Why We Betray Ourselves in Relationships
What self-betrayal teaches us about intimacy, desire, and healing.
Self-betrayal is something many of us do. And it’s a learned behavior.
Taught to override discomfort to belong. Silence our desire to stay safe. Ignore what our bodies know because relationships, families, and culture taught us that fitting in mattered more than telling the truth.
Over time, these moments accumulate. They shape our relationships, our sexuality, and our sense of self.
This essay explores what happens when we stop abandoning the body in the name of belonging, and begin returning to it instead.
Enduring
For years, I was married to a man I loved. He loved me too, genuinely, in the ways he was capable of. And he kept breaking our agreements. It happened in subtle and big ways. Not doing the dishes when he said he would, having sex with someone else behind my back.
Each time it happened, I stayed. I told myself I understood his pain. And I did. But I let that understanding become an excuse, for him and for me. If he was suffering enough, his behavior made sense. And if it made sense, I didn't have to face what it was costing me.
I also kept letting him into my body. Long after the trust had quietly left.
When we had sex, I would grind toward sensation, reaching for climax through intensity. Telling myself that as long as I climaxed every time, that was enough.
But it wasn’t. I wanted presence. I wanted to make love. And be made love to.
When we had sex, and he would pound towards climax, I could watch his eyes go somewhere else. He had been conditioned by years of porn, trained toward dissociated arousal, using fantasy and friction to get himself there rather than staying with me and what was actually alive in the room.
He wasn’t cruel. He was somewhere else. And I stayed, in the exchange and in the marriage, reaching for a connection that I had stopped feeling.
There was real love between us. When facial paralysis took over my life early in our relationship, he was a rock, and I needed that. He held me many times when I was in a process of unraveling from sexual trauma and exploitation. But I stayed long past that season, caretaking for him in ways that had more to do with old conditioning than with love.
It wasn’t that it was all wrong. We grew so much together. It was that I stayed beyond when we were still good for each other.
In our sexual dynamic, I thought there was something wrong with me. That it must have been from all the sexual abuse I had endured. That if I tried harder, moved differently, stayed longer, I would feel what I wanted to feel.
I stayed for years. With the broken agreements. With the sex that left me empty. Because leaving felt more frightening than enduring. Enduring was something I was so accustomed to. But choosing myself? Prioritizing my own needs. Honoring my body and soul in every way? That was new for me.
The self-reckoning I had to do around my ex-husband was seeing my role in the betrayals.
It was not about blaming myself for his betrayals. It was about seeing, clearly and without flinching, that I had also been betraying myself. Every time I stayed. Every time I allowed penetration my body wasn’t calling for. Every time I chose his comfort over my own needs and desires.
Understanding Self-Betrayal
I have been thinking about self-reckoning. Not self-blame, which is an entirely different animal.
Self-blame says I am wrong. Self-reckoning says: I see the role I am playing. I am ready to do something different.
The distinction matters. For a long time they felt the same to me because shame had collapsed the distance between them.
Any honest look at my own participation in my suffering would collapse into it’s my fault. So I avoided looking. Or I swung the other way entirely: I was only ever the victim of what had been done to me.
Both positions kept me stuck in the same loop of self-abandonment.
Sexual trauma can do this. It leaves an imprint of violation. And then, without our conscious choosing, we replay that imprint again and again, searching for a new outcome.
I violated my own boundaries constantly. I betrayed myself in a thousand small and large ways. Not out of malice. Not even consciously. But the pattern ran, and I ran with it, because I had not yet learned to pause and ask: what is my role here?
The shame had not yet lifted enough for me to have a role and not be bad. And the pain of feeling inherently wrong, bad, at fault for all the violations and betrayals was so big I would do anything to avoid it.
Taking self-responsibility does not mean the violations were my fault. It does not mean the betrayals I absorbed were something I deserved or manufactured. I have no control over what other people do, or what my nervous system does in response to what they’ve done.
What I do have is agency.
The capacity to notice the role I play in keeping my nervous system inside that old loop. To ask what it costs me to keep staying with someone whose actions do not align with their words. Or to continue to be an unsafe space for myself.
To feel, finally, what I am doing to myself.
Meeting Betty: Healing Self-Abandonment
Inside me there lives a part I call Betty.
Betty lives in binaries because the world that shaped her runs on them. The colonial capitalist patriarchy. Heteronormativity. She learned its logic early and learned it well. So when I speak about men and women the way I do in this section, I am speaking through Betty’s wounded conditioned lens.
She does not trust. Not men, not women. She is only just beginning to gain trust in me.
She learned it was safest to mistrust. To assume the inevitable. To stay vigilant, brace for impact. Betty scans her environment, looking for evidence to validate her beliefs: that women will betray her. They are vindictive, jealous, competitive liars who will do anything to be chosen by a man. And specifically, my man. That men will objectify and violate her. They are lustful, uncontrollable animals that take what they want the second desire starts moving through them. They want one thing from women: sex.
Betty carries the weight of every time she was left behind, cast aside, betrayed, violated. She developed the belief that her needs are not important, that she is here to be used, that love with another will always require her to abandon herself.
Betty was formed from years of evidence. And while Betty is no longer in relationship with people who are betraying or violating her, she still gathers evidence when she reads the news, watches TV, is catcalled on the street, receives a cruel remark from another woman, hears others’ stories of violation and betrayal.
For years I outsourced Betty’s care, in part because of confusion about where love comes from: the belief that what she needed could only arrive from someone else. I wanted others to soothe her, validate her, make her safe. And I kept choosing people who were not capable of loving her.
In my youngest years, I outsourced her care to people who maliciously abused her. As I got older, the pattern shifted. The people were no longer malicious, yet the betrayals continued in my most intimate relationships with men.
And now, I find myself with a man who knows how to love me. I chose someone I feel cherished, adored, respected, and honored by.
Even here, in the arms of a man of deep integrity, I found that he could not give Betty what she needed. That is not a failure in him. It is a structural impossibility. Betty’s healing belongs to me.
She needed me to stop abandoning her. To stop treating her like a burden. To sit with her, hold her, stay with her in her rage and pain and despair. To love her and advocate for her. To listen to her. To become the safe space of belonging she has been searching for.
Because the reality is that the world she lives in is not always safe. The evidence is endless. But I can create a space internally for her to rest in and come home to.
When I am not honoring her, not listening to and loving her, she takes the reins. She leaks out as control, as the story already written about how this will end, as the body braced for a betrayal and violation that hasn’t happened yet. She monitors constantly because she cannot afford to be surprised again.
I betrayed Betty every time I stayed too long with someone who was betraying me. Every time I allowed penetration before I was ready. Every time I prioritized someone else’s needs so completely that mine went unspoken. I left her alone in the dark while I performed connection.
Learning to hold Betty has meant learning to stay. When the pain got too big, I learned to leave my body. Yet part of me always remained there, alone. The work is getting back into the body with her.
When I sat with Betty recently, her back was turned. I said: I’m sorry. I’m sorry for leaving you, for abandoning you, for betraying you, over and over. I’m here now. You are not alone. When she felt my full support, the wall over her heart lifted. She felt me protecting her.
She has been waiting for me to protect her all along.
When We Betray Ourselves in Intimacy
I see this pattern constantly, in my work as a sexological bodyworker and intimacy coach, and in my own history. A partner who reaches before the other is ready, who moves toward penetration while the body is still dry and tense, who offers lubricant instead of asking what would feel good. Who shifts, mid-exchange, from presence into completion, and leaves their partner alone in the experience without knowing they have left. It is one of the ways the violence of these systems pervades into our most intimate spaces, into our bedrooms, into our bodies.
One person enduring. One person taking without knowing they are taking. Both of them starving for something real.
This is a violation of the body that is being overridden. And it robs them both of the possibility of true intimacy.
If you are the one enduring: your body is not a problem to work around with lubricant. Your body’s reluctance is information. Honor it. When you feel your partner shift, when the shared space collapses into their completion, name it. Say: let’s slow down. That is not criticism. It is an invitation into connection.
Do not allow your body to be penetrated unless your body authentically desires it.
What your partner does in response is up to them. You cannot control their behavior. The domain you have now is your voice, your boundaries, your body’s authentic truth. That is where your personal power lives. And where your pleasure begins.
Sometimes the voice cannot come. Fawning and freeze are autonomic nervous system responses, not choices. The body that endures without speaking is not weak or passive. It is doing what it learned to do to survive. The reckoning is learning that survival is no longer the only option.
The Other Side: Learning Presence in Intimacy
There is also a reckoning waiting for the one who reaches without attuning.
These dynamics are not fixed to any gender. Those socialized as women can move with entitlement too, using a partner’s body without attuning to it. Those socialized as men can endure, silenced by a different script. What I am describing next is a pattern of socialization, not a rule about who people are.
Most men were never taught to feel their way through sexual arousal. They were taught to manage it, perform it, discharge it.
Mainstream porn gave them a template: escalation, domination, completion. Watching it wired arousal to dissociation and fantasy, to cycling through images in the head when the present moment isn’t getting them there.
When presence with a real person, with all of their complexity and aliveness and need for slowness, doesn’t match the template, the body starts to struggle. So they force the erection through hard friction. Or they reach for medication rather than slow down and ask why the body stopped responding.
They perform climax as proof of their manhood because they were never told that softening, pausing, not knowing, these are also options.
I watched my ex-husband do this. He could not stay with me during sex. And when I invited him to, his nervous system had its own response, collapsing into sleepiness because real intimacy was too threatening. So tired he would actually fall asleep.
He was not trying to hurt me. This is not an excuse. It is the wound showing itself. He had never been invited to look at it, let alone move through it.
The reckoning for men, when they find it, often sounds like this: I have been using sex to avoid feeling rather than to feel more. The body that cannot stay present during intimacy, that needs fantasy or friction or a particular kind of escalation to remain aroused, is a body that has been trained out of contact with its own experience. That training is not personal failure. It is what the culture produced.
There is also the fear of pausing. Of checking in mid-exchange and asking: are you still with me? Is this still good? Many people have never done this.
They have been taught that stopping breaks the moment, that uncertainty is weakness, that their partner’s pleasure depends on their confidence and momentum. So they keep going, past the point where real attunement was possible, hoping the other person will say something if something is wrong.
They rarely do. Not because nothing is wrong, but because the other person has learned, as we have seen, to endure.
Slow down. Notice what is actually happening inside your body. Ask whether you are present with the person you are with. Ask whether your arousal is connected to them, or running parallel to them, using their body while your mind is somewhere else. Ask whether your genitals are connected to your heart.
And if you slow down and find you are not present, that your arousal is running parallel rather than connected, that is not failure. That is the beginning of honesty. Say so.
Say: Let’s slow down. Or simply pause, breathe, make eye contact. Let the moment be what it actually is rather than what you are performing it to be.
This takes courage. Because what people often find underneath the performance is vulnerability they were never permitted to have. The desire to be held, to be slow, to not know what happens next, to be seen in softness.
That vulnerability is not weakness. It is where real intimacy and connection begins.
Return to the Body
This is the thread running through my own story, through the years of work I have done with people learning to inhabit themselves.
We abandon ourselves to secure the connection. And in doing so, we lose the connection anyway.
What we get instead is something hollow disguised as connection. The only way back is through the body.
For me, learning this required saying sorry to my genitals. Really feeling it. For all the times I ignored her no. For every penetration I allowed before she was ready. Every time I used her to try to secure someone else’s love.
I put my hand over her and said: I’m sorry. I see you. I’m listening now.
And then I did the work. Hours of it. Sitting with her. Staring at her. Touching her, loving her in the ways she always wanted and never received. Holding her while she grieved, wailed, raged. Letting screams move through me, and pleasure too, alchemizing the shame with pleasure.
This is what reckoning looks like in the body. It is not abstract. It is intimate and slow and sometimes ugly and messy and always sacred.
That work is what made it safe enough to receive the same from another person. To let someone else tend to me with that quality of attention and love. To open and surrender that deeply. And to choose someone who actually could.
I have a rule now. I only allow penetration when my body is begging for it.
And sometimes, even then, sensation disapears, and I say: pause.
Sometimes I still struggle to say it. But I say it more than I used to. And I say it earlier.
What has opened in my body since I started honoring this is something I could not have imagined from inside the old pattern. I had no idea my body was capable of this much pleasure.
I am experiencing cervical orgasms now. Deep, full-bodied, cosmic. This is only possible when the nervous system finally trusts that it will be listened to. When the body is no longer bracing. When a woman stops overriding her own signal and starts treating her body as sacred ground rather than a resource to manage.
The cervix will not open for performance. It opens for truth.
Practicing Self-Trust
Self-reckoning is not a one-time arrival. It is a practice. You do it, and then you find another layer, another place where you handed yourself away without noticing. You meet it with compassion, not prosecution.
I notice when I am abandoning myself. I feel the moment I am staying in an exchange for their sake, not mine. I feel the moment I am afraid to slow things down because I am afraid of losing the connection. And I try, with whatever presence I have, to choose differently.
Not perfectly.
But I am no longer willing to treat myself the way I once allowed others to treat me.
That is what reckoning is for.
Signs You May Be Betraying Yourself Without Realizing It
You say yes while your body is bracing or collapsing.
You prioritize keeping the peace over speaking the truth.
You know what you feel only after the moment has passed.
You disconnect from your body during conflict or intimacy.
You feel resentful and bitter about the things you do for other people.
You believe you don’t have a choice but to say yes when people ask you to do things with them or for them.
You don’t ever allow yourself to change course or change your mind. Once you say yes to something, you always move forward.
Self-betrayal usually begins as an adaptation. The body learned that belonging required silence, compliance, or performance. And what once protected us can later become the very thing keeping us from intimacy and relational satisfaction.
So what’s next?
In my private somatic sessions, we slow down and listen so you can align your words and actions with your body’s truth.
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Continue the conversation with me at the Erotic Frontier on Substack, where I publish ongoing essays exploring sexuality, intimacy, embodiment, relationships, and healing.