I’m Afraid I’m Being Betrayed | Therapy & Theology with Lysa TerKeurst
I’m Afraid I’m Being Betrayed | Therapy & Theology with Lysa TerKeurst.
Betrayal can come in so many different forms. Maybe a friend tells a secret you trusted them with. Or maybe your spouse is making decisions that are breaking your heart. Or maybe a co-worker threw you under the bus. Underneath it all, if you’re honest, you feel betrayed by God: Why didn’t He step in?
This episode will help you begin to realize that the trauma of having your trust broken by people you thought would never betray you may be life-altering but it doesn’t have to be life-ruining.
Related Resources: We’d like to thank the American Association of Christian Counselors for partnering with us to sponsor Season 7 of Therapy & Theology. Click here to apply for their Mental Health Coach program, where you’ll be equipped to respond to friends walking through tough issues and situations
We don’t have to let the one who broke our trust break us. Sign up to receive “When the Person Who Hurt You Got Away With It: 3 Days to Moving Forward,” a FREE resource by Lysa TerKeurst, today!
Get your copy of Lysa TerKeurst’s new book, I Want to Trust You, but I Don’t: Moving Forward When You’re Skeptical of Others, Afraid of What God Will Allow, and Doubtful of Your Own Discernment, from the P31 Bookstore
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so today I want to step into that moment where either because of Discovery or disclosure you realize you are in fact being betrayed I remember this moment so crystal clear and I’m not going to go into the details of the situation but I do want to explore the emotional Fallout the emotional trauma the complete shock so I’ll never forget where I was I had just finished I was putting on an event at my house and I had just finished the last details before I went to bed the event was the next day and I took a
picture of how pretty the house looked and I remember standing there thinking I love my life and I was so excited about the next day it was a very big event in the life of my family and I took that picture I treasured that moment I went to bed and when I walked into my room I found a device and it told me pretty much just seeing it told me my worst fears were probably coming true and the amount of shock that I felt in that moment I truly felt like like something really huge had just crashed into my life and suddenly I was observing it and
and trying to figure out is this a nightmare or is this reality and I literally for a solid few minutes could not figure out what was happening and I couldn’t figure out is this real is this not real surely this cannot be real and then I just slipped into this moment where I just sat stunned and could not figure out how to even process what I was facing today I want to autopsy that moment of shock because even if your shock of betrayal even if it hasn’t been infidelity in your marriage maybe you over here two friends talking about you
and the shock of that kind of betrayal stuns you or maybe your teenage child steals your credit card and you realize wow things are not as they seem with my kid maybe you’re at work and a cooworker takes credit for something you did and then they take accolades and awards and the thing just kind of spins out of control and it’s too late to get it back and you feel so incredibly betrayed by that coworker or maybe your your parent says that they aren’t feeling good enough to take that trip and come to
your house only to find out that during that same time frame they went to to your sibling’s house and they were able to make the trip for your sibling I don’t know what that betrayal moment is for you and whether it’s a big tea trauma or a small tea trauma um all I know is that you can call this trauma and the severity of how betrayals play out in the context of your own life it is severe no matter if it’s something that may seem smaller than Fidelity or bigger than a friendship betrayal whatever it is in
the context of your life pain is pain and I want to talk about this today because I think that moment of betrayal is one of the greatest shocks that we will ever face I pray that you have not faced what I faced but if you have and um many of you have I think today’s discussion will be helpful so Jim I want to turn to you because you and I had some very interesting conversations obviously if you’ve been listening to therapy and theology for a while you know that Jim is my record uh my therapist of record is that how we say
it sure you can yeah um he’s also become over the years we have worked together in the role of counselor patient am I your patient I would rather say client that’s what say okay yes so we’ve work you’ve been very patient actually in many ways but that’s different this is true this is true so whether um so that’s how our relationship started but then over the years I started to recognize that um more people needed to benefit from your wisdom and so we started this Dynamic of adding in
conversations that maybe you and I would have in your counseling office um but we want to make it a conversation we invite other people in because um we found that people find is very beneficial so you and I were talking off camera and we came up with this thing about the layers of betrayal Joel I cannot wait to invite you into this discussion as well because you have let me know that betrayal is all over the Bible and I know you have a lot to say about it as well but let’s talk about these layers yeah so the
first layer is what I call slow growth betrayal and the reason I call it this is because you know your s ing some’s off um and you’re picking up on red flags but then your heart is so invested into this relationship and you want to believe the best about this person and so your heart and your head come in Conflict um in my new book I wrote about this and I want to read you what I wrote the hardship of discernment is that it doesn’t always give you details but just because you don’t know everything
doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pay close attention to the red flags you do see I like to think of discernment as the very intimate way God cares for me leads me redirects me warns me and reveals things to me that I otherwise may miss on my own it’s almost like we have the facts and then we have the feelings and God’s Gift of discernment kind of helps bridge that Gap but it doesn’t always give you details so I go on to admit that so many times when I’m feeling a moment of discernment my brain and my heart will
come into conflict especially when it comes to relationships I very much want to continue and that’s the rub here when this betrayal is a relationship that I treasure that I very much want to continue and I’m sensing red flags but I don’t want those red flags to mean what I fear they mean my head and my heart come into conflict and so I go on to say my brain will be firing off a warning but then my heart will try to override it because I want to believe this person I love would not deceive me I want to
believe this person I love truly cares about me I want to believe that this person really does have my best interest in mine like I have their best best interest in mine and so my heart will make excuses to try to quiet down the warnings my brain is sending and that’s from my new book I want to trust you but I don’t so Jim you taught me something really important because at first I was saying am I living am I living in denial at this point and you said no you think it’s rationalization unpack that for me
well the brain autonomically we believe and I do believe in in the way of the brain research it’s it’s as we’ve said on this podcast before the brain’s wired for confidence in knowing you don’t have to do anything it’s going to go out and say I believe this I believe that most people so in other words like my brain I’m in a situation yeah my brain is automatically assessing are you safe without you even being fully aware of it okay mhm we were I remember not long ago uh we were taping it was the indeed the
uh last series we did either on therapy and theology or another video series that we shot and um outside this building we were in the thunderstorms began to come through so obviously a mind can think wow how big is the damage I mean is it rain is it raining at home and yeah we’re present shooting videos but the brain will automatically Wonder or is there going to be thunder coming again as a long time broadcaster with this incredible crew we have here I’m thinking when they going to bust tape when they going to have to say okay we
got to stop the Thunder’s too loud I wasn’t trying to think that matter of fact I had to kind of keep coming back like stay present in the broadcast so news comes at whatever level or whatever layer the brain’s automatically going to go out and say I bet this and I bet that it will try to fill in the blanks I hope everybody will give oneself Grace there versus somebody confronting you saying well you just need an not think that the brain’s automatically doing that then you go to the heart that the heart is
there and I think along with the heart is story is narrative that says you had a book remember the first of this kind of four books that you’ve got out it’s not supposed to be this way when you start off the program today with I literally said Oh what a beautiful evening and my house and I take a picture to literally immediately go in and find another device something has invaded has entered that world the human brain in that moment should not say I knew it I know exactly what’s going on I it should go into a bit of
rationalization and say but but maybe it’s not what I think maybe now if there’s been a long trail as we’re talking about autopsying uh some type of betrayal like I saw this sign and this sign and this sign and this sign and then there’s this sign then maybe say I kind of knew the brain rationally can say this makes sense but you literally move from a beautiful scene what we would call homeostasis it’s a steady state in its home to go in and find the device so the heart’s coming in to say
please don’t let it be true I don’t want it to be true and then what do I do that those both can coexist so the reason I wrote this first layer is slow growth betrayal is because that is that season where you don’t know for sure it hasn’t been disclosed to you you haven’t discovered that undeniable evidence so it’s this weird stage of I think I’m seeing this but surely I’m not seeing this and I remember my rationalization was we’re in a season of lots of change there you go so we were in a season of
like the kids were growing up some were going to college um both of our my Ministry his business were at a stage where they were like really growing and busy um we were hitting um Mid AG or that midlife maybe for some crisis time frame and so there were so many ways that I could explain away what I was sensing what I was seeing the red flags that I was picking up on and so that slow growth betrayal for me was a season of just saying yeah it could mean that but I’m so confident it doesn’t well and in that moment like on an airplane
literally you went and I heard the volition the choice of turning off the autopilot all of us have autopilot I bet it’s this I bet it’s that that may only last a few seconds but you then turned the autopilot off and you were aware I believe in listening to you aware of the rationalization let us not make rationalization a bad word here uh you know it could be this instead of the brain automatically filling in the blanks you began I heard it right there filling in the blanks with some selft talk right some self-counsel like it
could be this and midlife and all like that and also I think there’s one of two groups of people in this slow growth betrayal time somebody who wants to discover that’s a point something bad has happened like this I want to discover what this person has done but then this other group which is what I was in I do not want to discover what what this person could possibly have done but I’m so convinced they haven’t done this and so those two groups of people will handle this very very differently and one group of people
is eager for evidence the other is in that rationalization like yeah I see that however when I ask questions about it I’m told that’s not true I want to believe it’s not true and so that’s what I’m going to operate and I’ll just explain away these other things now I think part of that I had good intentions I had because I loved my family I I I loved and I was experiencing enough good that it was easier to rationalize away the red flags I saw and notice you went of course Very organically out of just
your marriage but our words frame our reality we’ve said to I love my family so I’m as a counselor sitting there Joel would do that as a theologian I’m listening to people’s words so now we’ve broadened out like this autopsy I love my family it was beyond the marriage at that moment whether you meant that or not there was a sense of I’m thinking broader pull out the the camera and pull out of my family at that moment and what or what’s the impact if this is true toward the family system the whole unit
if I could make a couple connections even theologically um this the idea of kind of the slow growth uh betrayal it sounds like it’s actually also happening in four categories or four levels and this is kind of a theological uh view of it based off of the Hebrew word lib um Jim you were talking about the heart you know and in our society in our culture today we have separated the heart from the mind so the heart we would think is the place of emotion you know but the mind is the place of intellect the ancient Hebrews
did not understand it that way they understood that the LA the heart so every time you’re reading about the heart when you say that word you got to like say it because there’s people taking notes and I was taking notes I would be frustrated what is he saying La l e b is the Hebrew word transliterated with the English letters and if you want to be really detailed over the E you can put that like hyphen um you know kind of straight line over that e as an accent am detailed so thank you for that yeah so that’s know it’s a little bit long
anyways all that to say um La yeah all that to say that uh the heart the way the ancient Hebrews understood it was the Wellspring of volition right it’s it’s the place of both emotion and intellect it’s the place of both um thinking something rightly feeling something rightly and then doing something rightly and in this place of slow growth betrayal I want to add a fourth category to this what I’m hearing is you’ve got emotional reality you’ve got um intellectual reality you have physical reality and you’ve got
spiritual reality and I think it’s including like what why would God allow this to happen absolutely absolutely you’re sitting there in that room and then all of a you see you see the device and you’re actually going through I think probably all four of those things there’s an emotional reaction that’s happening there’s an intellectual reaction that’s happening that might be the reasoning right um there’s the spiritual reaction of maybe frustration with the Lord like God I thought we’re
in such a great place like how could this now be why would you allow this to be happening and there is a physical reaction that’s happening we know that the as you guys have both have taught me that the body keeps score there’s a great book on on that um but I I think it might be helpful for us to just also try to take a diagnosis or a diagnostic of our own selves and say okay where in these four areas in this slow growth kind of betrayal do we start to turn off a valve or do we start to ignore this
part of it right so we might ignore the spiritual part of it or the um emotional part of it and overemphasize on the emotional or the int intellectual and I can tell you what I did okay I think I turned off the O the other valves and turned way up the spiritual right so that I could say in my mind we have such commonality in how we love the Lord we serve the Lord there’s no way there’s no way that that would be crossed way which could have been a spiritual bypass I don’t know if it was for you but the idea of like a
heart bypass like the lib to to be able to just bypass and rationalize it spiritually or some people I’ve seen we’ve all seen go quickly to Romans 8:28 I don’t know what’s going on right now but all things work together or Genesis :20 someone minut it for harm but God me it and and and I I have great compassion Joel as I say that you think about the scriptural side and Lisa instead of saying well you’re just doing a spiritual bypass I want to be gentle with my words and I’m like anything you
do in that moment of overt crisis which it is all people say does it make sense to me I say everything makes sense even if it’s a spiritual bypass versus pathologizing it and saying why of course you could have done an emotional B there’s all kind of these I love how you’ve layered these based on Lisa’s layering and whatever route you take I say tell me more instead like what what are you doing doing a spiritual bypass I’m like why wouldn’t you yeah I love that you’re pointing that out Joel so
layer one is the slow growth betrayal where things seem off but you’re not really sure the second layer is the moment of Discovery or disclosure that’s the moment where you can no longer deny there there is no like rationalization like reality has hit you in the face that’s a relational 911 at that moment you’re at Ground Zero whether you know it or not we’re all over our head with 91 happened for real all of us were over our head at that moment and you’re like what has just happened and for me my greatest fear had
come true yeah I I could no longer like dance around it why was it your greatest fear I think I think that’s such a good question I I used to say you know I can handle anything but um because this relationship will always be intact and I would often hear of like bad potential things that could happen but I would go okay I can face it because this relationship is intact and I’m sure there were healthy reasons and unhealthy reasons for that but yeah my greatest fear was that my family would fall apart and having a betrayal in the mother
father husband wife relationship of a family that just seemed like it would blow apart so much I I wrote In the book this statement um that broken trust complicates every bits of the part of Love That should be comforting wow and you know there’s so much about how God intended love to be that’s a comfort to the two people participating in a relationship where there’s love broken trust betrayal complicates every bit of that you know longer know what’s true what’s real what’s not true what’s not
real you know um you thought you really knew this person and that’s why you trusted them so much and do you really know this person or what happened to this person where was the break I don’t know I call that relational vertigo I have never had vertigo but I’ve been with many who have and they’re like you don’t understand uh it could be flash photography sets them off or something and they’re spinning they’ve got to sit down or lie down so I’ve used a term you know I’ve just made up called relational
vertigo in that moment you’re like I uh there’s no need to try to be logical good luck in that very moment everything’s spinning as it should and I remember in that moment of Discovery cuz for me it was not a disclosure it was a disc like I discovered it and kept discovering it and kept discovering it um but I remember in that that moment the first words that came out of my mouth were eerily calm it wasn’t this big explosion I wasn’t screaming I wasn’t yelling it I was it was a very like almost unusual
calm and I just said this isn’t who you are Who’s the who to him you yeah I just said to to him like to my husband at the time this this isn’t who you are this isn’t who we are I asked that because some people would turn it internal and say this is not like least this is not who you are this is you know whatever I just why I wanted to clarify in this autopsy but you were saying in your mind or verbally said to him this is not who you are yeah yeah but then some statements were made that I quickly went
from an eerie calm to walking into my closet curling up in the fetal position and wanting the whole world to go away and just feeling like I cannot acknowledge this I cannot face this I cannot get up and if I just curl into the fetal position and will the world away maybe somehow life out there will fix itself enough to where I can handle it but right now I can’t handle it yeah and it was It was a devastating moment for me and took in that moment by your own narrative here and Joel you see this so obviously here it took a moment like
you said at first I had this which could be either a response or a reaction and then something happens and I’m in a fetal in the closet it sometimes it’s not always the first thing right it’s like it takes time we know that with real death of course a lot of this ends up being the death of a marriage or the death of a relationship but people will sit which I always think is so foolish someone had a casket and say she was just ENC she lost her husband and she was encouraging everybody at the casket
I’m well give her some space and then 3 weeks later let’s go visit her and see how she’s doing yeah this is kind of interesting so as we keep going through this it’s like therapeutic uh uh analysis or um you know and then I’m going to just keep doing some theological on so moment of Discovery um I think the moment of Discovery actually exposes the um the object of dependence H that the moment of Discovery when you discover something and it shakes you and at all those levels it really highlights
it puts out in front of us what is the actual object of our dependence and um and I think this is something that shouldn’t be despised and it shouldn’t be something that we um are angry at ourselves for uh but it is something we ought to be honest with John stot is a brilliant Theologian and um John St has this incredible uh statement quote that he says that um if honesty and humility go together then pride and Insanity go together wow so if honesty and humility go together and they do then perpetuating Pride will
lead us into kind of a chaotic insane living and so at this moment when the object of your dependence is presented in front of us the question is what do you do with it now here’s where that’s complicated for me because aren’t you supposed to to be in somewhat of a dependent relationship when you’re married oh yeah okay I mean we can go now or we can save this for just a little bit later but let me we’re on the edge of our seat here let me let me point this out though because I’m just
thinking you’re right I want to say oh absolutely I I depend on God and then all my other relationships but it’s like if you’re in that deep of a relationship like aren’t you supposed to also be dependent on the yes you’re dependent on God but also so let’s do an aut an autopsy of the of our favorite story in all of scripture Genesis 1 and2 the story of Eden and the reason he says our is because we have studied theology together for thousands of hours and we always go back go back to Genesis yes
Back to Eden we always always it always does and and um and I think it’s really important I said this uh I was at an event once and I I kind of came to this conclusion that I’m really worried that the way we study humanity is actually upside down we start with Genesis 3 so our anthropology our study of humanity starts with the fall and it’s not that the fall is a bad place or like that we shouldn’t pay attention to it but before we can even get to the fall we actually have to deal with the ideal of humanity
so our anthropology actually has to start in Genesis 1 and two so we can understand the devastation of Genesis 3 and the fall and then we can make sense of what God is doing in in the process of renewing and restoring all of creation back to the ideal of Eden and so I want to go to Eden and look at how God creates everything in Eden in Eden all the created order matters Adam and Eve are the Pinnacle for sure of all of created order but I think there’s a purpose for why they’re the last in the created order and here’s why God is the
one who is the one we’re supposed to be dependent on and all of creation the Sun the the light the grass the animals all that stuff is reliant on him and so when Adam and Eve come together they actually learn Mutual dependence my language is going to be precise and important they’re learning Mutual dependence that is actually first and foremost conditioned on two individuals that are dependent on God so if you have mutual dependence with each other that leaves responsibility for husband wife friend friend to first and foremost be
dependent on God but when the dependence on God is fractured instantly the dependence on each other is broken as well wow Eve fractures her dependence on God when the ideas presented to her that maybe God’s not good and it was actually that fracture that takes place that brings into chaos relationally Adam and Eve and now we know all throughout humanity and so I say that all to say yes you’re supposed to have um healthy and mutual dependence on each other up until the point we realize wait a minute the individual responsibility that we
