Self-betrayal, self-love, and loyalty to others

“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’s not so much what others have done to me that haunts me,” she eventually says. “I can deal with wounds I can blame on other people, but I’m finding it hard to forgive my own self-betrayals.”

I listen with genuine interest and curiosity. I am, of course, familiar with similarly self-referential psychological and ethical concepts like self-esteem and self-love. In the Western world, these notions have come to function as self-explanatory, feel-good mantras. But “self-betrayal” is more slippery and complicated despite its increasingly frequent appearances in self-help literature. Part of the difficulty is that “betrayal” seems, almost as a matter of definition, to require another person. I feel betrayed when a friend shares a secret of mine that he’d promised to keep. To take seriously the notion of self-betrayal seems to suggest accepting 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 from time to time. 

One of the paradigmatic examples of betrayal is of Christ by Judas, the gist of which is that Judas, considered to be part of Jesus’ inner circle, sold him out in exchange for money. What makes it a betrayal, and not just a more generic act of venality, is the prior relationship between the two, that 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 weight for us.

Perhaps obviously, I don’t have in mind Judas-level violations in this little essay, but mundane examples where we fail to meet our basic responsibility to prioritize, value or care for ourselves. For example:

• eating poorly even when good food is available

• chronically placing others’ desires ahead of our own

• remaking and adjusting ourself to be acceptable and appealing to others

• agreeing to settle for less than what we really want and need

• self-punishing actions, such as berating ourself or even habitually 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 reasonably available

In order for any of these to be experienced as self-betrayals, some self-awareness and knowledge is necessary. After all, it probably won’t be framed as betrayal if we haven’t stopped to consider and honestly reflect upon the situation. 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 experience that I 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 mundane life 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 when we rationalize such choices as noble self-sacrifices for others this may be the greatest self-betrayal of all. 

For although this post so far may sound like just one more exercise in navel-gazing, I don’t think it is. 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, such as when we present contorted, dishonest versions 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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