In
the messiness and ignorance of our humanity we struggle to cope with the
demands of being human. We all make mistakes, especially in our closest
relationships. Everyone can recall times of disappointment with friends,
companions, family members, advisors, teachers, or coworkers when we have felt
betrayed or betrayed others or ourselves. We gain self-knowledge and learn to
apologize and to forgive as we work through the many ways we let each other
down. There are minor, everyday betrayals, and then there are the
life-exploding disclosures that I explore in this book, the ones that break
your heart, fracture your world, and threaten to destroy your soul. I
specifically address betrayal in love—a shattering of trust by the one you have
been most
intimate
with and relied on to protect you from harm.
If
you are suffering from an intimate betrayal, you know. Betrayal is stun-ning.
It is mind-boggling. It traumatizes you and upends your life. Mostly, it hurts.
Betrayal inflicts a unique, unprecedented pain you can only compre-hend once
you have experienced it. Interpersonal trauma changes you. It lifts a veil from
your eyes, and you can never see the world in the same way again. Yet we live
in a culture that is blind to both the depth of wounding and the
heart-expanding potential of such a blow.
Before
your trust was shattered, you lived shielded from the indescribable pain you
feel now that the veil has lifted. Such havoc betrayal wreaks, the multilayered
torments of body, mind, and soul are so extreme that it can feel like nothing
less than torture. No wonder we tend to turn away, minimize, and bury the hurt.
If you are like me, you also do not want anyone to know what is happening to
you. It is humiliating and maddening to be in pain, obsessing about someone
that has left, deceived, or cheated on you. You can begin to feel like a
character in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s
Nest. Friends and family tend to look the other way, too. No one likes to
see a person so out of control of their destiny.
I
know because I had the veil lifted from my eyes, in a familiar way known to
many. The man I loved left me. With virtually no warning, my partner of six
years walked out a few weeks before a big wedding we had planned. When he went
from “I’ll love you forever” one day to “I’m finished with you” the next, it
stopped my world. His wholly unanticipated exit from our home and my life led
me to suffer more than I believed was humanly possible. At the same time, the
distress awakened depths of my heart that took my capacity to love into
uncharted territory.
Meanwhile,
friends and family advised me to get over it and move on as quickly as
possible. They were right, I reasoned, I would move on…I tried, but it was not
to be. Once the initial shock lessened, I began to grasp that my trust in life
had disappeared. My entire world had suddenly turned hostile, or so it seemed,
because of the faithlessness of one person—albeit one very central person, the
one I had counted most in the world to be there and care for me. His abrupt
about-face marked a cataclysmic divide in my life.
Prior
to the moment he walked out, I had considered myself a together, self-aware
person. After he left, I was more like a delusional broken heap. I put on a
self-assured face, but wandered around like a Swiss cheese, shot full of holes,
bewildered, with a secret, stabbing pain in my heart. I vacil-lated between
rage, panic, and bouts of grief. Often I could not stop crying. Falling apart
was to be expected—“everybody has been there”—after a tough breakup. But the
problem was, as time went on, my condition got worse, not better. Instead of a
few weeks or months, it went on for years.
I
could not comprehend why I had gone from competent professional to terrified,
whimpering child, unable to do much of anything, let alone “move on.” It was
only later that I realized this was no
ordinary breakup. Eventually, I realized how deeply I had been traumatized,
and that the nightmare of post-traumatic stress had set in.
Mine
is not an obvious or sensational horror story of betrayal and abuse. I was not
hit, or cheated on, raped or stolen from, yelled at, or bullied into
submission, not even abandoned dramatically at the altar. I wrote this book to
help show how relational trauma these days is often not obvious. Many of us
have become too educated, smooth, or sophisticated for such overt aggres-sion.
The damage to my trust and the erosion of the quality of my life came from
mind-bending subtleties, primarily half-truths concealed as exceptional
honesty: from bouts of seduction and warmth laced with withholding and
withdrawal; insincere profusions of praise, affection and loyalty, interspersed
with blame and criticism; important omissions of personal history; sexual
manipulation masked as the deepest love; systematic devaluation; and finally
a complete Jekyll-and-Hyde
character reversal. Abandonment and replace-ment were only the final and most
obvious blows to my sanity and stability.
Emotional
abuse and mental cruelty can be more damaging than blatant physical abuse
because, at least when someone beats you, or cheats on you, it is clearly their
problem. When you have a dagger plunged into your heart while being held in a
loving embrace, on the other hand, you do not know what hit you. When you are
betrayed with charm and a smile, it is stunning and crazy making. If you have
given the benefit of the doubt to and believed in your partner, it can take a
long time to get the hook out and make sense of your world again. Meanwhile,
you wonder if you are fit any longer for human company, or if you should have
yourself committed for observation.
As
I tried to make sense of what happened, my mind flooded with ques-tions.
Perhaps the most painful was, “How could I not have seen this com-ing?” When
you believe in someone so completely and then realize they have been deceiving
you about their love and loyalty, the worst thing happens: Your faith in yourself
crumbles. The instincts you relied on to perceive and under-stand your world
have misled you, and you do not know how you will ever be able to trust
yourself again. It alarmed me when I realized I had lost faith, not only in
myself, but also in other people—and, most disturbingly, in life itself.
My
heart goes out to you if you are in a similar situation. Perhaps what I share
will help you sort through the bewilderment and confusion, regain trust in your
own perceptions, and get through the worst. I had lived a lot of life and had a
lot of psychological experience and inner resources when this ax fell. If
anyone “should” have seen this coming and been prepared when it did, it was I.
But I was not at all prepared.
To
make it through this ordeal, I turned instinctively to my spiritual prac-tices:
mindfulness meditation, inquiry, yoga. I coped by sitting for hours each day,
breathing and watching the chaos, tracking sensations, thoughts, and feelings.
I was astonished at how much I learned—more, I thought, in two years than I had
in the ten previous. As a former college psychology professor, and a teacher at
heart, passing on what I learn comes almost as second nature.
I
did a lot of research in the effort to understand what I was going through. I
read hundreds of books and talked to scores of people. I researched a wide
range of subjects and touch on many here—trauma, posttraumatic stress, domestic
violence, subtle-body experiences, attachment theory, projection and splitting,
death and dying, faith and conscience, grief and forgiveness, Buddhist
meditation and Christian contemplation and prayer. I found that prescriptions
and advice abound on how to survive the loss of love, to heal from a broken
heart, to endure a dark night of the soul, to put your life back
together, and to move on
after being betrayed or abandoned. But for a long time, I found little that
validated my extreme experiences.
Those
around me, and even I, considered being abandoned by the person I intended to
spend the rest of my life with an unfortunate, but minor event to be swept
aside and forgotten, the sooner, the better. After all, people readily recover
from far worse things. Conventional wisdom, I discovered, was way off with its
clichéd treatment of heartbreak and betrayal as minor blips on the screen of
life that you tend to for a while before moving on to better things.
The
shame I felt about the depth and duration of the pain, along with the fact my
friends, family, and even counselors did not understand, encour-aged my
silence. The lingering effects on those of us who receive such a shock become a
secret we do not want to share with anyone. We even want to hide the
life-changing repercussions from ourselves. Amidst my struggle to recover, I
recognized that many who had undergone similar experiences had simply shut
down. For a time, I feared I would do the same. The continuing torment of
having my heart torn out by someone I believed loved me deeply and to whom I
had committed my love and life was just too much to bear.
When
you hurt this much, instinctively you want to help make it less difficult for
anyone else in pain. I never set out to write this book, but once it started
pouring out of me, I felt how much I wanted to bring more light to the facts of
what an experience like this actually does to a person. There was so much to
learn about this underrated trauma—the “most difficult of all woundings,” as
one author put it. I decided to base this book first on immer-sion into the
lived experience, a type of phenomenological research. I believe this approach
led to the emergence of a more nuanced perspective and a deeper understanding
than a study based on analysis and theory alone could offer.
The
orientation that guided me was to turn with curiosity toward the suf-fering,
rather than stifling the pain or distracting myself. This approach will be
familiar to many spiritual seekers and to those who have struggled to come to
terms with great loss—the way out is through the darkness. What it takes to
make this turn, to go from theory to practice in the midst of prolonged
psychological pain, tells an unforeseen story for each of us.
Taken
to heart this way, I found betrayal to be an initiation into an unknown self.
The shock launches the betrayed on a “night sea journey,” that stage in
spiritual growth known in mystical traditions as a dark night of the soul. In
this mythological descent you are taken suddenly into deep waters and swallowed
up by a sea dragon. Like Jonah, you are stripped bare and robbed of what is
dearest to your heart. The metaphors of darkness and night apply because you do
not know what is happening. You feel as if you must be dying
and you are. Some part of
your old nature is being shorn away to make way for the new you cannot imagine,
and over which you have no control.
Ultimately,
we each have to find our own way in the dark, until we are thrown back onto
land and the light of day. I share my truth, knowing no one can tell another
what it takes to welcome this unwanted journey. It took me years to recover
myself, and I fought it all the way, but I finally came to recog-nize that
betrayal and trust form two poles of experience. Apparently, we can-not embrace
one until we have drunk deeply of the other. Through destroying my trust, and
taking me into more suffering than I had ever known, betrayal catalyzed a
transformation inside that awakened qualities of faith, compas-sion, and love I
barely imagined were possible.
During
the long days and nights of blame and rage, of tears and star-ing off into
space, beneath my awareness, strange mystic moments penetrated through the
pain. These elusive flashes of truth, fleeting at first, but arrest-ing,
planted seeds of renewed faith and trust in the ground of my own raw heart.
With time, against all instinct, I learned to embrace the humiliation and
heartbreak as the terrain I needed to pass through in order to deepen into
secrets of a love my soul was hungry to taste.
Never
before had I felt such intimate kinship with life around me. Never had my heart
beaten in such rhythm with others in pain. Never had I sensed such a fervent
need not to harm anyone else with my actions. Never had I felt the vast sadness
I had carried in my bones my entire life. Never before had I sensed the touch
of the “hands of light” comforting me, or the gentle power of the earth and sky
supporting me, or the tender stirrings in my heart of what I could only call
divine love flowing toward me.
All
this took time, much more than I approved of. Meanwhile I thought the pain
would never end. A turning point in my struggles came when I began to question
the true source of my torments. One day, in one of those flashes, I intuited
that the obvious villain—the person who had hurt me so griev-ously—had been but
an instrument in the hands of an unseen destiny. I real-ized the peace I needed
to make was not with my errant partner, but with my own heart, my fate, my God.
The insight came and went, but the truth had touched my core.
While
each story of love’s betrayal is unique, as are the individuals involved,
betrayal is an archetypal experience. It is an event that we each carry in our
collective memory, from the moment of being born into this world. Because of
its archetypal core, the study of betrayal’s dynamics and impact has something
to teach us all. If, however, you have been spared the trial of an intimate
betrayal, what I describe may not make much sense to you. It may seem extreme,
exaggerated, even melodramatic. That would have been
the case for me before I
passed through this ordeal. I would not have had the slightest interest in a
book such as this one. I had no idea.
For
this reason, I offer this book primarily, and believe it will be most help-ful,
for those who have been betrayed, now or in the past, by someone they loved and
trusted; and for those wishing to help another navigate these waters. I offer
my story and my perspective, along with the results of my research, not as an
authority, but as a fellow traveler. I offer companionship, validation, and
solace if you are going through this harrowing time. I admit right now that in
the extended darkness, I despaired of ever trusting or caring enough to engage
life again. While I hoped against hope that the proverbial “pearl of great
price” was waiting to be found in the ruins of my torn-up heart, my doubts were
grave. I chronicle many of those doubts here.
I
can report that finally the miracle of
saying yes to what I wanted least in my life did take root in my soul. To
my surprise, the shattering of my world had magnetized a grace that was
teaching me how and what to trust. As I write now, nearly five years later,
recovering myself is a work in progress. But I have learned the greatest lesson
in my life to date. Deep suffering invites us into mystery: The pain speaks a
message we need and long to hear. The rage and yearning are prayers for truth,
for love. At the point of utmost brokenness, I did indeed find a golden pearl—the
longing cry of my own heart for a love that endures, a greater, divine love
that cannot and does not die.
Please
let my words resonate with your own experience where and how they will. I know
I cannot speak for what anyone else is going through. But I trust that the
universal core of this journey into and through the heart broken in love will
ring true for many. I wish for you, too, to find your gold.
* * * * *
This book is divided into
four parts, some of which may only be of interest to certain readers. Part I
revolves around the shock and shattering of intimate betrayal. In terms of a
rite of passage, this section deals primarily with the radical separation from
one’s past life a traumatic betrayal initiates. Included in this section is the
overall narrative of “my story” (chapters 1 and 2) and of my early efforts to
cope with the trauma and make sense of what happened. Some may be inclined to
skip the story segments. Starting with chapter 3, I discuss the psychological
dynamics of betrayal and introduce a number of themes, such as recognizing and
coping with the ego-shattering trauma, and the spiritual perspective that will
be developed more fully later in the book.
Part
II shifts the focus to the mystery of relationship itself. I explore the impact
on the subtle body of intimate relationship through the lens both of my husband’s
death and of the abandonment that impelled me to write this
book.
This is a section that I imagine will be most accessible to other women. Sexual
bonding, wounds to the etheric body, adultery, the role of psychologi-cal
projection in intimate relating are all considered. This section also includes
a discussion of the cultural blindness to betrayal.
Part
III focuses directly on the dark night or threshold phase of initiation: the
shock and suffering. I begin with an in-depth discussion of the trauma and dive
into the details of the dark night passage, including the opening up of earlier
trauma, infantile and existential, the unloading of the unconscious, a
travelogue through isolation, fear, shame, rage, helplessness, meaninglessness,
and more. The spiritual perspective emerges as acceptance of pain becomes a
prayer of the heart.
By
Part IV the book moves more directly into the shift to the awaken-ing heart
that is taking place. I chronicle the grief that pours forth as the deep heart
opens, explore the role of conscience, and grapple more fully with forgiveness.
The desperation of the dark time leads gradually to surrender, to prayer, to the
acceptance of grace and love, and finally I discuss the challenges of the
return to ordinary life coming back from the descent. If you are inter-ested in
the narrative, read the book from the beginning. Otherwise, please just dip
into topics of interest to you.
* * * * *
Because I write from personal
experience, I speak from the perspective of a woman betrayed by a man. I am, of
course, aware that women play out this same dynamic with men and other women,
and that men betray other men. I have chosen the orientation of a woman
speaking to other heterosexual women for the sake of consistency, and because
it best reflects what I have lived. I believe that our common humanity
transcends gender, and that the descriptions of betrayal as an often unwitting abuse
of power on the psycho-logical level, as well as an initiation into the
mysteries of heart on the spiritual, will also resonate for those in same-sex
relationships and for men betrayed by a woman. That said, please forgive
whatever gender bias has slipped into the telling.
I
ask your forgiveness also for whatever blame, harshness, or hurt may still
accompany my tone with regard to “the betrayer.” I have tried my best to
restrain the impulse to character assassination, and, I think, have at least
partially succeeded: but I have plenty of blind spots, I am sure. Opening to
the compassionate heart that can hold it all in love is a work in progress, the
work of a lifetime.
Please be forewarned that I often use the word God in this writing. I use God to refer
to the unknowable mystery that animates our world. Other terms that point to
the same indescribable source of life include: Spirit, cre-ator, Christ or
Buddha nature, the Divine, Atman, Allah, Holy Spirit, source, Higher Power,
Divine Mother, the Tao, the mystery, love, truth, silence, still-ness. Maybe
these words should all be capitalized to indicate a compelling, alive presence,
both independent and yet part of us. Some people by tempera-ment experience
this reality as a presence or a being, others as a place, or a state of mind.
My inclination is toward the personal. In this writing, they are all pointers—to
the living love that surrounds us, the creative source of all that is.
