When Trust Is Shattered: A Spiritual Path Through Betrayal

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As I prepare for the release of my memoir, Recover Your Soul: A Spiritual Journey of Healing from Addiction, Codependency, and People-Pleasing, on April 13th, I have been going back and listening to past podcast episodes that might offer additional support to those reading the book.

Revisiting these earlier episodes has been a tender experience.

They were recorded during seasons of my own healing when everything was still fresh, when I was actively untangling old patterns in real time, when I was learning how to turn inward instead of reaching outward in pain. There is a rawness in them that feels honest and important.

This episode on betrayal is one of those. It originally aired in 2023 from Season 4.

Betrayal can take many forms. It is not only about infidelity. It can be secrecy. Addiction. Emotional withdrawal. Broken promises. The moment when something you believed to be true suddenly isn’t. It can feel shattering.

An

The Recover Your Soul Spiritual Memoir will be available on Amazon April 13th!!!! Join me in person for the book launch on Friday the 17th and the weekend transformational retreat the 18th and 19th in Colorado. Lean more about everything on the website. 

Are you ready to Recover Your Soul? Work the Process at your own pace and still be in community with the new 9-Step Self Study Collective, or join a Recover Your SOUL CIRCLE for Group Coaching with others walking a similar path, or work 1:1 with Rev Rachel. It is time to choose your own healing and awakening and remember your wholness. 

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not allied or representative of any organizations or religions, but is based on the opinions and experience of Rev. Rachel Harrison or guests. The host claims no responsibility to any person or entity for any liability, loss, or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly as a result of the use, application, or interpretation of the information presented herein. Take what you need and leave the rest.

Transcript

Framing Betrayal And Self-Healing

Rev Rachel Harrison 1:07

Betrayal is one of the most painful experiences we can have in a relationship. Whether it comes from deceit, infidelity, addiction, secrecy, or even broken promises, again and again, it can feel deeply personal and it's shattering. While our instinct is to focus entirely on them, in recover your soul, we're learning to turn the attention to ourselves, to the only place that we have control, which is our own awareness, our own healing, and ultimately our own release and awakening. As I prepare for the launch of my upcoming memoir, Recover Your Soul, a spiritual journey of healing from addiction, codependency, and people pleasing, that will be out on April 13th. I'm so excited. I'm going to start to replay some of the episodes over the past six seasons that are going to be part of the supplemented suggestions as to how to deepen the understanding of the recover your soul process as explained through my story. I've been through it, and I think that's why we are so connected. Enjoy the episode. Welcome to the Recover Your Soul Podcast and Community, a spiritual path to a happy and healthy life. My name is Reverend Rachel Harrison. I started Recover Your Soul after having profound changes in my life from my recovery of alcoholism, codependency, people pleasing, and control addiction. I was guided to share the tools and principles of spirituality and the recovery soul process to help others transform their lives as mine was transformed. For us to overcome external circumstances, we need to turn the attention to ourselves, focusing on our inner change and healing. Positive results in our lives will follow. Welcome to Recover Your Soul. I'm Reverend Rachel Harrison, and I thank you for taking your time to listen to this podcast today. If you're new to the podcast and maybe you've only been here this time or a couple times, welcome, welcome, welcome. This community is growing. And I really think of this as all of us doing this together, this soul journey. It isn't easy work, but when we support each other and we see each other like we do in the support group or on the Facebook page, we remind ourselves that we are not alone in this journey. And so many of us have walked through the door of codependency or al-anon or recovery. But ultimately, we're putting all that stuff on the shelf and doing our own spiritual journey. We're turning the attention to ourselves and our own healing and learning how to stand in our fully resourced whole self. For today's episode, I'm going to hit a hot topic, something that I've been thinking about speaking on for a while. It's really come up because of some situations that are happening in my friends' lives, some situations that are happening in the lives of people that I do coaching with, and a lot around my own journey that I had with this situation, which is deceit and cheating. And this is a big topic. And I want to hit this from the soul recovery perspective. And I also just want to start off with the disclaimer that this is the soul recovery take on things. This is me, Rev Rachel. This is how I have perceived all of this through my spiritual journey and my way of seeing it through soul recovery. As always, with everything that I say, take what you need and leave the rest. And if something doesn't resonate with you or doesn't feel right, I'm not trying to tell you how it is or should be. I'm telling you my experience and offering it through what I now call soul recovery because this is a hot topic. This is a trigger button for everyone. I want to start with a story in my own life. And I've only told this story one other time in the podcast. And it was actually came out of the blue, wasn't expecting it to come out in the recording that I did with Crystal Jikowski on her breathe in, breathe out episode, which I then have also included in the episodes that you can listen to on the Recovery Soul podcast. And she and I were just, you know, openly talking about uh forgiveness and a variety of things. And this story about Rich and I came out when I wasn't expecting it. I'm actually gonna tell that story, but I want to back up and start, as I often do, in working on our soul recovery journey with our own childhood and our own way that we grew up and the patterns that were created that we continue to fulfill in our own lives around what our parents were like, what our beliefs were, what was taught to us as being right or wrong. I found out when I was probably, I don't know, maybe somewhere between 10 and 13 years old that my father had not been faithful to my mom. And my parents had divorced when I was seven or eight years old. As you know, if you've listened to the podcast before, that there was a major hippie upbringing. I was raised in a way hippie way, right? My middle name is Little Flower, that I was born in 1970, and that my parents had moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, because it was this land of the new spiritual journey. It was this open life. And my mom tells the story that she and my dad were having a conversation when I was about one year old, and my dad was sort of talking about some other friends who were having some issues over the wives not being okay with open marriage. And my mom realized that he was sharing that he thought that open marriage and open relationships were what he believed and how he wanted to be. As I talked about in the honesty episode, our family kind of did this thing where you didn't divulge information unless you were asked. But if you were asked, there was always truth. So in that moment, my mom tells a story of asking him, Are you, are you having relationships with other women? And of course, his answer was yes. So for them, it was this dance that they played in their marriage and their relationship around what did each of them want, and to have clarity around what was an open marriage, what was this new love, everybody loves each other thing. But my mom shares that she really had this level of deceit that she felt in the fact that my dad was actually having an affair with her best friend. And for them, they didn't see it as deceit. They really felt that it was this hippie, we all love each other, we're all connected way. But that doesn't mean that somebody else doesn't feel it another way, right? And in soul recovery, what we're looking at is we're not judging situations as being right or wrong, we're not judging somebody as being good or bad. We're really taking all of that off and we're allowing ourselves to be in our own feelings and giving other people permission to be in their own experience and their own feelings. So what's fascinating is that when my mom was telling me this story when I was, again, between 10 and 13 years old, she did this really amazing job of telling it as facts and not as pain. She has always been remarkable in this way that she didn't come in and tell me what a piece of crap my dad was for this thing that he did. What she shared was two human beings that saw things in a different way and had different needs, different expectations, different values. But she also shared her pain. She shared in a way that I could feel without making my dad be the bad guy, that it had been hard for her, that she had had this image of what their marriage was going to be like, what it was gonna be like in her life. And in that moment, it was shattered, right? That's deception. That's that moment when your value that you think it's gonna be like is immediately changed because somebody else's actions, somebody else's being human, right? And so it was an interesting time for me to learn this about my dad because he was always having a girlfriend. You know, when I'd go to visit, it was always around him having a girlfriend. And nowadays you'd probably call that love addiction. So I can see now that my dad probably had that. Now, has he said that of himself? Absolutely not. And I, it's not actually mine to give him that label. But for me, it was helpful to understand him better from this human perspective, because my mom had given this ability for me to look at it in this way and to not have judgment or to be upset. But at 13 years old, you're in a very formable part of your psyche and how your psyche is developing, especially around sexuality and around what it means to be in relationship. Now, my parents didn't end up divorcing because of that. They worked through things, they tried the open marriage, they tried a monogamous marriage, and in the end, they decided that their values, their things that they wanted in their life were just too far apart from each other, and that for them to love each other enough to truly accept the other for completely who they are meant that it wasn't going to be married. And as I've said in many podcasts before, to this day, they are still fabulous friends. They get along beautifully. They've traveled together. We spend holidays together, we go visit them, he visits us. It's been a beautiful relationship. And the truth is that they really did have a chance to go be their full expression of self, not in union. So that was my marker of what divorce could look like. That was my marker of allowing somebody to be themselves and to not be together, that it was okay to not be together. But I also came away from that formable experience. And I have talked to my dad about it over the years, probably not a ton, but enough that he's shared his own perspective, which really was this very idyllic, hippie part of him that felt like that was an experience that he wanted to have. And it was important to him. And relationships and girlfriends have always been very important to him. So when I went into my adolescence and into being in relationship, it was clear to me from that experience that monogamy was very important to me, that I didn't want to be in a relationship where somebody wasn't going to be loyal. But I also had this weird, unusual undertone that understood that the decisions that my dad had made had nothing to do with my mom, that his experience, his values, his needs weren't in direct reflection to the lack of my mom being able to provide something for him, that it was very separate. And from that perspective, I feel very lucky because I could step into these relationships where being monogamous and devoted to each other was important to me, but I didn't have unrealistic expectations. And for whatever reason, I'm also very grateful that I generally haven't been a very jealous person. And I think that jealousy is very normal and very typical. It really comes from a place, again, in soul recovery, we're looking a lot at control. It comes from this place of wanting sure results, wanting to know for certain that something is going to be a certain way. And I think, in a way, because I knew this about my parents and had this way of understanding it from such an unusual perspective, to be honest, I never was jealous because I knew that I couldn't control the other person, that there was actually no point in being jealous because they're gonna go do whatever they're gonna go do. It isn't about me being any certain way. Now you can show up in your relationship in the best way that you can, but I learned somehow that it wasn't about trying to control that situation. So fast forward to meeting Rich. And when Rich and I first met, he had shared that he had not been faithful to his girlfriend, longtime girlfriend, uh, that he had dated for seven years, which, as you know, at meeting him at 25, that relationship had been a very long-term relationship at that age. I knew that in his experience, that there was not a high likelihood that he would be able to break that habit, which is a very strange thing to say, but I could see it that way because I had had this understanding of the humanness of people in my parents' relationship. So as we were together, we had committed to a monogamous relationship, and that was really important. And for me, it was always really important based on my experience for me to always be the kind of person who's with the person I'm with and to not cheat and to not have a wandering eye. And I had one of those situations that you have with parents when they've reacted somehow that you react very differently the other way. So I had sprung very far over to this side of wanting to be very loyal because I could experience the pain that my mom had felt that she shared with me. And I didn't want to have anybody have to feel that, and I didn't want to participate in that. So when Rich and I met and found out that he had had this past history, and we decided that we wanted to get married, which I was ecstatic that he wanted to marry me, of course. I knew in the back of my mind that there would be at least one slip. I knew that it wasn't about me. Now I say that, and I want you to know that I feel anybody who's going through anything like this or has gone through anything like this, it doesn't feel that way when somebody has a slip or when somebody is deceitful or somebody's stepping out. It is one thing to have these spiritual beliefs and have these knowings that we're all having our own experience, but we are deeply intertwined with each other. There is this level of trust, there is this level of expectation that is our humanness showing up. It is the truth of who we are as human beings. Being a spiritual being, having a human experience doesn't mean that we bypass the incredibly deep and painful feelings that it is to be a human being. Having deceit and having somebody be unfaithful or lie to us is one of the most painful experiences that we can have as a human being. So even though I knew that there would be a moment when Rich would be tempted or have a slip, I didn't want it. I didn't want that to happen. And we had gone to that same therapist who we went to when I was pregnant with Alex, who had told us that we were alcoholics and then we had quit going. Well, prior to that, one of the things that we had been talking about was his ongoing friendship with his long-term girlfriend before me, who we are still actually really good friends with and as an important person in our life. But at that very moment, 28 years ago, he was not sure about how to be friends with her and also be friends with us. So he tended to have a friendship with her that was separate from me. And that was a problem for me. So even though I said that I didn't get jealous, I wasn't necessarily out of my mind jealous. I just knew that it wasn't healthy and it needed to have a correction. So in this counseling session with the therapist, she said just these incredible wise words. I should have known that we were alcoholics because she was so wise and everything else she said. But she said, marriage is complex and we all have unrealistic expectations of what we think our partner is supposed to be for us. And she said, it is absolutely essential that you are mindful in your relationships with people of the opposite sex because there will be moments when you are not getting from your partner what you need or what you want. And that other person that you've been hanging out with, that other friend, will provide it for you at that moment. And in a moment of weakness, you'll step out because that's what you need as a human being, right? You need that need to be met. And that made sense to us at the time. And her suggestion was if you want to be friends with this person, my suggestion is that you both are friends with her, that this having a separate friendship isn't healthy. And we heard that loud and clear. And she got invited into our life in a way that has been a beautiful friendship. Um, so grateful for that friendship on a lot of different levels. And I was grateful that Rich really heard that. There will be difficult moments. It is true that we can't provide for each other what the other person needs all the time, nor is it our job, to be honest, to be trying to fulfill every need or every want that that other person has. This is the part of us filling ourselves up first that is essential in our own lives and essential for healthy relationships. We are there to mirror for each other, to support each other, to be present for each other, to live together in a way that is healthy, but we cannot fill the other person's cup. We cannot be the one who does all the work, who is morphing and changing ourselves and trying to play some sort of game that will fill that person's role that's not healthy for anybody involved. What ended up happening with Rich and I is he was in a place in his life where we had had kids when I decided I wanted kids. He hadn't decided he wanted kids. He had thought that we were going to wait a couple years, but I had wanted the kids at that point. So that's when we started. And he had to work really hard. And it meant that he moved into man of the house at a much more rapid rate than I think he wanted to or was prepared for. And he was working just bone to the grindstone, just working so hard just to try to get our bills paid and everything happening. And we had two kids by now, and he had built the cabin up in the mountains for my mom, which was um a movement more into his alcoholism and was really difficult for me. So there's other episodes that go into that whole part of our life in terms of how we interacted with each other, but that drew us apart a little bit because I had resentments around that. And I was busy with the kids, and he was feeling overworked. He was feeling like a lot of his needs were not met, his intimate needs were not being met, he wasn't being seen by me in the way that he wanted to or needed to because I was consumed with mothering. And he went on a business trip to go do some work for a friend, met somebody in a bar who gave him all that attention that he wasn't getting from me. All that stuff that he needed. And again, this isn't about me not giving it to him. It's about his own relationship with himself and where he was at that time. And he had a one-night affair with this woman. Now, I know for many people, we're not talking about one time. We're talking about a lot of situations or a lot of time or a long relationship. And again, I don't want to make light of how incredibly complicated and difficult this is. But when Rich finally came to me and shared with me what happened, two parts of me danced with each other. One was absolute rage, of course. One was feeling that deceit, one was the world crashing around what you think that you have. And that is true feelings. That is important to allow yourself to feel those feelings. The other one was similar to when he shared with me that he was still drinking, which is that I could see a human being who is struggling and suffering with himself. But ultimately, we are always on this journey of trying to find our wholeness. We look to others to fill us up, we look to others to give us our self-esteem. We look to others to provide for us some sort of value in ourselves. And that comes in all kinds of shape and form and relationship and addiction. And ultimately, this is just another form of that. So we had the couple days of yelling and discomfort and not knowing how to handle it. And ultimately, what ended up happening in my situation was I very quickly moved into the awareness that I could drink the poison, that I could drink the poison that says, I'm going to poison you with my anger. I'm going to poison you with, I'm going to let you know what you did to me. I'm going to let you know how much you hurt me. I'm going to make sure you understand. And the truth is, it does hurt that other person, but it hurts us more. The resentment and the anger hurts us more. What ended up happening for Rich was he had been in this moment in his life where he wasn't sure that he wanted us. He felt overwhelmed with being a dad. He felt overwhelmed with being a provider. He felt overwhelmed with all the work that he had. He was in a little bit of his own life crisis. And the concept that he could lose his family over a carnal desire rocked him. It made him realize that this was the life that he wanted, that he did want these kids, that he did want this wife, and he did want this life. So in some strange, complex way, it was actually a blessing to wake him up and make him realize what he wanted. Now, it's not my job to have him want me. It's not my job to try to convince him that this life is the life that he should want. It's important that he chooses that on his own, that the awakening that he had was indeed this is his family that he wants. And it allowed us, as I talked about in the podcast with Crystal, to start having very clear conversations around what is acceptable, what kind of communication, what kind of talking, what kind of whatever is appropriate or okay. And in the end, it made us stronger. And for me, I was grateful that I could see him as a human being instead of seeing him as some ideal that I had set up of what he is supposed to act like, supposed to be like. Now, deceit is incredibly damaging. So it isn't like the next day everything turns out great and you can forget that any of that stuff happened. I felt again fairly deceived when Rich came to me two times and said that he had been continuing to drink and not tell me about it for two years. Now, again, in a way, that's a level of cheating, not with another human being, but with a life, with a sense of himself that is different than what he's portraying at home. It's different than what he's participating or thinking that I think is happening. And again, in soul recovery, what we're looking at is we're looking at taking the need for somebody else to be for us what we need or want for us to be okay. And we're looking at our own feelings. So I can look at my own feelings. I can come back to step one in soul recovery, which is that I'm powerless over every single thing besides myself. And I can say, I'm powerless over his identity crisis. I'm powerless over what he needs that either in drinking or in this particular situation, around what that was for him. The place that I can control is for me to stand in my integrity, to be the kind of person who comes from love and understanding, who can be the kind of person who can have curiosity of somebody else's life process and understand in a deep level, this is not about them doing something for me, but for them learning and growing and having their own awareness for them. Almost all negative behaviors that we do in our lives are our way of handling our own pain. And this is really around his own journey and his own pain. So if I can let go of this attachment that I have to him being for me, the way that I want him to be, I come to my own power. I get to decide that I can be clear about what my boundaries are, I can ask for what I need, I can attend to those younger parts of myself that are the ones that are being affected, that are feeling hurt. And then I can decide from my spiritually grounded, centered place whether this is something that I can let go, that I can move past with the idea of forgiveness on the soul recovery perspective, where you literally let the energy dissipate, you accept it, you don't have to condone the behavior, but you decide thoroughly that you're not going to continue to punish them for it. You're going to truly and deeply let it go. That's true forgiveness. Or you say, This isn't something that I feel I can move past. I am not comfortable with how this worked. I don't feel like it is a foundation of a relationship. And I don't feel like I want to stay in the relationship, that this deceit is too much. It's not one way or the other that can be written out in a book as if you follow one path and it gives you one direction, you follow another path, it gives you another direction. You are your individual self. But when you stop feeling like the other person's behaviors are a reflection of you and allow it to be a reflection of them and their experience, and you turn the attention to yourself and you come from your most fully resourced self, your most healed self, and you look at it from a place of compassion, and you look at it from a place of gentleness and tenderness, and you take deceit off the table and you see woundedness, you see somebody who's struggling, and you turn the attention to yourself and you begin to heal your journey, you start to heal your path, you start to look at how you need and want to be in the world for you to be your fullest and most highest self. You know, just in closing, it isn't easy being in relationships, and it isn't easy actually being out in the world with humanity and all of the temptations that come in so many ways. But the more that we stand from this letting go of control place, the more that we have deep realization that we can't meet everyone's needs, that they can't meet all of our needs, and put our own way that we choose to see it as our number one priority, and let so much of our control stop driving us into the place that thinks that somebody else is the source of our pain and come to the place where we choose our own path and we choose our own healing. And we also may choose to not stay in relationships. And if we choose to stay, we let go, we allow, we forgive, we see people truly as they are, we stop making people projects, and we open to both people being on their own path and hoping that we can support each other in a way that that path is leading us to our highest and best selves, so that we are each making the best choices we can to live in honesty, to live in gentleness, to not live from addiction, to not live from deceit, to not choose to do things that are hurtful to the other person. But again, it's not easy. And there isn't a one size fits all. And each person is entitled to go through their own process and experience their own feelings and attend to their own needs and be gentle with themselves and hopefully be forgiving and gentle with others. Again, I don't have all the answers for this. And as I finish up, my heart just goes out to so many of the people that I know that are out there dealing with these kinds of things, and there's so much addiction out there around sex and porn and relationships. It's just complicated and it isn't easy and it isn't straightforward, but we're remembering that it is their experience of trying to cover up or do something for their own pain and that we do our healing, we do our work on our self-esteem, we remember to keep our side of the street clean, and we come from a place of integrity in our own lives. And from that, we take our power back and we stand in our full strength. As I say all the time, if you need help working through anything that might be happening in your life that's like this and want some spiritual coaching support, feel free to reach out for a coaching session. There is so much inner work that can be done on ourselves that allows us to be able to handle these kinds of situations from our spiritually grounded, centered, adult, resourced place. And that's what I'm here to bring out and support in you. Until next time, Namaste. Thank you so much for spending this time with me and being part of the Recover Your Soul community. If today's episode spoke to you and you'd like to connect with the community even more, I invite you to join us on the first Monday of every month for the free online support group on Zoom. It's from 6 to 7 p.m. Mountain Standard Time, where I share a little bit more on the Recover Your Soul journey and then we break into small groups. You can register at recoveryoursoul.net, and if you've registered in the past, be on the lookout in your promotions folder for the reminder email and link. I'd also love to invite you to listen to the Recover Your Soul Bonus Podcast every Friday, either as an Apple Podcast subscriber or as a Patreon member. On Patreon, you can become a free member and have access to new episodes for the first week, or you can support this community with the tier that you choose. You can also follow me on social media, Instagram, Facebook, and join the private Facebook group for more connection with this amazing community. I hope you'll visit the website recoveryoursoul.net and you can sign up for emails so that you can be up to date with everything that's going on and maybe even join me for a retreat someday. Lastly, I thank you for sharing this podcasting community with anyone that you think might enjoy or learn from it. I also thank you for giving me five stars on any platform that you listen to and writing a review so that others can find the Recover Your Soul community too. Until next time, Namaste.