Rewriting Betrayal: A Mindset Shift That Can Set You Free

What If Betrayal Isn’t Real?

What if I told you there was no such thing as betrayal?

That we’re all just souls drifting around the planet in our little meat suits, following our bliss and accepting the present moment with absolute grace and contentment?

It sounds nuts doesn’t it? But that’s how they do it on the discovery channel.

Lessons from the Animal Kingdom

In the animal kingdom there is no such thing as betrayal. A lion can mate with his lionness’ bestie and then abandon them all for another pride with zero complaint from the wife and kids.

The human mind is a lot more complex and capable than the minds of animals. We can communicate, we are self-aware and we have a higher level of consciousness. This is great when it comes to inventing things, but not so great when it comes to accepting the flow of life.

How Ego Gets in the Way

Where animals exist in relative harmony, following instinctive patterns and moving with an inner knowing that guides them to protect themselves and procreate in the most fascinating ways, the human ego doesn’t allow us this freedom.

We are trapped by it. Given rules, shoulds, shouldn’ts, expectations, restrictions, limitations, judgements and consequences. These are unnecessary. We know this because every other species on the planet exists healthily and harmoniously without them, but this is how the mind functions.

The human mind is like a giant caterpillar with teeth that’s walked round in a circle, bumped into its bum, and decided the only way forward is to eat itself. It spends its life running away from fear, whilst simultaneously perpetuating it.

Animals Fear Threats — We Fear Thoughts

And while animals experience fear, it is only ever the fear of genuine threat. They will (thankfully) never know the fear of a thought that’s based either in the past, or in the future because they exist only in the present moment.

This brings me back to Betrayal.

How the Mind Responds to Betrayal

The word itself is a heavy one. To type it, to say it, it brings a sadness into my body that I can’t deny. Because I am a human, I have an ego, I lived in fear for much of my life, and I have felt betrayed.

The human mind, upon identifying a betrayal, will do two things.

It will look for the reason it happened and create a narrative.

It will develop a safety mechanism to ensure it never happens again.

In order to do this, the mind will go back into the library of your life experiences to look for patterns, data and evidence-based information that would explain why someone would betray you.

For example, if your boyfriend cheats on you, your mind goes back over your life history and recognises a pattern of behaviour with your dad cheating on your mum, then creates an easy narrative which is to blame it all on men, with the storyline of ‘men cheat’.

The next step is the safety mechanism, which in this example might be: ‘Men aren’t safe, so don’t date them’.

Log that into the ol’ belief system, and therein lies your singledom.

Our Survival Brain Loves Stories

This is excellent as a survival method, and came in very handy when we were cavemen and women, and we ate the red berries and died. Our minds created the storyline that the red berries meant death, and the safety mechanism was ‘don’t eat the red ones’, which worked like a charm.

We started to trust our minds too much. We realised it had powerful potential, we began to communicate with it daily (like we do now with Chat GPT), and instead of using our own innate intelligence, we believed everything our minds told us.

We gave our power away, and we let the mind create black and white thinking, what’s ‘wrong’ and ‘right’, what ‘should’ and ‘shouldn’t’ happen, to make us incessantly over-think until we locate a satisfactory answer, and we lost our ability to allow life to flow from us, to move as one and to accept what is.

I’m Not Justifying — I’m Offering Freedom

I’m not trying to justify the behaviour of whoever it is that betrayed you.

I’m offering a perspective that sometimes gets overlooked, but which has become a source of comfort, steadiness and peace in my life that I love nothing more than to share.

And it’s this. What happened, happened. We can’t change it. And the most powerful thing you can do is let it go and move on. Your life is a miracle and you deserve to feel relief, peace and joy. The suffering you feel from the betrayal is in the mind, and the mind's only job is to keep you alive. If you give your potential for joy over to the mind, it will squash it to keep you safe.

Be Like the Lioness

The lioness doesn’t blame herself for him leaving. She doesn’t spend days or weeks questioning if she did something wrong, or wondering what she could have done to make him stay.

The lioness knows that she is perfect, she accepts that he is gone now, and that this is also perfect. She moves with the same power and grace as she did before they met, and she will move with power and grace until the day she dies.

She feels no shame, no self-loathing, no insecurity, her mind is at rest, her body is relaxed, and she remains the Queen of the jungle whether he is there or not.

The Antidote to Fear is Love

Betrayal lives in the mind, and it is a product of fear. The antidote to fear is love.

So, my darling, if you are smarting from a betrayal, the answer is not in closing, hiding, hating or running. It’s love. Only love. Pure, honest, unconditional love.

Love yourself more, love your loved ones more, love strangers more, move with the same power and grace as you did before it happened, have faith in yourself and the magic of the universe, and above all else, remember who you are.

If You Need Support, We’re Here

And if you need support relaxing the grip your mind has on you so you can feel the relief of peace and acceptance, the RTT Therapists and Coaches at Inner Belief are here for you.