“No matter how much it may cost us, we need triangles for the sake of our souls. Triangles open things up and potentially reveal aspects of our innermost nature. This may be one reason why attempts at ‘sexual revolution’ so often become dull and boring. There is no tension and no conflict. Our inner world is no longer challenged.”
— Relationships and How to Survive Them, Liz Greene∗
Beyond her discussion of Freud’s contribution to the understanding of Oedipal struggles and the hidden dynamics of love triangles, Liz Greene has something even more important to say about the archetypal nature of the eternal triangle—namely, that it is a key factor in the processes of human spiritual transformation.
The Archetypal Triangle and the Drama of Betrayal
The reason for this is that the drama of the love triangle opens a wound that can be healed only at the level of the soul.
It is a drama in which feelings of humiliation, rejection, wounded self-esteem, and the desire for revenge reach critical intensity in the position of the Betrayed.
It is a drama in which the suffering of the Betrayer is no less, because beneath the appearance of possessing the love of two people lies an inner crucifixion by incompatible desires, as well as the effects of a strange emotional arithmetic in which two halves add up to less than one.
It is a drama in which the “Instrument of Betrayal” suffers no less either, for they too carry hidden moral conflicts, along with a deeply buried insecurity that one day the fate of the abandoned partner may also befall them.
But, as Liz Greene points out, the story of three is an archetypal story. It carries a crucial message for the one who finds themselves in the agony of the eternal triangle and, through the act of betrayal and infidelity, has descended into a hell of intensely painful emotions. That message is this: the true purpose of human relationships is not happiness, but love.
Love at the level of the empirical self—the ego—and love at the level of the soul, the immortal part of us, are profoundly different. When it is time for the soul to develop, life creates conditions of betrayal and wounding that lead to the birth of a love of a different order.
“Relationship triangles are an archetypal dimension of human life. We do not ever escape them, in one form or another. We also tend to handle them rather badly when they enter our lives. That is understandable, because triangles are usually evocative of very painful emotions, regardless of the point of the triangle on which we find ourselves. We may have to cope with feelings of jealousy, humiliation, and betrayal. Or we may have to live with the sense of being a betrayer—of being dishonest, of injuring someone. We may feel all these feelings at once, as well as the conviction of being a failure.
The emotions that are involved in triangular relationships are often agonising, and cut away at self-esteem. Because triangles confront us with very difficult emotions, we will usually find ourselves trying to blame someone for the presence of a triangle in our lives. Either we blame ourselves or we blame one of the other two people. But triangles are indeed archetypal—and if we have any question about their universality, we need only read the literature of the last three thousand years. Anything archetypal presents us with a world of purposeful patterns and intelligent inner development. There is something about the experience of the triangle which can be one of our most powerful means of transformation and growth, unpleasant and painful though it is.
Betrayal, whether one is the betrayer or the betrayed, does something to us which potentially could be of enormous value.
Nothing enters our lives that is not in some way connected with our individual journey. This does not imply blame or causality, but it does imply a deeper meaning which may be transformative for the individual who is prepared to seek that meaning. If a triangle enters one’s life, it is there for something. If we choose to react solely with bitterness and rage, that is our choice. But we could also choose to make the triangle a springboard for some real soul-searching. This is particularly difficult because the experience of humiliation usually invokes all the defence systems of infancy, and it is very hard to move beyond such primal responses to a more detached perspective.”
— The Eternal Triangle, Liz Greene
This last point is particularly important for anyone caught in the trap of triangular relationships. The intensity of the experience—especially for the betrayed, abandoned, or neglected partner—is immense because deeper layers of the psyche are involved. This is the realm of archetypes and the most primitive strata of the human psyche—the same layers we observe in their purest form in the emotional reactions of small children (see the article on The Abduction of Persephone).
It becomes clear why the challenge of an archetypal pattern is of such significance. The problem lies not so much in the fact that the feelings are agonizing, but in the fact that they cannot be stopped by personal will or conscious intention.
There is only one way out of hell, and it is called spiritual transformation. It involves a radical inner change, after which we are no longer the same.
If the transformation does not take place, even physical separation cannot make the feelings of betrayal and resentment disappear. Wanting to stop them is like standing in the middle of a road—no matter how much you want to reach the end immediately, you cannot. Teleportation is impossible. Whether we like it or not, we must continue forward, burning in the fire of calcination in order to transform our primal passions.
Only when those parts of us that are clinging to the external, the concrete, and the material finally find rest in the realm of the dead will we be able to open a new page of life. Before that, our childish, demanding, dependent, pressuring, accusing, and self-accusing parts must reach ash and die.
Only those who have attempted to forgive the betrayal inherent in triangular relationships know how extraordinarily difficult this is.
For the person who chooses to use betrayal as a springboard for spiritual development, understanding the archetypal foundation of such an experience helps them not to take what is happening personally. As Liz Greene says, “triangles are universal,” and in this sense, such an experience from the realm of hell binds us to the rest of humanity as a whole.
Types of Triangles
“There are different kinds of triangles, and not all of them concern sexual relationships between adults. Even if we restrict ourselves to sexual triangles, we find that they appear in a wide variety of forms. Sexual triangles are not always made of the same grand and dramatic material as Tristan and Isolde.
In some love triangles, all three points are clearly defined—there are two partners and a third person who is involved with one of them, and there is no movement within the relationship. The triangle is static and may last for many years, until one of the three participants dies.
In other love triangles, one of the points is constantly changing. A person may engage in a series of affairs, as was the case with John F. Kennedy, whose turnover was impressive. Yet both situations are triangles, and although we tend to assign a higher romantic value to the first, both evoke the same spectrum of archetypal emotions.
In addition to triangles in which sexual involvement includes every possible combination between the sexes, there are many other forms of triangular relationships. The most fundamental triangle is that between parents and children. Triangles may also involve friendship. More complex are triangles involving non-human companions.
One may feel jealousy and betrayal because of a partner’s devotion to work, artistic creativity, or spiritual development. Such triangles can provoke exactly the same feelings as sexual ones. When one partner withdraws into a creative space, the other may feel abandoned by the person they live with, and this can generate enormous jealousy. The creative process is an act of love… and if one loves one’s work, this can arouse intense jealousy.
It may sound absurd, but a person may feel extremely jealous, hurt, distressed, and abandoned—even if they never admit it publicly—because their partner is deeply attached to a cat or a dog. All these triangles may seem unrelated, yet they have one thing in common: love is no longer exclusive. And when we are forced to share our partner’s love—whether with another person or with something intangible, such as fantasy or spirit—we may feel betrayed, diminished, and deprived.”
— The Eternal Triangle, Liz Greene
The Three Angles of the Triangle:
The Betrayer, the Betrayed, and the Instrument of Betrayal
“… Some people experience only one of these points in a lifetime, and some are experienced in all three.
The Betrayer is the person who apparently chooses to get involved in the triangle. I use the word ‘apparently’ because one cannot always be sure how much conscious choice there really is, and one cannot be sure how much collusion exists between Betrayer and Betrayed as well. But whatever might be at work beneath the surface, the Betrayer is a divided soul. There is a love or attraction or need for two different things. Most of us carry the assumption that love should be exclusive, even if on a conscious level we profess a more liberal perspective. Because of the values of our Judeo-Christian heritage, we are brought up to believe that if our love is not exclusive, it is not love, and we are no longer ’good’ people. We have failed, or we are selfish and unfeeling. When we experience this kind of deep inner division, it is therefore extremely difficult to face. It is much easier for the Betrayer to come up with a list of justifications for why he or she is committing the act of betrayal. We do not often hear the Betrayer say, ‘I am divided. I am torn in half.’ More commonly, what we hear is: ‘My partner is treating me very badly. He/She is not giving me A, B, C, and D, and I need these things in order to be happy. Therefore I have a justification for looking elsewhere.’
All three points on the triangle are secretly interchangeable.
At the next point of the triangle is the Betrayed, who is apparently the unwilling victim of the Betrayer’s inability to love exclusively. … But the Betrayed generally believes that he or she is loyal, and it is the other person who is disloyal.
Finally, at the third point of the triangle, there is the Instrument of Betrayal. This is the person who apparently enters an already existing relationship between two people and threatens to destroy or change it… In fact, the Instrument of Betrayal may feel himself or herself to be a victim, and may perceive the Betrayed as the predator. We can begin to glimpse the secret identity between these two points of the triangle.
There are people who move round the triangle and try all three points during the course of their lives, sometimes many times. There are other people who stick with one point exclusively, and always get betrayed in their relationships, or always wind up playing the Betrayer. Or they are always the Instrument of Betrayal, and keep getting involved with people who are attached elsewhere.”
The Inner Identity of the Three Positions
Thus, in triangular relationships, there are three positions, and these positions are not only interchangeable but inwardly identical. The reason for this is that all three parts of this archetypal relationship are represented within our own psyche. Identifying with one corner of the triangle does not make the other two disappear; they simply become externalized through another person.
This is why Liz Greene repeatedly uses the word “apparently.” In our relationships, the visible and the invisible often do not merely diverge—they may be opposites. This is linked to the complementary function of the unconscious.
What we experience as betrayal occurs with the hidden consent—and sometimes even the desire—of the unconscious psyche of the betrayed person.
For example, the betrayed or abandoned individual may be deeply unhappy in the relationship but lack the inner resources to leave it. In such cases, the partner’s infidelity unconsciously fulfils the betrayed person’s hidden wish for the relationship to collapse—one in which happiness has long since vanished, replaced by habit, power struggles, or fear of change.
In this sense, the so-called Instrument of Betrayal is nothing more than an Instrument of Change, arriving to destroy something that is no longer alive. At times, this role resembles a corkscrew removing the stopper from a bottle of wine. I realize that such a metaphor may deeply unsettle those who adhere to a romantic definition of love, but romantic infatuation is not love—and that is precisely why it eventually fades. Relationships that begin as love triangles often dissolve once they have served their purpose.
It is therefore important to understand that the true cause of infidelity is not the appearance of a new romantic object. The true cause is a conscious or unconscious conflict between the two partners. Power struggles, disguised as love, lie at the heart of the hidden dynamics of love triangles.
This becomes particularly clear when the Betrayed directs more anger and blame toward the Instrument of Betrayal than toward the Betrayer—or when the Instrument of Betrayal harbors accusations of inadequacy toward the Betrayed. In such mutual accusations, it is not difficult to see two parties disputing ownership of the same “prey.”
Four Basic Groups of Triangles
“We can also think of triangles as belonging to four basic groups.
First, we have the usual family triangles, which this essay is primarily concerned with. We also have power triangles and protective triangles. These two kinds of triangles are not separate, although there is a slight difference between them. Both have a very distinctive flavour, and the reasons they enter a person’s life are not entirely rooted in the family inheritance.
A protective triangle, for example, may involve a man or a woman who needs to form an additional relationship outside the established one because they feel deeply inadequate inwardly. They are flooded by profound feelings of insecurity and feel threatened if they become too committed—if they put all their eggs in one basket. That would make them too vulnerable, and rejection would be unbearable. The triangle is then unconsciously created as a protective mechanism. If they are abandoned by one partner, they will always have the other. This is not usually done consciously, but it is a powerful motivating factor in many triangles.
We also have triangles in pursuit of the impossible. These may overlap with family triangles, as well as with protective and power triangles. But there is a special ingredient in the pursuit of the impossible, and often the deeper motivation is artistic or spiritual. Sometimes, when we seek impossible love, it may have very little to do with human beings at all. Yet we can translate our creative or mystical longings into the pursuit of what we cannot have. In this way we open a dimension in the psyche that has more to do with creative fantasy than with relationships. The artist’s muse is usually not his wife or her husband. These triangles may involve elements of early family dynamics or include protective motives, but they need to be understood from a different perspective.
The final group—triangles that reflect an unlived psychic life—includes everything else. When we look more deeply into family triangles, we must always ask ourselves why we so desperately want closeness with a particular parent. What does that parent mean to us? Why is it not a problem for us to be indifferent to one parent, while we demand nothing less than absolute fusion with the other? Inevitably, in the end, we discover pieces of our own soul that have grown together with the points of the triangle—every triangle, whether motivated by family dynamics, power struggles, protective mechanisms, or all of these together. There are exceptions, of course, because there are always exceptions to every psychological model.
The main point, however, is that when a triangle enters our life, regardless of which point we occupy, it brings us a message about a dimension within us that we have not recognized or lived. If the triangle pattern continues to reproduce itself, then the message is truly important, and we must hear what it is trying to tell us.”
— Liz Greene, “The Eternal Triangle”, Astro.com
In short, the message carried by repeating triangular relationships is that the time has come to seek within ourselves what we have so far sought outside. This message is nothing other than a call to spiritual awakening—to a change of direction from outer to inner, in which our desires undergo transformation and we begin to discover the different symbolic ways in which they can be fulfilled (see “Excessive passion seeks defeat”).
For in the dusk of our darkest and most unwanted psychic experiences lies the doorway to our unlived life. That unlived life can mean many things, but among them the most important is what we associate with alchemical gold and the aim of individuation—the birth of the Self. It is a sense of inner value and stability that does not depend on the material: on the external and the concrete. By a paradoxical logic, genuine self-confidence grows in direct proportion to the integrated inner “darkness”—all those heavy feelings of inferiority that the dramas of love triangles so effectively bring to the surface.
Only the person who has stepped out of the neurotic, immature position of being only “white and good,” and has taken possession of their inner demons, can have a real sense of inner value. Only integrated darkness can deal with our fears of rejection or criticism—for can you frighten a wet person with rain? Only integrated darkness can give us the experience of wholeness, and only in the wholeness of our own qualities and reactions do we finally stop comparing ourselves with others and discover our uniqueness—the only antidote to jealousy. Only integrated darkness carries the softness of unfeigned humility and authentic compassion—the true fabric of love, free of power struggles or emotional dependencies.
“There is no formula to cope with the pain of betrayal. But an archetypal perspective can help us to look at things differently, although the pain cannot be explained or imagined away. There is no remedy for this kind of pain. But there is a difference between blind pain and pain that is accompanied by understanding. The latter has a transformative effect.
When there is no consciousness, triangles do tend to repeat themselves—different characters, same script. Some triangles are truly transformative. They do break apart an old pattern, and the new relationship is genuinely much happier and more rewarding. Or the triangle serves the purpose of freeing energy, freeing inner potentials, and even if the old relationship is re-established, or one winds up with neither party, everything has changed. But we are still ourselves, however much we try to rearrange our outer lives, and if an inner issue has not been dealt with, the same patterns will begin to arise in the new relationship. The compatibility may be greater with another partner, but one must still deal with one’s own psyche.”
–Liz Greene, The Eternal Triangle, Astro.com
The Spiritual Meaning of Betrayal
By now it is probably becoming clear why Liz Greene regards betrayal within the love triangle as a springboard for spiritual transformation: it is the way through which deeper and more authentic forms of love are born. As long as we have not freed ourselves from our fear of rejection and our emotional dependency, we will continue to enter repeating triangular relationships. The same applies to the development of humility and respect for the other’s choices, as well as to self-confidence that includes the acceptance of our own weaknesses and imperfections.
The triangular equation of love will continue to challenge us until we understand that the function of betrayal is to bring us back to ourselves—to urge us to place the soul first in the relationship between ourselves and the object of our feelings. It is as if we are once again in a triangle, but this time the third point is not another person, but our own soul. This is the point that guarantees freedom within the couple: a constantly open angle in the relationship between two people, reminding us that love is not about having, but about being—and that it is something immeasurably greater than partnership alone.
“We may enter partnership with the hope that it will fulfil us and put an end to our need or loneliness. Reality, however, is that this inevitably leads to death. Even when love flourishes within partnership, the incompleteness of the soul remains, and partnership cannot fill it. To engage with this very deep and very human incompleteness leads us to the greatest mysteries of life, to the spiritual and religious dimensions.”
Bert Hellinger
As Hellinger writes, even those of us who are fortunate enough to have happy partnerships cannot have the gap of our inner incompleteness filled by anything belonging to the earthly realm. This is why every development of partnership is, in a sense, a growth toward death. Jung says essentially the same when he speaks of the path of individuation, of withdrawing projections and breaking away from what we call emotional dependency.
“On this emotional bond, generally speaking, far too much is staked. It also contains projections that must be withdrawn if one is to arrive at oneself and at objectivity. Emotional relationships are relationships of desire, burdened with compulsion and lack of freedom: something is expected from the other, and in this way both the other person and we ourselves become unfree. Objective knowledge lies hidden behind emotional relatedness; it seems that this is the great secret—only through it is true coniunctio possible.”
C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 292
Since coniunctio refers to the union of the inner masculine and the inner feminine—the “mystical marriage” of the alchemists—when we speak of bonding, it is important to understand that the capacity for emotional bonding is also the capacity for deep transformation. But this is a different kind of bonding from remaining in an unhappy relationship, enduring, forgiving compulsively, or retaliating with harm. We might call it “bonding with oneself within the relationship with the other.” When we know that the solution lies not outside us but within, we do bond—but not with the other person. We bond with our own growth.
Without bonding there is no transformation, because only when the pain of betrayal touches the very core of our being is there no other way out of hell except to cling to our own soul. Only then does something deep within us begin to change, and we begin to understand that the Instrument of Betrayal was, in fact, an Instrument of our own development.
Conclusion
Thus, the purpose of betrayal is not to harm us, but quite the opposite—to help us build inner value in which fear of rejection no longer exists. Its purpose is not to destroy love. The purpose of betrayal is to test how real what we call love truly is. Betrayal does not take away; it can only give. This, however, applies only to those who choose to see it as a springboard for spiritual growth.
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
∗Liz Greene, Relationships and How to Survive Them, (Quotation from the Bulgarian edition of the book)
