There is an unreal sense of healing that human beings experience that I can't sum up in a simple word. I know this because this week, someone I know and care about very much is facing the reality of betrayal and it's immediate aftermath: shock, survival, discovery, humiliation, and unworthiness. And i went through this, more than once, and i am so much better. We have all been betrayed, and it makes us so angry. We sit in anger for days and months, sometimes even years but forgiveness comes and it heals.
The shock comes from having trusted, from believing in the innocence of an intention, while another's double life was hidden, and a stronger force than the bond we shared, and that seems impossible. The survival is in splitting the house or the friends or the pets or the bills, in making sure we haven't been hurt deeper than just the emotional. It's calling banks or doctors or lawyers. It's buying new furniture. It's trying to leave with more dignity than what the truth revealed. The discovery is in what actually happened. How the lie really went, and friends will tell you they suspected all along, or had heard this or that. Maybe you piece together missing pieces of old stories, or maybe, as was my case, a third party confessed. The humiliation and unworthiness is all the same. I wasn't good enough to be told the truth. I wasn't good enough to be enough. And now, everyone knows. And I am a fat son of a fuck.
And it makes you angry, but you can't scream and you can't cry, because you want to be the bigger man, and you don't want to keep being the victim. And you don't want this to be how you identify or how other people identify you. But it feels endless. Everywhere you look you see an accomplice. You speak to the betrayer alone in the shower. every morning, you replay the final conversation and how you should have said it to really have left them breathless, like you still are now.
And then, you start to heal. You walk a little taller the first time someone tells you that you have pretty eyes. You run into an old friend who reminds you of how fun you can be. You pay your bills. You ask questions and go to therapy. You sleep and you wake up, over and over again. And you meet people who you trust. And you meet people you don't trust, and now for the first time, you can tell the difference between these two types of people.
You fall in love again. You run into the betrayer and you literally feel nothing. Not sad, not happy, not mad, not fat, not thin, not scared, not competitive, you just feel...fine.
You remember a good time, and you smile, and that good time involved the person who hurt you: your mother, your ex, your friend, your boss, and you send them a note to say thanks for this memory. And you mean it, and you feel good offering gratitude and letting them know that you release them of guilt, or blame, or worry about it all.
But you know you have healed when it happens to someone you love, and you can share your recovery, and you say the words (only to yourself), "the person who hurt my friend is not evil, not void of goodness, but fucked up back then. And I have compassion for the betrayer, because they fucked it up."
Out loud to your friend you say, "I am so sorry for your loss. And I am so excited to watch you grow right now, because the death of this relationship will make you a Phoenix, a Hulk, a Bloomin Onion, and I get to watch you smile again. And I promise you this, it will get better than it ever was or has been. And I know this because I am. I mean for gods sakes, I'm 165 pounds."
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