let your heart break and drop the story: why betrayal burns so badly and how to lean into life after

notes on the dissolution of trust & how betrayal disrupts meaning-making processes from an attachment & trauma theory lens

“Let your heart break and drop the story.” -Pema Chodron

Betrayal: violation of a person's trust or confidence, of a moral standard

This week, I experienced what felt like a betrayal.

A medical provider charged with my prenatal care effectively abandoned me without medical cause or recommendation, leaving me in the space of having to rush to find a new provider for labor and delivery at 34 weeks pregnant. This is not the third trimester experience I imagined. This is not a possibility I prepared for, let alone knew could even happen this late into my pregnancy. After days spent scrambling to secure a new provider and processing through the emotional fallout of this devastating news, a solid, singular feeling of wrongness settles at the bottom of this course of events.

What she did feels wrong to me as a person and a patient.

What she did feels wrong to me as a fellow helping professional.

What she did feels wrong to me as a soon-to-be new mother who depended on her for proper care.

Betrayal is an intense, juicy word: it brings to mind dramatic telenovelas, love triangles, and spats between monarchies played out on battlefields. Intense as its connotation may be, when I reflect back on the last few days, this is the word that most closely summarizes my felt sense and relational dismemberment from this individual. I trusted this provider to deliver on her side of the bargain: what she agreed to in her contract with me, with local state laws, and with ethical duties dictated by the medical profession. She violated this agreement and trust was broken. This is the nature of rupture.

In attachment theory, rupture refers to a disruption in emotional bonds. We experience rupture when someone we love or depend on breaks a promise, does something to hurt us, or disregards a boundary. Rupture is inevitable even in the safest, most securely attached relationships. Its medicine is repair, or the experience of acknowledging and amending the rupture and then coming back into connection. Relationship expert Esther Perel says that intimate, healthy relationships require rupture to build trust. If you don’t know how someone is with you after they hurt you, how can you trust them? Perfect attunement is not possible with imperfect humans in an unpredictable world. Repair is necessary to work through miscommunications, errors in judgements, and careless actions.

But what happens when repair doesn’t occur? Does this constitute betrayal?

And what happens when the rupture is fundamentally a betrayal in trust? What does repair look like when trust is shattered, not just as fallout, but as the initiating event?

To develop trust with someone, we must risk vulnerability. We have to give people space to show us who they are with their actions. This can build trust or it can build disappointment, heartache, and loss. When someone’s actions align with our mutual agreed-upon standards of relationship, we incrementally build trust in that person, believing that they will deliver. When their actions misalign with our agreements, we lose trust in that person. And when a large bank of trust has been developed and this misalignment still occurs, betrayal often accompanies loss of trust. To trust someone means that we believe they will deliver. When this belief is fortified over time and then shattered with a rupture that is not followed by repair, we naturally feel betrayed.

We have to make sense of the betraying person’s action in light of their previous actions, which are now incongruent. We have to ask ourselves if we misread the actions that secured deposits in the trust bank, or flat out missed other actions lurking on the periphery of their trust-building behaviors. We start to question our assessments and intuition. We introject this loss of trust in the betraying person by losing trust in ourselves.

In addition to the loss of belief in the betraying person, we lose a vital belief when we experience betrayal. We lose faith in the relational process of trust-building with betrayal, the idea that if we deliver on our side of the bargain, other people will continue to deliver on theirs. When this agreement is broken, we lose faith in the nature of relationship itself.

In the fallout of this betrayal, I noticed myself falling victim to self-critical introjects that slammed my decision to work with this provider: I should have listened to so-and-so’s opinion. I should have asked more questions. I should have honored the part of me that felt uncomfortable with this provider’s inconsistencies. In reaching for my part in this exchange, my system is looking for coherence and control. This phenomenon is something I’ve learned working with trauma survivors and is well documented in research: people often blame themselves when trust is broken and boundaries are violated because self-blame offers an illusory sense of control. When we feel like we have control over a situation that is out of our hands, we feel less powerless and overwhelmed by it.

The process of recovering from betrayal does not stop at a singular, self-blaming reason or solution in moving toward a new relationship, however. Recovering from betrayal asks us to re-write our understanding of relationality. We must move out of the black-and-white world of bargaining, where we believe that if we simply do our part other people will do theirs. We have to move into more comprehensive terrain that accounts for more shades of humanity and deeper roots of their internalized parts and archetypes. We have to accept axioms that aren’t fair and don’t always make sense. Bad things can happen to good people. Good people can do bad things. People change their minds. Nothing is promised or set in stone in this world of unpredictability and impermanence. We are owed nothing, even if we show up for our side of the street and honor our end in the bargain.

Accepting these truths offers freedom. Beyond betrayal, there is life. There is learning. There is wisdom.

I’m choosing to learn from this experience of betrayal. And the learning isn’t adopting a scrutinizing, self-blaming framework as I evaluate my past choices or implementing tactical knowledge with my present choice in selecting a provider. The learning is a wider and more generous relationship to life. My old provider made a choice and life now unfolds through that choice. I don’t know where it’s unfolding, but I choose to trust this course and lean into it. I choose to not retract my ability to trust and shut my heart down because of how this person initiated this course. I choose to lean into my agency, my vulnerability, and my right relationship to life. I can bear devastating news. I can bear disappointing consequences. I can bear change and surprise.

And if anything… this kind of spaciousness is what I want to welcome my son into. I don’t welcome him into a world of perfect plans and met expectations. I welcome him into this wide, beautiful world and winding, brilliant life. With an open heart.

~S

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A brief note on me: my name is Sarah Ann Saeger and I am a licensed IFS therapist, writer, and post-lineage yoga teacher. My mission is to help you embrace the embodied wisdom of your whole self. You can find me on Instagram where I share short-form musings & lessons related to parts work with over 100k followers!