DTH-XI-0021
“Someone I trusted betrayed me and I can't stop bleeding.”
The trust is dead and pretending otherwise only keeps the knife in. Let it be a wound, that is what it is. But a wound you refuse to feel becomes a wall you build around everyone who comes after. Grieve what they broke. Then decide what gets to enter through the opening they left.
Your Practice
- Stop arguing with what happened. Say it flat: 'They betrayed me. It's real.'
- Feel it fully for a set time, write the loss, the trust, what you'll never get back.
- Refuse the lie that everyone is now the betrayer. The wound is not a verdict on the world.
- Choose one specific thing to carry forward unguarded, your honesty, your loyalty. Don't let them take that too.
The Architects
“Grief is felt not so much for the want of what we have never known, as for the loss of that to which we have been long accustomed.”
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 2, ch. 44 (Pericles' Funeral Oration), Crawley translation