Beyond Betrayal

Beyond Betrayal

I am learning to be alone again. It has been almost a year since Brian got married. My friends and family are annoyed with me for “not getting over it.”  It is the strangest thing and there is no way I could make up a story such as this. My “boyfriend,” he dubbed himself, of seven years, abruptly left me without saying goodbye, or even ending our relationship and married someone from his deep dark past. She was someone he knew almost 30 years ago. Brian did prison time for smuggling rare bird eggs out of Australia in the late 1990s, and the woman he married and her then boyfriend were the ones that recruited him to the smuggling ring. They would employ young guys, pay them $5,000, get them passports and pay their way to Australia where they would climb the trees, steal the eggs and store them in special “egg vests.”  They would then bring them back to the states where they would rear the birds and sell them as captive bred. They sold anywhere from $1,000 to $14,000 each and the arrest records reported they stole hundreds of eggs, quite a lucrative caper. 

They were caught and both ended up doing federal prison time. Theodora Elizabeth Swanson did 41 months in prison and Brian T Bradley did 37 months. Then, they reconnected all these years later to get married. The bad part is this romance was going on all the while I was battling cancer and Brian was living with me. How am I supposed to just “get over it?” Our feelings and emotions are very powerful, so powerful for me that it took my mind off the most difficult struggle of my life, cancer.

I don’t know what hurt me the most. The fact that he was carrying on with her while I was so sick and struggling, or the fact that he didn’t end our relationship once he knew he was getting married? Was it the fact that I took care of him all these years and he just deserted me when I needed him the most? Or was it just the level of deceit that he was capable of that was keeping me stuck in this obsessive and destructive cycle? It traumatized me deeply. Being a psychology major, I looked up the definition of betrayal and I was experiencing most of the symptoms outlined in the definition. I was embarrassed and felt a lot of shame. I was beyond sad, and I obsessed constantly about it. I couldn’t sleep and my self-esteem was in the toilet. I was completely devasted and I could not process what he had done. If anyone told me that Brian would do something like that I would have said “…no not my Brian!” But he did and it thrust me into a deep depression. 

There are stages of reckoning in a betrayal, just like there are stages of grief in a death. At first it was denial but the fact that I found out by accident, discovering pictures of the wedding on Facebook, I could not deny it for long. The shock and horror that I experienced when I stumbled upon her page was something that had no way of making sense to me. And seeing it by accident on social media totally blindsided me. Disbelief and panic set in immediately. How could he do this to me? How did he plan a wedding? Where did the money come from?  For the last seven years he was with me every single day including all spring and summer while I was going through chemo. Why did he have to lie and cheat especially while I was so sick? And why keep up the ruse that he was working on himself and that perhaps we were still together? He kept saying he was working on his mental health, and he had a lot of nighttime work, and he would be up to see me soon. I was lost and confused. For the last seven years he had been with me every single day unless he had work but even then, he couldn’t wait to come and be with me.  It defies all logic. The only thing I can think of is that he needed to use me until he was married, and she finally arrived from Tennessee to rescue him and is finances.  You see, I had been feeding him and his dogs, helping him financially, and letting him live with me and not contribute a cent towards anything. He never had much money and any money he did make went to his own compound. He had to keep his own place because he was a falconer, and he needed room for all his birds. My little plot of land was not big enough for them all. I took care of his six dogs including vet services and paid his car insurance as he had no driver’s license. I thought he was being a loving and devoted partner. He went to the breast surgeon with me while she explained the biopsy results. He went to the oncologist with me while he talked about chemo but had a panic attack and had to leave the room. That is probably the day he started fishing for a rescuer. He shaved my head when my hair started falling out. He pretended to care all summer, ate my food, used my resources, let me pay for everything, slept in my bed with me and lied to my face every single day.

The wedding was on September 20^th. I had been away in North Carolina recuperating the first week in September and this gave him the opportunity to get ready for her to arrive.  He did not formally end our relationship until October 30^th, and I didn’t get the plates to his van that I was insuring back until November 30^th.  He just kept on lying and lying which confused me even more. I did not find out he was married until a week before Christmas. Leaving me for someone else while I was battling cancer makes him a pathetic loser and a coward but using me for whatever he could get out of me while he was already married to someone else without my knowledge makes him a sociopathic criminal. He owed two years back rent on the property his friend Rich bought and was holding for him to one day purchase. But he had no money and no credit and Rich wanted to sell the property. Brian needed to be bailed out and Theodora was up for the job. It’s hard to believe that he actually found someone to do that. But she was in between husbands and in desperate need of a man so the universe opened up for them.

Yes, I was experiencing all the symptoms of a betrayal and I had to get a grip. I raged and wrote letters and emails to him and to them both. I made the mistake of commenting on her wedding post, and she came at me claws bared. He lied to her of course about the nature of our relationship to get what he needed from her and to position himself in her life. After all, he couldn’t expect me to subsidize him in my condition and what if I died? Who would take care of him then?  She was horrible to me and told me how long they had been in love and how devoted to her he was. She even accused me of using my cancer to get sympathy from Brian. It was insane that she was declaring how he never lies to her, and she will always believe him, and she knows him better than me when I KNOW he was lying to her. He came to see me on my birthday September 28^th.  He was married a week and still had not even ended our relationship. Why come and visit me if he was married to someone else?  He told her he did not come to see me and only texted me, which was a lie. Oh, he was lying to her, but she will never see it. He had done all of this, but I am called the crazy one.

 I couldn’t control myself and I would fall into a sobbing mess without notice. I went on surviving infidelity websites and tried to meditate. I did a lot of self-talk and allowed myself to experience any emotions that came to me, and I honored them. I couldn’t shake the sadness that enveloped me. The only thing I could do was “act as if.” I made myself stay away from looking at Facebook or Linkedin or any other social media that they were involved with. I made a promise to myself to not talk about it to anyone. I had to straighten my crown and keep going. And that is what I did. I am better now. Not much, but better. There are no words of wisdom to tell anyone experiencing a betrayal such as this. It takes as long as it takes, and everyone is different. I tried to stay busy and accepted every invitation that came my way even though I had no desire to do much of anything. I treated myself to anything I wanted. In essence, I spoiled myself, which didn’t really help.

It has been almost two years since my diagnosis and the horrors of chemo, radiation and surgery, and it has been a year and a half since Brian got married. I got very sick from the chemo and was in constant pain. I couldn’t eat and lost 50 pounds. I was so weak I couldn’t even bend down to pick up the dog dishes. The weird thing was that he was here all summer while I was suffering so. But he had to have been planning the wedding for months, including a trip to Tennessee to see her in June that he lied about. He left me with eight dogs so he could go and cement the wedding deal. He said he was camping with the guys, and I believed him. But all of that is over and nothing that I can say, do or feel will change the outcome. Now it is time for me to realize the reality of things and really move on. The one thing that is for sure, I am better off without him, and I hope I never know another person as horrid as Brian T Bradley. I have never been treated so badly by anyone in my entire life. But to really move on I must face the past and what has happened even though it seems like a horrible nightmare. 

Now that the dust has settled and all the dots have been connected, I must face a part of my life that seems like it never existed. I was kind and loving with Brian all the seven years we were together. I embraced all the crazy things he brought into my life and home and loved him the best I could. The only thing that I could have done better was to try and have better communication with him. I did know that he was duplicitous and deceitful in my heart of hearts, and I looked the other way a lot. It is not as if he was actually out there cheating on me, but he is always in survival mode and he kept in touch with women from his past like Theodora “just in case.”. During the pandemic, he was sending his old girlfriend, Suzanne love songs via email. We talked about it, and I understood that he was still pining for her, but I couldn’t be in a relationship with a man that was doing that, so I told him he had to leave until he figured it all out. He played the suicide card and I caved. Funny how that act of kindness would backfire on me. 

In order to move on I must forgive myself for looking the other way and accepting behavior that was demeaning and deceitful to me. I must forgive myself for not honoring my intuition and allowing myself to be manipulated and used. I also must forgive him for the sake of sanity all around. I am not the one that did these terrible things, but I am just as culpable for letting them happen. They say that forgiveness will set me free, and I do know this but boy, it is damned hard. The one thing that helps is that I like the nurturing and loving part of myself, and I am proud that I was always kind and tried to help him and share what I had through the pandemic and beyond. I must now realize that I am the one that needs the love and once I really know that I am deserving it will come as it should. Happiness is possible.