I'm glad you decided to keep going instead of letting these experiences alter your commitment. A set of people (some close to me, others less so) betrayed me (on a much, much lower level) and for a while, the damage that did to the trust I had in those relationships crept into my relationship with myself and I started to doubt myself, too.
It took several months to get over that aspect and separate the damaged trust in those relationships from how I view myself. As a result, I have completely restructured one aspect of my life and the way I interact with people within it. This started off as avoidance and resistance as I wasn't interested in being around most of it any more out of resentment, but as I reanalyzed the whole situation--with the help of several people who witnessed the thing that happened and independently decided to tell me that what happened was wrong and that they fully supported me and my role--I have developed this new situation into one that truly aligns with my values in relation to this area of my life. It ended up solidifying my goals and allowing me to function authentically in what is honestly a chaotic space full of people who *love* having control and obtaining power and manipulating others in a way that is incredibly disproportionate to what having power and control and engaging in manipulation provides in this field. It doesn't make sense to me and have no interest in participating in that... but I can help from the sidelines and form 'alliances' with others who share my opinions on it. There's a lot more of them that I realized, and I would not have known this if that negative thing hadn't happened with the original group.
