betrayal and marbles

i remember my first ever betrayal by a friend. i was in kindergarten. we were sitting in circle and the teacher was talking. i whispered to my friend that the doctor said i didn't have to wear glasses anymore ... the teacher yelled at us for talking and asked if we were talking on topic. my friend could have lied and said yes. she lied all the time. but she didn't. she said "no" so i got yelled at some more. 

i remember that feeling of my heart sinking. of knowing that my best friend didn't have my back. 

so what do we do with these feelings of betrayal? i want to share with you a really important part of Brene Brown's Daring Greatly. she wrote about trust as a jar of marbles. 

when someone does something trusting, we add marbles to their jar, and when we are betrayed we take marbles out. she wrote:

When we think about betrayal in terms of the marble jar metaphor, most of us think of someone we trust doing something so terrible that it forces us to grab the jar and dump out every single marble. What’s the worst betrayal of trust? He sleeps with my best friends. She lies about where the money went. He/she chooses someone over me. Someone uses my vulnerability against me (an act of emotional treason that causes most of us to slam the entire jar to the ground rather than just dumping out the marbles.)

All terrible betrayals, definitely, but there is a particular sort of betrayal that is more insidious and equally corrosive to trust. In fact, this betrayal usually happens long before the other ones. I’m talking about the  betrayal of disengagement. Of not caring. Of letting the connection go. Of not being willing to devote time and effort to the relationship. The word betrayal evokes experiences of cheating, lying, breaking a confidence, failing to defend us to someone else who’s gossiping about us, and not choosing us over other people.

These behaviors are certainly betrayals, but they’re not the only form of betrayal. If I had to choose the form of betrayal that emerged most frequently from my research and that was the most dangerous in terms of corroding the trust connection, I would would say disengagement. When the people we love or with whom we have a deep connection stop caring, stop paying attention, stop investing and fighting for the relationship, trust begins to slip away and hurt starts seeping in.

Disengagement triggers shame and our greatest fears - the fears of being abandoned, unworthy, and unlovable. What can make this covert betrayal so much more dangerous than something like a lie or an affair is that we can’t point to the source of our pain - there’s no event, no obvious evidence of brokenness. It can feel crazy-making.

so what do we DO? how do we recover when we notice the marble jar is empty?

we trust ourselves in asking for what we need. we notice the people whose jars are over-flowing and we focus on those relationships. we let go of our fear of being abandoned and alone and we turn to our full-jarred relationships. because those are the people who will fill your life with more than simply marbles. 

as well as remembering my first betrayal, i also remember the first time someone had my back. it was my cousin D. i was the youngest kid on the street and all the older kids used to tease me and bully me. i had these shoes ... these really cool red plastic sandals. and the boys on the street would tease me by calling them orange. i know how dumb that sounds. i really do. but i was only 7 years old and it was one of the many things the boys did to make me cry. they seemed to take pleasure in my tears. tying me up to the tree with skipping ropes, trying to get me to eat poison berries ... anyway ... my cousin D was visiting. he is 3 years older than me, so he seemed like a big grown-up teenager to me though he was only 10. and he stood up to those boys and told them that the shoes were, in fact, red. RED. 

such a small thing. but it has stayed with me for 30 years. D remembers it too. his jar is over-flowing with marbles. 

who are your full-jar people? how do they add marbles to the jar? what will you do to add marbles to theirs?

be kind to yourself,

xoxo

...