I was a mess because of it, a real mess. My closest friend in the world, at that time, betrayed me; I had no skills for how to handle that betrayal and how to suffer that kind of loss. I had no knowledge of how to move ahead in life, and I became bitter and mistrustful. I dimmed my sense of hopefulness and appreciation of my life. I spent a couple of years in inactive unhappiness because I was betrayed and abandoned and never saw it coming. I never saw it coming; I had no clue on God's earth, that this human being could ever, do this to me. But it was during this period, that I was so unsettled by things, that I learned a couple of things. One, I was an emotional mess. That's good to know, if you are one. It saves you from inflicting harm upon yourself and other people unconsciously. At least, you gain a little more conscious awareness of how absolutely annoying and ridiculous you are. So, that was one advantage of the experience of realizing that I was a mess.

 

Two, I learned that there are experiences that many of us have, that we can't get over. They become part of our personality for a while. Like, I'm Fred, the guy who was betrayed; that’s how I started to define myself. That's how I started to orient myself. I developed a victim consciousness and I came to recognize that healing that victim consciousness is a choice; it can be an effective choice if you don't want responsibility for your life, and it gives you a place to avoid having to look too much at your own behavior. That doesn't mean that victim consciousness is terrible the whole time. One of the things that I've learned is: victim consciousness is really good for a period of time. It's a wonderful, useful, helpful tool of safe harbor. You don't have to look too carefully at you and your coping abilities; you can look at what happened and blame it on that. That's a really essential kind of safety net that is obviously wired into us as a species. So we don't have to take on, in full force, our own failures to cope, no matter what it is.