Verified by 
There once was a lovely young maiden who met a handsome prince. He was known throughout the villages to be a ruthless man who charmed young ladies out of their virginity and would then leave them after degrading and insulting them. The lovely young maiden had been warned about this nefarious lothario from her parents and her friends; however, she became mesmerized when she encountered him at an isolated brook in the forest.
He approached her with dazzling eyes and insisted he was transformed from seeing her and that his heart had opened in a way he never experienced before. He said he had been searching for her his whole life and wanted to spend the rest of his living years adoring and cherishing her. She was taken aback and quizzed him relentlessly to catch him in a lie and discover the true villain behind the mask he displayed to her. Instead, he was patient and reassuring and said he would wait however long she wanted and would even marry as soon as possible.
After so many assurances and great romantic gestures, the young maiden married the prince in a quick elopement. After their first evening together, he awoke and immediately berated her and said she was worthless and he could never love her. She cried and pleaded with him not to leave her and asked what she did wrong. He gave a sinister laugh and said it was his nature to take women’s virginity and she should have known better.
The young maiden’s heart raced fast, and she began hyperventilating while crying out to him in deep moans like a dying animal. In fact, the young maiden got so sick that it was many years before she was able to tell anyone what had happened.
Betrayals can be traumatic and inflict deep psychological wounds coupled with serious biological ramifications. Betrayal traumas can range from damages to property and death of loved ones due to natural disasters to feeling betrayed by one’s body when it gets sick to experiencing lies, manipulations, and physical injuries from trusted loved ones.
Experiencing high-betrayal trauma
The psychological scars from trauma coupled with the heightened fight-or-flight stress response from an overactive sympathetic nervous system can create expectancy habituation and continual betrayal reenactments—or, in other words, those repeating patterns that make a person ask why the same thing keeps happening. Moreover, sometimes the person can reenact the victim part of the betrayal or play out the victimizer role with a new person. It is almost as if the person is attempting to make sense of the betrayer by trying out their behavior in some way. Nietzsche’s quote, “Be careful when fighting the monsters lest ye become one,” fits this latter aspect.
Like the story depicted, betrayal trauma can lead to physical illness. The body cannot sustain heightened levels of cortisol (the stress hormone) without deleterious consequences. Inflammation and disease vulnerability increase, along with the risk for unhealthy coping behaviors, like drinking alcohol, consuming an unhealthy diet of excess salt, fat, and sugar or not eating food and losing lots of weight, not sleeping or oversleeping, not getting adequate exercise, or becoming isolated and disconnecting from healthy relationships.
If you have suffered a high-betrayal trauma and can relate to the negative consequences, one of the first things to do is to practice reconnecting with your parasympathetic nervous system (also known as the “rest and digest” nervous system) by relaxing every muscle in your body. Imagine your muscles loosening like wet noodles. Imagine every inch of your body releasing more with every exhale.
This is a quick trick that you can practice all day and all night—and as you relax, also imagine every cell renewing and your immune system strengthening and your heart filling with warm love. (I understand if you are balking at this suggestion or just nodding yet not wanting to try it. Please just take 30 seconds to try it right now and see how it feels to understand what I mean.)
Hopefully, you just tried the relax the muscles technique and felt the surprising calm from it. Next comes the benefit of therapy with a person who is trained in treating trauma. A person trained in trauma will know that the therapist and the client need to discuss the betrayal trauma in a relaxed muscle state; otherwise, re-traumatization can happen if either person is tense. Then the experience can be processed in a way that builds new neural pathways instead of those old, pesky ones that are causing so many problems. Find someone you can trust, and do not hesitate to look elsewhere if the person is not helping you or if you do not feel safe and connected.
Finally, if you are journaling or painting or engaging in other ways to process the betrayal experience, please remember to practice doing it in a state of relaxed muscles. Daily practices of meditation can be an immense aid as well—along with finding ways to feel gratitude, for even this terrible betrayal could serve as a wake-up call to living a deeper and more fulfilling life of authenticity and open-heartedness.
What happened to the young maiden?
After surviving a life-threatening disease, heartbreak, and the isolation from being abandoned by her loved ones and friends, the young maiden found a wise old woman who taught her how to meditate in a state of grace. The maiden opened up and began confiding to the old wise woman about her feelings of humiliation and rage. Her body had been filled with toxic hate for the prince and for herself for having trusted him.
The wise old woman taught her how to feel the healing warmth of her heart and how to send that loving energy to everyone in the world, including the nasty prince. In time, the maiden began to transform into a dove. It is said that she visits the homes of the betrayed and prays over them as they sleep. When a person awakes to a feather on their bed, they know they have been visited by the healing dove of peace and love.
