Horror. Shock. Like the bottom dropped out of your world. It’s dangerous, there’s no ground. But quite still – like, static. Like you are frozen in space and time. Stomach has dropped, a stone replaced it. A really sore, aching, sad stone. Ah yes, there’s a terrible deep grief. Loss. No going back. It feels like I stepped off a cliff. I press my stomach, the upper part – solar plexus – with my hand, and feel choky. My throat hurts, aches – the muscles in the front, the soft parts of it. The places that would be pressed if there were a noose around my neck. I start to cry, quietly and gently. Tears drip into my ears. That tickles. The pain in my neck and stomach eases a bit. But there’s still this terrible, inescapable sadness.

I reach out to hold my daughter’s hand. She’s lying next to me on the bed. I say hesitantly, “Was it…. grief?” She doesn’t answer. I guess again, “Horror, sadness… shock?” I shake my head and laugh a little, slightly damply because of the tears. Finally she speaks, into the darkness. Her voice is quiet and I can tell she cried too. “It was betrayal.”

The emotions game

My daughter explained to me once about acting. She can do it; I can’t. She says she imagines a situation where she feels something, and then puts herself into it in her mind. And she feels all the emotions. She can make herself feel them, quite literally. I hadn’t known, before this, that actors – good ones – literally feel the emotions they’re acting.

While I lack this skill, I possess another, rather unusual one. It’s that I feel the emotions of those close to me. I feel them especially strongly if I manage to fall into a certain state that I’d describe as ‘meditative’ but could equally be called, for the less cynical among us, a trance-like state.

What I described above was me and my daughter playing what we'd called ‘the emotions game’.¹ We’d try both ways – me feeling and her guessing, and then vice versa. We quickly discovered that I’m good at guessing, but very bad at intentionally feeling anything, and that she can’t accurately guess what I’m feeling – it was more ‘stab in the dark’ when we did it that way around. So we naturally fell into always doing it this way around. Her feeling and me guessing. With this, we achieved an amazing accuracy rate. Even though sometimes words failed me to describe what I/she was feeling (‘betrayal’ was a hard one, for example!), the actual feelings were right every time.

Betrayal – what is it?

The first part to betrayal is when something you thought was true, and that you relied upon, suddenly is not true. It’s being out in the desert and going to drink from your water flask, and finding it empty. Even though you clearly remember filling it beforehand.

The second part is that it wasn’t just you being forgetful, or that there was a hole in the bottle. It’s that someone else drank it, or emptied it, and then put it back without informing you they’d done so. Someone who could have known, if they’d been interested, that later you were going to be thirsty – or even, dead.

So it’s a combination of loss (hence the grief element), puzzlement – and horror.

Society’s betrayal of the human²

The hierarchical and competitive nature of our culture requires, by definition, someone else’s exploitation just for us to lead our normal lives. To thrive – in fact, even just to survive – we have to constantly protect ourselves from being exploited by others and by the system. While simultaneously exploiting the system, and others, to the best of our ability, from whatever position we happen to occupy within the power structure.

Someone, somewhere, is finding their water bottle empty.

Every time I order off Amazon, search something up on Google or ChatPGT, scroll through my social media, drive my car, do my grocery shopping, support my kids in their education, get a job or a promotion, or pay my taxes. It isn’t really avoidable (and the oddly popular narrative that it is, on an individual level, is both pernicious and harmful – as this ‘blame game’ effectively stifles any forms of meaningful or systemic reform).

Even in our closest relationships, hard as it is to admit it, we rarely fully trust and relax. The law says that you either exploit or get exploited. We are afraid, and we play along.³

Betrayal, in fact, is a cornerstone of our culture.

Invisible oppression

We’re so used to respect flowing upwards, but not downwards, that we don’t spot this pattern even though it’s right in front of us. When a teacher reprimands the children for responding in ways the teacher personally doesn't like or doesn’t agree with, thereby demanding their ‘respect’, we think that’s all right and fair. We expect obedience from our children, and when we don’t get it we say they ‘lack respect’. Our boss can speak without smattering their speech with ‘pleases’ and ‘thank yous’, or any apologies e.g. for overriding others' ideas or feelings, and that’s quite normal – we don’t hate them for it. Perhaps unless they’re a woman, in which case we may respect them, but we don’t like them half as much.⁴

Betrayal and shame

Having investigated the experience of betrayal, I was intrigued to realize that, for me, the exact same physical and emotional feelings accompany the emotion of shame. Why, though? If I’m ashamed I haven’t been betrayed, have I?

When writing the parts of my book that talk about self-harm and suicide, I thought a lot about the feelings behind those things. The spiralling or frozen horror, the ‘bottom dropped out of your world’, the puzzlement (‘how can the world be like this? I don’t want to be here!’), the emptiness, loneliness, and shock (which can even manifest in physical symptoms such as a visual ‘white fog’ and a ringing in the ears⁵), accompanied by feelings of gigantic, unbearable loss and grief.

I also knew that if rage and grief – which are nothing but the expression of pain, really – couldn't come out, in a child, they would go in. It would become self-hate, even self-harm (whether physical, mental, or both).

Perhaps then, if betrayal seems to hold such similar physical and emotional feelings as shame, there’s quite good reason for it. Shame is a fate generally reserved for the powerless, or for powerless situations at least, where anger hasn’t served, you can’t ‘rail against the machine’ anymore. You’ve given up doing that, having discovered, painfully, that it was a hopeless cause. Your own betrayal by those close to you, by everything around you, internalizes and becomes betrayal of the self. This is a survival mechanism that goes very deep in a social animal such as a human – you’re more likely to survive if you’re the one at fault, and not the structure and people you rely on.⁶

Ultimate self-betrayal

Deep within all of us, however powerful and confident we appear, lurks the subconscious knowledge that if we betrayed others (which is scarcely avoidable in this world) we have, on some level, felt their pain too. Even if we tell ourselves that we’re all individuals – islands.⁷ And even if we develop strategies like thick armor, dissociation, or hyper-focus, to fool ourselves into believing that we haven't.

The difficulty is that it’s not really possible to live in the world, as it is, as a human, and not somehow take part in what’s happening. Is this maybe why we resort to things like addictions, distractions, anything really, to ‘not feel’? Perhaps we’re trying our best to numb the pain of betrayal. Our own and each other's.

This could explain why compassion feels so important to me. So radical. With its healing power, I believe it could be the key to our freedom.

❤️

Footnotes

1. My daughter and I had tried with numbers, colours, and shapes – all of which were fun, but we discovered we achieved by far the highest accuracy rate when we used emotions.
2. I’ve taken this title from Alice Miller’s powerful book, ‘Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society’s Betrayal of the Child’.
3. I use the word ‘exploit’ here to mean the extraction of someone else’s services and resources that were not freely and happily given i.e. they didn’t have much choice in the matter. What they gave might be in the form of their money or goods, their work and time, and/or various emotional support services. This model of extraction and self-protection is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, since (in this model) if you don’t forcibly extract from others, while simultaneously protecting yourself, you’ll quickly become depleted. Then there’s the strong cultural narrative that you should invest your all into one romantic and sexual partnership, which is meant to also provide everything you need materially and logistically. In the meantime, as I discovered when studying empathy, we can far more easily switch off our empathy for someone who provides us with something we need. In effect, it’s a bit of a stitch-up.
4. Women leaders have to be a lot ‘warmer’ to be liked at all, than male ones. Chalmers, J.K. (2021). Perceptions of Women in Authority Positions: The Role of Warmth and Competence.
5. HHTM (2024). Chronic Stress as a Trigger for Tinnitus: New Study Offers Insights into Neural Mechanisms, Hearing Health & Technology Matters. Hearing Health & Technology Matters.
6. It’s been observed in various studies that children tend to blame themselves (self‑blame) in situations involving parental distress, abuse, neglect, or family conflict. A couple of examples are: Tanzer M, Salaminios G, Morosan L, Campbell C, Debbané M. Self-Blame Mediates the Link between Childhood Neglect Experiences and Internalizing Symptoms in Low-Risk Adolescents and Quas, J.A., Goodman, G.S. and Jones, D.P.H. Predictors of attributions of self-blame and internalizing behavior problems in sexually abused children.
7. Monty Python refers to the concept of individuality in this scene from ‘Life of Brian’: Brian comes out onto the balcony and starts speaking to the crowd of people below, who are all hanging on his every word. He’s trying to make them all go home. He tries to explain that they shouldn’t follow him, saying, “You’ve got to all think for yourselves, you’re all individuals.” The crowd chants back in unison, “We’re all individuals.” Except one little guy, who pipes up all alone, “I’m not.”

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