What if you could use betrayal to find yourself? What if that looked like understanding yourself as an expression of God?
We typically think of betrayal as one catastrophic event, but usually betrayal is a death by a thousand cuts. And whether you've had the rug yanked out from beneath you, or a slow erosion of your foundation--losing trust in yourself might be the surprise casualty of betrayal. Bestselling author, counselor, and international speaker Ali Davidson has been through betrayal and back, and she's going to talk to us about how she used betrayal as a method of metamorphosis.
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BETRAYAL, AND LEARNING TO TRUST YOURSELF AGAIN feat. Ali Davidson
Julia: [00:00:00] Hello everyone. Welcome to Becoming Divine. My name is Julia Wesley. And today I have very special guest Ali Davidson with us. She is a best-selling author, transformational coach, and international speaker. She's trained and skilled in many modalities, but it is her heart and experiences that bring healing to those who need it. For over 25 years, Ali has dedicated her life to helping women step into their greatness by harnessing their power, connecting to their desires, and helping them become their own best friend.
So thank you so much, Ali, for being with us.
Ali: [00:00:45] Thank you for having me. Really excited to be here.
Julia: [00:00:48] Excited to have you. So I know we're here to talk about betrayal and that seems like a heavy topic, and frankly, I don't even know where to start approaching it.
Where do you recommend?
Ali: [00:00:57] I like to start by telling people that studies and research shows that everyone on the planet-- okay, 95% of the people on the planet will experience some form of betrayal in their lifetime. At least once. And the interesting thing that I have found is when we talk about betrayal, most people think infidelity, right?
Cheating, which is, of course, one of the worst forms of betrayal, but the truth is we're betrayed almost daily and we don't even realize. So betrayal simply means a breaking of a promise or agreement that's either spoken or unspoken. You can be betrayed by your body.
Let's say you had this big event planned and suddenly you get the flu. All of a sudden you can't go do that. Your body has betrayed you because you were waiting and expecting and excited about doing this. And everything shifted into something you didn't want.
And that's essentially what betrayal is about. So you can be betrayed by a boss who tells you, you do this great project and I will give you a bonus. And at the end, you do the great project. And he says, sorry, I just can't, it's not in my budget. Or a friend who says, yeah, I'm happy to stay at your house and take care of your pets while you're gone.
And then, and the last minute says, sorry, I can't make it. And it's not always something that is insidious. It's not always in on purpose. It just happens where something that we expected shifts. And the feeling behind it is as the closer the betrayal is and the more traumatic, it is like infidelity, the more your worldview collapses.
So that's how I described betrayal. And it's funny because when we talk to people and start talking about it, people go, Oh my gosh, I was betrayed and this happened to me! I didn't even see it as a betrayal. And the reason I feel it's important for us to see it is because ultimately the greatest betrayal of all is the betrayal that we do to ourselves.
Julia: [00:03:06] Getting deep.
Ali: [00:03:07] Mic drop.
Julia: [00:03:09] Betrayal, the way that you're describing it, it almost sounds like a mindset.
Ali: [00:03:13] Yes. Although I think it goes deeper to me. Mindset is a wonderful tool to keep your ego busy so that your soul can move forward in the direction that you want to go.
I don't see mindset as an actual tool to advance you forward. I think of it more Oh, I'm having a crappy day. Okay. I'll do an affirmation and set my mind to be successful. But what you're really doing is keeping your ego busy with this project while you hopefully are getting in alignment with your soul.
That's how I look at it. If you look at betrayal, it goes all the way back thousands of years, right? Betrayal is a sense of a feeling of sacrifice, a feeling of abandonment. And when we think of betrayal, we always link forgiveness and betrayal together.
And I guess that's where I differ from a lot of people who teach about forgiveness because I don't believe that forgiveness is something you can choose. I don't think it's an action. I think it's a state of being, and that state of being occurs naturally when you have truly accepted what's happened and let go of any conditions or any regrets or any guilt or any bad feelings you really just accepted and that's forgiveness.
Julia: [00:04:35] Yes. I really liked that perspective on forgiveness of it being acceptance. I have a few examples of people in my life who were pushed to forgive when they're like, that's not going to be happening. I'm going to be angry until I'm not angry anymore. And eventually, that anger ran out and they got over the issue.
But I think when you try and push forgiveness to the point where it's fake, you're just compounding a problem.
Ali: [00:05:05] I agree. I think I call it a spiritual bypass.
Julia: [00:05:09] Yes. I love that word. It's one of our favorites.
Ali: [00:05:13] Yeah, it is a spiritual bypass, when you say all right. And I had it, this was born out of my own experience of my book is called Born of Betrayal: from Breakdown to Breakthrough. And it really is my experience of going through a betrayal was that all these people who loved me and wanted me to be okay kept saying to me, Oh, you have to get past the anger.
Don't be angry. Or you have to forgive and if you forgive everything will be okay. And what I found was in attempting to do it too soon, or in attempting to squash or suppress the anger, there was really only one place to go. And that was back into depression and despair and hopelessness and sadness.
But I had a wonderful coach who recognized this and she helped me really experience and express my anger in a healthy way. And that moved me emotionally up the guidance system to a better place. And what I realized in the forgiveness part was that it was much more important for me to forgive myself. And that it, my healing did not require me to forgive somebody else.
It really was about forgiving myself because then in forgiving myself, by my definition, I accepted myself. I accepted myself, both in my human form and my shadows and my limitations with love and oh, humility. And in doing that it didn't matter whether I actually forgave anybody else. You really didn't because they weren't in my life.
They were just in my head at that point.
Julia: [00:06:48] Yeah. That's a good point. I think that for many people, no one thinks about forgiveness as forgiving myself. Is this where you were talking about earlier about betrayal? The worst type of betrayal being when you betray yourself.
Ali: [00:07:03] Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not saying that men aren't betrayed.
I think to some degree, I know everyone has been betrayed. I have found that what women do with betrayal and what men do with betrayal is very different. And it's not right or wrong for either. But I think it's really important that women start to realize that when we put everyone else's needs before our own; when we say yes to things we really don't want to say yes to; when we sacrifice our desires for someone else over and over again-- that is betrayal. That is an abandonment.
And what will show up is anger and resentment and frustration, and this need to get away. And so we have to stop doing that and forgive ourselves for doing it in the first place. Because as we realize that when we're becoming divine, I love the title of your podcast.
When we keep doing these things thinking that in doing them we are loving people, and we are helping people, we start to feel these kinds of ugly feelings. Which we then abandoned ourselves about again, because we got that little voice saying, Oh, you're so crappy.
You're so selfish. You're so this you're some of that. And none of that addresses the fact that we are human beings and that we do have an ego and we can't get rid of it. It's wired into us. And we do, if we're going to go to the place where we believe we are one, which I do believe we are then we have to love and honor ourselves as much as we know and love and honor other people-- if not more.
Julia: [00:08:44] I completely agree. That's exactly right. So there's a couple of things I want to hit on there. One is that you mentioned that our ego was hardwired into us, and I fully believe that. A lot of my teaching is we're not meant to kill our ego. We're meant to heal it and to integrate it into a larger perspective so that we can hold that detailed perspective in that big picture perspective and heal our interpersonal relations as well as our relationship with ourself.
But I also, I'm really interested, if you could expand a little bit on how you see men and women interacting with betrayal differently.
Ali: [00:09:18] Ah, okay. There's been enough out there and I'm not the specialist in it, but I've studied a lot about the differences between men and women. And so men. And let's take it away from the men and women, and let's move more into the masculine and the feminine because we have both masculine and feminine attributes and qualities and energies within us.
So as a woman, I operate better in my world. And in within me when I am more in my feminine energies than my masculine and the same is true for men.
What I see has happened over the last 50 years is that when women went out into the world, they only had one model of what it looked like to be successful outside of their home, like in the work world. And what was that model? Men. And the masculine is very orderly. It's process-oriented. It's goal-oriented. It's I want to go there and I see all the steps ahead of time that I have to take the little milestones. It is more competitive. It is more assertive.
It is more concrete. It is more compartmentalized. So that just some words to describe the masculine. The feminine is I like to think of it as pregnant because the feminine creates not from here, not from where I am out into my future, but from within/ it creates from the unknown. We fall in love with this thing inside of us before we know what it's going to look like, sound like, and become.
And that's how we actually naturally create, we think of wanting to make a meal and we're experiencing each flavor as we put the recipe together. That's how we operate. We are more collaborative. We are more intuitive. We operate from this different place. So when women went out into the world and started operating in a masculine, most of the time, it was difficult for us to come home and step back into our feminine energy.
So in relation to betrayal, when we step out of what is natural within us, we are essentially betraying ourselves and becoming more something that is not as comfortable. And the evidence that it's not healthy for us is the fact that over the last 50 years, heart disease has become a number one killer for women.
And it was never that. But it's because we're forcing ourselves into a kind of energy that is irritating to our bodies and irritating to our heart. That's what I believe. And so finding that way to come back to the feminine, which allows men to go back to the masculine actually brings a healthy balance to us, to our relationships, and to the planet.
Julia: [00:12:18] Okay. That's interesting. Yeah. When you say that men, how did you phrase it? Men react to betrayal differently.
Ali: [00:12:28] Oh yeah. So when men are betrayed, they do what's natural to them, which is to immediately go into a compartmentalized view. The betrayal is over in this box.
Their work is over in this box. Their health is over in this box. Women don't do that. Women have a holistic kind of-- it's all wired together. So when we're betrayed, it affects all parts of our lives. Everything is questioned. Where a man can look at just that relationship and not let it infuse all other parts of his life.
Does that makes sense? Yeah. That's the major difference that I see. And as a result, when I'm working with a man we're just working in that area. But for women, it just goes across the board. So it's in lots of areas like the pinnacle, but it's not the only place they betrayed themselves.
Julia: [00:13:27] Oh, that's interesting. Do you find one way to be easier or healthier to work with than the other? Whether you should compartmentalize it or let it infiltrate your life?
Ali: [00:13:37] No, I think it is what it is. And I'm generalizing of course, because not all men do this and not all women do that.
But the answer to the healing of betrayal is really finding wholeness, right? Because there's a separation within us that is what causes the external world to-- if you want to look at the Law of Attraction, to bring that betrayal from the outside in, there has to have been ways in which we've been betraying ourselves.
What I'm reaching for with clients is that wholeness-- what I'm reaching for in myself and what I'm reaching for with them. And what I have learned is that knowing who I am; loving and accepting who I am and then empowering myself with that knowing and loving is what wholeness is, what makes wholeness.
So whether I'm working with a man or a woman, I still approach it from this place of we have to have you fall in love with you. We have to look at all parts of yourself, both the positive as we call it or the negative as we call it because I don't see them as parts of us that are positive or negative.
I just see them as a part of the whole and accept and understand and love that part. And then we have to gather all this yummy stuff and then look at what we want to create in the world and a piece of that empowerment is coming to a place of trusting yourself.
And that's one of the things that disappears when we're betrayed, because suddenly what we thought was true, isn't. And so we start to question whether we can trust ourselves. So it starts with trusting, knowing, loving, and then empowering. And that's what takes us to wholeness. It's magical, right? Then they take them to the playground, which is a whole nother programming and a concept of mine. But how do we get there?
I use a lot of different tools for myself. I know that when I really know that I am not alone in the universe, that I am one with God, source, whatever power you want to call it. And I can in the moment acknowledge that. And that's when miracles occur and that's when healing happens. And I even hate the word healing because as a counselor and a coach, people work on things and then go out into the world and experience something else and then come back and go, ooh, that same thought is there.
I didn't get it. It's not that you didn't get it. It's not that it didn't heal. It's that the transformation happens in increments. We can only transform as far as we can handle it until we experienced more of ourselves and then transform again. And so I think of it as shifting and transformation and transfiguration and metamorphosis, rather than healing.
Cause even if you fall and break a bone you'll always have that scar. The bone will be stronger. It'll be okay. But scar is still there. It doesn't go away
Julia: [00:16:44] Yeah. That doesn't mean it's not healed though. Yeah. Yeah.
Ali: [00:16:47] It's just different. It's changed.
Julia: [00:16:49] Yeah, exactly. So back to the idea of trusting yourself, I don't necessarily see myself as someone who's gone through a hard line betrayal, but even I have a hard time trusting myself with like big things. How do you help someone trust themselves?
Ali: [00:17:07] I think we all have unconscious tools that we don't realize we have, that we use for the little stuff. And so that's where I began. Like what do you use for the little decisions that you make that helped you to know that that you can trust yourself?
I used to really pat myself on the back for being one of these people who just automatically trusted everybody. And when I would talk to somebody, oh, no, not me. I don't trust anybody until they prove themselves to me. And I'd be like, Oh, I trust everybody, and aren't I cool? And then I realized that both were bullshit. That the only reason I trusted everybody was because I didn't trust me. And I would rather trust everybody else and make them responsible than to trust myself and make myself responsible.
Oh yeah.
Julia: [00:18:01] That is a big one.
Ali: [00:18:02] Yeah. And so that's where I began is, where in your life have you trusted yourself and what was the strategy you used? For some it's it can go way off charts Oh, I used a muscle memory. I used a pendulum. I used. The cards, the divinity, that area. Or some would say, I would look at my past history and say, where is something similar to this?
And did I make it through? Some people look at what's the worst case scenario when I have this big decision to make, and would I survive it? And if I would survive it, then is it worth doing? Some people would look at pros and cons. There's all kinds of ways that we make decisions, but in the end, it's being willing to hold yourself responsible for the outcome, whether it is the outcome you want or not.
Julia: [00:18:55] Getting someone to the point where they hold themselves responsible for an outcome that they don't want is a tall order. Yeah. How do you help people get there?
Ali: [00:19:07] Part of it, I think is, again, the great thing about the ego is not only does it protect us from lions and tigers and bears, it also looks at everything from a past experience.
Cause that's all it has. And so we can tap into our past and say, what was similar? How did that come out? Also keeping in mind that some past experiences we're looking at now is simply a perception. It might not have happened exactly like that, but whatever we perceive it to have been, that's where we're making our decision from.
And so when I look back on things that have happened that I didn't want and I look far enough back, I can then move forward from that experience and say what was the ultimate thing that occurred. What if I hadn't taken that road? What if I had shifted and went this way? What would have been missing in my life today?
And in most cases, what we find is we can't even imagine that because there was something so much more valuable, ultimately in this experience. It's still not what we want, but that's when we also move into that place of our spiritual beliefs. And for me, and for the people that I work with, it's accepting that every moment is perfect.
Every moment is divinely orchestrated with us consciously or with us unconsciously. We're still a part of the equation. And so first you'd go into that belief system and the mind, and then you take them into the heart of it.
And what really is the gem and the beauty that came out of who are you today as a result of that experience? What have you learned that is now changing who you are in this moment and what really is important? Because I learned a lot about things that the outside world tells us is really important, like money and the house and status and all that. And realize that, wow, I can be stripped of everything and-- though, it's not like I'm happy that I was stripped of everything, but there is a sense of freedom that comes from knowing that I can have everything gone and still be alive. Still be okay. Still laugh at something funny. Still find joy in a beautiful day.
So that's the spiritual part that comes in. That we know there is no good or bad. It just is what it is. I love that because we get to decide whether we want to make it good or bad.
Julia: [00:21:41] Yeah. It is hard to put into context when you don't necessarily will have any context.
Because some things, they undoubtedly suck. But it's when you come to the point of acceptance of the situation as it is. And I don't mean acceptance as complacency to what it is. Just acknowledging that, this situation,? I don't like it.
That's acceptance, that's even surrender.
And then when you get to that little neutral point, right? Then you have the ability to take action. Because you've recognized what is, you've become conscious, and so now your unconscious thoughts and beliefs can no longer seize control of the reins because you've dropped them. And then we get to take actions and make choices.
Because it is such a complex, I don't want to call it just a 'spiritual concept' because it's just the way things are. But it's sometimes difficult, for me, I'm like, I didn't want to manifest that, darn it. Let me blame someone else for that. Yeah.
Ali: [00:22:41] Yeah. And that brings up two things, one is that it is important for us as human beings to acknowledge the human part of us. I did a speech once in church. And I said to the audience, can you believe that you came from oneness from the allness, from this place where you are perfect? And people say, yes. Okay.
And do you believe that when you die, you go and become part of this oneness, this love again? And they said, yes. And I said, then why is this journey all about enlightenment? Aren't you already that? If that makes no sense to me, why would we put ourselves through this physical experience of this manifestation of human beingness if the purpose isn't to experience that?
Yeah. It's not about becoming enlightened. We already are. Because it is about being fully human and fully divine at the same time, which is really the message that Jesus Christ was talking about. And so the part of us that's really fully human is this jumble of neurons that has accumulated all these experiences.
And from these experiences, on an unconscious level, has created these beliefs which manifests daily. 95% of everything we do comes from that. So when we talk about raising our consciousness or becoming higher consciousness in my mind, I'm thinking of the iceberg, right? And the iceberg being the tip is our conscious ego and the what's below the water is our unconscious mind.
So if our experience here in this planet is to become fully human and fully the mind, then to me, what it's saying is we're trying to lower the water so that more and more of who we are becomes conscious in this experience.
So what you're saying is it is about being in this moment and being able to surrender and go, yeah. That's sucks. And be okay with the fact that you feel that. And that doesn't mean that it's 'wrong'.
And I think that's the distinction, people say when I think about what happened, I still get angry. Does that mean that I haven't transformed it and I haven't healed it? And I'm like when you watch a scary movie, do you get scared? Did you feel your heart racing? They're like, yeah. I said, do you watch, when you watch a movie and it's really sad, you find yourself crying? So is it okay for you to remember something that is upsetting and be upset?
What's the difference, right? That doesn't again mean that you haven't moved beyond it. When I tell a sad story, it's sad. If I tell us that story with this laughter and there's an incongruency people go, what the hell? It doesn't make sense. Yeah. So yeah, it's okay to say that was not something I enjoyed.
That is not something I wanted. That was not something I liked. And, what's next?
Julia: [00:25:49] Yeah, exactly.
I lost my train of thought. Back to talking about enlightenment and you were telling your church, aren't we already enlightened.? And as soon as you said that, it was like, yes, we sure are.
It's just, we come here and we tell ourselves that this is a completely different place. This isn't divine. And then we create an entirely new set of rules, which are not necessarily based on the way of the rest of the universe. We think we're special. And through that, in these different parameters that we have set for ourselves, all of a sudden, we have to try and reach enlightenment again as if it as if we didn't come from it. As if we aren't already there.
And I think it's an interesting thing to claim for yourself because. Then once you stop trying to strive for it, and then you can just let it come to you, then you're like, Oh, now with this new knowledge, what do I want to do with my life? Rather than reinforcing the idea that I'm just, some dumb moron stumbling around in the dark.
And I think it's a powerful notion because I'm not saying that as soon as you claim enlightenment for yourself, all of a sudden everything's going to change and everything-- you could. It could have, I'm going to leave that door open for you. But you'll probably just stop putting so much pressure on yourself or stop placing so many expectations on yourself, or maybe stop holding yourself up to standards that you now recognize as ridiculous.
And maybe you'll let the universe work with you instead. Maybe you're no longer someone who has to long haul it alone. And anytime I listen to a guru speak, it's all about sneaky ways to get you to realize that you already are enlightened. And that you're just pretending that you're not. Which is of course the illusion, the whole pretending thing.
And I'm not claiming to act or carry the perspective of an enlightened individual throughout my day, all the time. But I do have flashes of brilliance and I think everyone does. And I think the more that you trust those flashes of brilliance, the more that you'll be able to transform your life. Which I'm really intrigued by the idea of using betrayal to transform your life.
Because it brings to mind this idea that betrayal was created from a life that you had built. And so you're using that betrayal to give yourself a phoenix kind of a moment.
Ali: [00:28:08] And if you believe that we are one, if you believe that we are-- I don't want to get into a religious concept of God, but I use God just because it's what I know.
But if you truly believe that we are one with God, then the very first betrayal is when we see ourselves as separate. And so we spend a lifetime not wanting to be alone. Think about it, right? Our first separation is from our mother and then our last separation is when we leave this life and so many people are like, oh, you're dying.
But if we can see it as one continuum of our spirit, then we know that we are never separate. And that's the piece that ultimately is when we really accept; that we are fully divine having a fully human experience for the only purpose to be the experience itself.
So a lot of what I believe today comes through my own experience and working with so many people. And then having the period of time where I was with an infant that wasn't my child, and watching this infant from zero to about five years old. Spending enough time with him and seeing who he was before he got conditioned pattern. Before the conscious mind, the ego took over and how natural it was for him to reach for something that he desired without judgment. It's that internal little voice we have that judges us. What if I fail? If we had that fight when we were learning to walk, there'd be a whole lot of us crawling.
Yeah. We would have given up, yeah. And so in the end, that's where I want to help people to go. To a place where they recognize that we will always be loved, that we will always be accepted for who we are.
So it's more than just healing the heart, the broken heart for a man or a woman who's been betrayed by a spouse or a partner. It's so much deeper than that.
And one of the things that I just recently learned, I'd love to share with your audience is that because I believe in the law of attraction and all that, this is nothing new. There's nothing new under the sun, right? We're all just repeating the same thing in different words, with a different voice that perhaps somebody will hear differently. But right. What I learned recently was it's not about just creating a dream and then imagining yourself having the dream and feeling the feelings of the dream that brings the dream to you.
It is in every single moment. When my mind, my ego says you can't have that, that I stop and go, hey, love ya. Thanks for that. But what if I could? Yeah, in that moment, right? That we really keep the manifestation of our true desire, our deepest desire of experiencing this. Without judgment, we don't stop the flow.
So it's something that I've been practicing literally for the last couple of weeks. Like just really being conscious of my thoughts every time I have that fearful questioning judgmental thought to simply stop and acknowledge that part of me. And thank that part of me and then ask myself, what if that's not true?
What if this is true? And just being in the moment to moment and miracles are happening all around me. It requires a relationship with yourself.
Julia: [00:31:56] I recently had a between lives regression session done. And I regressed back to that moment of distinction, first distinction. First becoming aware of myself. And it was so traumatic. I had to, as like a little baby soul, had to be coached and been like it's okay. It's all right. And because I am, here as Julia, the Julia ego, who is so independent, I love it. I thrive in it.
That surprised the hell out of me that would have been so traumatic, but you're right. The closest that we come to it here as human is community. You're so used to being part of that little nursery-- that recognizing you as being distinct, not separate, but feels different.
You're like, oh no, thank you. I want no part of this. It very much reminds me of throughout my childhood, up until about the hormones hit, I really felt still part of everything. And then, real identity set in as a human. Then I was like, this sucks. I don't want to be different.
I don't want to be any of this. Because you don't feel like you're part of everything again. And I guess that's another betrayal. A betrayal of self, because if I had just honored my differences, I could have enjoyed things a heck of a lot more. But yeah it's just funny how we, again, back to recycling lessons, again and again, I was recycling this idea of separation as an illusion.
I'm just distinct. I'm not separate,
Ali: [00:33:28] Yeah and we know neurologically, we are hardwired for community. We are hard-wired to belong. And when you think about it, we yearn for community. We yearn for partnership. We were looking to complete ourselves. This feeling of 'I'll be complete when I know that I'm loved and I have this home and family and relationship. And oh, to be completely alone, it'd be really sad.' And again, it's this part of the story of that physical separation from our spiritual self. And then not seeing or understanding that spiritual part can never be separated from us.
And I say to my clients a lot, I'm like, look, there's only one person who I can guarantee you will be with you from the moment you're born until the moment you die. If you don't like that person you're in trouble. Yeah. Yeah. That's you.
And so as much as we have relationship and we have connections, if we don't have a true, honest, deep understanding, love connection with ourselves-- and I don't mean in an egocentric narcissistic way, but the same way that we did when we were children? We didn't question whether somebody loved us or question whether we were worthy of that.
We didn't question whether we had the skill or ability or we fail, or we didn't, we just. We were just beating and that's the striving in this life. If we have any striving at all. Yeah,
Julia: [00:35:01] I agree. And it's not easy. No. And I also think it comes back to the idea of that spiritual part of us can never 'go away'. And so that little spiritual part of us is that little piece of enlightenment that we keep striving for and running towards. And it's just another evidence that it's never gone. It's always been there. Yeah.
So what made you want to reach out to other people about betrayal? What motivates you to do this work?
Ali: [00:35:31] I'll tell you a little bit of my story. I was the oldest child in an immigrant family. My family came from the island of Cyprus, the first generation born American. So I grew up in a culture that was half Greek, half American.
So right there, there was a distinction. And I grew up with a very authoritative father. There was a lot of abuse and stuff that I grew up with. And my M.O. was as the oldest child to protect everybody, to be the smartest, to be the fastest, to be the most creative, to be the most entertaining.
So that I could somehow hide from my own vulnerability, my own fears, my own scared little girl. But also from the world. And so that was my first betrayal. My first betrayal was with my father. He molested me when I was a little girl, but then I continued that betrayal of me very early on being who I thought other people needed me to be.
And fast forward, many betrayals little things here and there, little losses here and there. In my second marriage, the biggest betrayal of all was finding out that my husband and my best friend of 25 years were having an affair and in a flash, my whole life changed. My whole life. Everything about my life just went upside down and dark.
I remember when I found out, I remember having that, I call it my Scarlet O'Hara moment. You might be too young to know, Gone With The Wind. But if your listeners are older, like me, they'll remember this scene in which she is standing with the burning of Atlanta behind her. And she says, as God is my witness, I will never go hungry again.
And that was my moment of, are you kidding me? I have to go through this too? Because I was already a coach and a counselor, and I'd already had losses and things that I've learned from, in things that I was teaching people, but I had not had this level of betrayal.
So I went off. I left my town. I left my friends. I went to a whole new place. I lived in one place for 25 years. I left everything, started fresh in a town where it rained all the time. And I was by myself. And the only thing I had was me and God. And I started getting all these messages-- boom, write this book. And I thought, oh, I don't want to write this book!
And I had to, and when I wrote the book, what I realized later was that it was my own form of therapy. Because I wrote it as if I was writing to a friend. And every time I went to write a new chapter, I would go to the beginning of the book and read the beginning again and all the way through to that where I ended and then I'd write.
And I do that every single time. And in doing that, I started to recognize myself. I started to connect with who I was. Started to appreciate and love that part of myself. So I did my own therapy. And then finally, I thought, okay, it was done. It was for me.
And then things just were not working out in my life.
They just still were not working out. What the hell? And my message was, you gotta publish this book. And I'm like, ooh. And I did. And so now I feel like I have stepped into a whole new adventure for myself, where I'm partnering with spirit where I'm listening.
And when I have my doubts, I got to do my own work. To come back to a place where I, again, trust my knowing, trust myself, trust that no matter what I'm going to be okay. Nothing can be taken from me because I am everything already. Everything is me.
So that was what I felt compelled by God by spirit, to put my voice out there in the world for people who could only hear it from me. That betrayal is the greatest opportunity for you to find yourself-- your true self. And that letting it be the thing that takes you down is a choice. And I'll tell you when it first happened to me, all these women came out of the woodwork to tell me about their story.
And I'm like, oh, I'm just drinking this stuff up. But what was really disheartening was that a lot of these women, they had been betrayed eight, 10, 12 years earlier and were still hooked into that story. Still feeling like their life was taken from them and that they can't move forward. And I thought I can't be that.
I just can't be that. Yeah. I hope that answers your question. I feel like there's such a gift. And that's why the book is called Born Of Betrayal because what was born was me. And what could be born out of that story for anybody is a new relationship with themselves. Which will, I believe, especially for women, when we women stop betraying ourselves, then we can step into our true essence.
And when we do that, the world gets a little softer and all these things that we're afraid of, it really goes away when we start having a better relationship with ourselves. Because we can't stop judging the world if we're still judging us.
Julia: [00:40:37] Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing your story and all your wisdom with us, Ali. I really appreciate it. Do you want to tell everyone where they can find you?
Ali: [00:40:44] Sure. You can go to my website, which is www.coachalidavidson.com. If you'd like to talk to me, you can book a 30-minute free consultation with me and just get to know each other and see if I can be of service.
You can go to Amazon for my book. It's called Born of Betrayal: from Breakdown to Breakthrough. And I just know that everything is perfect in your life, even when you think it's not. And that when you start to look at it from that place, new insights come and a new relationship is born with you and there is nothing more important.
Julia: [00:41:21] That's beautiful. Thank you so much. And thank you for listening everyone. We'll see you next time.