Your mate cheats on you. You’ve never done anything even remotely like this. You are devastated, outraged, crushed. Over the ensuing months the many flavors of betrayal are played out.

Ultimately, your relationship comes to an end and over the succeeding years you “forgive” your mate but never forget. Again and again you replay the betrayal to others, reminding all that you were the “good” partner, the loyal and dedicated mate whilst it was your “bad” counterpart strayed.

Years later, you learn your mate eventually bottomed out, lost everything, rebuilt herself. Today you listen in disbelief as others describe him as thoughtful, caring, compassionate, spiritual. “Where was the good stuff when I was around?” you ask. You are dubious that she’s really changed.

What you don’t know is that those same friends who describe your ex as a changed woman still describe you – these many years later – as angry, bitter, and resentful. What happened?

The ego has two principal acts: One tears us down, the other inflates us. All too often, when we are “wronged” by another, we in a sense take solace in that victimization, convinced the world owes us something. After all, we’ve been good, we are the aggrieved party, we’ve done nothing wrong.

Ok, but meanwhile your former mate, the one who bottomed out, recognizes she doesn’t like the view from the gutter and sets about renewing herself. In the intervening years she picks herself up, dusts off, and begins to sing a new tune. Ahhhh, the air is nicer up here, not soiled by lies and deceit.

You, by contrast, continue to dwell in the darkness, your anger and hurt almost palpable. You are not growing at all while, ironically, she is.

In a spiritual sense, life is not about “good” vs. “bad,” it’s about consciously awakening to the imagined self (you know, the good, the bad, the ugly – all fictions of the mind). Those who have been wronged by another, who bask in their victimhood, manage simply to retard their own growth.