Celebrating my being betrayed

"It ain't the knife in the heart that tears you apart

It's just the thought of someone

It's just the thought of someone

It's just the thought of someone sticking it in, sticking it in." Graham Parker

That's a quote from an old song, the chorus of which is, "Just can't get, just can't get no protection." And I guess that's the moral of the story if you prefer not to read all of this. What follows is a kind of Christian Stoicism, a position that a lot of people will find contradictory but that has deep roots in saints Paul and Augustine.

Twenty-five years ago I was subjected to the worst betrayal of my life. What made it the worst was the person who did it. The actual betrayal was something I was always going to get over; all it needed was time. (I don't mean by that that it was a trivial matter.) The shock that could have killed me inside was the person who stuck the knife in. And it is a bit of a blessing that this was all I had to face; there are, after all, people for whom being stabbed in the back is not a metaphor.

Before I get into it, a little bit about what I mean by betrayal because not everyone means the same thing by it. Last fall, I shared on Facebook that the anniversary of the this betrayal was coming up. I said I was not going to share details, what the betrayal was or who did it. I could not have been more vague about it. Shortly after the post went up, someone contacted me and said, "I think you should know that there are people mocking you for that post in groups you are not part of." I thought that was an interesting response. Two of the people who were doing this mocking separately got in touch with me and expressed concern about how I was feeling, apparently unaware that I knew about their cruel remarks elsewhere. They were also apparently unable to read; I had quite clearly said that not only was I long over the betrayal but that it had actually proven to be a very liberating experience in the longer run.

They also both thought they knew who the betrayer was but they were uncertain as to what exactly the betrayal was. They respectively speculated it might have been the time a particular person forgot a promise or the time there was an argument. I have more to say about that but I think the first thing to note is that neither of those two things is a betrayal. A betrayal is when somebody who was on your side openly or secretly works against you. They do this with the explicit understanding that what they are doing will cause you to fail. They don't just fail to come through in some spectacular way. I can understand why being letdown by someone you love can feel like a betrayal. When something really hurts, that intense pain can blind us as to other person's intention. And it does seem that in common usage the meaning has gotten fuzzy. A lot of people use "betrayal" to mean something that made them feel betrayed regardless of whether they actually were.

But that's not, as I say above, what betrayal means. Betrayal requires that the betrayer deliberately chooses to work against you with full knowledge of what they are doing. I had planned something and I had asked others to help, including my betrayer. And she had enthusiastically said she would and even helped me to plan the particulars. And then she secretly did things that guaranteed my plans would fail. Even as she said she loved me and would support me, she was planning to hurt me.

The odd thing was that, when my project did fail, it was painfully obvious what she had done. She either hadn't thought that through or she just didn't care. I don't know because I can't read minds. There was a particular thing that had to be in place for my plan to work she had made sure it was not in place. I couldn't have doubted what she had done and that she had done it deliberately even if I had wanted to because she made it clear she'd done it when I confronted her. And we had a moment. I remember her defiant, even triumphant expression. And then she said things.

"It took a long time coming

That big over the shoulder statement

But when it came, it flowed easy as poison." Marianne Faithfull

The experience brought moral clarity even before I was able to process all the details. The first hint was that someone else who was involved figured out exactly what had happened without being told and he immediately set about trying to make it better. It didn't work. At the time, I couldn't say why. I could see that he genuinely felt awful about it. He even acted like someone who had been complicit in it and he could not have been. The act of sabotage necessarily required that she keep the whole thing secret from him. If he had known, he would have stopped her.

The reason, I know now, that his immediate and absolutely genuine grief and guilt at what happened didn't comfort me at the time was that he'd figured it out so quickly. Imagine you're with someone when you hear a news report that someone has been assassinated and they immediately know who did it. There has been no arrest, not even a hint about who did it, yet they instantly know who did it. He felt badly because he knew, and had long known, what this person was capable of. He didn't expect this particular act of cruelty but he wasn't at all surprised when it happened.

That other shoe didn't drop until last fall when I shared that the 25th anniversary of this unspecified betrayal was coming up and that, because it had proven to be a very good thing for me, I planned to celebrate it but I wasn't sure how best to do that. And that led to the incidents I described up at the top of this post. But here's the really weird thing. As I said, two people thought they knew who had betrayed me even though they didn't have the vaguest idea what had been done, where and when it had been done, or how it had been done. That isn't surprising, this happened twenty-five years ago. What is surprising is they were, however, both absolutely correct about who had done it. And that's stunning. And neither had any doubt. They didn't tentatively guess about who my betrayer was the way they had about what she had done. They didn't even ask me to confirm. They knew! I'm in my mid sixties and I've known dozens of people who might have betrayed me over the years but they knew, without knowing any other details, who my actual betrayer was.

Here I have to admit to my own blindness. The man who figured it out at the time and the two others who figured it twenty-four years later were all able to do it because this betrayal was absolutely in character for the person who did it. My betrayer was not a trustworthy person and they always knew that she wasn't. I didn't. I didn't miss it for lack of evidence. There had been other betrayals of other people and I'd seen those happen. And here I'll stop explaining for their is a secret here about another betrayal of another person from years earlier that could still bring incredible shame on others were it come out. I think I'm the only person still alive who knows the details and I plan to take those secrets to my grave. The important point is, I should have known better long before that day twenty-five years ago and the fact that I didn't is entirely my fault.

Which brings me to forgiveness. I resolved that I would forgive my betrayer this year. It stopped hurting long ago but I had not forgiven. A big part of my not having done so is that she never asked to be forgiven. And I set out to do that this past Lent. I think I succeeded but nobody else has to believe me.

And now to celebrate ... well, to celebrate what? I think the thing to celebrate is my deliverance. I came out the other side of this experience without bitterness. I was angry, very angry, for a long time. But I'm past it and I've gotten over it. And I think I deserve zero credit for that. If it had been up to me, I would be bitter and I would have done resentful things in retaliation. But I didn't and I think that was because God was working in me.

What happened after the betrayal was hard. I've said this before but disillusionment is a difficult experience. On a purely linguistic level, that's odd. Having illusions is a bad thing and yet no one uses the word disillusionment in a positive way. It hurts like hell. There is massive cognitive dissonance when we are disillusioned.

You can't be betrayed by an enemy. Everybody expects their enemies to try and hurt them. When you're betrayed, someone who is supposed to be your friend turns out to be your enemy. Your entire moral universe is upset. You don't know whether anything was ever true. Every relationship you've ever had, every kind thing anyone has ever done for you may have been a ruse.

My betrayal disillusioned me and it would have, as I say above, been very easy to respond with resentment. The thing about being betrayed is that I was deceived. The whole thing happened because I trusted this person and I did so even though there was lots of evidence that she was not trustworthy. How had I allowed that to happen. This sort of thing had happened over and over again. The crucial difference twenty-five years ago that there was no blurring the matter. The illusions had to crumble at some point. I was blessed that they did at a a time when I was well-poised to deal with them. I was a in a good place in life and I had someone in my life who really did love me.

I'm going to celebrate by going to mass at a particular church in a particular place that means a lot to me and then I'm going to go out to dinner with a particular person who means a lot to me.