Abuse and Betrayal by Jonathan Anthony Burkett is coming soon. Here is the first chapter, free.
A note before you read: this book talks honestly about abuse and betrayal. Read at your own pace. If you are in danger, call 911. You can reach the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 or the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.
There is a moment most of us can return to without trying. A kitchen. A car parked in the dark. A hallway with the light on under a door. A text message read three times because the words would not make sense the first two.
You were not looking for it. You were washing dishes, or driving to work, or laughing with friends, and then a smell, a song, a tone of voice pulled you straight back. Your chest tightened. Your hands went cold. Years had passed, maybe decades, and still, for a few seconds, you were right there again.
That is the memory that stays.
This book is about that memory and the people who carry it. It is about abuse, the harm done to us by someone with power over us, and betrayal, the harm done by someone we trusted. Often those two arrive together. The person who hurt you was not a stranger in an alley. It was a parent, a husband, a wife, a pastor, a coach, a best friend, a boss who called you family. That is why it is so hard to talk about, and that is why so many of us never do.
If you picked up this book, there is a good chance you know this territory from the inside. Maybe you lived it as a child. Maybe it happened last year. Maybe it is happening now and you are not sure what to call it. Or maybe you love someone who went through it and you want to understand them better.
Wherever you are, I want you to hear this first, before anything else: what happened to you was not fair, and it was not your fault.
Abuse and betrayal are far more common than most people would guess. They happen in every neighborhood, every income bracket, every race, every faith and every kind of family. They happen in mansions and in trailers, in churches and in clubs, in marriages that look perfect on social media and in friendships that have lasted since grade school.
And yet, when it happens to us, we almost always feel alone.
Part of the reason is simple. People do not announce it. There is no sign on the front door that says “something terrible happens here.” The woman at church with the bright smile, the coworker who tells the best jokes, the uncle who fixes everyone’s car, any of them could be carrying a story they have never told. Research on trauma has long shown that a great many people keep these experiences to themselves for years, and some for their whole lives.
So we look around and see what looks like normal, happy lives, and we assume we are the only one. We think something must be wrong with us. Why did this happen to me and not to them? The truth is that it probably did happen to some of them. They are just as quiet as we are.
A woman I’ll call Angela worked the front desk at a dental office in a small Ohio town for nineteen years. Everyone knew her. She remembered patients’ birthdays, asked about their grandchildren, kept a jar of peppermints by the sign-in sheet. She was the person people told their troubles to.
Nobody knew that Angela had grown up in a house where her stepfather controlled every dollar, every phone call and every door. Nobody knew she had married young to get out, and that her first husband had turned out to be a different version of the same man. She left him when she was twenty-six. She never told her coworkers. She never told her second husband the whole story either, only that her first marriage “didn’t work out.”
When Angela was in her late forties, a patient came in with a bruise she tried to hide under makeup. Angela recognized the way the woman held her arm, the way she apologized for everything. Angela gave her a peppermint and a pamphlet from the women’s center down the road, and then she went to the break room and cried for the first time in twenty years.
“I thought I’d put it all in a box,” she said later. “I didn’t know the box was still open.”
Angela is not one person. She is thousands of people. Maybe she is you.
If abuse and betrayal are so common, why are they so hidden? There are many reasons, and we will spend whole chapters on them later. For now, here are a few of the biggest.
We are told not to talk about it. Sometimes this is direct: “What happens in this house stays in this house.” Sometimes it is a look, a sigh, a change of subject. Children learn very quickly which truths are allowed and which ones get them in trouble. Adults learn it too.
We love the person who hurt us. This is the part outsiders struggle to understand. You can be afraid of someone and still love them. You can know they hurt you and still want them to be okay. You can hate what they did and still remember the good days, the birthday cake, the time they showed up when no one else did. That mixture of love and harm is one of the most confusing things a human heart can hold.
We are afraid. Afraid of being hurt worse. Afraid of losing our home, our money, our kids, our church family, our job. Afraid no one will believe us. Afraid people will believe us and then look at us differently forever.
We feel ashamed. Shame is a strange thing, because it so often lands on the wrong person. The one who did the harm walks around with their head up, while the one who was harmed feels dirty, foolish, weak or broken. That is backwards, but it is real, and it keeps millions of mouths shut.
We do not have the words. Many of us did not know that what we lived through had a name. We thought it was just how families were, how marriages were, how that church did things. It is hard to speak about something when you do not even know what to call it.
Each of these reasons makes sense. None of them mean you are weak. They mean you were surviving, and silence was one of the tools you had.
Most bad days fade. You forget the flat tire, the argument at the grocery store, the rude customer. A month later you could not tell anyone the details.
Abuse and betrayal are different. They tend to stick.
Part of that is how our minds and bodies are built. When we are in danger, or when someone we depend on turns against us, the body goes on high alert. The heart races. Breathing changes. The mind takes a kind of snapshot, saving every detail it thinks might help us survive next time: the sound of the car pulling in, the look on their face, the words that came right before. That alarm system was designed to protect us. But it does not always know when the danger has passed, so it keeps the snapshot close and pulls it out whenever something looks or sounds familiar.
There is another reason too. When harm comes from someone we trusted, it does more than hurt. It rearranges how we see the world. Before, we believed certain things: that parents protect, that husbands are safe, that church is holy ground, that a best friend has your back. After, those beliefs are cracked, and we have to build new ones. That rebuilding takes time, and the memory of what broke the old beliefs stays with us because it changed the very ground we stand on.
A man named Kwame grew up in Atlanta, the oldest of four. When he was thirty-one, he found out that his business partner, a man he had known since college, a man who had been in his wedding, had been quietly moving money out of their company for three years. By the time Kwame discovered it, the business was nearly gone, and so was the friendship.
Kwame did not lose his house. He found other work. Within a few years, by most measures, he was doing fine. But he told his wife that he could not stand to hear a certain kind of laugh, a relaxed, easy laugh, because it was the laugh his partner used at every dinner while he was stealing from him. Kwame would hear it from a stranger at a restaurant and lose his appetite.
“It’s not even about the money anymore,” he said. “It’s that I didn’t see it. I sat across the table from him a hundred times and I didn’t see it. So now I wonder what else I’m not seeing.”
That is what betrayal does. It does not only take something from us. It makes us question our own eyes.
A man named Arturo was the youngest of five in a family that moved between San Antonio and Laredo depending on where his father could find work. His father drank on weekends, and when he drank, he picked one child to be the target. More often than not, it was Arturo. The words were worse than anything else: that he was soft, that he was a mistake, that he would never be a real man.
Arturo grew up, joined the Army, became a welder, married, and had two daughters he adores. He is the kind of father who never misses a recital. By any outside measure, he got past it.
But Arturo told his pastor something he had never told anyone. On Friday nights, even now, in his fifties, he feels a knot in his stomach around nine o’clock, the hour his father used to come home from the bar. He knows his father has been gone for years. He knows his own house is safe. His body does not seem to care. Every Friday, the knot comes, and every Friday, he sits with it until it passes.
“I used to think that meant I was weak,” he said. “Now I think it means I was a little boy who had to be ready, and part of me is still ready.”
His pastor did not tell him to pray it away or to just move on. He said something simpler: “That little boy did a good job keeping you alive. Maybe he can rest now.” Arturo started a small habit after that. On Friday nights at nine, he steps out onto the back porch, says a short prayer for the boy he was, and goes back inside to his family. The knot still comes some weeks. It is lighter than it used to be.
That questioning is one of the ways these memories settle in and stay. Throughout this book, we will keep coming back to three places where abuse and betrayal leave their mark: the heart, the mind and the body.
The heart is where we love and trust. After abuse or betrayal, the heart often builds walls. We might keep everyone at a distance. We might cling too tightly, terrified of being left. We might choose people who treat us the way we were treated before, because it feels familiar, even when it hurts. We might feel numb, or jealous, or suspicious of anyone who is kind to us.
The mind is where we think and remember. Here the marks can look like worry that never shuts off, sadness that sits on us like a heavy coat, sudden flashes of memory, trouble concentrating, or a voice inside that repeats the cruel things someone once said. Many people describe feeling like they are always waiting for something bad to happen.
The body remembers in its own way. Stress that lasts for years can show up as headaches, stomach trouble, tight shoulders, poor sleep, exhaustion, and pain that doctors cannot always explain. Some people flinch at a raised hand even in play. Some cannot sit with their back to a door. The body remembers what the mouth has never said.
None of this means you are broken beyond repair. It means you are a human being who went through something that would mark any human being. If you see yourself in these descriptions, it is worth talking with a doctor, a counselor or a pastor you trust. You do not have to sort it out alone, and you do not have to wait until it gets worse.
We will look closely at each of these, the heart, the mind and the body, in Part Three. For now, it is enough to notice where you feel it.
Let us say plainly what so many of us have whispered for years: it was not fair.
You did not deserve to be hit. You did not deserve to be called stupid, ugly, worthless. You did not deserve to have your trust used against you, your money taken, your body treated as someone else’s property, your faith twisted into a weapon. You did not deserve to be lied to, cheated on, abandoned, or made to feel crazy for noticing.
Some of us were children when it happened. Children do not cause abuse. Children cannot consent to harm, cannot defend themselves, and cannot leave. Whatever someone told you, whatever you told yourself, a child is never responsible for what an adult chose to do.
Some of us were adults, and we carry a different kind of shame. “I should have known. I should have left sooner. I should have seen the signs.” Hear this: abuse and betrayal work precisely because they are hidden. The person who harms you rarely shows that side at the start. They show charm, attention, kindness. They build trust first, and then they use it. Being fooled by someone who worked hard to fool you is not a character flaw. It is evidence that you were willing to trust, and willingness to trust is a good thing that someone else chose to abuse.
The responsibility belongs to the person who did the harm. Always.
A woman named Quentina, who went by Q, spent her twenties in a relationship with a man who never hit her but told her daily that she was lucky anyone put up with her. He checked her phone. He decided which friends she could see. When she got a promotion at the hospital where she worked as a respiratory therapist, he sulked for a week and then told her the only reason she got it was that her boss felt sorry for her.
For years, Q blamed herself. She replayed every argument, looking for what she had done wrong. When she finally talked with a counselor, the counselor asked her a simple question: “If your little sister described this exact relationship to you, what would you tell her?”
Q did not even hesitate. “I’d tell her to get out. I’d tell her it’s not her.”
“Then why is it you?” the counselor asked.
Q said that question cracked something open. Not all at once, but enough to let light in.
Here is a truth that might be hard to hear and might also be a relief: you may never forget what happened. And you do not have to.
So many people believe that healing means erasing. They think that if they were truly better, the memory would disappear, they would never feel the old pain again, and they could talk about it as calmly as they talk about the weather. When that does not happen, they decide they have failed at healing.
But healing does not work like that. Many of us do get past it. We build good lives. We find people who are safe. We laugh again, love again, sleep through the night again. And still the memory remains. It may lose its sharpness. It may come less often. It may stop running our decisions. But it is part of our story, and some part of us will always know it happened.
That is not failure. That is what it means to be a person with a history.
Think of a tree that has been struck by lightning and kept growing. The mark is still there in the bark. Anyone who looks closely can see it. But the tree is alive, putting out new leaves every spring, giving shade to whoever sits beneath it. The mark does not stop the tree from being a tree.
So when we talk about “getting over it” in this book, we do not mean pretending it never happened. We mean getting to a place where the memory is something you carry instead of something that carries you. A place where you can say, “Yes, that happened to me. It was wrong. It shaped me. And it is not the whole of who I am.”
This book is organized in four parts.
Part One: The Wound looks at what abuse and betrayal actually are, in their many forms, and where they come from: family, love, friendship, church and work.
Part Two: The Hiding looks at why we keep it secret, the fear, the shame, the self-doubt, the anger at unfairness, and the special silences carried by men and by those who were hurt as children.
Part Three: What It Does to Us looks closely at the heart, the mind, the body and our faith, and at how hurt can pass down from one generation to the next.
Part Four: Getting Over It, Never Forgetting is about the road forward: telling someone, getting help, staying safe, deciding about forgiveness on your own terms, rebuilding trust, loving again, and breaking the cycle.
Here is what this book will not do.
It will not blame you. Not once. If anything in these pages ever feels like it is putting responsibility on you for what someone else did, that is not the intent, and you can set it down.
It will not describe abuse in graphic detail. You do not need to relive anything to read this book. We will talk about patterns and impact, not about acts.
It will not tell you that you must forgive, reconcile, stay, or go back. Those choices belong to you, and to no one else.
It will not replace a counselor, a doctor, a lawyer or a domestic violence advocate. It is a conversation, not a cure. When you need more than a conversation, and many of us do, this book will point you toward real help. You will find a section called Where to Find Help at the back of this book with places to turn.
One more thing before we go on. Some of you are reading this from inside the storm. The harm is not in the past. It is down the hall, or on your phone, or coming home at six o’clock.
If that is you, your safety matters more than finishing this chapter. Please be careful about where you keep this book and who might see it. If you are in danger, reach out to emergency services, a local domestic violence program, or one of the resources listed in Where to Find Help at the back of this book. People who do this work every day can help you think through your options quietly and safely, at your own pace.
You do not have to make every decision today. But you deserve to have someone in your corner who knows what they are doing.
And a word for another kind of reader. Some readers have not been through abuse themselves, but they love someone who has. A husband trying to understand why his wife freezes when voices rise. A mother whose grown son will not talk about the coach he had at fourteen. A friend who keeps getting canceled on and does not know why.
If that is you, thank you for being here. Your patience matters more than you know. As you read, try to listen more than you fix. Try to believe more than you question. The people we love who carry these memories do not usually need us to solve them. They need us to stay, to be safe, and to let them tell their story when and how they are ready.
You do not need to be ready for everything in this book. You do not need to read it straight through. If a chapter feels too close, skip it and come back later, or never. If you need to put the book down and go for a walk, call a friend, pray, or simply breathe, do that. There is no deadline here.
Here are a few small things you might try this week, just to begin:
These are not cures. They are first steps. And first steps count.
I want to end where we began, with that moment you can return to without trying.
It may always be there. But it is not the only moment you have. You also have the moment you got out of bed this morning. The moment you made someone laugh. The moment you opened this book. Those count too. Every one of them is a sign that whatever happened did not get the final word.
So many of us have walked this road in silence, each of us thinking we were the only one. You are not the only one. You never were. And from this page forward, you do not have to carry it alone.
The Bible says, “The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.” Whatever you believe, may you find that kind of nearness, in God, in good people, in your own steady heart, as we walk through this together.
To be continued in Abuse and Betrayal, coming soon.
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