Recovering From What Is the Hardest to Overcome

When we think about recovering from the disruptions of life, one of the hardest challenges is when we experience betrayal. Trust has been broken. This can happen within our families, between friends or within our work. This can even extend to ourselves, a feeling or sense of our own betrayal. 

I remember an overwhelming feeling that my body was betraying me when I was going through treatment for Hepatitis C. That same experience is one that friends have shared with me about their own daunting health challenges.

What is the betrayal? We've counted on something or someone, and it, or they failed to live up to that promise. It is without question, the most difficult emotional barrier to overcome.

From my work and within my own life, I have found that when we feel betrayed, particularly when it causes or stems from disruptive change, a completely different energy is born. Betrayal carries a risk that can and often does, prevent us from moving forward. Because of that, it merits thought and honest conversation.

I don’t often select books by authors I don't know anything about outside of what's written on the book jacket. However, I did some random searches on Amazon around the subject of betrayal and came across a book that deals with this subject in a way that promised to be soul changing. It is a memoir of a significant time in the author’s life where she was grappling with how to find healing after witnessing great betrayal in her time working with survivors in Bosnia.

The author, Jeanne White Eagle (yes... Cherokee roots, so there is that place of recognition for me...) was in her 40's when she met and married John Pehrson. They felt they were called together to a greater purpose and left their corporate work to embark on a deeper mission. They went on to work with people around the world in war zones and places of very deep conflict. Hence their presence in Bosnia.

Their work became a personal quest when she found herself in the throes of a betrayal that rocked her own center to its core. I was moved by this woman’s capacity to tell her story and share her journey through a devastating and redefining time.

What was meaningful to me is that she does not follow any of the expected formulas to just forgive and move on. She tackles it straight on. The anger, the hurt – all of it. Forgiveness is not enough. We must reach a place of resolve and release that dispels the power of the betrayal in a way that remains with us where other methods fail.

Part VI of the book opens with this thought from Swedish poet, Yiva Eggehorn:

“Stay still in the pain,

rooted in that which is light in you.

Let the sword go through you.

Maybe it is not a sword at all.

Maybe it is a tuning fork.

You become a tone.

You become the music you always longed to hear.

You did not know you were a song.”

Her journey to her own healing helped her reconcile how we can all find it in the end and that’s the reason she shares the message. In her words: "It was confirmation again that if any of us can heal completely, it makes it possible for all of us, a whole world, to heal."

A message of healing and hope, for ourselves and the world. I can't think of anything more important right now.

You can find the book here Grace: A Journey from Betrayal to Healing.

Let’s all remember that life will bring us many tuning forks. It is the secret of our music, of our song.