I don’t know you.
I don’t trust you.
How could I believe you?
Why would I trust you?
I want to trust.
I want to believe you.
I want to believe myself.
Betrayal: when the ones on which a person depends for survival significantly violate that person' s well-being...
Betrayal can profoundly devastate your safety. This experience can be embedded deep inside as a template for the future, holding you back, keeping you apart, afraid to connect.
Betrayal can happen when the details of the past provoke a reaction in the moment. Memory and present experience can feel mercurial. The mind can resonate and then forget in dissociation, like the quicksand of voice or faces after a dream. The mind may be flooded with a force field of feeling with no explanation. Current events or the memory of trauma can be in a smell, a sound, a mental snapshot; you see with the nose; you hear with the tongue. You feel in silence or chaos with a sense of neglect and abandonment.
The feeling of betrayal will show up in triggers that seem to come out of nowhere when even a fragment of the past shows up: a word, a gesture, a hint of patronizing. Family, partners, institutions, countries, churches, organizations may have betrayed you. You have to reckon with the collision of confusion and dependence that make it so hard to trust again or have conditioned you to continue to choose people that recreate your past. Then if things fall apart, you may automatically take the blame or simply retreat back into yourself. Sometimes it seems easier to self sabotage or take the blame yourself than to consider who was actually responsible for not protecting or responding to you.
Perhaps you have tried far too many times to find the key to feel safe after the betrayal of abuse. EMDR, therapy, yoga, self help books...drugs. There have been so many moments, so many starts and stops. Perhaps you have been waiting for a long time to blurt out the whole story. Maybe you cannot say what you went through because often there are no words.
You recognize that healing will not be simple because this process of recovery isn't just about the sexual abuse. It is about all the other elements of tumult and betrayals that may have made up your life. The lies, the secrets, the shame imposed by the ones who harmed you may still caution you to keep quiet. Maybe you have had to lie or diminish your story just to be sure that whoever listens to you can bear a piece of the truth. Perhaps you have left therapy because it was so hard to move forward, or you sensed you were not really seen. Maybe you could not assess whether the therapist was for real. If they had bad boundaries, it compromised or destroyed your safety yet again. You may wonder if it is worth the risk to find another way get out of this hole of loneliness and fear.
You just want to heal. So, you persist.
But the journey is truly worth every stop and start. It may not be easy to find a professional who is capable and committed to your recovery who you can count on to allow you to be vulnerable and powerful at the same time. You will have to ask hard questions, check your intuition, test the waters of safety and truth, and remain fierce and gentle with yourself in the process.
It also can take some time to find a community of support and learn to trust others again, but this is one of the most important parts of recovery. It is a series of small steps out of your comfort zone to look for a group where you finally feel seen and safe. You may be surprised who shows up to be the ones you most trust.
Eventually you begin to connect the dots because you have others to relate to that share your struggles. Even in confusion or clarity, you move in and through fear on a new path forward because you are not alone.
Something can open.
Respect. Movement. Stillness. Words. Push back. Pull in. Deconstruct. Remember. Recreate. Rework. Repeat. Laugh. Listen.
Connect.
We are out here.