Sorrow, Loss And Betrayal

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

What is desired is not achievable

Davin is thirty-eight years old. His father was an architect, his brother became an architect, and Devin himself received an architectural education and served as an architect for a time. He was so often sad, experiencing loss and betrayal that he no longer knew if he had a soul left.

Davin's father is a kind, but domineering, old alcoholic who did good to people and expected gratitude from them in return. Devin knew well how he would live when he became an adult: he would be an architect, live near his parents and take care of them. His older brother strictly followed this rule, and Devin had already passed the "stage of first adulthood", during which childhood experiences were already internalized and turned into a set of ideas about themselves and others, such ideas help the child to reflexively develop strategies for dealing with anxiety.

Devin became an architect, got married and settled in the neighborhood of his parents, living up to their expectations. His mother, being a typical codependent person, gradually contributed to this. After the death of her father, Devin immediately became an emotional support for her.

At first glance, Davin's wife Annie was quite different from his family members. She possessed a developed intellect, ability to write, actively participated in political and public life, but she was often haunted by mood swings, and she developed an addiction to alcohol. When she was 30 years old, she was diagnosed with cancer, and Devin devoted himself entirely to his wife - caring for her until she died. This loss unsettled him for two years. Their life together was turbulent, tragic and full of traumatic experiences, but Devin could not help but sacrifice himself, since he was "programmed" from childhood to take care of a family member in need of help. He was aware of himself only in the role that he played in the family. In the overwhelming majority of such families, one of the children, by an unspoken unconscious parental decision, is assigned the role of the keeper of the family hearth, a scapegoat or a comforter of all suffering. Devin uncomplainingly assumed this role and selflessly fulfilled his destiny.

Devin came to therapy complaining of mental dumbness, i.e. lack of feelings, desires and life goals. His wife is dead. He could no longer work on architectural projects and make plans for life. He no longer understood who he was and who he wanted to be. Towards the end of the second year of therapy, he was dating a woman he had known before. He had known Denise for a long time, but ended the relationship with her when he began to court Annie. Denise never married, but she made a professional career and was a completely self-sufficient woman both financially and emotionally. Talking about the renewal of his relationship with Denise, Devin mentioned her hot temper, but he was sure that in the process of his future life together, his girlfriend would become softer. However, he could not explain why he was sure of this. Despite his admiration for Denise and even love for her, he could not imagine himself again in the role of husband.

Devin's diagnosis was easy enough: he suffered from reactive depression. But since this depression lasted a whole year after his wife's death and spanned his entire life, I thought that depression was just the tip of the iceberg - a more serious malaise and emotional distress. Davin's life came to its "turning point", the midlife crisis, to the "pass" between the false self, formed during the internalization of the relationships that developed in the parental family, and the image of the person he wanted to become.

Regardless of when a person's false self image is destroyed, he usually has a painful time of disorientation in life, a time of "wandering in the desert."In the figurative expression of Matthew Arnold, this is "a wandering between two worlds: one of them is already dead, the other is still powerless to be born." A person does not have any desires, he is not satisfied with any relationship, no career, no application of his strength; he becomes inert, loses strength of mind and any idea of the possibility of a new sensation of his Self. At this time, for Davin, everything lost its meaning, because he was focused on saving his false Self. His soul could somehow be touched only by reading, love of music and enjoying nature.

During therapy, in the course of which his former self, which had practically ceased to function, was gradually eliminated, it was not difficult to turn to the formation of his idea of the future. But any idea of the future should be formed by the ego-consciousness, and not arise in the depths of the human psyche. In this regard, Davin developed a strong internal resistance, apathy that resembled fatigue, even laziness, which in fact represented resistance to aimless wanderings. It is very likely that the turning point in therapy was the session that Devin brought Denise with him. He wanted to explain to her his seeming stubbornness, external resistance to communication with her, which she perceived only as rejection. During the session they attended together, Denise spoke about her relationship to Davin's mother. His mother treated Denise in a friendly way, but at the same time, whenever possible, she humiliated her own son. "The only thing he really can do," she said, "is to clean the house well."

Denise also noted that Davin's brothers and sisters often called him to help them urgently: to sit with the children, drop them at the airport, clean up the house, and Devin, always loyal to them, had to help them. I have developed an image of Davin as an intelligent, gifted man who is still trapped in the relationships inherent in his parental family. His mother, experienced enough to instill confidence in her son's girlfriend, simultaneously sought every opportunity to spoil the relationship between them in order to retain the exclusive right to influence him. Devin's siblings were also very aware of the role that Devin played in their family, so they quite deliberately benefited from it.

What Davin was unconsciously suppressed most deeply was not the loss of his wife, but the loss of his Self as a result of constant demands and expectations from others over the years. During his conversation with Denise, Devin gradually became aware of the exploitative nature of family parenting. Then the vitality awoke in him again, and he again felt himself inspired by desire. (Etymologically, desire [desire] comes from a combination of the Latin words de and sidus [to lose your guiding star].) As K. Day-Lewis wrote,

Strive forward with a new desire:

After all, where it happened to love us and build, -

There is no refuge for man. - Only spirits abode

Located there, between a pair of lights.

Two weeks later, Davin had this dream:

I'm going to the Spectrum for an Elvis Presley concert. Since I am going to meet Elvis, it is very important to me how I will do my hair. Elvis stands on the stage and sings. He is very young, and he sings one of my favorite songs. To the left of the stage is a screen behind which a naked woman is taking a bath. As soon as she gets out of the shower, Elvis catches my eye and looks at me knowingly. There is no catch in his gaze. On the contrary, apparently, her presence gives Elvis strength, energy and a sense of fullness of life. The woman was part of a performance that only me could see.

At the exit from the Spectrum, I see Annie standing nearby. She gives me a Bible, but it's not a Christian Bible. Annie says, "She's back for hers again," and I understand that this Bible was written and illustrated by her sister Rosa during an exacerbation of schizophrenia. The book cover depicts a scene from the Apocalypse.

I ask Annie what to do with this book, and she says, "I want you to edit and design it." I feel like I'm torn apart. I love Annie, but I absolutely do not want to take this book, because it contains everything that was bad in our relationship: the harmful influence of our families, my ability to attach great importance to the problems of another person and my need to save Annie from herself and from the outside world.

I realize that Annie is drinking again. I understand that she again plunged into sadness, which she absorbs from the outside. I tell her that I'm going to marry Denise, but it doesn't hurt her. Annie then says, "Everyone thought we were going to die together." Then he asks: "What do you hear about football? How are Phyllis? How are Eagles?" Now I understand that our life was stupid and superficial. We have lived for too long with false feelings and at the same time never trying to realize what was important to us. I understand that we will never be together again, and I feel sad. But I will marry Denise, and Annie will remain sad and alone, because she has nothing else to do.

In this dream, huge autonomous forces are manifested that exist in Davin's psyche and seek to return him to active life from a state of living death. Despite the outward inaction due to the loss of his wife, a revolution is taking place in the depths of his psyche. This loss forced him to radically rethink his life. To understand the depth of this experience, one must realize that the greatest loss is the loss of his mental integrity, that he grieves not so much for his wife as for his lost soul.

One way that allowed Davin to become aware of his Self again was to appreciate the gift that this dream turned out to be for him - a striking reflection of his past, given to him by his own psyche, and allowing him to realize this past and free himself from it in order to move on. …

In his associations with the above dream, Devin linked the image of Elvis Presley with the "mana personality" of a charismatic rock musician. Elvis' songs resonated in his soul, when Devin, burdened with responsibilities to others, was completely out of time for songs. It can be assumed that in the image of a naked woman on stage, which only he could see, his anima was openly revealed. Before thinking about a new relationship, he should have combined the phenomenal energy concentrated in the image of Elvis with the noumenal energy of the anima, i.e. with an inspiring desire.

The fragment of the dream, in which Annie hands the Bible to Devin, indicates not only the parental instruction to young Devin to take care of others, but also the presence of psychosis in his wife's family. His wife's sister, Rose, suffered from psychosis, mostly Devin looked after her. Both in a dream and in life, his duties were to check and put things in order, others did not want or could not do this. But in his dream, Devin saw what he could not realize before: he no longer belongs to this "world of pity", in which you have to do their work for others, saving them from themselves.

Now he saw in Annie not only a person who constantly needed him and whom he was accustomed to patronize, but also a superficial and provocative person: she translates their deep and meaningful conversation into a discussion of the successes of the Phyllis and Eagles sports clubs. And as if in an ancient Greek tragedy, Devin sees that he lived in an illusory world and, feeling sadness from losses, losing ground under his feet and grieving for those who remained in the "world of the dead", he prepares himself for life in a new world, for a new relationships, to a new sense of self. Two weeks after Davin had this dream, he and Denise were married.

Only a great loss can be a catalyst for confrontation with another loss that a person experiences so deeply that he is not aware of it. It is about losing the sense of your journey. Devina was only able to awaken to life sadness, which ultimately forced him to admit his self-alienation. And only Annie's betrayal helped him to realize the essence of those exploitative relationships that developed in the parental family.

Wandering through these lost places of the soul and working through their inherent traumas, Devin discovered the life he had always aspired to - a life that was his own life, not the life of another person. Deeply experiencing loss, sorrow and betrayal, he discovered desires in himself and saw his guiding star.

Loss and sorrow

Probably, in our entire journey, full of troubles and anxieties, we feel losses almost as often as existential fear. Our life begins with losses. We separate completely from the protective maternal womb, severing the connection with the heartbeat of the cosmos; life throws us into an unknown world, which often turns out to be deadly. This birth trauma becomes the first milestone on the path that ends for us with the loss of life. On this path, various losses constantly occur: security, close relationships, unconsciousness, innocence, gradually there is a loss of friends, bodily energy and certain states of ego identity. There is nothing surprising in the fact that in all cultures there are myths that dramatize the feeling of these losses and rupture of relations: myths about the Fall, the loss of the state of paradise bliss, the myth of the Golden Age, which is based on the memory of an indissoluble unity with mother nature. Likewise, all people experience a deep yearning for this unity.

The theme of loss runs through our entire culture, starting with the most sentimental lyric songs, in which one hears a complaint that with the loss of a loved one, life loses all meaning, and ending with the most painful and piercing prayer, in which a passionate desire for mystical union with God is expressed. For Dante, the greatest pain was the loss of hope, the loss of salvation, the loss of paradise, along with the haunting memories of the hope for this connection - there is no such hope today. Our emotional state is primarily determined by losses. If our life is long enough, then we lose everyone who is of value to us. If our life is not so long, then they will have to lose us. Rilke said very well about this: "This is how we live, saying goodbye without end." We "say goodbye" to people, with the state of being, with the very moment of farewell. In other lines, Rilke speaks of the predetermination of farewell: "Death in oneself, all death in oneself to carry before life, to wear without knowing anger, this is indescribable." The German word Verlust, which translates as loss, literally means "to experience desire" in order to then experience the absence of the object of desire. There is always a loss behind any desire.

Twenty-five centuries ago Gautama became the Buddha (one who "gets to the heart of things"). He saw that life is incessant suffering. This suffering primarily arose from the ego's desire to control nature, others, and even death. Since we cannot live as long and the way we want, we experience suffering in accordance with our losses. According to Buddha, the only way to get rid of suffering is to voluntarily give up the desire to rule, allowing life to flow freely, i.e. follow the wisdom inherent in the transience of being. Such liberation turns out to be a real cure for neurosis, because then man does not separate himself from nature.

Having given up control over others, a person is freed from bondage and allows life to go on as it goes. Only the free flow of life can bring a sense of peace and serenity. But, as we know, the senior officer in the service of the Ego is Captain Security with a subordinate Sergeant Directorate. Who of us, like Buddha, can "penetrate the essence of things", extinguish desires in ourselves, go beyond the boundaries of the Ego and from the bottom of our hearts preach the idea "not of mine, but of Your will"? Tennyson said that it is better to love and lose than not to love at all. The day after Kennedy's assassination, his relative Kenya O'Donnell said on the radio: "What's the use of being Irish if you don't realize that sooner or later the world will break your heart?"

The Buddha's wise teachings, which imply a refusal to oppose the natural course of things, seem poorly acceptable in the conditions of modern life. Somewhere out there, on the battlefield of the mind, which recognizes parting and loss, with a heart longing for unity and constancy, there is a place for us who want to find our individual psychology. None of us, like Buddha, can attain the state of enlightenment, but at the same time, no one wants to be an eternal sacrifice.

The main thing for the expansion of consciousness is to recognize that the constancy of life is due to its fleetingness. Essentially, life's transience reveals its strength. Dylan Thomas expressed this paradox like this: "I am ruined by the force of life, the green melt of which makes flowers bloom." The same energy that, like a detonator, causes the wild flourishing of nature, feeds itself and destroys itself. This transformation and disappearance is life. The word we have for immutability is death. Thus, in order to embrace life, one must embrace the energy that feeds and consumes itself. Immutability contrary to the power of life is death.

That is why Wallace Stevens came to the conclusion: "Death is the mother of beauty"; he also called death the greatest invention of nature. Along with the feeling of the power that feeds itself, comes the ability of awareness, meaningful choice and understanding of beauty. It is wisdom that transcends ego anxiety, embodying the mystery of the oneness of life and death as part of this great cycle. Such wisdom opposes the need of the ego, transforming it from insignificant to transcendental.

The mysterious unity of gains and losses, possession and parting is strikingly accurately reflected in Rilke's poem "Autumn"; it corresponds to the time of year associated with the end of summer and all winter losses in the northern hemisphere. The poem ends like this:

We all fall. This has been the practice for centuries.

Look, a hand falls nearby casually.

But there is Someone who is infinitely tender

He holds the fall in his arms.

Rilke connects the image of leaves falling to the ground (on the ground, which soars in space and time) with the general experience of loss and fall, and hints at the existence of a mystical unity hidden behind the phenomenon of falling and expressed through it. Perhaps it is God, Rilke does not explain who it is; he sees himself in a great cycle of gains and losses, desperate but divine.

The experience of loss can be very acute if something valuable is missing from our life. If there is no experience of loss, then there is nothing of value. As we experience loss, we need to recognize the value of what we had. Freud, in his essay "Sadness and Melancholy", describing his observations of a child in whom one of the parents died, noted that this child was grieving about his loss, so a certain energy was released from him. A child whose parents are physically present but emotionally absent cannot be sad, for there is literally no loss of parents. Then this frustrated sadness is internalized, turning into melancholy, into sadness for loss, into a strong longing for union, and the strength of this longing is directly proportional to the value of the loss for the child. Thus, the experience of loss can occur only after its value has become a part of life for us. The task of a person who finds himself in this quagmire of suffering is to be able to recognize the value that was bestowed on him and to keep it, even if we cannot keep it in the literal sense. Having lost a loved one, we must mourn this loss, while realizing all that valuable, connected with him, that we have internalized. For example, a parent who is painfully experiencing the so-called "empty nest syndrome" suffers less from the child's abandonment than from the loss of inner identity due to the termination of his parental role. Now he is required to find a different use of the energy that he used to spend on the child. Therefore, the best attitude towards those who have left us is to appreciate their contribution to our conscious life and live freely with this value, bringing it into our daily activities. This will be the most correct transformation of inevitable losses into a particle of this fleeting life. Such transformation is not a denial of losses, but their transformation. Nothing we have internalized will ever get lost. Even in losses, some part of the soul remains.

The word grief "sorrow" comes from the Latin gravis "to bear"; from it the well-known word gravity "gravitation" was formed. I repeat: to feel sadness means not only to endure the dire state of loss, but also to feel its depth. We only grieve about what is of value to us. Undoubtedly one of the deepest sensations is the feeling of powerlessness, reminding us of how weakly we can control what happens in life. As Cicero said, "it is foolish to tear the hair on the head in sorrow, for the presence of a bald head does not diminish suffering." And at the same time, we are sympathetic to the Greek Tsorba, who revolted the whole village against himself by the fact that, having lost his daughter, he danced all night, for only in ecstatic body movements could he express the acute bitterness of his loss. Like other primary emotions, sadness does not find expression in words and does not allow itself to be dissected and analyzed.

Probably the deepest poem about sadness was written in the 19th century. by the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It is called "Forest spurge". The word "sorrow" appears in it only once, in the last stanza. However, the reader feels a terrible emotional anguish of the author, his deep inner disunity and a state of deadlock. It seems that all that he is capable of is to describe in detail, to the smallest detail, the unique inflorescence of forest milkweed. The weight of sadness weighs on him so that it becomes incomprehensible; the author can concentrate only on the smallest natural phenomena.

Deep sorrow does not give

Wisdom, leaves no memories;

Then I just have to comprehend

Three petals of forest milkweed.

Rossetti is aware of a huge irrecoverable loss and, just like Rilke, using the metaphor of autumn leaf fall, points to the infinite through the finite, comprehensible to the mind. I repeat: the sincerity of sadness allows us to recognize the internalized value of another person. The ritual "opening" of the gravestone in Judaism, i.e. removing the veil from him on the first anniversary of the death of a buried person carries a double meaning: recognition of the gravity of the loss and a reminder of the end of sadness, the beginning of the renewal of life.

No amount of denial will make it easier for us to experience loss. And there is no need to be afraid of these sad experiences. The best opportunity to accept the feeling of fleetingness of being is to determine the golden mean between excruciating heartache and feverish fermentation of thoughts. Then we will be able to hold on to the disappearing energy and establish ourselves in what was ours, at least temporarily. In conclusion to his transcription of the story of Job "I. V." Archibald McLeish cites the following words of I. V. about God: "He does not love, He is." “But we love,” says Sarah, his wife. "Exactly. And this is amazing."The energy needed to assert value in times of sadness becomes a source of deep meaning. Not to lose this meaning and to stop trying to control the natural course of life is the true essence of the dual effects of sadness and loss.

When Jung's wife died, he developed reactive depression. For several months he felt confused and disoriented in life. Once he dreamed that he came to the theater, where he was completely alone. He went down to the first row of the stalls and waited. Before him, like an abyss, the orchestra pit gaped. When the curtain went up, he saw Emma on the stage in a white dress, smiling at him, and realized that the silence had broken. Both together and separately they were with each other.

When, after three years of practice in the United States, I again wanted to come to the Jung Institute in Zurich, I wanted to see many of my old friends, especially Dr. Adolph Ammann, who was my supervisory analyst at one time. Just before my arrival, I learned that he had died and was saddened by the irreparable loss. Then on November 4, 1985, at three o'clock in the morning, I "woke up" and saw Dr. Amman in my bedroom. He smiled, bowed exquisitely, as only he could do, and said: "Glad to see you again." Then three things occurred to me: "This is not a dream - it is really here", then: "This is, of course, a dream"; and finally: "This is a dream similar to the one that Jung had about Emma. I have not lost my friend, since he is still with me." Thus, my sadness ended in a sense of deep peace and acceptance. I have not lost my friend-teacher, his image lives inside me even now, as I write these lines.

Probably nothing that was once real, important or difficult can be lost forever. Only by freeing your imagination from mind control can you truly experience the severity of the loss and feel its true value.

Betrayal

Betrayal is also a form of loss. Innocence, trust and simplicity in relationships are lost. Each person experiences betrayal at one time, even on a cosmic level. The ego's false conviction, its subjective fantasies of omnipotence, add to the severity of this blow. (Nietzsche noted how bitter disappointment we feel when we learn that we are not Gods!)

The divergence between ego fantasies and the constraints of our unstable life often feels like a cosmic betrayal, as if some universal parent is leaving us. Robert Frost turned to God with the following request: "Lord, forgive me a little joke on you, and I will forgive you a great joke on me." And Jesus on the cross cried out, "My God, My God! Why did You forsake Me?"

It is only natural that we want to protect ourselves from this disturbing world, its ambivalence and ambiguity, projecting our childish need for parental protection onto an indifferent Universe. Childhood expectations of protection and love often run into betrayal. Even in the warmest family, the child inevitably experiences a traumatic effect associated with either emotional "redundancy" or emotional "insufficiency". Probably nothing causes such a heart tremor in parents as the realization that we are injuring our children by the fact that we remain ourselves. Therefore, every child first of all feels betrayal on the part of humanity due to the restrictions imposed by parents. Aldo Carotenuto notes:

… We can only be deceived by those whom we trust. And yet we must believe. A person who does not believe and refuses love for fear of betrayal, most likely will not experience these torments, but who knows what else he will have to lose?

The more this "betrayal" of innocence, trust and hope is, the more likely the child will develop a basic distrust of the world. The deep experience of betrayal leads to paranoia, to the generalization of losses during the transfer. One man, whom I watched for a very short time, remembered the day when his mother left him forever. Despite his successful marriage for love, he could never trust his wife, followed her everywhere, insisted that she pass a lie detector test and thereby prove her loyalty, and considered the smallest incidents as evidence of her betrayal, which, as he believed, prepared for him by fate. Despite the constant assurances of his wife that she was faithful to him, in the end he forced her to leave him and considered her "departure" confirmation of his conviction that she had betrayed him once and for all.

In fact, paranoid thoughts to one degree or another are inherent in each of us, because we all have cosmic trauma, we are under the influence of traumatic existence and those people who have undermined our trust.

Trust and betrayal are two inevitable opposites. If a person was betrayed, which of us was not betrayed? - how difficult it is for him to trust others after that! If, due to parental neglect or abuse, the child feels betrayed by his parents, he will later enter into a relationship with the person who repeats such betrayal - this psychological pattern is called "reactive education" or "self-fulfilling prophecy" - or he will avoid close relationships in order to avoid recurrence of pain. It is quite understandable that in any case, his choice in the present will be subject to the strong traumatic effects of the past. As with guilt, a person's behavior is largely determined by their individual history. Then to form new, trusting relationships means in advance to admit the possibility of betrayal. When we refuse to trust a person, we do not establish deep, close relationships with him. By not investing in these risky, deep relationships, we discourage intimacy. Thus, the paradox of the binary opposition "trust-betrayal" is that one of its components necessarily predetermines the other. Without trust, there is no depth; without depth there is no real betrayal.

As we noted when we talked about guilt, the most difficult thing is to forgive betrayal, especially one that seems deliberate to us. In addition, the ability to forgive is not only an internal recognition of our ability to betray, but the only way to free ourselves from the shackles of the past. How often do we come across bitter people who have never forgiven their ex-husband who betrayed them! Being held captive by the past, such people are still married to a traitor, they are still corroded by the hydrochloric acid of hatred. I also met couples who had already formally divorced, but still felt hatred towards their ex-spouse not for what he did, but precisely for what he did not do.

Juliana was daddy's daughter. She found a man who took care of her. Although she was annoyed by his custody, and him - her constant need for help, their behavior was determined by an unconscious agreement: he would be her husband-father, and she would be his devoted daughter. When her husband outgrew this unconscious relationship and rebelled against it, both of them in their early twenties, Juliana flew into a rage. She was still touchy like a little girl, not realizing that her husband's departure was a call to become an adult. His betrayal seemed to her global and unforgivable, while in reality he "betrayed" only the symbiotic parent-child relationship, from which she herself would never have been able to free herself. Suffice it to say that she immediately found another man with whom she began to act out the same addiction. She ignored the call to become an adult.

Betrayal is often felt by a person as an isolation of his self. The relationship with the Other, on whom he had counted on, placed some expectations and with whom he played folie a deux, now became dubious, and the basic trust in him was undermined. With such a change in consciousness, significant personal growth can occur. We can learn a lot from the traumas we receive, but if we don’t learn, we will get them again, in a different situation, or become identified with them. Many of us have remained in the past, "identifying with our trauma." God, probably, “betrayed” Job, but in the end it is precisely the foundations of Job's worldview that are shaken; he moves to a new level of consciousness, and his trials become God's blessing. As soon as at Calvary, Jesus felt that he was betrayed not only by the Jews, but also by the Father, he immediately finally accepted his fate.

Naturally, betrayal makes us feel rejected and probably evokes feelings of revenge. But revenge does not expand, but on the contrary, narrows our consciousness, as it returns us to the past again. People consumed with revenge, with all the depth and justification of their grief, continue to be victims. They all the time remember about the betrayal that happened, and then their whole subsequent life, which they could build for their own good, is upset. In the same way, a person can choose one from all possible forms of denial - to remain unconscious. This trick - the refusal of a person to feel the pain that he has already experienced once - becomes resistance to personal growth, which must occur in anyone expelled from paradise, and to any demand for expansion of consciousness.

Another temptation of the betrayed person is to generalize his experience, as in the already mentioned case of the paranoia of the man abandoned by his mother. If she left him, then there is no doubt that any other woman, whom he begins to care for, will do the same. This paranoia, which in this particular case seems quite understandable, infects almost all relationships with cynicism. The tendency to generalize on the basis of any acute feelings of betrayal leads to a narrow range of responses: from suspicion and avoidance of intimacy to paranoia and the search for a scapegoat.

Betrayal prompts us to strive for individuation. If betrayal stems from our existential naivety, then we want to embrace more and more universal wisdom, the dialectics of which, as it turns out, boils down to gain and loss. If betrayal stems from our addiction, we are drawn to where we can remain infantile. If betrayal arises from the conscious attitude of one person to another, we have to suffer and comprehend the polarities, which consist not only in the betrayal itself, but also in ourselves. And in any case, if we do not remain in the past, mired in mutual accusations, we will enrich, expand and develop our consciousness. This dilemma was summarized very well by Carotenuto:

From a psychological point of view, the experience of betrayal allows us to experience one of the fundamental processes of mental life: the integration of ambivalence, which includes feelings of love-hate that exist in any relationship. Here again it is necessary to emphasize that such an experience is experienced not only by the person accused of betrayal, but also by the person who survived it and unconsciously contributed to the development of the chain of events that led to the betrayal.

Then the greatest bitterness of betrayal may lie in our involuntary admission - which often happens after several years - that we ourselves "agreed to that dance" that at one time led to betrayal. If we can swallow this bitter pill, we will expand our understanding of our Shadow. We cannot always be what we want to look like. Again, referring to Jung: "The experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego."Describing his own immersion in the unconscious in the twenties of the XX century., Jung tells us how from time to time he had to say to himself: "Here's another thing that you do not know about yourself." But it was the bitter taste of this pill that caused such a development of consciousness.

Experiencing losses, sorrow and betrayal, we "sink into the depths", and, perhaps, "pass through" them to the wider Weltanschauung. For example, Devin seemingly fell into a quagmire of sadness over his late wife. But his sense of uselessness and inner disunity did not match his loss. After working through this experience, he was able to see that he had lost himself, grieving over his unlived life, devoted to others from childhood and doomed to live as someone else intended. Only after enduring the excruciating suffering during these two years, he was finally able to start living his own life.

The loss, sadness and betrayal we experience means that we cannot hold everything in our hands, accept everything and everyone as they are, and do without acute pain. But these experiences give us an impetus to expand consciousness. In the midst of universal variability, one constant striving arises - the striving for individuation. We are not at the source or at the goal; the origins were left far behind, and the goal begins to move away from us as soon as we approach it. We ourselves are our present life. Loss, sadness and betrayal are not just black spots in which we unwittingly have to find ourselves; they are links with our mature consciousness. They are as much a part of our journey as the place to stop and rest. The great rhythm of gains and losses remains beyond our control, but in our power there is only a desire to find, even in the most bitter experiences, that which gives strength to live.