Episode Details

Betrayal, in Leszek Erazmus's definition, is being deceived, harmed or let down by someone you trusted, in a way that goes against the values you thought you shared. What interests him is what it does afterward, which is that people stop living in ordinary time and start living in fight or flight, all day and then overnight, in a state the body was only ever built to hold for a few minutes.

Leszek Erazmus is a double certified life coach and a consulting hypnotist based in the Portland, Oregon area, working with clients online and in person. He has worked across a wide range of issues but has increasingly focused on betrayal, and he says why: he has been through two of his own, one that took him twenty years to process and one that took five, and he does not want anyone else spending a quarter of a century on it. He calls what someone comes out the other side of a rebirth, and is candid that the cost of that is something in you having to end.

He and Lisa start with the two directions betrayal pushes people. Outward, into anger at the person who did it, which at least generates energy. Or inward, into shame and questions about your own worth, which he considers the harder one because it can slowly rewrite someone's identity, with the betrayal itself submitted as the evidence. From there he spends time dismantling what people assume hypnosis is, and explains how it differs from talk therapy: cognitive and narrative on one side, experiential and metaphorical on the other, and no requirement to describe what happened. He is careful to say the two work well together and that severely traumatized people should keep the talk therapy going.

The second half turns to what Lisa calls systemic betrayal, where the harm is coming from the court rather than from a person, and where the sense of powerlessness is renewed at every hearing. Leszek's approach begins with rebuilding an internal place of safety, then uses a technique developed for combat veterans in which someone watches their own history at two removes and then alters what they are watching, which is aimed at loosening the link between an event and the meaning attached to it. He closes with something anyone can use tomorrow: pressing the toes into the floor, tensing and releasing the large muscles of the legs, gently rubbing the fingertips, and a longer self-touch routine called havening for the morning of a hearing.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• What betrayal does to the nervous system, and why fight or flight isn't survivable long term
• The two directions betrayal sends people, and why the inward one is harder to reverse
• What therapeutic hypnosis actually is, and the myths that keep people away from it
• Why hypnosis doesn't require you to describe what happened to you
• How to work on betrayal by a system, not only betrayal by a person
• The movie theater technique, and putting space between an event and what it means
• Three grounding techniques you can use in a courtroom without anyone noticing
• Havening: the routine Leszek gives every client, and how to use it before a hearing

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 What betrayal is, and Leszek's own two
5:00 The two directions it sends people: outward anger, inward blame
8:00 Hypnosis myths: mind control, sleep, and spilling your secrets
11:00 What a session is, and how it sits alongside talk therapy
13:00 Why hypnosis doesn't require you to retell the story
17:00 The dominoes, and how the change shows up days later
18:00 Betrayal by the system, and rebuilding a sense of safety first
20:30 The movie theater technique, and space between event and meaning
25:00 Doom scrolling, agency, and giving up too soon
31:00 Three grounding techniques nobody will notice you doing
35:0