My Betrayal Earthquake
I was hit by a virus and an earthquake at the same time. It was February 2020, and the virus, as you know, was COVID-19. The earthquake did not hit just me in Los Angeles but shook my spiritual yoga community worldwide. The earthquake was caused not by the shift of tectonic plates in the earth but by a book written by a well-known woman in our community reporting her love of, abuse, and heartbreak at the hands of our spiritual teacher. This disrupted life as we knew it, creating confusion and contention, and setting us all on a path of individual and collective introspection and healing.
This continuing process has brought a lot of pain and divisions as well as spawned diversity, new communities, and better ways of doing things from lessons learned. As a longtime yoga teacher, yoga therapist, and professional life coach specializing in emotional therapies, I want to share a bit of my process and what I have seen and learned about this type of wounding, all in the hope that it might be helpful to anyone healing from an earthshattering experience. I begin with my story and finish with a discussion of betrayal, what it is, and some ideas for the healthy processing of it.
While my individual process and views are just one in a broad spectrum of our very human responses to all this, I validate and accept the many feelings and beliefs in my community and in you, the reader, that differ from and may even oppose mine. I would hope we could all remain friends and connect on the common need for healing. I have not previously been very public with my opinions and I’m aware that some felt this was wrong. But from the beginning, I have been talking directly to individuals and smaller groups in a personal way, rather than through social media. I recognized that my process would involve shifting and evolving feelings, so I took the forced isolation of the Covid pandemic to privately process these events in my own time.
The earthquake analogy has been helpful to understand and navigate this process. I did experience a pretty strong earthquake in Los Angeles in 1994. Disturbed at 4 AM by unexpected and violent shaking that was disorienting and confusing. It took some time to even understand what was happening, to move from confusion to clarity and action in order to function and survive. Later came the steps to explore the devastation, assess the damage, see what was salvageable, clean up, repair and rebuild, and only later have time to work on preparedness, prevention, and safety. These same stages have been occurring for the individuals and organizational structures of my community.
This was the “me too “movement entering my life directly. At the time I began reading Pamela Dyson’s book, there was a postcard on my desk that I had picked up somewhere: BELIEVE WOMEN!. For me, dozens of events over four decades that had been explained to me in one way instantly made sense in a new and more logical way.
My spiritual teacher, whose presence and teachings had helped and benefited me enormously in my life and who I still see as brilliant in many ways, also had some serious defects that caused harm to many. Not everyone could embrace the possibility of this extreme duality.
For some, Yogi Bhajan was a perfected master and therefore could not have been other than how he presented himself, a celibate man of highest integrity and regard for women, a spiritual man, disciplined and beyond the frailties of desire. He couldn’t be that AND have a hidden dark side. So we, his students who loved and honored him as such, were forced to confront difficult choices. First, believe the newly revealed images of him and face the disintegration of an entire bedrock of our lives. Or disbelieve emerging reports as more women and children came forward and keep the world as we knew it intact. The gut-wrenching, life-changing, trust-crushing experience I went through after accepting the revelation of his dark side causes me to understand anyone who somehow chooses not to do so.
I sought refuge from the initial disorientation by seeking to understand. I had to deal with disbelief by gathering information. If my former truths were threatened, I needed to get to the truth, no matter where it led. I had to fight depression by taking action. After reading the book and having known Pamela – she played a role in my wife and I getting together and was the minister at our wedding – and reading about her women’s writing club that supported the decision to tell her story, I trusted her motives, her heart. She loved Yogi Bhajan, too! But, trust but verify.
So, I discussed it with my wife and heard from some of her childhood friends who could now share about their own abuse and talked about the painful conflict between trying to trust and obey their teacher in this system of obedience and the awful feelings from it violating so many other rules both spiritual, societal, and instinctual. One may disbelieve a person and a story or hearsay on social media, but multiple dear friends sobbing and speaking in private are altogether believable.
Next, to better understand, I looked for information from experts in this type of phenomenon. I read and then led a discussion group on the book, Sex and the Spiritual Teacher. Unfortunately, abuse of power by trusted religious leaders is so common it is well-researched and studied. The signs and symptoms summarized there was a checklist that matched my experiences. Terror, Love, and Brainwashing, that sounds extreme, but this academic study of “totalist organizations” was also helpful. All such groups begin with a charismatic and authoritarian leader, a system of ideas that answer all life’s questions, an “educational” pathway of entry, and a structure in which the closer a member is to the leader, the more fully “deployable” they are. Ouch! Check, check, and check.
Our organization’s leaders asked the experts, “What do we do?”. One recommendation was to hire an independent body to gather more reports from people with a range of opinions and experiences. The “An Olive Branch Report” was another subject of disagreement and division which, for me was a bigger quake than the first.
I spoke with people I knew who had similar experiences similar to Pamela and with friends who didn’t believe a bit of this. Many of us compared notes. Old stories made sense in new ways; pieces of a puzzle came together. The earthquake was this: an entire belief system, a reality, and understanding of the world as we knew it, that solid ground to stand on and live by was gone. Where to go, where to stand, what to believe now? Many would not leave the old ground and tried to hold on and deny any change was taking place. I saw immediately that it would divide the community based on the ground each person planted their flag, and who would be in that same camp to rebuild with.
And my feelings? All of them: anger, grief, and sadness, apathy and depression, some doubts and fears, confusion and disorientation. I withdrew from Yogi Bhajan, put him in my mind’s “time out” room, and didn’t want to relate to his pictures and teachings until I sorted things out. I took my time, no rush. I completed some yoga teacher training courses in progress during 2020 with open discussions with the students and an environment of tolerance for diverse feelings and reactions. We watched the “camps” of similar believers form. Who’s in, who’s out, who stays, who goes their own way. This is the way things evolve, like it or not. Realizing a need to move beyond avoiding Yogi Bhajan, I sat down with him mentally and spoke openly, man-to-man. I thanked him profusely for all the gifts of 40 years that helped me have a life I love and become who I am. Then I shook his hand and said my goodbyes. We parted ways peacefully.
Quite a story. Now let’s turn to understanding this kind of traumatic earthquake and some ideas for healing from it. It has a name: BETRAYAL. Why use this word? Betrayal is:
the act of disappointing a person’s trust, hopes, or expectations.
failure to keep or honor a promise, principle, cherished memory, etc.
For example, the man I looked to as a hero, priest, mentor, and model of greatness, whom I aspired to be like, and whom I trusted to always represent Truth and Divinity and always serve my family and community members selflessly spent years giving classes of female devotees a long lecture on virtues and nobility, then going home to violate several of his assistants. While married. And a Sikh with a pope-like religious position.
Have you been betrayed? A love partner who made an agreement to monogamy but has multiple secret sexual affairs. A friend who is duplicitous, speaks poorly of you to others, cuts you off suddenly for no known reason, steals your boyfriend. A husband who mismanages finances by gambling or unrevealed spending and puts the whole family out on the street. An employer that fires you unjustly. A corporation or government that’s doing great harm but covers it up.
When you put your trust in someone - or something like an institution, a system, or a government – it means you have an understanding of how they will behave, you know what to expect, and on that basis, you can live with confidence and without fear. When the object of your trust violates that trust by acting outside the agreements and understandings that led to your giving your trust… the harm is often huge and complex. It hurts! It can leave you angry, sad, depressed, untethered from that reality, and disoriented as to what to believe. In short, it is traumatizing. What to do? Here are some ideas that have helped me and many of my clients.
The many emotions we feel when traumatized arise as a healthy response to help manage the situation. We need to accept the difficult feelings as allies in the recovery process rather than dismiss them and believe something is wrong with us. Working with those emotions is an essential path to recovery from the trauma of betrayal. I discovered that the predominant emotions I felt aligned with the Seven Stages of Grief. Note that these lists vary, and a person may experience some and not others, and in any order. Each of these “stages” is an emotional state, so we can address them as they arise. Let’s take a quick look at some of the emotions we feel when betrayed, and how can they help us learn, heal, and grow? This list is taken from a series of classes I created to recover from betrayal.
The very nature of the thing is an initial Shock – the earthquake in some foundation that our life stands on. Disbelief is natural when the brain has so much conflicting data. “This can’t be true”, softens the blow and gives us time to stay awhile in the safer world we once knew. It is tempting and quite possible to remain here somewhat permanently as in, say, losing a presidential election. The word for entrenched disbelief is Denial.
It takes a lot of energy to fight the truth, which Anger can supply. It is also the emotion we need to fight the situation, the person, or even ourselves as we begin to suspect it may be true. Anger is the emotion that seeks to protect us from harm, but once the deed has been done, we must channel the Anger into future protections from similar things. That could be channeled in that direction even now, but will likely have to wait for acceptance. We are more likely to use anger to blame whoever revealing the news, or even parties to the betrayal including, incredibly, those abused by our betrayer. A common example is women blamed for a man’s infidelity.
Later, we may blame ourselves – for not knowing or preventing it – but that means we have already begun to accept it. Similarly, Guilt may set in as we “try on” the new truth, still somewhat incredulous that we could have let it happen. Every one of these emotions is helping you slowly to heal and become stronger and wiser. But when we can’t yet get there, it may be the darkest before the dawn. Depression and Apathy are sure signs we are reluctantly realizing we have to deal with this harsh new reality, but that takes courage, willingness, and overcoming feelings of helplessness. Depression calls for surrender, letting go of what was so that change and renewal can enter.
Grief and Sadness call for much of the same, but their presence means we have turned a corner. They signal recognition of loss the healing of which is grief’s purpose. When all resistance has been exhausted, we can finally begin the essential process of grieving. This emotion helps us to let go of what was and, eventually move on to something that could be much newer, better, truer, and fulfilling to our needs and values. Not to live without what you had before the betrayal, but to use the crisis to improve on what were invisible defects. To rebuild something from the rubble that has a stronger foundation. It can take a lot of time and is certainly hard work, but if we don’t get stuck in any of the stages, we have come to terms with what has happened and accepted it. Ah, Acceptance, the opposite of resistance, we are once again in flow. I accept my past choices and see where I could have worked smarter to speak to power and ask about things that seemed off, rather than ignore the signs. I am happy to say that I have done this work. You can too. Trauma is part of life and so is our innate ability to cope with it and grow from it. If you would like to go deeper into this subject in a practical way and move through these emotions, I created six classes, Recover From Betrayal that will help you understand, process, and – in time – heal the wounds of betrayal.
