The body - betrayal & trust in action

Scott Clark

Learning requires mistakes; if we can’t afford to make mistakes, any attempt at learning is just a single blind shot into the dark. But this knowledge doesn’t necessarily make mistakes less painful, or easier to bear, and betrayal is a case in point. Betrayal is the failure of trust, evidence that our trust was misplaced or overstated. Betrayal is often a very painful way of learning that we must judge our trust more precisely or place it more wisely.

We often think of betrayal and trust as features of our relations with others, but they can also be characteristic of our inner world as well; especially of the relationship of the body to other aspects of self. How often have we felt injury or physical infirmity as a failure of trust in our physical self? This sense of betrayal can be more painful and more lasting than the simple injury – the feeling that we must re-evaluate the limits within which we can expect to move and act in the world.

Perhaps it is a bit grandiose to compare the results of injury or illness, annoying but still mundane and material, with the results of trauma in our emotional and spiritual life. But these things are not separate. As infants we have little possibility of our own effective action, and therefore no possibility of self-reliance; instead, we are completely dependent on those who take care of us. Our developing physical capabilities gradually permit more and more independence, and in the same way permit the development of our consciousness and inner life. The sum of what we can and cannot physically accomplish circumscribes, if not our entire world of thought and aspiration, then certainly its foundations.

When this changes, especially through injury or illness, the basis for our independence is threatened, and we feel as though our personal world is betrayed by the very body that enables it. How can we rebuild trust, especially if the circumstances require new parameters within which trust can be realistic? That is a difficult question. What we often do is side-step the question entirely by surrendering ourselves into the care of experts, especially medical experts. While this need not be a surrender of our own power and competence, it is unfortunately rare that we are treated by the medical world as equal beings who need to learn and to understand; equal beings who, given the chance, may bring into action our own inner capacity for healing and growth. Instead, the physical parts of our self are too often treated as things, intricate things perhaps, but not more. The relationships between our physical parts and the parts that are more interior are left out. And when we are treated in this way by others, we begin to treat ourselves this way. We treat our own bodies as objects and not as the domains of our life and vitality. We ourselves ignore the necessity of trust, precisely judged trust that can be justified by our movement and action.

The re-establishment of such trust requires a kind of re-negotiation, looking again at the constituent parts of our co-ordination, accommodating to areas that are now less capable, and allocating a little more to areas that remain strong. It must be a process similar to our original development led from inner goals rather than external, following pleasure rather than pain, accepting no outer authority without the agreement of our experience. High standards, perhaps; but anything less will perpetuate betrayal.

© Scott Clark 12/10/99