On Betrayal, and Being the Betrayer
“Out beyond ideas of right doing and wrongdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” ~Rumi
In today’s early morning hours, Spirit tapped me to name and write some truths that have been in process, working through my body, the past several months. The transmission “just so happened” to finish coming through at 3:33am.
And so I am called to reluctantly share an uncomfortable truth.
This fall I hurt someone whom I deeply love. This truth coincides with another, seemingly contradictory truth, that I did so by following the truth of my body and my heart. My inner guidance system.
Nothing about it makes sense to me with my rational mind. Still. I only intuitively sensed it was an experience I needed to have for my soul’s evolution.
From the outside looking in, it reeks of dysfunction, self-sabotage, pleasure seeking, and disrespect.
No doubt all that exists at the human register. What is also true, is that that is not how it felt, or my experience of it on the inside of its unfolding.
Betrayal only happens in deep relationship, otherwise it would not be so.
I have been betrayed many, many times in my life. I know its sting. I know the ways it tears you apart on the inside at visceral levels. I know its lack of answers. I know the deep chasm of feelings of unworthiness and unlovability it can send you spiraling down.
I also know its lessons.
I know how deeply I have judged my betrayers. I know the moral righteousness I have fed off of in the process. I know how good it has felt to wrap myself in the blanket of victimhood.
I also know that all of us have the potential to be the betrayer. And that all of us have played all the roles—if not yet in this lifetime, in another.
And that is a very humbling thing.
Being the betrayer and learning to love myself through it, offering myself compassion and gentleness through a situation that caused harm to someone I love—while holding myself accountable and accepting the natural consequences and fallout of my choices—is one of the biggest, most powerful lessons I have gone through to date.
It brought me deeper into my shadow work, forcing me to confront my lingering attachments to being “perfect” and “good.” To learn to love myself when everything else fell away.
For me, the “material” included moving to a new place, on a seemingly arbitrary rock in the middle of the ocean, without friends, without family, without a home, in the midst of my belief systems morphing, while a volcano erupted and the ground was literally moving beneath me.
Nowhere to run to. No one to hold me.
No external root chakra to tell me I was safe and worthy, just as I am. I had to dig deep inside myself, confront the pieces I had been avoiding, trust myself and my truth, and love into myself deeper than I ever knew was possible.
I had to sit with my deep-seated guilt and shame alongside my deepest fears of being misunderstood and withstanding outside judgments being projected onto my body. I found myself confronted with my most pernicious unworthiness story . . . that I am really “bad” at my core.
It was not comfortable. In fact, I don’t recommend it! It was also exactly the experience I needed for my soul’s evolution.
In Spiritual Somatics Coaching sessions, we talk about “fear chasing.” Often we catastrophize situations through unhelpful mind stories and unresolved traumas that sit alongside of cultural and familial programming and patterning. These fears keep us playing small. They lie to us about ourselves. They keep us trapped, afraid to take up space, afraid of being “found out.”
The truth is that I did face fallout and repercussions in real time—loss of loved ones, harsh criticism and judgement, loss of material security, psychic attacks, and a destabilized nervous system. The necessary karmic fallout of my actions.
And. I am still here. I am still standing. And I am stronger, more forgiving, more understanding, more humble than I was before this experience.
Alongside of the judgement and rejection I also experienced unexpected outpourings of tremendous tenderness, gentleness, and care from unlikely sources.
In short, this experience of being the betrayer brought me deeper into my humanness. It brought me closer to myself. It brought me closer to people in my life. It showed me my ability to love myself through missteps. To accept the lessons that come my way with grace and resolve. To claim myself and my story and my truth 💯, outside judgements and projections be damned.
It showed my who my people are. It allowed more of my people to find me. It allowed some of my relationships to come into deeper balance. It allowed me to practice receiving love, compassion, and grace without needing to be perfect, or needing to “do” anything to know I am deserving of love and kindness. It reminded me that we all are deserving of love and kindness, at all times.
At every moment, we have a choice.
We can believe the stories and versions of ourselves that other people tell us we are or perceive us to be, or we can stand firm in our inner Truth and Integrity and choose to love and trust ourselves.
To keep going.
To keep growing.
To keep failing.
To keep trying.
To keep loving.
I have long lived under the story that in relationship, especially when power differentials are present, I need to prove myself to be trustworthy moment to moment—every thought, word, action, deed under the magnifying glass of scrutiny. This is some of my own cultural programming in need of revision. I see now how this is a punitive, unforgiving posture toward myself, cultivated in deep distrust of self and other. One that does not leave any room for error, or the truth that we are here to experience the full spectrum of what it means to be a messy, imperfect human.
I have received many gifts through this experience.
It has shown me the type of relationships that no longer serve me in this lifetime.
It has shown me how exhausting it is to only feel worthy of being in relationship if we are perfect.
It has shown me that I want to be in relationship and community with people who are capable of loving each other through the harm, through the betrayals, through the conflicts, through the disagreements, through the pain.
It has shown me how I want to be in relationship with people who trust my character without me needing to be perfect to prove that I am worthy of love. Who can love into me when I lose my way, offer me compassion and honest reflection, and trust me to be accountable for my actions.
It has shown me how to trust myself.
It has also provided me with the beautiful gift of finally fully forgiving my biggest betrayer in this lifetime to date.
To try on from the inside how what I then perceived to be intentional harm was really only them following their own truth, body, and internal guidance system. How the emotional hurt I experienced in that situation was really just the energies rearranging, and the fallout of their own confusion in navigating the experience from their level of consciousness.
What happens when we truly realize that other people’s actions really have very little to do with us at the end of the day?
What happens when we realize we are all vulnerable to each other? That we each are capable of truly beautiful things, and also capable of great harm?
What happens when we realize that following our truth naturally creates ripples that impact others in ways that we cannot control? That sometimes to follow our path, we must let people down? That sometimes we will play the role of the betrayer, and that we are worthy of love anyway?
What if betrayal is simply a redirection of energy? A hopping of timelines? An ending of Soul Contracts?
What if everything we do to another, we do to ourselves?
What if in the end, there is nothing to forgive?
The Hawaiian forgiveness practice of Ho’oponopono, which translates as “to make right,” changed my life when I started working it over 5 years ago. I have done considerable work with this practice towards forgiving past versions of myself, my lineage, and my own betrayers. It has been a revamped, staple daily practice of mine since the fall. Cutting the chords, asking for Soul Contracts to be completed, and all energies returned.
This practice does not rely upon a Judeo-Christian model of repentance. Rather, it acknowledges the interconnectedness of everyone and everything. How deeply we belong to each other. The inherent interdependence between self and other, micro and macro, individual and collective. How we are all a part of the web of creation, different parts of the One.
The higher we resonate on this spiritual journey, the more claims to self/other, good/bad, right/wrong, and moral superiority fall away. For someone groomed steeply in a Catholic epistemology, this has been a deeply uncomfortable unlearning. Those simplistic binaries, judgments, and parameters feel safe and known. Following the clear truth of our body and our heart, regardless of how it looks from the outside in, goes against everything most of us have been taught.
This post is not about absolution. I take full responsibility for my choices. And there is honestly liberation in that. When we have betrayed another, when we have caused harm, all we can do is walk through the fallout with as much integrity as possible. And what a truly humbling process that is.
At every turn, we have the choice to allow this world to soften us or harden us. Despite everything, I choose to become softer. The softer I become, the more it leads me home to myself. The more I come home to myself, the more I come home to everyone and everything.
There is a saying that during these times we are to take nothing personal, least of all ourselves. As the Ego grip begins to dissolve, we are left with the reality that we are a complex ball of energy, far more dynamic and in flux than 3D human parameters and rules allow us to believe.
There is beauty in this. And space.
Again and again, as we begin to transition out of these old low density binaries and polarities, I come back to the truth that love is the only thing that will see us through.
There is a saying that we can only love each other as deeply as we love ourselves. I would like to suggest that the more compassion we can offer ourselves for our personal missteps and errors, the more compassion we can extend to each other. And at the end of the day, loving kindness is the only thing that matters.
Only Love is Real.
May we all remember ourselves home,
Trish
