On Healing from Betrayal

Someone I follow on Twitter (yes, still on there; no, never calling it X), asked about how you deal with betrayal, hashtag serious answers only.

I’ve been dealing with betrayal in a couple of areas lately. Without going into too much detail right now for a variety of legal and ethical reasons (subtext is my love language), let me say that I started another psilocybin journey recently with a set of questions about feeling betrayed. (Here’s a post about my first trip.)

When I came out of this recent journey, I got some clarity. That experience also gave me some insights about how to deal with betrayal. Here’s what I’ve gleaned in a listicle because we just don’t have enough of those now that Vice and Buzzfeed have collapsed:

1. Is it really betrayal? Or, did you grow and change but the other person didn’t? The first step is assessment. In my case, someone I trusted and relied on to help with my healing revealed themselves to have views on a certain geopolitical situation that were aligned with death and destruction rather than with healing. I saw a change happening in myself over the last few months, but not in my trusted healer person. It’s not that this person betrayed me by not growing, but I realized they have to work out their own relationship to geopolitics. I can’t fix that for them. So we went our separate ways.
2. If someone really betrayed your trust, then they have shown you who they are. You don’t owe them another minute of your time, talent or treasure. Second step, maybe someone actually did betray your trust. Now what? Once someone has revealed themselves to be untrustworthy, then I’m done with them. I know that it’s tempting to ruminate over why they did this, or what led them to this act of betrayal, but after a certain point, there’s no understanding that lessens the pain or changes any of this in a material way. So, my strategy is to no longer feed the energy creature in question with my perseverating about why they did this. Some people, as discussed here recently, are sociopaths. There’s nothing else there except a bottomless pit of self-aggrandizement.
3. Forgive yourself for what you didn’t see or figure out, especially if the person involved intentionally sought to deceive you. This one is probably the hardest for me. “Why didn’t I see this?” can be the start of a long set of questions that all lead to self-blame. Instead, if someone INTENDED to deceive you, that should be the focus, not that you were fooled, but that they meant to trick you. They counted on you falling for their deception. This may be the most painful part of dealing with betrayal, but it’s still not your fault.
4. Learn from the experience and promise yourself not to repeat that exact mistake again. This is where you should ask yourself a set of questions so that you’re not in this position again. This is a slightly different set of questions than the ones mentioned above (#3), because those all end in self-blame. This set of different set of questions — What was it about me that made me susceptible to this con? What was the con artist offering that I wanted or needed? How did their appeal work on me? What role did I play in contributing to this? — can help you understand what happened without the self-recrimination. When the Madoff scandal finally became public, part of what investors had to reckon with is that they were duped because they wanted to believe in annual returns of 10% when most funds only yielded something like 4%. Certainly, Bernie Madoff intended to deceive people; AND, the people who invested with him wanted to believe the lies he was telling were true. This is where whiteness plays a role. Whiteness shapes who we believe, who we consider trustworthy, and who we have trouble imagining could be guilty of a serious crime. For example, when this woman got arrested for being the ‘mastermind of an $8 million dollar shoplifting ring,’ the headline still refers to her as a “San Diego mom,” because of how we see refuse to see through whiteness especially when it is someone gendered femme. There’s a whole genre of entertainment that relies on our collective surprise at this, and man-oh-man am I tired of it.
5. Accept that betrayal is part of the human experience and because of that people have made amazing ART based on it. Find a novel, play, film about betrayal & revel in your part in this human experience. There is so much art about betrayal and it is meant to help us transcend our individual experience of it and see it as connected to what our fellow humans go through. You think that you are alone in your shame and your disgrace at being deceived, and then you experience art — you read a novel, find a memoir, see a play, watch a film — and then you know that someone else has been through what you’ve been through, or worse, and they survived. They not only survived but the betrayal taught them something about themselves, their vulnerabilities, and they learned. The point is not that you will never make a mistake again, never get betrayed again, but that you learn how to show up for yourself a little better next time. The evidence that you’ve grown is not that you don’t get deceived ever again, but that you don’t let it happen in *exactly* the same way again. Once you’ve processed it and are clear on what happened, and have protected yourself from it happening again, then you can go on to trust again.

I have a feeling we’re going to get lots more practice dealing with betrayal.

My sense about what’s coming is that as the old world crumbles and the new world is emerging, there will be lots more betrayal. Partly, this is because we are creating more lots more people with sociopathic tendencies. It’s also because we’re living within a social, political, and economic structure that is crumbling on a planet that’s rapidly getting warmer. All of which will embolden people to “place the oxygen mask on yourself first,” the mantra of narcissists justifying their scams the world over.

Yesterday was Palm Sunday, and I was startled almost to read the passage in the lectionary that referred to Judas betraying Jesus to get his thirty pieces of silver. It startled me because I’d been thinking so much about betrayal, and how to deal with it, process it, and there it was, in this story I’ve heard a thousand times and rushed passed this detail. So intimate. Someone trusted. Someone close. Betrayed with a kiss. Because that’s how betrayal works, from someone close enough to kiss you.