On Self Betrayal
Learning to trust yourself is the key to genuine transformation.
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For years I was the only person I would betray. I am a fiercely loyal friend. I’d fight a dude for a friend. I’d kill a dude for my family.1 But I treated my own wants and desires like they didn’t matter.
I’d make a small agreement with myself — I’m not going to drink tonight — then go out to dinner with friends who suggest splitting a bottle of wine, and immediately betray the choice I’d made. Well, I’ll just have one glass! Then, of course, I’d beat myself up for the self-betrayal.
Why do so many of us do this? Those most susceptible to it are the people pleasers, and women especially are often raised to make other people happy, even at their own expense. For me, there’s another culprit beyond learned gendered behavior: I was diagnosed with Celiac Disease when I was I was two years old. I was gluten-free before it was cool. Nobody knew what the hell gluten was in the 90s and 2000s (including lots of doctors we went to, and every waiter at every restaurant). At the time oats were also thought to be glutenous, and therefore I was allergic to… everything… and desperately wanted to fit in with… everybody.
During my formative individuation years, I put other people’s wants and desires over my own.
“Let’s get pizza after school,” a group of friends would say. “Great!” I’d reply. Cut to me eating a sad “salad” (5 pieces of iceberg lettuce that wasn’t even on the menu, the pizza guy just felt bad for me) so that I wouldn’t be perceived as difficult, annoying, or having any needs at all. I never expressed the deep isolation that came from this. I wouldn’t ever dare say things like “I’m hungry” or “Can we go somewhere else?” I didn’t want to be a weird kid with an allergy, I wanted to suffer alone while constantly betraying my own wants so people would want to be my friend. Obviously.
If somebody told me a donut was so good that I had to try it, I would. When I was 10 or so, a friend’s mom was trying to get her daughter to eat her dinner and asked me to try something I was allergic to so I could tell my friend how good it was. It’s just one bite, I figured.
A huge part of learning to take care of myself as an adult is creating clear boundaries around my autoimmune disease and my health. To not say I’m totally fine with cross-contamination because a boyfriend wants to share fries and fuck it, fries sound amazing. I’ve gone through the ebbs and flows of maintaining and betraying this. It feels a lot better when I maintain it.
In one way or another, many of us have been programmed since childhood to betray our own desires in both very small and big ways. Sometimes, our self-betrayal comes from a desire to make people like us. Other times, it’s because it’s just easier to betray ourselves than to keep our promises. Or, it’s because what we really want (to not spend money) conflicts with another want (a $17 cocktail ).
The good news? As we grow up and individuate we begin recognizing this pattern of self-betrayal. The bad news? This awareness often awakes a vicious inner critic. When we make choices unaligned with our values, our critic is there, eager to remind us that we knew better, and could have made a different choice.
SO WHAT HAPPENS AFTER YEARS OF SELF-BETRAYAL?
Betraying ourselves slowly erodes our ability to build self-trust. It’s one of the ways we teach ourselves that we aren’t worthy, we don’t deserve what we want, we don’t have good judgment, or that being liked by other people is more important than being true to ourselves.
Without self-trust, we lack confidence because we literally cannot believe we’re capable. How could we, if we can’t even keep a promise to ourselves?! We live in a state of regret, harping on past choices that were influenced by others. Stress and worry are never far, questioning if our current choices are good or worse… right.
If you struggle with decision-making, you probably need to work on self-trust. You probably don’t believe you can make good decisions, so each one feels painfully important.
Here’s what Healthline says:
Trusting yourself is one of the most helpful things you can do for yourself in your life. It can help build your confidence, allow others to trust you more, and make the process of decision-making much easier. To trust yourself, all you need is to make a little effort, create self-love, and find the ability to look inward.
It’s ridiculous that they make it sound easy to “create self-love,” but I do agree with the crux of their statement: Trusting yourself is one of the most helpful things you can do in your life.
Here’s Psychology Today:
There is a difference between a life that is grounded in self-trust and one that is not. When we look at examples of people who are self-trusting, we find that they have clarity and confidence in their choices. They are interdependent, which includes healthy dependency, not overly dependent or hyper-independent. They speak with authority that comes from a deep place within but is not arrogant. They are good observers and have cultivated the ability to learn from their experiences, both the successes and failures.
That sounds pretty good. But how do we actually begin to build self-trust?
KEEPING A 40-DAY PROMISE HELPED BUILD SELF-TRUST
Through reading about self-trust, reparenting yourself, and inner-child work, I knew I needed to start making and keeping promises to myself to build trust in my judgment and decision-making. So when one of my Yoga teachers announced a 40-day abundance meditation, I committed to it.2
It only took a week of successfully completing the daily meditation to feel the effects of keeping a challenging promise to myself. I felt energized and more confident. Accessing my wants came with new ease. I was… happy?! Holy shit. I thought. Do other people just feel this way all the time, simply by being true to themselves and following through on their promises?
I started making new daily promises just for the rush of keeping them. Every time I honored an agreement, it felt so good that any difficulty was worth it.
My husband has never been drunk or done drugs in his life. When we first started dating, I always wondered how he never gave in, not even one time in college. But finally, I understood: He knew keeping this lifelong promise to himself would feel better than getting drunk ever could.
About 15 days into the meditation, I missed a day. I continued on, but toward the second half of it, I missed more and more days and felt increasingly bad about myself. I eventually stopped around day 37. I’m sure I subconsciously believed I didn’t deserve to finish after missing so many days.
A month or two later, I started the meditation again from the very beginning. Even despite my previous “failure,” I had a determined confidence. I still missed a day or two, but I never beat myself up for it — I just added a day to the end of the meditation and kept going until I finished 40 days.
Other people who did the same meditation talked about job offers and new opportunities that emerged during the timeframe. I didn’t get any of that. Where was my abundance? Why did it work for them, but not for me?
Then, I realized, for me, the abundance came in experiencing all the ways building self-trust opened up my life, and offered new clarity, purpose, and connection to self. It felt like the missing key: Without self-trust, I could not truly take care of myself.
THIS IS HARD, BUT WE CAN DO HARD THINGS.
I get waves of insomnia, which means mornings are often painful. Exhaustion chains me to the bed.
One morning last week, in a daze from not sleeping well, I stared at my phone: If I don’t get out of bed now, I’m going to be late for my Yoga class. Getting up felt truly impossible. My dog angelically snuggling up to me clearly could not be disturbed. Debating whether to skip the class, I closed my eyes and said to myself: Getting out of bed right now is going to be really hard. But you can do hard things, so you can do it.
I got out of bed and drove to class.
Many of us start The Artist’s Way this week. A huge part of why I’m doing it is to deepen my trust in myself.
Doing morning pages and artist’s dates for 12 weeks is going to be really hard. But that’s okay because we’re capable of doing hard things. If we do skip weeks, drop off, or disappoint ourselves, we must face that with compassion. Your inner critic only keeps you in a cycle of pain.
Again, from Psychology Today:
Because they [people who are self-trusting] can trust themselves to not be self-punitive when they make mistakes, they can look openly at their experience without fear of self-punishment. If my agenda is to protect myself from external or internal recrimination, I am not going to be able to examine my experience because my primary intention is not to learn but to protect myself.
As I began The Artist’s Way this weekend, I came across the contract you are supposed to make with yourself before you start. I am certain last time I attempted the workbook, I did not actually sign this. I probably read it, thought okay sure, and then kept reading.
This time, I copied it into my journal, printed it out from this PDF, signed it, and hung it up next to my desk.
Take the agreements you make with yourself seriously. Recognize that building self-trust with yourself is transformative. Refuse to live in fear of self-punishment by treating yourself with compassion when you fall short. Would you forgive a friend for skipping a day of her morning pages? Of course, you would. You’d probably say something to her like: It’s a process, and you’re doing your best, which is good enough. So try saying it to yourself, too.
Who you are is not your fault, but it is your responsibility.
QUESTIONS OR JOURNALING PROMPTS FOR YOU