The Holy Rage of Grief! Honouring Ones Healing Journey and Boundaries After Betrayal
A musing on the holy rage of grief, and the audacity to honour your healing process
Betrayal doesn’t just hurt!
It detonates!
One moment, life is familiar!
The next you’re watching your reality collapse as suddenly you’re faced with what your intuition has been trying to tell you finally reveal itself!
In the moment I heard the words, “what can I say, I can’t lie to you, we only did it on my side of the bed!”
When that truth came crashing into my reality, into my bed, in my marriage of 33 years, the shock and the trauma literally broke me open.
It wasn’t just heartbreak! It was desecration! It was a complete defilement of the sacred vows we had made all those years ago!
And no, 2 years later, I haven’t, “moved on, In the way you think I should!”
It’s not because I’m stuck! But because I refuse to bypass what must be witnessed!
There’s a cost to facing grief! But there’s a greater cost to faking and bypassing it!
Our culture rushes healing and has a tendency to wrap betrayal in platitudes. The perpetrator urges us to be, “civil,” to “co-parent,” to “rise above!”
But here’s what I know:
You cannot alchemise what you won’t sit with!
You can’t bypass the devastation and expect to call it peace!
So I’ve stayed long enough to feel and process the experience through my body without bypassing and storing the experience in my cells to deal with later.
I have stayed in the fire to transmute the pain.
Stayed in the sacred grief that doesn’t perform for public approval!
And No, I don’t want to be at events with them!
Because my boundaries are not bitterness, they are reclamation!
Because pretending I’m “fine” for other people’s comfort is a betrayal of myself and I’m no longer prepared to betray myself so that others are comfortable.
Because “moving on” doesn’t mean erasing what happened. It means integrating it into my bones, where the wound becomes wisdom, but that cannot happen not by force.
There is a kind of violence in demanding proximity after betrayal.
It says:
“Come sit at the table where we once broke you!”
“Swallow your sorrow. Don’t make this awkward!”
“Be palatable! Be pleasing! Be over it!”
I say: No!
You don’t get to hurt me and then demand my presence!
Forgiveness doesn’t mean reunion!
Grace doesn’t mean access and healing doesn’t mean exposure to the source of the wound!
Make no mistake, none of this is about revenge.
It’s about truth!
It’s about dignity!
It’s about choosing not to gaslight myself for the comfort of those who previously benefited from my silence!
My grief is sacred! And it’s not done speaking yet!
If I am still raw, it’s because I have the courage to feel!
If I am still absent from the rooms they enter, it’s because I’m building a temple from the ashes, not performing at their altar so they feel better about their actions!
No one gets to judge the timeline of a soul’s rebuilding!
And I don’t owe anyone a seat at my resurrection!
For anyone walking this road:
You’re not too sensitive!
You’re not stuck!
And you’re definitely not bitter!
You are brave enough to grieve what others try to ignore.
You are wise enough to set boundaries where others set traps.
You are alive enough to heal without performance.
True healing can only happen through the body, stay with the grief.
Let it roar!
Let it teach you about boundaries, let it teach you where your edges are!
The ones who rise without rushing the wound are the ones who rise whole!
If you’re in the depths of such an experience, feel free to get in touch as I can share tools and techniques that you can use to move through your grief with sacred presence. On this new moon my intention is to work with those who are brave enough to witness themselves, honour their journey, honour the life transitions and bless all of their life experiences with presence.
Much love on your journey xx