How to stay spiritual after betrayal (without bypassing your anger)

Q: How can we stay with the spiritual process during a time when we’ve been betrayed, gaslit, and manipulated? There are times I’ve felt so angry, the divinity of the person who has wronged me is clouded in my view. I want to see this too as Grace, as an aspect of God, but anger strengthens feelings of separateness. I feel betrayed and no longer want to interact with someone who is causing me harm. How do I serve those with whom I have such grievances as God?

A: Whew. You’re coming in hot with a good question.

So I sat with this for a little while, and the thing that stuck out to me is that you’re trying to see what you’re going through as an act of Grace.

And so when I teach about Grace, I teach about it in such a way that I’ll say, “Everything’s Grace. Everything’s Grace.” And then somebody could be in a really bad situation and the whole time they’re like... “Okay, where’s the fucking Grace in this?”

So let’s talk about this.

Your question is a totally real experience that I relate with. I think sometimes you want to see something as Grace because you’re actually trying to find: What’s the spiritual lesson here? You’re trying to find the lesson. And to me, that’s not what finding the Grace in something actually is.

Because sometimes there can be this feeling of, “What did I do to deserve this? What do I need to do to evolve?”

And that’s also not exactly what I mean by finding the Grace in something.

When I was going through the worst times—like four or five years ago—I wasn’t looking for Grace. As my mom was losing her mind, putting her into a group home, all of these awful things grinding me down… I wasn’t looking for Grace in those moments.

When life is really challenging me, I go very deep into my practice and I just put one foot in front of the other. I’m not sitting there like, “Where’s the Grace?” I’m just trying to keep my sense impressions intact—listening to talks, doing my practice, one foot in front of the other.

And in those moments, I’ve had times where I thought, “Oh my God, maybe this is never going to end.” And that’s really scary. I’ve totally been there.

And yet, here I am—something shifted. I learned a lot from that period of time in my life. There will be future hard periods of time in my life, guaranteed. But what I learned from it motivates my reply to you now.

Rather than looking for the “lesson” in something to find the Grace, it’s more helpful to ask:

What am I learning about myself right now as I go through this?

You’re learning that you’re angry.

You’re learning that anger is obstructing a feeling you obviously value.

You’re learning that you can’t interact with this person anymore.

You’re learning that you feel betrayed.

And that’s what’s spurring you to ask these questions.

So you’re actually just learning things about yourself. And from my perspective, the anger you’re feeling is actually a good thing. It’s showing you where your boundary is. Maybe up until now you didn’t know where your limit was. Now you know.

So if there’s Grace in the situation, it’s learning: “I’m at my limit.” And that, if anything, is a growth edge, because you can learn how to enforce that with this person.

So yes—if there’s any “lesson” or any Grace, it’s that anger shows you where your boundaries are. That’s a fruitful area of investigation.

Your question started with, “How can we stay with the spiritual process during betrayal?” To me, staying with the spiritual process just means not completely losing your faith in God just because things are difficult. That’s what it is. Not becoming an atheist just because things aren’t working out in a way that feels good. If you can do that, you’re fine.

There can be really tough shit going on in your life. But there have also been mystics throughout history who were nearly stoned to death for their beliefs, and they still had faith in God. So, it’s on YOU to figure out how to navigate to that state.

There are so many possibilities in Consciousness. And I think one thing that can keep us in faith is understanding all of these different cogs of the spiritual wheel; all these pieces that come together and interlace so we can understand how it’s possible to have faith even in the face of really difficult situations. Grace is a good place to start on Patreon (it's free to listen!)

So... that was my little soapbox on your question.

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