“The worst of all deceptions is self-deception.” — Plato
“I’m not willing to betray myself anymore to fit in with you. I just can’t do it.” — Brené Brown
My friend sits across from me shredding her napkin as she hunts for language. We have known one another for years — forever, I sometimes think — and I am confident that, eventually, she will get to the point. She will scurry and skitter around for a while but eventually land the plane. “It is not what other people have done to me that haunts me,” she eventually says, “but what I have done to myself. I can deal with wounds I can blame on other people, but I’m finding it hard to forgive myself for my own self-betrayals.”
I listen and ask questions, aware that this notion of self-betrayal feels kind of new to me. I am, of course, familiar with similarly self-referential psychological and ethical concepts like self-esteem and self-love. In the Western world, these have come to function as feel-good mantras. But “self-betrayal” is more slippery and complicated despite its now frequent appearances in self-help literature. Part of the difficulty is that “betrayal” seems like something that, almost as a matter of definition, is done to us by another. I feel betrayed when a friend shares a secret of mine that he’d promised to keep. Even to take seriously the notion of self-betrayal suggests that there is an unknown, unaccessed part of myself. That there is an “I” and a “me” that are not only separate, but in poor communication with one another or even working at cross purposes.
One of the paradigmatic examples of betrayal is that of Christ by Judas. Although there are various versions of the story, the gist of it seems to be that Judas, considered to be part of Jesus’ inner circle, sold him out in exchange for money. Part of what makes it a betrayal, and not just a more general act of venality, is the prior relationship between the two men. As the story (sometimes) goes, they had been friends of a sort. Indeed, without the prior presumption of some trust between them, there could have been no betrayal. If Judas had just been a random townsperson, Jesus might still have been captured and crucified, but the poignant aspect of betrayal would be absent.
From this point of view, to be capable of feeling a sense of self-betrayal is kind of a good sign because it suggests that we have developed some sense of self-trust in the first place. We have learned to expect at least a modicum of conscientiousness in terms of how we treat ourselves and handle our lives. Only when we have already begun to trust ourselves to some degree can actions and activities that might otherwise have been understood as mere failures or mistakes take on this greater moral weight for us.
To be clear, I’m not speaking primarily of Judas-level violations in this essay, but of mundane examples where we may come to recognize that we’re failing to meet our basic responsibility to prioritize, value or care for ourselves. For example:
• active addiction
• eating poorly even when good food is available
• chronically placing others’ perceived needs and desires ahead of our own
• remaking and adjusting ourself so as to be acceptable and appealing to others
• agreeing to settle for less than what we really want and need
• self-punishing actions, such as internally berating ourself or holding ourself in an uncomfortable posture
• forcing ourself to remain in a job or other life circumstance that fails to nourish or fulfill even when other options are available
• turning away from our internal truth and overvaluing the opinions of others
Evidently, in order for any of these to count as self-betrayals, some self-awareness is necessary. It isn’t betrayal if we genuinely don’t know better. And, critically, some amount of self-love is also prerequisite, for we must value ourselves enough to get that we actually do deserve better than what we’ve been creating, or, at least, consenting to, in our lives. In short, in order for me to have betrayed myself, I must, at some level, both know that I’m shortchanging myself and believe that I deserve better. These are critical points since the vast majority of people on the planet do not have the luxury of choice in many of these circumstances. This fact alone should give us pause when we consider how many of us who DO have the privilege to choose paths of self-flourishing still opt for self-abnegation, self-denial, and self-imprisonment of one sort or another. And that we may rationalize such choices as noble self-sacrifices for others may be the greatest lie of all.
For although this post so far may sound like just one more exercise in personal self-indulgence, it isn’t. Just as compassion for others is predicated on a capacity for self-compassion, and kindness to others on kindness to self, so too is self-loyalty — the opposite of self-betrayal by my reckoning — linked to loyalty to others. And I don’t mean cheap loyalty either, such as when we present skewed images of ourselves to others to keep from rocking the boat or to avoid having to confront difficult life choices. There can be no loyalty, to self or to others, where truth is absent. And if I am habitually enacting the self-deceptions necessary to rationalize my substandard treatment of myself, then I guarantee you that, whether you notice it or not, I am selling you out as well.
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