trust yourself

Betrayal.

It feels hot and cold simultaneously.

It is complex.

It is infuriating.

It feels numbing. Shocking.

It is a loss of such great magnitude—trust lost, thrown away, trampled.

It engenders such feelings of sadness.

What does it mean to feel betrayed? What kind of loss is that?

What does it feel like to betray the trust of another?

I’m not quite sure how to enter into it except by telling a story that I interpreted as betrayal of trust. I now understand he didn’t do this to me, he did it for himself. In such a way, selfishness itself can be a betrayal. And I know betrayal from the other side, the betrayer side. Yes, I have betrayed people in my life; I recognize it.

I worked with a man for a number of years who by all external measures was a great partner for me. Everyone who saw us work together said so. We played off of each other’s ideas in a fantastic way. We both acknowledged the substantial magic in our work together. There was a great back and forth. There was an unspoken knowing between the two of us when we worked in front of a group. It was really magnificent, until it wasn’t.

We worked with a client for a number of years and during one trip to work with them, things had changed. I was left out of conversations about the work, and slowly got that the whole dynamic had shifted, in an uncomfortable way. Little things were different, as were big things as time went on. This wasn’t my interpretation of what was going on—this was what was going on. Intuitively I knew it and soon I knew it in a more concrete way. But I couldn’t understand it, and so I asked questions. I would eventually learn, years later, that my questions were being framed as a paranoid tirade to the client—and that, in fact, a secretive affair with someone on the client team was driving everything. The pieces all fit together sometimes, but not necessarily in the moment. In the moment, I was simply bewildered.

As a child, I remember reading about a kid who was trying to make his mother think she was going insane by raising the shelves in their closets so that she would conclude she was shrinking. That’s how I felt in this situation. Looking around as I imagine that mother did, with that sort of sudden hot feeling inside just thinking, “Wait a minute, that shelf was reachable yesterday. How could I be shorter today?” and not telling anybody about it, but just wondering in solitude for an agonizing while.

And then finally raising that question and having the son say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Maybe you’re just shrinking. The shelf is exactly the same.” That’s how betrayal feels. The shelf was getting higher and I was made to feel like I was shrinking. It’s an awful feeling. I don’t know how quite to describe it, but maybe you can imagine. Maybe you have experienced it—a friend, a love, a work situation. And maybe you have betrayed yourself.

What does one do in that moment? What does the mother do as she feels she’s shrinking? First, I imagine that mother, like me, quietly questioned herself, “Am I shrinking? Maybe I am shrinking. Maybe I’m the one who’s lost their mind. I must be shrinking.” There has to be self-doubt because the alternative is unthinkable and yet the alternative is what is true.

Betrayal is not an over-exaggeration. It’s not an emotion I feel I need to justify. It’s a real emotion. It’s the emotion of being fooled, of trust being stripped away for whatever reason. More difficult than the story of the mother with the shelf (because when she found out, she and her child have a good laugh about it, which is why it is fiction), this one was not funny. It was devastating. And maddening. And sickening.

The wife of a convicted mass murderer, an upstanding family guy who wore suits and ties to work, was interviewed on TV years ago, saying she had no idea about his secret, awful life. I remember thinking at the time, “You have to know. You must know.” But now I understand she didn’t know; she couldn’t know.

We are left to choose whether to be right in such a situation, or whether to give up that attachment to being right. Yes, even when there is work and money and a contract at stake. Even when falsehoods are being told about us. Betrayal is an act that requires trust in order for trust to be betrayed and that’s a horrible thing to feel.

So in those moments of betrayal, when you have been told you are shrinking and you know that you’re not, you start questioning yourself. Here’s what I’ve learned: it’s the self-questioning that is destructive, not the actions of the other person. I don’t care about those actions as much as I care about my own interpretation of them—and my own response. Karma will take care of them. My own karma is what I worry about.

Betrayal looks like different things to different people. For me, in this instance, it looked like lies and justifications and silence because I was being betrayed by someone who couldn’t or wouldn’t face it directly, and so let circumstances do it for him. Betrayal can look like a secret told when we asked for it not to be told. Betrayal can look like walking into a thrift store and finding that our ex-partner has put our things up for sale rather than allow us to get them back. Betrayal looks different for all of us, but I imagine it feels somewhat the same across all our stories. There’s a feeling of impotence, of shock, of not knowing this level of deceit was possible. There is something redeeming in our being shocked—it means that for us those actions would not be possible.

There are also feelings of anger. Some of that anger is justified and some of it is directed at ourselves: “How could I have been so stupid? How could I have been so blind? How could I have been so naïve?” “Why didn’t I see this coming?” “Why do I feel this way?” These are the questions that are dangerous to us.

Asking “why do I feel this way?” can invalidate the feeling itself. I am feeling betrayed. That’s what I’m feeling. That’s an honest, important feeling to walk into, to map our way through, to acknowledge. It’s a place of learning and also a place of great pain.

What is difficult about betrayal? It’s not the act of being betrayed. It’s not the betrayer, because we can let go of them, and thankfully they have shown us the way to do just that. What is harmful and hurtful about the act of being betrayed is not even the lies that we find out are being told about us. None of that.

What is harmful about it are those moments where we question ourselves. What is difficult about betrayal are the moments when we feel we are shrinking, and we panic. What is difficult about the moments of betrayal are the moments of hot fire that we feel we shouldn’t feel. What is difficult about betrayal are those moments when we recognize we know nothing about who this person is.

It is not the betrayal that is important. It is what that means for us as we move forward. Could we ever trust again? Can we be that naïve again? What are those words of evaluation that we put on ourselves? Let go of that person. They do not deserve another moment of our thought. The person who deserves attention at this point is ourselves. What are we leaning into? Are we leaning into uncertainty for ourselves? Are we leaning into anger for ourselves? Are we leaning into shame, or are we leaning into a healthier us as a result of this?

Can we lean into an appreciation of what we had, and what we learned?

I wrote a note on Facebook one day when I was thinking about this experience of betrayal: . “I am writing an essay about betrayal. If we create our own realities with our thoughts, are there no actions that constitute betrayal? So if I feel betrayed am I just interpreting someone else’s actions in that way? But then who can be held accountable for their actions when they actually are acts of betrayal, a violation of trust?” The response in the conversation that followed was illuminating for me.

“Feeling betrayed is ego-based,” Thomai said. “It stems from a deep how-dare-you feeling,” and I can see the truth in that.

“The betrayal still exists I think,” Melissa wrote, “creating our own thought realities means that we choose how to react, frame it, respond and grow from it. We can’t control or deny some of the challenges thrown our way. We can choose how they affect us.”

Brandie wrote, “Ultimately I think it’s helpful in the process if we can see the gift of what arises out of the betrayal. Sometimes I think this takes a while though. Three years post-divorce I see the gift of my husband wanting out of our marriage, and how that has put me on a much healthier path for my life. It took stepping back and seeing a bigger picture for me to find the good.”

I agree. My life has been fuller, richer, simpler, more expansive, and much more creative since this betrayal occurred. And so in the process of writing about this I’m learning to let it go.

As Mary Anne wrote in answer to my question, “ Broken promise is the door walked through in order to become betrayal. Betrayal is bending a promise the opposite way it was created to bend. Betrayal exists. How I deal with it is my responsibility, my gift, and my lesson.”

Truly powerful people know that.

Honor what was: Reframe betrayal as a way to see the truth of someone. Honor what you had with them, and let them go. And, more importantly, let go of your self-doubt about it—and of your need to make it right.

[Excerpted from The Geography of Loss; art by Deb Mitchell for The Geography of Loss]