Debi Silber – Beyond Betrayal 2022 – The Shift Network

Betrayal has an impact on your body, mind, and heart. Blindsided by the person or people you trusted the most, it’s natural to grasp at whatever or whomever you think might ease your pain. Or, conversely, you do nothing and hope that time will repair the wound.

Without correctly healing from this unique type of trauma, you risk remaining sad, stuck, or sick. Betrayal jolts your sense of confidence, belonging, and worthiness. It kicks up feelings of rejection and abandonment.

Because betrayal affects you on every level, it needs to be healed on every level. A proven and predictable roadmap exists for fully healing from betrayal, and you’ll step onto it this session.

In this module, you’ll:

• Define what betrayal is and does, coming to understand the different types of betrayal (family member, partner, friend, coworker, self, etc.) and why shattered trust hits so profoundly
• Hear how betrayal makes you question everyone and everything, and how what you’re experiencing is totally normal
• Explore the ways an unhealed betrayal can affect your health, work, and relationships
• Consider when and where your trust was originally shattered (it may not be where you think)
• Track how the beliefs you have now were formed by the betrayal, and see if they’re keeping you sad, stuck, or sick

Dr. Debi will walk you through how the game-changers she uncovered in her doctoral study — Post Betrayal Transformation, Post Betrayal Syndrome, and the 5 Stages From Betrayal to Breakthrough — can become essential go-tos when you apply them to your situation. Comfortingly, her work confirms the predictability of healing; the full physical, mental, and emotional impact of betrayal; and how betrayal is a different type of trauma that requires a different approach to healing.

Through these respective lenses, you’ll explore how an unhealed betrayal may be affecting your health, work, and relationships — and what to do about it.

In this module, you’ll:

• Receive validation that this isn’t all in your head: Betrayal is a different type of trauma and healing it has its own name, now called Post Betrayal Transformation
• Check your health status and mental/emotional states against the collection of symptoms so common to betrayal that they’re now known as Post Betrayal Syndrome
• Accept that, lest you stay stuck for years, decades, or even a lifetime, to fully heal you need to go through the proven and predictable 5 Stages From Betrayal to Breakthrough
• Take a quiz to see which symptoms of betrayal (even if it happened decades ago) may still linger for you
• Determine which of the 5 Stages From Betrayal to Breakthrough you’re in and how to slowly, carefully, and cautiously move forward

Imagine the four legs of a table: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. It’s common to lean heavily on the physical and mental legs and neglect the emotional and spiritual ones. Doing so makes you really good at thinking and doing (using your mind) and not so good at prioritizing feeling and being (tuning in to your heart).

With only two legs strengthened, it’s easy to see how the table topples, which can very much happen if you’ve experienced a betrayal. Balancing the four brings stability.

In this module, you’ll:

• Ask yourself 4 questions to check if you’re numbing, avoiding, or distracting — none of which allow you to care for yourself or others, or to answer your soul’s higher calling
• Look into some of the most common reasons you may seek out such behaviors as above
• Make a pie chart of all the areas (work, kids, health, relationships, self, etc.) on which you focus during the day and determine which percentage of your time goes toward each
• Learn how the mind takes a thought and, over time, turns it into a belief, leading to subconscious programming that’s responsible for your actions, behaviors, and habits
• Practice a powerful mind hack to create from these subconscious beliefs a new set

On “D-Day,” or Discovery Day, you learn the news that stands to forever change life as you’ve known it. The betrayal completely shocks your body, mind, and heart. Physically, the shock ignites your stress response. Mentally, you can’t wrap your mind around what just happened. Your worldview craters. This is the stage where you’re scared, frantic, lost, confused, and desperate to feel better.

It’s time to move on from D-Day. Today’s class will focus on crafting a self-care plan that soothes and supports you while setting you up for lasting healing.

In this module, you’ll:

• Dial into what happens during this stage and what you can do about the waves of pain, sadness, anger, and confusion
• Hear about the most common symptoms left in the wake of a betrayal and learn how, unchecked, they can lead to illness and disease
• Learn how the right kind of support can move you through this and the other stages, while the wrong type of can hold you back
• See how common it is to struggle and suffer in silence, as you protect the betrayer and/or deal with shame and embarrassment
• Be cautioned against masking physical symptoms, which is like putting a sticker over a car’s check-engine light, versus addressing the root cause

In the aftermath of betrayal, you’re spinning with questions: How will I survive this? Where do I go? Who can I trust? In Stage Three, you figure out some of the answers and, in the process, feel so much better.

Which is why Stage Three can be the hardest to leave. Survival feels so much better than the shock and trauma from which you just emerged, causing you to think, “Whew, I’m OK!”

The problem is, you’re unaware that Stages Four and Five are available to you, so you resign yourself to thinking, “This is as good as it’s going to get; I’d better get used to it.” A few things happen when that’s your belief:

You get used to all kinds of small self-benefits from being in that space: You get to be right. You have someone to blame. Nice.

Next, because you’re feeling less-than, unworthy, undeserving, and unlovable, your energy attracts the same. The mind wants to be proven right, so if those are your beliefs, your mind will find evidence by way of confirmation. If you weren’t already stuck enough in Stage Three, this keeps you glued there.

You’re not happy in this stage, and don’t know how to make the pain go away, so you look for ways to numb, avoid, and distract yourself from the feelings — be it with food, drugs, alcohol, work, TV, keeping busy, people-pleasing, or perfectionism. Diving into these “methods of mass distraction” may keep the feelings at bay, but they do nothing to actually move you through your discomfort; you’re simply trying to outrun it.

In this module, you’ll:

• Learn why things may get worse before they get better and what getting unstuck looks like
• Acknowledge the benefits of remaining stuck and how they may be enticing even though you think you want to move forward
• Validate your anger, sadness, pity, and compassion as progressive emotions that reveal your movement from one stage to the next
• Consider adopting a Hard Now, Easy Later approach that pays off in the long run versus the often subconscious choice to go with Easy Now, Hard Later
• Amass the qualities, tools, and strategies you need to move out of this most alluring stage

This week, you’ll examine the stage wherein you recognize, accept, and acknowledge that your old normal no longer exists.

You’ll explore how while you can’t undo the betrayal, you can control what you do with it.

You’ll receive help creating a new space that’s worthy and deserving of the new version of you that’s now emerging.

In this module, you’ll:

• Review certain relationships to see if you’ve outgrown them — common as you move from Stages Three to Four — and grieve those whose time has passed
• Prepare yourself to intentionally seek growth-minded soul warriors with whom to grow
• Learn how spirituality, faith, or religion help rebuild trust and play an integral role in continued healing and transformation
• Take what had been your life story and write — as a coherent new narrative — its pivotal next chapter
• Look through the window of willingness to assess if it’s safe and in your best interest or not to heal and rebuild with the person who hurt you