Recovery After Betrayal... The Power of Community

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.

This Week

The past week’s war in Gaza has added more sorrow to a year of conflict across the globe. It has filled our world with grief and sorrow, anger and fear. We mourn the those slaughtered in the terrorist attack and those innocent victims both Israeli and Palestinian, who like so many victims of war, are caught in the middle.

Today we stand with the people of Israel who have struggled for centuries to be free--and we stand with the people of Palestine, who continue to live under intolerable oppression.

As humans, we must acknowledge that we are dependent on one another. As survivors, we know only too well that retribution and violence do not heal.

The Question

Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotch-potch of impulses, our perpetual miracle — for the soul throws up wonders every second.

—Virginia Woolf

Sometimes, we just don't understand why or what or how.

Sometimes the question overwhelms any answer we could possibly give to the grief, the loss, or sudden change in circumstance or history.

We may have been conditioned not to know how to respond to change without allegiance to what we learned from our family or culture. Perhaps we have been shamed or punished if we challenged the norms of our communities. Maybe we were alone in our thoughts or questions. If no one else was really there to support us to think for ourselves or help us through, it was hard to trust or find a safe space to land. We may have built cocoons of apparent safety or comfort, sometimes at the cost of living a fuller life that would include dipping into the unknown.

Surely, in the journey of recovery, our old beliefs about ourselves can fall apart. However, the part we possibly never trusted in ourselves can grow, quickening the impulse to question. At these junctures, and throughout the life ahead, this kind of inquiry may beckon us to reach deeper inside and utilize a new curiosity despite the old prompts of shame or fear.

Perhaps we stop and consider the question beyond any previous answer, and then approach and even embrace what is yet unknown.

Our eyelids flutter as we awaken to the bright wind of change. Those questions remain; in fact, we have more questions than ever. It is what happens with growth.

Indeed, it is the questions beyond the creaking door that remind us that we are truly and wondrously alive.

We open the door.

"One-liness"

I am proposing that we reconceive the dream. That we consider what would happen if security were not the point of our existence. That we find freedom, aliveness, and power not from what contains, locates, or protects us but from what dissolves, reveals, and expands us.

—Eve Ensler, Insecure at Last: Losing it in Our Security-Obsessed World

"One-liness"

Every survivor has known loneliness⎯the kind of solitary pain that comes before, during, and certainly after the wound of sexual trauma. There are few words to truly describe this experience, and often, too few who will listen, hold or believe unbearable, perhaps unsayable, truth.

You may have been instructed or threatened with words or customs to keep your story secret. Perhaps you keep all that you carry to yourselves, either directly or through the unspoken family lineage. These secrets are the legacies of shame that bury themselves deep within the DNA of the psyche, calcified in your body and nervous system.

Perhaps you were punished or shunned because you dared to use your voice or your actions to reveal the truth. You may have devoted your life to political or legal work, to self-sacrifice and long hours of service, perhaps sacrificing your own health or wellbeing to continue to feel apart from connection. You might have created new avenues of psychological, physical or spiritual bondage by recreating abusive practices within yourself that further isolate you from real connection.

These kinds of one-liness can be a chosen separation, a lifestyle that has been embedded by trauma to survive. However, one-liness cannot protect or keep you safe any more than secrets can. It is often most present in the midst of family or social gatherings, when the performance of connection is so starkly different from the actual experience of disconnection. Neglect, one of the most devastating aspects of the loneliness of abuse is so often unrecognized from the outside. In this loneliness, you learn to become invisible even to yourself when you believe you don't matter.

This form of isolation is not solitude. Solitude is regenerative and necessary⎯truly essential to centering the self and reconnecting inside. Isolation is the other end of solitude. It is generated by depression, anger, or fear. It leads to less life and vibrancy as you go down countless rabbit holes of possible dangers, distractions or addiction, instead of making real connection. Isolation distances you because of the fear or pain of abuse. You may keep yourself in this tight capsule of isolation or one-liness to feel safe, but it won’t feed you nor make you feel any more secure. The result is a profound loneliness that only replicates the pain of the past.

How do you reckon with the wounds or habits of isolation? How do you manage or cease contact with those who have hurt or harmed you, especially family members or partners?

Maybe you experiment with new connections that resemble the playbook of the past.

Or…maybe you risk seeking relationships that have the capacity to nourish you and perhaps allow true mutuality in the connection. Maybe you begin a new friendship and actually enjoy the experience, not only by being truly seen by the other, but also by getting out of your own way in the exchange. Maybe you take the chance to let someone in.

It may be a challenge to trust yourself enough to differentiate between the toxic "woundology" of a trauma bond and the real depth and freedom that honest connection generates. Of course, this means you may have to feel the scary reality of caring, or the possibilities of loss that are natural consequences of life and death.

It may be worth the risk.

You will know when you can actually hear and listen without numbing out or simply waiting to have your turn to speak. It will be easier to share and to listen, to speak your truth, laugh freely, and...connect honestly.

You know you are on the right path when you begin to notice that you are not front and center in your exchanges, when you are as interested in the other and an active part of the conversation—neither star player nor non-player in each exchange. You begin to experience and feel the warmth of true connection.

You will know when others matter, because you matter.

You will know when you are less concerned with whether you are recognized for what you do or how you perform, but recognized because you are simply enough.

You experiment with new thoughts, new choices, new realizations…and new connections.

You may still feel lonely at times, which is recognizing a longing for meaningful connections.

But you are on the road to recovery, discovering a way out of isolation.

You have to love. You have to feel. It is essential to being human. Taking the great risk to finding connection and true community is the road to healing.

1.  Insecure at Last: Losing It in Our Security-Obsessed World  —Eve Ensler

   https://www.c-span.org/video/?195040-1/insecure-last

2.  Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.    —Louise Erdrich