The spiritual betrayal of cruelty: the desecration of love
Also if anyone is planning to be cruel to me on my birthday (12/13) I may perish from a cardiovascular event. Please withhold all dastardly deeds until there are at least 12hrs of daylight every day.
Recently, I've been feeling an inexplicable sense of impending doom about my birthday, an event that normally I am extremely excited about. I have determined it is not fear about turning 30; it is an eerie, almost paranoid sense of dread, a punch and pull in my stomach. It is as if I'm bracing myself to experience an enormous betrayal. Yet, there isn't really opportunity for that in my life currently. I have an enormous amount of love in my life and I am endlessly grateful for it, so I’m not about to go Johnny from The Room over anything. I've considered it may be a sort of emotional flashback to an earlier time. There was a year long ago in which my birthday led to a Betrayal Reveal that isn’t worth rehashing. Maybe it’s some swirling memory of that, which was frankly the Straw That Broke the Camel’s Psyche.
Anyway, due to this periodic dread, which occurs exclusively when I am reminded of my birthday (12/13), I’ve also been mulling over how to articulate betrayal as an experience. Why does it hurt so bad? What even is it, really, that feels like betrayal to me? As a disclaimer: this writing emphasizes my own experience with betrayal, but I have of course betrayed others throughout my life. I have been cruel also. I don’t see myself as a pure victim in such a way. Dynamics are always complex. This is simply a close reading of a particular type of pain.
Last night I watched a bunch of stories about near death experiences (NDE). One of the women said as a result of her NDE, she realized she had built a wall around herself after experiencing betrayal—in particular, her husband cheated on her. As 10 years passed, she became increasingly socially anxious and she avoided making new relationships. What her NDE taught her is that she needed to overcome this avoidance, because she was closing herself off from Love, the foundational force of life.
Not only was she closing herself off from receiving love, she was not giving it. She recounted that during her NDE she was shown a memory in which she gave a single mother in front of her in the grocery line money to cover her purchase. The woman refused, but she insisted, because she had been in that position before. The “spiritual being” in the NDE then brought her to a future scene in which that woman she had helped was volunteering in a food pantry. When a visitor came up to her and expressed embarrassment that they could not afford food, the woman reassured them, saying she had been in their position once before also. Catalyzing, life-saving interactions that result from the force of our own love are what we reject when we avoid connection.
I cried listening to her story. I related to her, building a prison around oneself because of past pain. I felt more expansive and open after finishing her story, more ready to love. It was like a fog had lifted, or I had more freedom of psychic movement into a place with more light than where I had been dwelling before. Between this, a homily from mass that day about healing from spiritual affliction born of poor choices, and an extremely supportive text from my best friend, I simply felt a great deal of love. I felt connected to something beyond anxious rumination. Feeling love, I could more clearly understand the wounding force of its absence. I suppose it takes light to explore darkness. My understanding of betrayal sharpened.
When I say betrayal, I don’t refer to infidelity or even disloyalty exactly. Infidelity sounds catastrophic and spiritually destructive in its own unique way, but what I refer to is not about cheating. Nor is it just “backstabbing” in the sense of someone feigning friendship yet cutting one down to others in pursuit of ambition. That can indeed be part of the pattern of betrayal that I’ve found most damaging, but it is more than that alone. Mostly I refer to the type of betrayal that happens when someone you love, who once was safe, becomes cruel: they intentionally hurt you, they belittle you, mock you, turn on you or scapegoat you. This is what crushes me, when someone with whom I have shared the vulnerable complexities of my humanity comes to treat me as if I am wholly bad. It leaves me shocked and pleading. Betraying my trust is one thing—that is mostly enraging. Betraying my vulnerable love is utterly devastating.
If I were to describe the sight of such betrayal it would look like falling to one's knees in tears, reaching out for love as someone who once was safe mocks you. Being baffled by sudden cruelty where there once was warmth, trying to express love and hurt, then being met with more cruelty for doing so. There’s a flavor of it in the scene from The Lion King, when Scar manipulates Simba into believing he is responsible for his father’s death, and tells him to run away and never return. The horror in Simba’s eyes is the horror of reality being twisted by one you trust, and your sense of self being decimated by a cruel lie. Scar’s action is sinister and calculating with a goal to overpower, and the spiritual betrayal of this moment is one of the most poignant I can think of (but I’m also bad at recalling media so that doesn’t say much honestly). The way he uses his position as a figure of comfort to be malicious, all to serve his own egocentric desire for power (which he miserably fails at wielding), is an incredible act of spiritual betrayal. Scar has canceller psychology and The Lion King is the perfect movie btw. I could probably write about it for a billion years.
I am also reminded of the still face experiment, where mothers suddenly become inexpressive towards their babies, and the baby eventually begins to panic and cry. Watching this stokes the exact type of existential horror that emerges from the betrayal of cruelty, although cold indifference is not necessarily the same as active cruelty, and obviously peer relationships aren’t infant-mother ones. Nonetheless, there is a common horror in watching a baby become distressed at a still faced mother and having people you love become filled with enmity towards you—especially if the silent treatment is part of the deal. It is so uniquely disorienting, and a source of pain against which you are powerless to change. When it has happened to me, it strips the foundation of reality from beneath me, and leaves me free-falling into confusion that steals my peace of mind.
The part about someone safe becoming filled with enmity is important. It is one thing for a relationship to simply end from dislike; that is not a betrayal. It is when someone, especially without warning, apparently villainizes you. This is when your humanity is rendered invisible, replaced by a one-dimensional projection that isn’t aligned with the facts of who you’ve demonstrated yourself to be, when even acts of actual love become seen as evidence of your wickedness. This is where the thread of “cancellation” is woven in, I suppose. This is the starting point of narrative weaving and smear campaigns.
I have an ostensibly minor example of the dynamics of such a betrayal, one that occurred in a broader series of events I have no interest in rehashing. Through confused tears in the midst of a very heated conversation that included me being called a bitch, I said, “I love you guys so much, you’re my best friends.” This was later cited as me being manipulative, which was then used as justification for worse treatment down the line. Few things are as dizzying as love being twisted into use as a warrant for cruelty. This is when the invisibility beneath the weight of another’s projection comes in; when you cease to be seen as who you are, but rather as a flat character in a predetermined narrative that suits the psychological needs of the person betraying you. Now you are an abusive mother, an evil temptress, a threatening rival, a representative of an oppressing class, anything other than what you actually are: a human being trying to love.
What I came to understand after this experience is that when someone has decided to cast you in an archetypal role of Evil Woman in their narrative, any reminder of your multidimensional humanity becomes seen as a nefarious, intentional manipulation of their guilt that justifies even more cruelty. If you express either warmth or pain, it is read through a paranoid lens: If she is telling me she loves me, or is crying, and I feel guilty, it is because she is manipulating me to feel guilty, which means she’s even worse than I thought. Meanwhile, what they’re feeling is literally just their conscience telling them to stop being cruel to another human being. I suppose if someone has become determined to hate you, an expression of love can seem like a weapon in a war, one you may not have even realized was being waged at all.
The injury of betrayal is compounding. Each time it happens I seem to grow more sensitive to it, try as I might to be calloused. Such experiences lead to obsession with discerning reality, something I have come to understand is truly a consequence of gaslighting. I obsessively reread correspondence between me and whoever it is that has betrayed me in this way, trying to discern if I “deserve it.” I even used to bring messages or letters to therapy to ask for input. I have recordings of me in college reading correspondence and analyzing it. I have spent so many hours of my life obsessing over these events, to no useful end. One must simply come to accept that people you love may switch into hating you, I guess. Mostly I have succeeded at that, but like an ankle that has been sprained too many times, sometimes the pain flares up again and you’re suddenly limping around.
I reflect on the end of my 2022 zine Floating, where I wrote: "In the passion of our hatred, the fury of our bitter quips, we are driven not by mere desire for separation from those who hurt us—but a crushing pain at the betrayal of our inescapable union. We are entwined, unbearably, delightfully, eternally."
When I wrote this, I meant it broadly. The passion of our hatred and fury of our bitter quips pointed more towards internet political warfare than close relationships, but the same principle holds. I consider my desire to push away or hide when I feel betrayed by cruelty. My instinct is to isolate when I feel discarded, but that makes it worse. That quote is precisely why. Whether I'm fighting with someone I love or shutting them out after feeling discarded, what drives me is not at its core an actual desire for separation. Avoidance is a defensive reaction that conceals what I actually want: to love and be loved. Whether we are lashing out or running away, we feel how connected we all ultimately are, but we are in pain and afraid. At the root of all our worst relational impulses, including the cruelty, is a desire for love that gets overpowered by fear of pain.
I mean it sincerely, not as poetry, when I refer in this excerpt to “our inescapable union.” Cruelty is a betrayal of the unbreakable bond we have as human beings, something that transcends mere touch or emotion, but enters the realm of the spiritual. This is why cruelty feels like an existential betrayal: we were made to love each other. To choose hatred over love is to abandon not just a person, but the sacred duty each of us has to be merciful and kind, something I see as effectively a cosmic law, revealed to us by at least our conscience if not religious texts.
In whatever form it takes (not only that which I neurotically examined in this essay), betrayal of our responsibility to love each other is a type of desecration. It inflicts wounds on others, on our souls, and it drives us further away from love itself—what I might call God. Indeed, I believe committing acts of cruelty, whether through active abuse or willing indirect participation in an ultimately cruel scheme, becomes a spiritual affliction that, over a long enough time, can lead to spiritual death. The way out of such a state is through connection, love, honesty and forgiveness. (This is part of why I have found solace in Catholicism: it offers a structured remedy to spiritual decay, a path to revival from spiritual death.)
As I also wrote in Floating, “The devastating paradox of human connection is that we will hurt and heal each other forever. We will exile and seethe and fall to our knees praying for the strength to carry on. This is what it is to be alive, to ache and to weep before the unimaginable cruelty of other people while yearning to be loved.”
While I have come to believe it is, ultimately, impossible to fully eradicate cruelty whether due to evolutionary or spiritual constraints, I believe it is possible to overcome the impulse as an individual, and to repair bonds broken by cruelty should mutual willingness be present. I have not merely been a victim of cruelty, but a perpetrator of it, as is the case for all of us. I cannot wholly condemn others or myself for such behavior, and believe we are capable of change and worthy of redemption. At our core, what we want is love and connection, forgiveness and freedom, not to be chained to the weight of resentment and pain. We were made to love each other before we learned to hate.
I’ve just published another book, Landing: Reflections on Breakups and Yearning, available for purchase now. Landing is a compilation of personal narrative and reflective essays about breaking up and rediscovering what you want from love. The writing is organized into five sections: Leaving, reflections on ending my relationship of eight years; Yearning, reflections on what I want from love in the future; Advising, advice for others considering or going through breakups; Growing, reflections on a turning point after reconnecting with my ex; and Landing, an epilogue about coming down to earth.
Happy birthday 🎉 🍰
Happy Birthday, Molly. Thank you for putting so many of your thoughts out into the world. May you experience joy in this year ahead and keep on writing, keep on wrenching your heart open despite the pain, in love and in service of others and of God. Because it's worth it and we're all gonna' make it.