The Trauma of Trusting the Two-Faced Bully
Trusting someone who does not have your back is one of the worst kinds of pain there is.
If you have ever trusted someone with your deepest fears, your vulnerable parts, your insecurities and self-doubts, your desires, or beliefs, or your total and complete love and they act like they support you and have your back one minute but then turn on you and side with the naysayers or bullies in your life the next, it can feel like the worst pain you have ever felt. It is a sharp and deep stab in the back. This is betrayal like no other. When it starts out in your young life with a parent or close caregiver that you trust and depend on to keep you feeling safe and secure, the reaction in your body, mind, and soul to this kind of hurt can cause you to fight, flee, freeze, or fawn in order to stay safe. For many, the shame that takes over when you are in the presence of people laughing at, berating, or demeaning you feels all-consuming and claustrophobic. It’s like you can’t breathe and when you look for that one trusted person in the crowd who you know will protect you, who agrees with your point of view, who loves every speck of your flawed but wonderful self and will surely stick up for you against the bullying of these others, you find that this trusted person is actually laughing at or berating you, too. They are siding against you and with those bullies. You are left alone on an island without any lifeline at all.
The sheer panic, loneliness, and despair this causes is unfathomable because, as a child, you rely completely on your caregivers to protect you—physically, mentally, and emotionally—at all times, no matter what. When that is taken away from you or is absent all together, the beliefs you create about yourself can be that you don’t matter, you are stupid, your existence is nothing to anyone, or that you are unacceptable and unlovable. It does not take very much for children to form these untrue beliefs about themselves simply by sensing a rupture in the attachment to a primary caregiver, let alone if the primary caregiver is outwardly betraying the child’s trust. The caregiver can repair this rupture swiftly and completely if they recognize what they have done and try hard to never do it again, but if they don’t, it can be life-altering for a child.
You might notice that along the course of your life, you have encountered other moments like this with friends, co-workers, bosses, lovers, and even your own children. Each time this happens, you might freeze in fear, petrified of the loneliness and isolation you feel as well as want to run away and shrink in shame and become invisible, disappear, and move into a cave. You might notice that you want to scream and fight the person who has betrayed you, or you might notice that you make a decision that the best thing to do is to start endlessly pleasing the person who has betrayed you so that they might reconsider their tactics the next time they feel peer-pressured into taking the side of abusive people over you. Your attempt at making your “trusted” person think better of you is your way of ensuring that you won’t be outcasted from the group. This is simply a part of your system that is trying to protect you and help you feel safe in a very unsafe environment. As children, it is no wonder we adapt in these ways. And, we still carry on that behavior into adulthood and react to our abusers in the same way that we did to our two-faced, hypocritical caregivers who did not protect us when we needed it the most.
Our caregivers’ abusive and distrustful behavior in this way sets the stage for future abusive and traumatizing intimate relationships with partners who will act in similar ways as our caregivers did when they did not have our backs. Once again, in these adult relationships, we feel like the fool, the idiot, or the shameful person who is not supported by the group we are living with or dealing with and the partner we trust the most to have our back simply laughs along with the crowd or allows some of them to talk down to, mock out loud, or verbally abuse us while he or she watches and seems to agree with the bullies that we are bad people who deserve this mistreatment. And, just as in childhood, we feel that same sense of desperation or anger, that frozen and small or wanting-to-escape-the-situation feeling, or even a backward-seeming desire to simply laugh along and side with the bullies against our own selves in order to get past the discomfort of the humiliation we are experiencing. Again, we might resort to making ourselves into pretzels and pleasing or complying with the abuser so that maybe they will stick up for us the next time the bullies are around and want to use us as their personal, energetic punching bags.
In a very literal way, we choose to abandon ourselves in order to please abusive people simply so that we won’t be shunned and have to be alone. We think that maybe, just maybe, we can finally get someone to see that we deserve respect and love, not bullying and condescension. We desperately seek external validation because we did not have the tools or the skills to know how to have our own backs and to give ourselves the internal validation when we were little ones. In order to survive, we sought the validation and love that we needed from the people we loved and depended on, even if they were bullies and abusers. They were all we had.
Because we are acting from the age of the child who was traumatized and betrayed by the ones we trusted most, we react in the same way or ways we did back then—even though logically we know that we are adults and should know to handle it better. The beliefs that we tucked deep inside ourselves the first time or times we were shamed in this way are wired there so well that we believe them and they take over. On a very primal and emotional level we believe that we are the laughing stock, the emotional one, the dumb one, the fat one, the unlovable one, the insignificant one, or the one who can be walked all over. Logically, we do know better, but this is an emotional reaction that comes from a deeper, more hidden place in our minds and bodies.
Luckily, there is a definite way that we can let all of this go and move past it. I have a proven method for helping my clients release these old beliefs and stories and come into more authenticity and peace than they may ever have known. Once we can see those hidden beliefs and where they stem from, we are well on our way to releasing them for good. The baggage that we carry from the trauma, abuse, bullying, betrayal, and the limiting beliefs is a burden and it is very heavy. When you are ready to finally release it all, let me know. I will help you.
