What is the spiritual gift of betrayal? What is the real difference between the betrayer and the betrayed? How are their mental and emotional realities different at the moment the violation of trust happens?
What are the mechanics and dynamics at play in the process of betrayal? Is betrayal inevitable in our conscious evolution? Why do we create situations in our lives where we experience such painful and deep soul-crushing consequences of betrayal? Regardless of whether we are the victim or the perpetrator, we both end up suffering. So, why do we do this to each other?
I like to believe that everything has a meaningful purpose in life.
Most of what that purpose is about will likely never be revealed to you easily or even in this lifetime. This is why you keep coming back. So, even if everything makes perfect sense somewhere, you will most likely still feel like some things do not yet make sense in your personal inner reality. And this is normal!
Those things are actually the stuff you don't yet understand the real meaning or purpose of. This is why life is still interesting and exciting to you. It's about something you don't yet know. If you knew everything about yourself already, how exactly would you find any pleasure or purpose to live or to continue evolving as a human being?
Not being completely honest with ourselves is not good or bad; we just don't get it yet, and that's perfectly fine. We are not ready, or we are not yet appropriately equipped to face the deep truth. And it's okay. You have time, and no one cares about the real 'speed' or efficiency of your personal transformation.
You would be surprised to realize how long you can remain in denial and how much creativity you have to continue inventing all kinds of comforting lies to yourself.
But at some point, you must understand something very simple about how consciousness works. Because you don't fully understand the wisdom of something you refuse to truly see inside yourself, you will certainly create a life to show it and teach this to you anyway, but a bit differently.
This is actually the very straightforward 'higher' purpose of betrayal and why we do this to each other: we betray to help each other evolve faster. We do this mainly with bigger and more complex intentions in mind (or heart), which are about how to stop betraying ourselves—the parts of us that we are more likely not even aware of but already seem to harshly judge and condemn.
Ultimately, there is no difference between the betrayer and the betrayed.
We all usually play both of those roles in our human experience. The evolutionary gifts and teachings we offer each other in situations where betrayal happens are actually the same for all of the roles.
The emotional journey and self-created stories about what actually happened in the act of betrayal might differ from one person to another, depending on which role they consciously played during the unfolding of this situation or how much they are attached to their self-perception.
The real problem with betrayal is that it creates a very nasty trauma in our personal and collective nervous systems. If we have no idea how to deal with this kind of trauma and what it tries to teach us, we might go down a very creative spiral of self-destruction very fast. We might also lose trust in all our relationships and even in Life itself if we fail to recognize this kind of trauma in us and what it does to our inner systems.
The emotional journey one goes through during moments of betrayal (or its digestion and integration process in personal consciousness) is very intense and often highly complex. It's usually filled with a lot of pure anger, fear, shame, guilt, confusion, deep deception about self or others, and the painful disillusionment of what reality truly is.
It shatters your sense of trust. And with no trust, you very slowly start losing yourself and the authentic quality of your relationships with others. This is what betrayal does to you and your reality.
Its purpose is to wake you up from your self-delusion and self-distrust. It's to show you parts of yourself you have been ignoring for a very long time. But for some reason, it uses the strategy of very painful betrayal to make you lose the trust you already have.
Maybe it is this way to teach you the real value of trust. It's very painful and causes suffering, but at least it works. It works perfectly if you know how to responsibly rebuild yourself after that.
Maybe it's to show you very clearly where exactly you have been lying to yourself. Where have you been sabotaging your own dreams without even realizing it, just because you are too blind or scared to see how miserably good you are at self-betraying your own soul.
What have you been betraying so stubbornly inside of you this whole time? Where exactly does your own inner self not even trust you anymore, and why?
Betrayal trauma is not often talked about. Why is that?
Maybe, because we actually have no idea how to heal it for real. So, we are all somehow deeply and viscerally scared of it. But the fear of it, unfortunately, does not prevent you from re-experiencing it over and over either.
No matter the role we play, we manifest betrayal-driven situations in our lives as a very potent (and usually very efficient) strategy to show us where exactly we are betraying ourselves already and dramatically fail to clearly see, accept, and sustainably transform it into something else.
If there is no part in you that feels deeply betrayed by yourself, it's virtually impossible for you to find yourself in a situation of actual betrayal being used as a process of co-evolution.
If you do experience such painful things, or if you find yourself playing any of the roles: the victim, persecutor, or even the savior in the act of some sort of betrayal-driven situation, you should very closely listen to what this says about you personally. The very first question you should probably be asking yourself is, where have I been betraying myself lately?
This is potentially the hardest question to ask yourself at that moment. Doing any kind of self-work or looking internally will be very hard, potentially even impossible for you when you experience a situation infused with too much betrayal energy.
Because betrayal is very powerful emotionally and energetically speaking. It literally crushes your soul. You will feel everything, and it will be confusing, painful, and very dark.
I could even argue that it's the most intense and complex of traumas one can deal with. I might even suspect that the state of our collective mental health and the strategy we use to co-create our future is driven mainly by our unresolved trust issues of betrayal trauma present at the systemic level of our reality.
Just look around.
Our families, cultures, and history are filled with all kinds of stories of systemic betrayal. We build and invent all kinds of things to protect us from others simply because we don't know how to trust each other anymore. We are very scared to be betrayed, either by those we love already or by strangers we don't even know but somehow still believe will certainly betray us at some point.
Most burnouts at the professional level have some kind of relationship to betrayal. People who are recovering from burnout often talk about being betrayed by someone or something in their work environment. Sometimes it's related to their boss, team, or partners. Sometimes it's even more complex. Some people feel betrayed by their community, sector, industry, government, or even the workplace or the 'system' in general.
The truth is, if during the recovery and healing process, the person fails to see how they have been betraying their own dreams and inner values in their workplace to the point of manifesting the actual burnout, they have a very high risk of re-experiencing burnout again at some point. But most likely even more intense, painful, and complex.
If they blame all kinds of dysfunctions in the system or something exterior to them as the primary cause of their burnout, they have most likely not yet understood the real meaning of what they have been through or how exactly they continue to profoundly betray their own life and even their future today.
This is not authentic recovery or healing from burnout. This is called a more sophisticated form of self-denial and an even more skillful blindness strategy about our deeper truth.
You can't trust anyone.
This is often the unwritten truth we all share in our business (and even sometimes personal) affairs, but we never really take time to truly talk about it together in a grown-up way. Imagining doing business in a world where betrayal does not exist seems impossible and potentially even stupid for some.
The consequences of all sorts of real or feared 'betrayals' in the system or in the way we naturally do business today create many different, but very painful distortions in our shared reality and social field.
We can talk about small things like unemployment rates, work-life imbalances, work-related health issues, and dysfunctional power dynamics in the workplace that lead to decreased productivity and motivation. Depression and mental health pandemics arise because of a lack of creativity, authenticity, inner power, and meaning in the jobs we do daily.
We could talk about big things like intellectual property rights, the administrative nonsense of NDAs and other contracts, industrial secrets, international law for 'responsible' and fair market competition, human and land rights, the economic tragedy of the commons, and the nonexistent strategy for climate change.
All of those and many more are somehow related to our deep and often unconscious fears of being betrayed at the macro level at some point in our lives.
In ethics, we call this the prisoner's dilemma. It's a moral problem first addressed by a mathematician that basically explains the very rational logic of betrayal.
The only way you can create a win-win situation is when both (or more) parties actually trust each other to do what they have agreed on while keeping the interests of the whole in mind. It's about real cooperation. If you don't trust the other, you will eventually create a situation where both of you end up being losers.
The prisoner's dilemma is actually at the core of our global economic and geopolitical structure today. Our deep misunderstanding of how it actually works is potentially also the main source of many of our current man-made disasters around the world, including war, global soil and water crises, or biomass and biosphere destruction.
It has been discussed by most of the most influential economists, politicians, and social and environmental scientists for ages now. It's not a big secret to anyone anymore. We know this very well and for a very long time.
We know the real collective price we pay for distrustful competition and for betraying each other. We already mathematically and morally understand how going against authentic cooperation for the benefit of the whole makes us all complete losers eventually.
But.
Our entire system today is built on the idea of not trusting each other. The day we start actually trusting each other for real, the entire system crumbles instantly. Most of our 'social' expenses worldwide are currently being spent to either protect ourselves from those we don't trust or to attack those who don't trust us.
Imagine how many jobs and entire industries would disappear if we were not scared of being betrayed by other human beings or something else.
Imagine how many natural resources we would have never used or forests we would not have burned if we trusted each other? Imagine how much less stuff we would need, invent, or buy to feel safer, more loved, or genuinely satisfied with our lives, only if we knew how to learn authentic trust again between us.
If you want to go even further, what would the government of a country look like if it existed in a reality where all its citizens actually trust each other to do the right thing for the whole and not only for themselves? What would the political strategic plan and agenda look like if it were built for people who can generate win-win situations in most of their relationships without the fear of being betrayed by someone or something?
What would the system be if it were co-created by people who genuinely trust each other and not the self-created 'prisoners' who are too scared to be deceived or betrayed by others, less conscious, or more evolved souls?
The only thing that keeps this distrustful system alive is the fact that we are too blind and ignorant about how exactly we have been betraying ourselves until now already.
The system only betrays you to show you where you don't yet fully trust yourself completely.
This is its painful but very powerful teaching.
The system is the exact same 'mirror' of your true self to you as everything else in this reality. Its mirror could be wide, intense, shocking, and very difficult to accept, but the clarity, beauty, and magnificent wisdom of what you actually end up seeing definitely make the experience of looking worth it.
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