you ignored them willfully?
As a scientist you can look at it as a failed experiment in which you put all your efforts knowing things are not going good, but hoping some day they will miraculously turn out to be good. You try to learn from the situations and move on, but if you are an idealist, who thinks an idea world should not behave in this way, if you were so genuine, then it becomes too difficult to understand how the other party could be so bad? I mean how could people be so bad where they just take things without any kind of empathy and compassion.
So to understand this question you start learning how people behave by studying psychology and you come across this notorious class of people called "narcissist socio-path", who seem friendly, agreeable, trustworthy, but who would lack any kind of emotions, regret, guilt towards the wrong doing they have done after taking advantage of others kindness. So you now understand technically and rationally there are these kind of weird bad people and you were unlucky (you do not believe in luck still) to meet such a person. But still your mind refuses to accept the fact that you were hurt so badly.
So you continue with new experiments to train your mind to come out of this shadow of darkness to find new goals, new ambitions to overcome the sadness of the betrayal. You train it daily that success is the best revenge, so you should be successful even more successful than ever, and only that can heal it. You train it saying, this is better for me, because it has taught me so many valuable lessons in terms of how to identify good people from bad people so early in my life, that it will not be difficult to identify them in future, and this is a blessing in disguise for the fact that this saves you from lot of difficult experiences in future due to this experience.
So you try to train your mind with all the willpower of your never die attitude and positivity, but still when you are not watching your mind, it sleeps into that other aspect where it hurts. The challenge is to keep watching it so that your rational always.
I think this is when you become a monk , when your feelings are immortal :-)