Before we get to your superpowers, I need to address an oversight. In my last post, I used the term “betrayal trauma,” but I forgot to tell you what it means!
Dr. Jennifer J. Freyd, the creator of betrayal trauma theory, first described the term in the early 1990’s. Betrayal trauma occurs when a person, group of people, or institution that you depend upon violate that your trust in a big way. Dr. Freyd’s research with her colleagues (including me) over the past several decades has shown that people who experience betrayal trauma are more likely to forget about the abuse, or dissociate certain aspects of if from awareness compared with survivors of other types of trauma. The reason for this dissociation and amnesia is that the survivor can’t afford to lose the depended-upon relationship and so their brain comes up with ways of making the trauma go away without it actually going away.
If you have experienced betrayal trauma, I think you likely also have superpowers of a particular sort.
You likely have the ability to connect with the unseen.
I’m not talking about UFOs. I’m talking about the fact that in order to survive betrayal trauma, you needed to develop finely tuned empathy and intuition so that your system could know how to appease the person who was betraying you in order to maintain the relationship. So you may have the ability to feel what other people are feeling, even when they don’t tell you anything about what they are feeling.
I’m also talking about the likelihood that while you were in the relationship with the betrayer, you may have had to find a source of comfort or support inside your own imagination. As humans, we are wired to form attachments and to feel loved and cared for. When this safe care is not readily or consistently available from the world around us, some part of us will seek it out, even if only in imagination or dreams. You may have a particularly strong imagination, ability to be creative, active dreamlife, or ability to see connections and beauty that is harder for others to see.
This week's belonging reminder:
Here is a research article from 2018 showing increased empathy in adults who have experienced childhood trauma.
If you are a betrayal trauma survivor, you may be a warm, empathic person who can easily sense into what others are feeling.
This week's practice suggestion:
Take a look at these words again:
You have the ability to connect with the unseen.
What are your initial reactions to this idea? What do you feel in your gut when you read that sentence? Take a few moments to jot down your reactions by following these prompts:
- Recall a time when you strongly felt another person’s emotions.
- Recall a time when you were able to anticipate how to make another person feel seen, heard, or comfortable.
- Recall a time when you had a sense that something unspoken was happening and you later learned that you were correct about this feeling.
These questions represent one category of ways that chronic betrayal trauma tends to train survivors to be especially tuned into unspoken nonverbal cues from the surrounding people and environment. The training comes from having to anticipate the perpetrator’s moves in order to stay as safe as possible within an unsafe situation.
In addition to being able to sense the unseen within other people, your superpower also likely enables you to sense the unseen in other ways. Here are some writing prompts to get you in touch with how this has been present in your own life:
- Where do you go to in your mind for comfort when things are hard? Where did you go to in your mind when you were younger?
- Did you ever have any imaginary friends? If so, describe them.
- Did you ever feel that you were able to communicate with plants, trees, animals, or other non-human beings?
- Have you ever felt guided by dreams or synchronicities or signs in the world around you?
Betrayal trauma opens us up to the unseen because the seen is not reliable and some part of us knows that, even if not consciously. This superpower opens us up to the possibility of life that could be bigger and richer than what we have known so far.