BETRAYALS IN RELATIONSHIPS

Fr Jim Cogley

At one point in the Gospels Peter professed undying loyalty to his master. Yet within days he had denied on oath that he ever knew him. Such professions of love and promises followed by the worst betrayals are played out every day in close relationships. A man may profess loyalty and undying love to his partner and within days act in a manner that is in total contradiction to what he has said. Usually when someone continually repeats and goes overboard with their promises it can be a red flag that the opposite intention is lurking close to the surface of their unconscious. With an addiction this is an ongoing recurrence, like promising to never get drunk again.

How can there sometimes be such a huge contradiction between what someone says and what that person does? The famous words of Shakespeare have a biblical quality, ‘To thine own self be true and it must follow as the day the night that thou cans’t be false to any man’. Only to the extent that anyone is true to themselves can they be true to anyone else. Our inner betrayals will always lead to either outer manifestations or if not, inner strayings of the heart. He may wait for the wife to go to bed so he can watch porn. Where we have ‘no go’ areas in our lives our closest relationships will also suffer from the same ‘no go’ areas and these will also affect the quality of communication. The bottom line is that if someone is living a superficial lifestyle and divorced from their depths it will be their unlived life that will prove detrimental in the relationship.

A dynamic that is often at play in many relationships is a profession of love that is based on one or both partners need. It is very different to say, ‘I need you because I love you’ as opposed to, ‘I love you because I need you.’ The latter sounds attractive to another who is Also insecure and needy. It is a wonderful boost to the ego to feel so needed. Yet in that statement are bundles of entrapments that with the passage of time will inevitably come

to the surface. If my love is based on need, I don’t require an equal partner but a slave whom I can own, who will always be there at my beck and call, who will have no life of their own, who is not allowed to have other friends. In this kind of relationship, the other person never feels free or encouraged to follow their own path and there will always be jealousy, insecurity, control and possessiveness lurking close by.

The following is a quote from a man who was in the process of awakening and reflecting on his life:

‘At twenty-two I met a lovely girl, and we fell madly in love. We felt as if we were the answer to each other’s deepest needs and our chemistry was explosive. We were inseparable for nearly two years before the cracks began to appear. Then we were forced to look at what we had both carried into the relationship that was glaringly obvious now that our sexual attraction was wearing thinner each day as we became constantly embroiled in disagreements. These emotional outbursts were shocking to both of us as we had often vowed earlier that we would never cause hurt to each other. Now we were seriously hurting the one we loved the most. It was as if a side of each of us that we never knew existed had come out of nowhere. It had evaporated our former bliss and excitement at being together and sometimes we felt as if we were relating as strangers who didn’t know each other’.

‘What was happening in our relationship was a complete mystery at the time, but with painful reflection it’s now obvious that we had slipped into a place of reacting as children and were no longer relating as adults. On the surface we appeared to be two adults with three children while the reality was that there wasn’t an adult in the home. We had each come from very dysfunctional backgrounds with a host of unmet needs and we were looking to each other to meet those needs. Our childhood anger at those needs never having been met was now directed towards each other and from where we were coming from, each time we argued, we hadn’t even met each other. As our children went through their different growth phases they were mirroring and awakening the parts of us that we thought we had so left behind as to believe they no longer existed. What we discovered was that it is the very nature of relationship to expose our deepest wounds so that slowly we come to the realization that placing the burden of our unmet needs onto another person’s shoulders and not taking responsibility for them ourselves is a sure way of hurting the one we love and damaging what we love the most.’