The Anger That Comes With Betrayal

This next entry was supposed to be about the Restful Healing stage of trauma recovery but this was on my heart. Especially because the hurting need to hear these things. I'll get back to the above in a few days. I need to touch on anger today.

When I was planning my escape all I felt was adrenaline and the feeling of love and protection for my children. It lasted weeks after as I established the new boundary and fortified my new surroundings. The need to make a safe place consumed my every thought. Once the hoovering tactics and threats subsided, I began to have feelings I didn't know what to do with.

I had been told all my life that anger was not an appropriate feeling. I never heard that verbatim. It was unintentionally reinforced that when I showed anger it was suppressed. I wasn't given another alternative. Four decades of this life i'd spent in that mindset.

So here in my home, which I now refer to as my beautiful cage, a rage started to well up in me that only someone who has felt true betrayal would understand. Sitting here now thinking about it I still have very strong feelings after years of therapy.

I want to make this crystal clear. You are allowed to be as angry as you want to be for as long as you need to be. If you are free of your abuser, you no longer have to protect someone else from your anger because you are worried about retaliation. No one has the right to try to make you feel obligated to let it go. In fact, letting go or minimizing it will only suppress the resentment and allow it to fester in you, manifesting in other destructive ways through your behavior. There is a time for active forgiveness. This is not that phase of healing.

When someone close to us has violated our trust and/or well-being that is one of the most egregious acts of betrayal that exists. The realization that this has happened to us is understandably traumatic. We are left with intrusive memories of these events, the grief of the loss of trust, and humiliation over allowing ourselves to trust in them in the first place. Initially, you may feel as if you can never trust anyone that way again. The certainty we had about the world has been shaken, perhaps uprooted, depending on the relationship. The feeling as though we never really knew them at all resides with us. They feel like a stranger which is why we want to become estranged from them.

Though your peace has been essentially stolen from you, take comfort in the knowledge that there is a path through the pain. I cannot give you a timeline because everyone's is different. I needed to tell you today, that this will pass. When grandma told us this it wasn't some lore that only applies to high school breakups and lost jobs. Grieve the betrayal, because you SHOULD. You owe it to yourself to give your anger validity.

You can also find community in others telling their story of healing from betrayal using #betrayaltrauma

I painted the below while I was trying to make sense of my anger and resentment. I'm not a particularly gifted artist but it was a worthy therapy and I found that art, music, and writing of all sorts very helpful for me.