How To Deal With Betrayal

This post is personal. I recently found out that someone I trusted had been lying and stealing from me for years. This is someone I trusted with my children, my parents and my property. Despite having several incidents where money and household items went missing, I never considered she could be the culprit.

And then the truth came out.

She had been stealing for years, thousands upon thousands of dollars. And while the money was significant, it was the betrayal that weighed on me. It was the years of trust I had innocently projected onto her and the realization that she was not who I had imagined her to be.

As I grappled with what was happening, I decided to look at the situation from the inside-out perspective. Mostly because I wanted to see how the inside-out understanding held up to a situation that felt personally difficult and hard to deal with.

If it’s true that we create our personal experience, and hence our reality from the inside out, what does this mean for how I was experiencing someone I trusted and cared about lying and stealing?

The first thing I explored was, what is betrayal?

The more I considered it, the more I had to contend that betrayal is a creation of the mind.

While the felt sense of betrayal is real - a pit in my stomach, a frenzied energy in my body and an ache in my head, betrayal is not a thing that you can place in a box. It’s a concept. It’s a word that we give for an experience. That is a set of felt senses and thoughts, that collectively we call betrayal. And the only way betrayal can exist is through the gift of thought. Without thought there is no betrayal.

Without thought there is only whatever is happening now.

This doesn’t mean that what this person did, did not happen. Thousands of dollars were taken from my home to hers, she repeatedly said things that were not true, but betrayal, well that is our attempt at summarizing a phenomenon that requires memory (time travel), judgement (perspective) and felt sense (awareness).

This realization sparked two questions: Why does this matter? And am I letting her off easy?

First, it matters because yet again I see how experience of whatever is happening in my world, is 100% created by the mind. Betrayal, while a word that is packed with image, emotion and felt sense is part of the powerful illusion only possible through our mind’s projection.

I know this because throughout this process my personal experience has fluctuated. I sometimes feel hurt, I sometimes feel angry, I sometimes feel empathy, I sometimes don’t think about it at all.

This is how personal experience works. It’s not linear, static and absolute. It fluctuates, shifts and disappears.

And this is helpful to see because it softens the difficult emotions. I know that ultimately I can decide whether to stay on the magic carpet ride of difficult emotions or hop off. I know that difficult emotions are arising from the inside out, not from what is happening around me. And I also know that my experience can change in an instance.

This idea that “lying + stealing = betrayal” becomes a lot less concrete.

Now this can be misconstrued. I’m not suggesting that stealing and lying are things that are good or that we should simply allow people to do what they want without consequence. I believe there should be consequences to actions, even when we have empathy for whatever thinking led to a criminal’s misguided behaviour. This does not excuse their actions and it does not negate the need for repercussions.

I simply see my personal experience of a situation entirely separate from what I want to do about it.

My personal experience comes from MY thoughts. That’s it.

And because my experience comes from MY thoughts, I have some influence on how I experience anything that happens in my life. I can’t control it, so I won’t beat myself up for feeling bad or betrayed, but I don’t have to continue to feel that way if I don’t want to.

I don’t have to THINK that, and so consequently I don’t have to FEEL that!

I also know I won’t get stuck in any particular feeling for long, because thoughts are fleeting and hence feelings are fleeting too. The thought I’m thinking now is always on its way out - it’s simply the nature of thought. And so even if I do notice that the uncomfortable feeling keeps coming back, I don’t have to try to push it out.

My personal experience is constantly fluctuating moment-to-moment. I don’t have to do anything for that to happen. It happens with no effort on my part whatsoever. It’s simply how it works.

What I want to do about the situation is what I want to do. That’s it.

My options for what I want are endless and I get to choose based solely on what I want to do about whatever is going on. And this is best determined from a settled mind. A mind that isn’t focused on feeling betrayed, but instead is clear to allow its true wanting to come through. This does NOT mean you’ll do nothing or you’ll let someone off easy. It simply means that whatever you want to do will come from a place where there’s room for your wisdom, creativity and common sense to come through.

So how do we HANDLE betrayal?

Ultimately, anyway we want, and likely in a wide range of ways.

Because it’s not ALL up to us, but it’s not entirely NOT up to us either.

So we deal with it variably, and eventually it passes.

Our thinking and awareness focus somewhere new, and with it our experience shifts.  Not because we did something for it to happen, but because that’s how it works!  Knowing this, reminds us that we are fundamentally designed to handle anything life offers up.

And this is really great to see.

It underlines the basic, yet profound truth, of the popular statement "you got this", because you do. You were perfectly designed to meet life no matter what arises. Simply look in the direction of how we operate - what is true for all of us - it's the proof you've been searching for.