Dear Burned Out Black Girl, What Happens When Betrayal Teaches You to Betray Yourself?
I was listening to Pastor Keion talk about betrayal, and he defined betrayal as the abuse of access.
That got my attention.
Because betrayal requires access. A stranger can hurt you, disrespect you, reject you, or even harm you, but there is something different about being harmed by somebody you trusted enough to give access to you.
He said, “They used what they knew against you.”
And clinically, that made me think about betrayal trauma.
Some of our deepest wounds happen within relationships where there was trust, attachment, dependence, or safety. That’s part of what makes betrayal so disorienting. You’re not only processing what somebody did. You may also be trying to make sense of the fact that the person you trusted was capable of doing it.
And sometimes you still need the relationship.
That’s where things get complicated.
Because what happens when acknowledging what you know threatens something else that you need?
What happens when telling the truth might cost you the relationship? What happens when saying no might cost you belonging? What happens when acknowledging that something doesn’t feel right means you now have to make a decision you don’t feel ready to make?
Sometimes we adapt.
We learn what not to say. We learn what parts of ourselves create conflict. We learn when honesty is welcomed and when honesty has consequences. We learn how to read the room, maintain the relationship, keep the peace, and survive the environment.
Those adaptations can be incredibly intelligent.
But what happens when we keep using them after the environment changes?
That’s where I’ve been thinking about the relationship between betrayal and self-betrayal.
I define self-betrayal as the repeated, frequently unconscious overriding of our own needs, values, limits, and inner knowing in order to preserve attachment, safety, belonging, or relief.
In other words, sometimes the way we learned to survive betrayal becomes the way we learn to relate to ourselves.
And I want to be careful here because this is not about blaming people for what happened to them.
If you learned that telling the truth was dangerous, silencing yourself made sense.
If you learned that love required performance, performing made sense.
If you learned that being needed was one of the safest ways to maintain connection, becoming indispensable made sense.
If being strong protected you from being vulnerable in environments that weren’t safe enough for vulnerability, strength made sense too.
The problem isn’t that you adapted.
The question is whether you’re still making decisions from an adaptation that you no longer need.
We Learn Performance Early
I think about this beyond our families and relationships too.
Think about school.
Most of us spent our formative years inside a system where somebody else decided what we needed to know, taught us the information, and then asked us to give the information back correctly.
Perform well and you receive a good grade.
Perform poorly and there is a consequence.
There is value in education, obviously. But I also think it’s worth examining what happens when children are consistently rewarded for performance and compliance without being equally taught to question, discern, challenge, create, and trust what they observe.
And then there is the experience of Black girls.
There are times when a Black girl’s questioning, assertiveness, emotional expression, or refusal to accept something she believes is unfair can be interpreted as disrespect or defiance instead of critical thinking.
So what does she learn?
Not necessarily consciously.
She learns something about what version of herself is rewarded in that environment.
We do this everywhere.
Family.
School.
Church.
Friendships.
Relationships.
Work.
We are constantly receiving information about who we’re allowed to be.
And eventually some of those external expectations become internal rules.
Now nobody has to tell you to be strong. You tell yourself.
Nobody has to tell you that resting is lazy.
Nobody has to tell you to keep everybody happy.
Nobody has to tell you that questioning authority makes you difficult.
Nobody has to dismiss what you’re feeling because you’ve gotten very good at dismissing it before anybody else has the opportunity.
That’s the part of self-betrayal that fascinates me.
At some point, the external relationship can become an internal one.
So How Do We Come Back?
I think we start by learning how to be present with ourselves again.
That’s why mindfulness matters so much in this work.
And I don’t mean sitting quietly trying to make your brain stop thinking.
I mean developing the ability to notice yourself while you’re actually living your life.
Something happened.
What did I feel?
What did I notice in my body?
What did I immediately want to do?
What did I actually need?
Did I respond to what I needed, or did I immediately start calculating what everybody else needed from me?
Sometimes we don’t know the answer.
That’s okay too.
If you’ve spent years overriding yourself, you’re probably not going to hear yourself perfectly the first time you decide to listen.
That’s why this has to be practiced.
And it has to be practiced with compassion.
Because I absolutely do not want us to learn the language of self-betrayal and turn around and use it to attack ourselves.
“See! I betrayed myself again.”
No.
Notice it.
Get curious about it.
What were you protecting?
What were you afraid would happen?
What did you need?
Which version of you made that decision?
What information do you have now that she didn’t have then?
That’s a completely different relationship with yourself.
And I think that’s where self-loyalty begins.
Not with always choosing yourself.
Not with never compromising.
Not with cutting everybody off.
Not with getting every decision right.
It begins with being willing to consult yourself before making the decision.
Self-betrayal gradually erodes self-trust. Self-loyalty rebuilds it through repeated, intentional decisions that demonstrate to you that you will listen and respond to yourself.
And maybe that’s another way to think about access.
You will always have access to yourself.
The question is:
What are you going to do with that access?
I was betrayed in such a horrible way , i have lots of traumas. But trauma for betrayal is like being pushed out of an airplane without parachute and when you look up, you see "your person' pushed you.
Spot on🤏🤏