When mastering The Art of Betrayal know this, that when you betray somebody else, you also betray yourself.

Bar a few years when my youngest son was born, when my mother broke off all contact with me. I have always kept some form of contact with my mother, after all she was my mom. Some times it was strained and other times it was a little smoother.

My mother never liked my boyfriends while I was dating them, and she didn’t like my first husband at all. Newly divorced and financially and emotionally stretched I need some support from time to time, especially if I was working over weekends, and for a while she stepped in to baby sit my boys. This helped me a little and she continued to do this once a month when I was pregnant with my daughter. I was talking to my mother on the phone a few days before her birthday, on January 9^th, 1993. We chatted about me bringing the boys over and having lunch together, to celebrate her birthday. I was almost 7 months pregnant with my daughter at the time.

On the morning of her birthday, I called to see what I should bring with me for lunch and my step-dad answered the phone, “She’s moved to Cape Town.” He said “Gone off with a bloke.” and he put the phone down. Apart from the odd phone call, I had little contact with her, and I didn’t see her until I started traveling to Cape Town for business a year and a half later.

Her life was like that, my step-dad followed her to Cape Town and they reconciled for a while, but they ultimately separated a few years later. Throughout this time my mother’s financial situation was more down than up and and mine was improving all the time. I helped her with money countless times over the following years, mounting up to tens of thousands of dollars. A few years later my mother moved again, this time coming up almost as far north as you can go before leaving South Africa, this time with a different man, but one she’d been having an on and off affair with for 15 years. Life was tough for her up north. It was a farming area and they didn’t speak much English, and as a result it was impossible for her to work. After living there a few months, she asked me if she could live with me for a while.

This was probably the smoothest time I ever had with her. For almost a year she stayed in the house, and established a relationship with my daughter, and there was an almost easy truce. For a moment I almost thought she had changed, but sadly it was more out of the necessity of a roof over her head.

I continued to help her financially when she was living with me and she always joked that she’d repay in her will. In November 1999 she moved out into her own place and started to establish a new life with her new husband in a town close by. We still had contact but not too much, both her and her husband were chain smokers, and smoked in the house. I couldn’t cope with it for any length of time and didn’t stay long when I did visit. It was still a truce though and it seemed to be lasting.

I went and employed my mother too!

When I started Airport Media, my mother offered to do our books, one thing I knew was that she was good at what she did and I felt a certain level of comfort that she would look after my interests. As the business grew I felt very privileged to be able to offer her a full time position. Our industry was fast paced and high earning even the back office support staff. Thus began a 10 year journey whereby my mother worked for me. All told she had an interesting and entertaining work life whilst with my company. We had loads of fun as well as working hard and to the greater extent she did a great job. Until a few things changed.

My mother’s favourite daughter

I married Chris in 2010, and I will go into more of the details about how this impacted on my relationships in the article “There is Always a Price to Pay.” My business partner, her husband, and my mother had initially thought my being married to be a great thing, but they hadn’t reckoned with their being unable to bully Chris. As a result of this and a falling out at our wedding, my mother was on the war path with him and in turn with me, and although I didn’t know it yet, they had begun a campaign of deceit and betrayal with my family, my children and my friends.

In late 2009 my mother divorced her third husband and in mid-2011 retired to England. Although South Africa had been her home for more than 30 years she said “she wanted to go home”. By this time we were almost not talking at all, and at her farewell party she thanked my business partner, to whom she referred to as “her favourite daughter” for the years she had enjoyed at Airport Media, completely ignoring me. I was more shocked at her bad manners than at what she said.

“Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive” – Sir Walter Scott

I was in the process of creating the Bob Proctor project and was tired of all the looks and glances I was receiving. My life was in such turmoil on the financial front that it didn’t really matter to me anymore. I had lived with her vitriolic and venomous tongue all my life, and it was a relief to know that she wasn’t going to be in the country anymore.

But distance has no meaning for energetic connection, given that very powerful emotionally charged connections between two people know no time or distance, they just are.

The implosion of Bob’s project was hitting us hard when I got the first glimpse at the campaign they were launching around me. My dad called me from England. He had been on the line to my mother, heaven forbid, and my ex-business partner. They were concerned about me, about my daughter, and now so was he. I was livid. They had been emailing and calling my daughter about my financial position and grilling her for information. I was furious with my mother and I limited my contact with her over the following year. This was until the night before we had to move out of our beautiful home. Our telephone provider had managed to disconnect us a few days early and my aunt was desperate to contact me. When I left Airport Media I changed my mobile number and she didn’t have my new one, even contacting my ex-business partner who even though she knew my number, had declined to give it to her. Eventually she managed to get my number through Facebook. I knew that something was up when I spoke with my aunt, my mother had been diagnosed with lung cancer, it was pretty serious, and shockingly my aunt had been told on pain of death almost, that she was not to tell me.

I was quite stunned as my aunt new that my ex-business partner knew, and although we were no longer friends we had been through a lot together and I was astonished that she would keep something like this from me. My aunt promised to keep me up to date.

It was always all my fault

A few months later out of the blue I received what could only be described as the most evil of intentioned email from my mother. In the email she blamed me for everything that had gone wrong with her life, from the moment I was born, bringing Douglas in to it and blaming me for his failures. The venom and poison with which each word was written made it difficult to read, highlighting things that I had done that were wrong and laughing at mistakes that I had made. Accusing me of things I hadn’t done and then ending the letter with “And I have lung cancer.” I will always remember that email for the hurt it was designed to inflict upon me.

I am eternally grateful to my aunt for telling me about my mother’s diagnosis as her email was painful enough without the ending being the first time I would hear of her condition. It was very hard not to respond to her with a like for like email. I took a few days to cool off and in the end I responded along the lines of my being grateful that she had gotten her feelings off her chest, as now she could focus positive energy on overcoming the disease. I never got a reply.

I will never understand of my mother’s decisions. A few weeks after that email, I received another needing my help to obtain medical reports around her lung function. She had had a large operation on her shoulder just before Christmas in 2010 and a lung function test had been done before the anesthetist would clear her for surgery . I had managed to get the test results for her, and when the surgeon declined to operate I spent a long time researching the terminology on them. Over the course of a few weeks and with the assistance of friends in the medical industry I discovered that my mother was diagnosed with a tumour on her lung in 2009. After my mother’s death my aunt told me that my mother was desperate to have her cancer operated on, but the surgeon was worried about her ability to breathe unaided and her quality of life afterwards. She had kept the diagnosis from all of us. I discussed it with my aunt, and she told me that my mother said that her cancer couldn’t be treated in South Africa, it could have easily been treated here, but she wanted to die in England.

She did it her way

My mother came back to South Africa in the December before she died and I had a breakfast with her. I am glad I did, even if only because it was the right thing to do, and it was the last time I saw her alive. Three days after her birthday, on January 12^th 2013 my mother died. The ensuing chaos around my mother’s death and getting Douglas back to South Africa from England, ended up with my handling the paperwork in South Africa for the entire estate. Douglas brought me my mother’s files, such as they were and her computer for me to access statements and accounts through her email.

Reading the campaign of deceit and betrayal

Sitting in front of her computer, passwords in hand I contemplated my options. If I started looking, what would I find, and if I found it, would I wish I hadn’t? I started out with sorting her email in alphabetical order and started out by looking at all her accounts, printing off the statements one by one. Curiosity got the better of me. I went into the sent items and typed my name in the search window and……… what a stash I found. There wasn’t anyone I knew save for Chris that hadn’t been contacted by my mother.

I was mesmerised by the lengths she had gone to, to extol my misfortunes, my failures, and my fall from grace. She had contacted my former corporate attorney, my auditor, suppliers, my former staff, my children, and my aunt and many more, it took my breath away.

The contents of each email so vile and condemning, there was even an email where she gleefully told someone she had cut me out of her insurance policy and that there would be nothing left for me to have in her estate. I could feel hot tears of hurt, guilt and shame prickle my eye lids, at that moment, that very moment when we needed money, when she could have helped me, in her final moment she had let me down, again.

I finally understood why I had been unable to cry when she died, nor when I comforted my brother. No matter how hard I tried over the years, no matter what I had done it wasn’t enough, I had grieved for the mother I had never had years ago. I couldn’t love the person, but I had still loved the position after all.

I printed off only what was needed for the attorneys handling the estate. Before I gave the computer back to Douglas I gave my daughter the opportunity to read the emails that were written about her, as my mother had taken great delight in manipulating her too. I left the computer open for her. I don’t know if she read them or not, I didn’t ask, and she didn’t say.

An unconventional childhood is what I always say. I don’t like to say a bad childhood, because what would I compare it to? Even with everything I experienced, that was a lot of humour and perhaps that was what kept me going. My mother wasn’t ever cut out to be a mother, and in those days there weren’t that many opportunities for women to be much else. She was the youngest child of parents who were both in their forties when she was born. My grandma wasn’t a great mother or homemaker either. My mother saw children as a means to her end, I was too wise, too cautious and too strong for her, and I managed to break her hold on me. I don’t think she ever forgave me for that.

It is what it is, there are moments that I can remember with fondness and those are the ones I choose to focus on. I do believe that whenever she could remember to think about her children over herself, that she did the best she could with the resources available to her.

Reading The Art of Betrayal would more than likely, have floated the word ‘betrayal’ in to your thinking. How often have you felt betrayed by someone? Can there be anything worse than experiencing betrayal? How did I feel when you betrayed someone’s trust or when they betrayed your trust?

Betrayal is a very powerful word which brings in to play, even more powerful emotions. Betrayal’s root is betray, which comes from the Middle English word bitrayen — meaning “mislead, deceive.” Betrayal has to do with destroying someone’s trust, possibly by lying.

Question:

Who has betrayed you, how has their betrayal impacted on your life and how do you perceive others when in a similar situation to the one through which this betrayal was presented to you?

Exercise:

1. Who has badly betrayed you?
2. How does recalling this event make you feel?
3. Why do you think they did this to you?
4. If you were them and they were you, would you have done this to them?
5. If yes, why so?
6. If no, why not?
7. What could have been driving them when they betrayed you?
8. Have you been able to show them true forgiveness post this betrayal?
9. What damage are your unprocessed negative emotions around this betrayal having on your life, personally and professionally?
10. What if you were to change how you think and feel about betrayal such that this event made you wiser, open and more aware as opposed to angry, resentful and closed?

My profound lesson:

It was Dr John Demartini who gave me an entirely new and different understanding of betrayal and for this insight and paradigm shift, I am eternally grateful. In his book The Values Factor, on page 130, he writes “Many of us have grown up with the fantasies of a “completely supportive relationship” in which there are few challenges or conflicts because “when people love each other, anything is acceptable.” To a great extent, this is an unrealistic fantasy that leads inevitably to confusion and to feelings of frustration and feeling unfulfilled. We might even experience the illusions of “betrayal” and “aggression”. Since maximum growth and development in life demand a balance of both support and challenge, learning how to embrace these two complimentary sides equally and simultaneously is important in every area of life.” Today I now understand what my highest values in life are, and given that I have a fairly good idea of what my mother’s highest values were, I now realise that she had not betrayed me. She had merely made decisions which were aligned with her highest values, which were best supported by her internal Thought Operating System (TOS), and so, in her model of the world, she was not betraying me at all. That her values and the values of my business partner were more closely aligned, meant that automatically she’d feel a greater affinity for her than for me, as they had a much stronger connection if you will. It is what it is and given my new understanding of betrayal and values, it’s so much easier for me to now embrace the good, to let go of the bad and to harness all the valuable learnings.

To your success, with love

Suzanne.