Et tu?
It’s not the occasional silent treatments, lies, or shouting matches. It’s not the drunk confessions, passionate disagreements, or all-out brawls.
It’s the calm silent plunge of the proverbial knife to your back.
Betrayal.
The pain shocks with the sudden and fierce brutality of a new reality. Breath is stolen. Recovery isn’t even a thought because how could one ever recover from such a deep insidious wound? A wound so cruel because of the familiar, knowing path it takes. A path clearly and voluntarily defined by you. A path that led directly from a trusted someone with whom you shared heart-to-hearts to your now-stunned and broken soul.
The Most Unkindest Cut of All
We’ve all had moments when we vehemently disagreed with people we care about, trust and love. We all, I assume, have had at least fleeting moments when revenge teased and tempted. When the confidences your friend, lover or family member once shared with you threatened to form on your tongue as weapons to use against them.
And I would assume those same weapons have been formed, and possibly used, against you.
Nothing cuts deeper or hurts longer than betrayal from someone you once trusted. The wound healing only at the surface while still gaping deep inside. What emotional pain is greater than that of betrayal?
Grief?
Loss?
But then… what is betrayal if not grief and loss?
How does one come back from that? How does one allow themselves to trust again?
Those questions not only stump me, but also plague Jax, hero in my romantic suspense novel, Duplicity.
“What did you mean, they said you killed her? Did you?” she asked. “And… who were they?”
They. The rotten-to-the-core collective ‘they’. His… friend… Steuben and the other top brass who’d lied to him for so long. They’d gotten away with it, every one of them. Well-connected and untouchable, with Steuben not only as Chief of Department now, but also in charge of this case. Stueben had handed them the shovel and they’d dug a hole for him, so deep and wide, he hadn’t even realized he was trapped inside.
What an ass he’d been.
Cowards Die Many Times Before Their Deaths
If betrayal changes the betrayed, does it also change the betrayer?
Or does it expose them?
To betray means to have violated a trust. One must then wonder… was the betrayal the original goal? The trust deliberately coaxed from a targeted victim for the purpose of using that trust against them? Or was the betrayal an act of convenience, timing, narcissism? Sadistic pleasure?
We all have the ability within us to trust others, just as we all have the ability to gain others’ trust.
Don’t we all, then, have the ability to betray?
Men at Some Time are Masters of their Fates
Pain frustrates us. Drives us to tears. Infuriates us. We’ll do most anything to avoid it.
Talk through it, drink through it, wallow for a while then attempt to ignore it…
The steps to recovery from pain may be the same for all of us on paper, but in our hearts, in our psyches, some steps may be shorter — some rises higher, the angle askew, the path unsteady and seemingly insurmountable.
But deep inside, something rumbles. Something that keeps our gaze lifted, our step forward.
It’s our need to trust our own judgment again. Our need to trust our own instincts. Our need to trust ourselves.
Our need to trust.
If only we can remember how.
