Thinking about Betrayal Trauma on a Greek Island

We've all been betrayed. It's a painful human experience that often leaves the victim feeling shame and confusion.

"Why me? What did I do?" Writing /talking/ thinking about helps to wash the shame from it. You didn't do anything beyond being human. The person who betrayed you was being cruel, is unwell, or is an asshole. For more profound insights, clinical and otherwise, read on . . . You can hop down to the PS / Courage Words in the latter half of this blog post to read more about Betrayal Trauma.

News from Greece . . .

I’ve been back in Canada for just over a week. Such organization and orderliness! No one is shouting at sheep (including me). There are no sheep in this Toronto neighbourhood. It’s rained all spring here, so this place is like the Amazon. The raspberry canes have invaded my little garden and burst into a green thorny wall. The slugs are waltzing in slow-mo around the leaky rain barrel.

To my home in Lesvos, I went, I saw, and was conquered. By the usual suspects. Beauty, and the fox. By the full moon of April, and physical exhaustion: cleaning up the grove (old branches, new bushes, weeds, long grasses and wild grains), by burning brush, and pruning. I pruned inexpertly and too late. I, or Stelios, will do better in the winter.

At the close of my last missive, I said I had two big pieces of new to share.

The first one is: I renovated!

The team of Kosta and Kosta did all the real work, of course—mixing concrete, plastering, building, tearing up old tiles, putting down roof tiles. I did throw the sledgehammer a few times—bracing in every way, sledgehammer therapy!—and lay a few bricks for the photo op. I made decisions galore, and coffee for my wonderful master builders. And I perseverated every step of the way (about the building stuff, the septic tank, and the borrowed money–not about the Greek coffee—I’m good at that.)

These guys!! They were the absolute best! Kosta and Kosta: I learned so many new dialect words from them, as well as secrets about plastering and roof repair. So much love for these extremely smart, dedicated and very generous master builders. Thank you two!

Kosta and Kosta would start their work day at 7:30 am, finish around 3 pm and hit the road back to Mesotopos in the beloved mustard-yellow Diahatsu. Then I would eat and nap, get up and meditate under Thalia, and see therapy clients.

During those daily meditations, I did a lot of the waving-away-the-mosquito process. No killing! Lately, in our horror-filled world, I find it difficult to kill any living thing. My early Buddhist training asserted itself. I first saw a monk wave away a mosquito (about a thousand times) when I was seventeen and learning to sit in Denchai, Thailand. I described that experience in the book about that year in Phrae, called Touch The Dragon.

But who knew that gesture actually went IN? It is my meditative mosquito gesture now.

I sat under the olive tree Thalia, meditating. Waving. Musing (Thalia was the actual Greek muse of comedy, and theatre, feasts . . .)

Thank you Thalia!

Sometimes I simply lay on the ground (with an old carpet and tarp beneath me), watching the sky through the canopy of olive leaves. It sounds so idyllic, despite the occasional mosquito. Or snake. (More about the snakes another time! And the tortoises.) It was idyllic. The ground is volcanic: on a wearying day, it feels like pure medicine to lie down and rest on that earth.

Olive groves have an ancient history as healing places. The trees, the oil, the leaves—these have been sacred medicines from time immemorial. It has always fascinated me how many people feel connected to olive trees, and to Greece. The very first time I travelled there (at nineteen, to lovely Skopelos, the island where Mamma Mia was filmed years later) I experienced a sense of elemental belonging: it was as if I already knew the place in my bones. And I felt I should know Greek, too, the music of which reminded me of Spanish (a language I was learning at the time). I thought, I will live here one day. Many visitors from diverse countries have described a similar feeling.

The way I live on the land also brings me into constant touch with Earth and creature, stars and water. Greece is complicated, difficult sometimes–like any other place!—AND it’s been one of the most precious gifts of my life.

And this is my News Item #2: YES, I hope to invite a small group of people to experience and explore that sense of rich connectedness and deliciousness in a retreat . . . in 2025! The exact date will depend on responses to a survey I’ll post here and send around to my peeps next week . . .

I wanted to offer the retreat this coming September, but echoing the universal story of renovations, my own renos started late, and are not yet finished.

To facilitate the retreat properly and graciously, the “new” little old house has to be comfortable enough to host people who come to work together and alone, with me, with the olive trees, with the land.

Participants of this creative/healing retreat will not stay in the grove at night. The house is still too small for that, despite a new kitchen and bathroom, a new sitting room, bigger windows, a shaded deck. It’s not a villa—it remains humble.

First summer in Greece. When the little house had no plumbing no electricity no kitchen . . . How things have changed!

However, there is a beautiful hotel resort down the hill, right on the Aegean Sea: the Aeolian Village will become home for the participants.

So do me a favour for the next few days . . .

If you are curious about a transformative sojourn on a Greek island, please do some dreaming, some imagining. Feel free to send me an email at karen@karenconnelly.ca if you want to ask a question directly.

In my next blog in a few days, I’ll post a survey-link asking a few specific questions about dates, times, length, price points, all the nitty gritty. (The survey will be completely optional— no need to spend any energy on it if you’re not interested).

And courageous human, please, feel free to share this website with others who need Courage Words about Betrayal Trauma and recovery, or who want to dream of Greek islands and olive groves.

Bon courage!

Kaz

P.S.

Courage Words for this week: Betrayal Trauma and Betrayal Blindness

Betrayal trauma is an important area of interest for me as a therapist. Most if not quite all interpersonal trauma is betrayal-based.

Self-absorbed, narcissistic and abusive people (diagnosed and undiagnosed) have an astonishingly acute ability when it comes to enacting betrayal. Sometimes families will act as a brutal unit in betraying one individual (sometimes the identified black sheep, and / or the most empathic or vulnerable person in the family. Many artists have experienced being the identified problem, and are routinely betrayed/unseen).

To the victim, personal betrayals are dizzying in their acuity and aggression. That’s what betrayal is: a deliberate disloyalty, an intentional act of cruelty or treachery. The knife goes in right there. Those who betray us either know us intimately or are in positions of power that involve a duty of care and responsibility (such as healthcare professionals, religious figures, gurus, or institutions). Our vulnerability is available to them in a sanctioned, supposedly safe capacity. Whole groups of people experience betrayal trauma within societies; BT is the basis of racism and other forms of discrimination in so-called liberal democracies.

In personal betrayals, the self-absorbed or narcissistic individual has usually invested heavily in the early part of the relationship. In quick order, they become one of your best friends or a wonderful, passionate lover, a true soul mate. You find yourself idealized, cherished, praised. It’s really wonderful! They are the one you’ve been waiting for! This idealization creates attachment and expectation regarding your importance to the Other.

When the betrayal comes, surprisingly, betrayed individuals will often ignore it (for months or years). The shock of the betrayal is so intense that it’s safer to not face it. This is part of the betrayal cycle called ‘Betrayal Blindness’ identified and expertly researched by the American psychologist Jennifer Freyd and colleagues.

“Forgetting,” minimizing, and simply not ‘seeing’ the abuse are all manifestations of betrayal blindness: the act of holding the betrayal outside of conscious awareness and, often, protecting or excusing the betrayer. To abusive or self-absorbed people, betrayal isn’t really betrayal–it is how they relate to others.

Betrayal blindness helps us to survive because it allows us to remain connected to those who have harmed us. From birth to our dying moments, we are wired for attachment and connection. We need each other—even through and despite our existential separateness from others. The people who betray us tend to manipulate this natural vulnerability. They implicitly or explicitly threaten cut-off, isolation, or demotion within relationship. (Or they are unreliable and chaotic in their emotional availability, creating a sense of insecurity and confusion—usually a learned pattern from own childhood of insecurity or betrayal.)

Children especially need to be blind to betrayal in order to survive: continued relationships with their caretakers or family members are critical, no matter how severe the abuse. If we grew up blind to betrayal—minimizing, excusing, forgetting, not knowing how harmed we were–we may unwittingly find ourselves in similar relationships as adults. Again, betrayal blindness supports our profound human need for relationship and attachment. Statistically, many women remain ‘blind’ to the egregiousness of their abuse because leaving relationships can be more dangerous than remaining in them (to them and to their children).

If you move through betrayal blindness, recognize abusive behaviour and seek to address it directly, if you approach your betrayer to ask, “Why? What happened here? You hurt me . . .” usually the next stage of narcissistic relationship begins: Devaluation.

No, I can't believe this is happening . . . (Unsplash photo by Anthony Tran. )

Devaluation may be part of a cycle or the beginning of the end of the relationship, though it can takes months or years. One of the primary ‘acts’ of devaluation involves projecting negative, blaming emotions on to you. This is unconscious for both parties. I’ll be writing more soon about projections and projective identification, powerful defense mechanisms . . .

The projected emotions and ‘story’ are usually close to the bone: they hurt because they lock into some sensitivity you already have. That is also why these projected emotions and states feel so ‘real’--they are adjacent to present sensitivities. “I didn’t hurt you. You are hurting because you are so ______ (whatever the most wounding words may be). Don’t you realize how painful this is for me? Think about that!” Or, “What’s your problem? Why can’t you accept me, generously, just the way I am? Instead you pick me apart and criticize all the time. It's suffocating.”

Your point of view is usually demolished in short order; guilt and hurt is projected back on to you as though you caused the problem. You may find yourself questioning your reality or even ‘enacting’ the projection, behaving differently than you usually do. Next week I’ll write about how to refuse other people’s projections. How would DO we do that? (Stay tuned!)

If you refuse or eventually stop accepting the projections, the next phase begins: you will be discarded, slowly or quickly. If a religious, friend or academic group is involved, this is part of the process of ostracizing the other person. Ostracism is an ancient societal form of betrayal, and of betrayal trauma. In early societies, ostracism could literally mean death; that’s how much we needed each other then.

Now it usually means a kind of social death, which is still dangerous and painful (witness doxing, academic mobbing, call-out culture). Discarding / ostracism may be the end of the relationship or it may lead to the beginning of a new phase: hoovering, when the relationship cycle begins again and the person comes back for more narcissistic supply, often blaming you further for disrupting and harming the relationship in the first place (and possibly threatening you subtly or overtly if you refuse to continue being that source of emotional energy).

There usually comes a time when blindness begins to change; we begin to open our eyes. This can be frightening, but it’s also usually a great relief. Betrayal blindness ends when the abusive behaviour is egregious, often repeated, or when you simply get tired of it. People reach a crisis point. Or, other areas of growth in life make you stronger, able to confront the betrayal for what it is.

“I was blind but now I see” – I often think of those simple lyrics from Amazing Grace when helping clients as they face personal, institutional, and family betrayals. We need the help (I think) of spirit, a sense of deep love, our own worth, to move out of betrayal blindness and face betrayal for what it really is.

Here is to opening our eyes, courageously, despite our trepidation, despite our fears of loss. Here is to building new rooms of courage. (Or reno-ing the old ones!)

xok