Someone has let you down. Some you trusted has broken that trust. You feel betrayed. It feels like someone has plunged a knife in the pit of your stomach and every time you remind yourself of the betrayal it feels like the knife is being turned and twisted in your stomach.
How could they let me down after all I have done for them and for our relationship?
I was always trustworthy. Why couldn’t they be?
Stand back for a moment and try and get some perspective.
Who let who down?
Are you ready for a constructive dose of self-realism?
You let you down!
Tough one to hear but before you get really annoyed let Us explain:
At some stage, probably in your childhood, someone – father, mother, sibling, friend, family member, stranger – did something to affect you negatively. You were told, or it was implied to you, “don’t worry, I am harming you but I love you so I will protect you”.
This conditional love was internalized as “You can harm me, you are really protecting me, it’s for my own good and you love me. So, if I let you harm me again it’s for my own good because you love me. To avoid you harming me again, I will look for ways to appease you, to keep you happy and maybe your harming me will reduce – if I keep feeding the wolf, it may not eat me!”
This harming may be violent such as physical abuse, sexual abuse or it may be subtle as “Mommy has a headache again, so be a good child and play by yourself, again, and don’t ever worry Mommy”, or it may even be more subtle.
You received the silent treatment when you made a mistake so the punishment went on for days and you felt bad for days. The ways of harming a child who is so trusting are as numerous as blades of grass on a field.
The trusting child cannot fight back. It succumbs and internalizes the message to say “I must be bad because the adult knows everything and if I got hurt it must be because I am bad so I got punished.”
The child now betrays the inherent trust it feels inside by saying “I trust you to give me love so I will do what you want me to do otherwise I won’t get love from you”.
By giving its feeling of trust away to another, who is harming it, the child experiences a betrayal of trust inside itself. Its intuition that warns it that you are being hurt is told to “shut up – don’t you understand that person loves me that is why this is happening”. This conditional love sets up the continual search for conditional love as unconditional self-love has never been allowed to be experienced.
Now we enter adulthood. Someone wonderful, someone loving, someone giving enters your space and wants to relate to you in a relationship. This feels foreign. You now don’t know how to recognize unconditional love. You are quite suspicious of true motives. How can you not want anything but my friendship and love – everybody who gives love wants something from me. No, I don’t trust you – go away!
Soon afterwards along comes someone to relate to you, be your friend and after a while also professes love for you. However, this person wants something in return. It may be sex, money, marriage, undue attention, continual “dumping”, a place to stay, introduction to someone influential, etc., etc.
This you recognize as love. “They need me so they must love me”. This conditional love is what you only know, and recognize, as love. So a relationship develops. You are now wearing an invisible sign above your head that reads “I have ignored my intuition, betrayed my own trust in myself, only feel loved when conditions are attached – am available to be betrayed – but don’t you dare!”
So, inevitably the person offering the conditional love – themselves a victim of conditional love – like you, feels that it is acceptable to betray a trust, after all, they betrayed themselves of their own trust when they were children, as you did. However, maybe their betrayal of their own trust was more hurtful, more frequent and went on for longer so their feelings of guilt and remorse are less attuned than yours. Simply put, it is easier for them to betray your trust than it is for you to betray their trust.
So here we are now seeing a “bigger picture” of betrayal of trust. Your betrayal of your own trust, as a defenseless child, set up a recognizable repetitive pattern for your adulthood. Tough to accept but the acceptance of this is the first step to break the cycle of repetition of you being betrayed again and again, and again, in all types of relationships – at work, at home, in social gatherings, and so on.
Ready to break the cycle? Brave enough to take charge of your life? Well here goes:
Take a few deep breaths to rid yourself of your increasing anger.
Firstly, identify the fact that you allowed yourself, as a child, to betray your own trust in yourself, and, to betray the trust of your well intentioned intuition, of what was acceptable to you and what was not. Don’t forget you were a trusting child; you could not fight back at this unfairness. You had to give in to it by betraying your trust. Forgive yourself totally.
Secondly, it’s time to identify the incidents that you can recall, when you allowed people to damage you and then give you conditional love. You had to feed the wolf so it would not gobble you up!
A subtle example to assist you here is the special love your parents gave you and then when your brother or sister arrived you were told to “love your brother or sister”, but in reality they took the limelight and attention away from you. So you were a “good” sibling but you felt betrayed by your parents. By being “good” to your siblings, you got your parents conditional love. But in truth you were not true to yourself. If you could have expressed yourself, you might have said: “This is not acceptable to me. First you loved me, now I feel dumped and you only have time for that screaming brat. Can’t you find a way to love us both equally and spread equal love and attention on both of us? If not, I think I will become a screaming brat so I get your love and attention!”
When you take the time to identify these long buried issues, do not hold back because you don’t want to hurt the feelings of loved ones who might still be on the earth plane and especially those ones who are in Spirit. Those in Spirit need the healing of understanding and even forgiveness, if you can find it inside yourself to give it, eventually.
Thirdly, identify what is now no longer acceptable to you as you stand in your new-found integrity ensuring that you no longer want to betray your own trust in yourself. Identify those issues from your past that are no longer acceptable to you. Identify issues currently that are no longer acceptable to you betraying your trust in yourself. Identify what is no longer going to be acceptable for you in the future when you are asked to repeat patterns of the past in betraying your trust of yourself.
Fourthly, now that you have an acceptance of your total inner trust of yourself, you have created unconditional self-love.
Fifthly, you can now entrust your intuition to do the job it was trained for, which you squashed all those years ago, convincing your intuition it could not be trusted. Allow the inner aerial of your intuition to be raised high and to let you now know what is acceptable to you now and what is not acceptable to you now, as you stand firm in your integrity.
Sixthly, strengthened by your continual inner resolve, your inner strength, you can now confront the issues and the people that are now no longer acceptable to you. You can also recognize the people and the issues that are now acceptable to you as you stand in your new found integrity. Expect your address book to be a lot smaller, but those that remain will be your real friends.
Seventhly, by expressing your intentions about what is now no longer acceptable to you, you must stand resolutely in your integrity. The fall out will be dramatic, difficult and emotional. Perhaps you should post a sign “Hard Hat Area” as they do on construction sites. Yours is a re-construction site! Stand firm, stand resolute, you may end up naked and alone in the winds of change.
Your real friends will come to cover your nakedness and take you to shelter. Be brave. After all this is Love’s work we are doing here, replacing familiar fear with only love. Never forget, God is Love, so by implication, this is God’s work we are doing here.
Eighthly, by unlocking these resistances of the past, you are unlocking your “Love Chest”. Your empowerment of stating what is no longer acceptable to you is the key to unlocking this “Love Chest”.
This “Love Chest” is where your unconditional self-love has been stored since you were a child. By unlocking this unconditional self-love and releasing it to become free you will feel the love and warmth denied to you, by you, for so long.
Ninthly, this unconditional self-love will manifest itself as a light shining from you as you become enlightened by unconditional self-love and unburdened by removing the blockages of the past conditional love. This light shining from you will be recognized by all.
Tenthly, the light in which you stand will lighten the previous darkness which used to surround you. The people and issues in darkness will now be seen clearly for their intentions and conditional love. Those with harmful intentions will find the light too uncomfortable to bear and they will scurry away from you into the darkness which falls outside the light coming from you. Their controls and manipulations become visible in the light and immediately recognizable as not acceptable to you. These people leave you and slink away into the darkness where they look for new prey. The past betrayal of your trust of yourself to enable these people and their issues to control and manipulate you, giving conditional love in exchange, now becomes so transparent to you that you are sickened by their actions and the, now, unacceptability of all of it.
Eleventh, with your light shining bright, other people, who also have lights shining brightly, will seek you out and want to be with you, in unconditional love. Their lights and your lights burning together will create even more light of unconditional love.
Twelfth, the flow of energy of unconditional love between you and these others will be recognized by your intuition as acceptability of where you want to be, and where you need to be, for your continual happiness, good health and peace of mind.
Thirteenth, you will now be blessed forevermore providing you stay in this new found sacred space with these new found energies of unconditional love.
Fourteenth, we wish you Namaste – May the unconditional love that is God inside you recognize the unconditional love that is God inside of others.
The cycle of betrayal of trust, which started with you as a child, can now be broken as you go from conditional love to finding unconditional self-love – by knowing what is now acceptable to you and what is now no longer acceptable to you.