There is a particular kind of pain that lives below the throat. It does not announce itself at dinner parties or in therapy waiting rooms. It does not fit neatly into a diagnosis or resolve itself in twelve sessions. It is the pain of a woman who trusted — trusted a vision, trusted a man, trusted that God was watching — and found herself standing in the wreckage of all three at once.

I know this pain. I have carried it silently for longer than I care to admit.

His name was D.W.. The company was called Warm Spirit. And what happened there — what was done, what was taken, what was made clear about how the world sees a Black woman with a dream — did not just cost me professionally. It reached into something far more tender. It made me question whether I was capable of being loved. Whether I was worthy of fulfillment. Whether God, who I had followed with my whole heart, had simply looked away.

I am writing this because I believe someone reading these words is carrying the same silent weight. And I want you to know: you are not alone in this deep and ugly place.

It did not come to me at a business meeting or in the middle of the night. It came to me in church.

I was sitting in the pew, as I have sat in pews my whole life — a woman of faith, a woman who prays before she moves her feet, a woman who has built everything she has on the belief that God is present and purposeful. The preacher was speaking about God’s love. About being chosen. About how the Father sees each of us, knows each of us, holds each of us.

And something in me broke open.

Not with comfort. With grief.

I looked around at the faces lifted in worship and felt more alone than I have ever felt in a crowd. Because the sermon was not for me. Or at least, it did not feel that way. It felt like a description of a relationship I had applied for and been quietly, consistently denied.

This is not a pretty thing to admit. It is not the kind of faith testimony that gets you invited to speak at women’s conferences. But it is the truth. And I have decided that the truth, however ugly, is more useful to you than a carefully managed version of my healing.

We speak of betrayal as though it is a single event. A door that closes. But for a woman — especially a Black woman in professional spaces — betrayal is not a door. It is a slow erosion. It works in layers.

The first layer is the visible wound: the broken promise, the stolen vision, the professional harm done in plain sight. That part, at least, has a name. You can point to it. You can say, this happened, and it was wrong.

But beneath that is a second layer, quieter and more corrosive. It is the layer where racism and sexism have already prepared the ground. Where you were never fully seen as the architect of your own vision. Where your authority was tolerated but never truly respected. Where the message — unspoken but unmistakable — was that someone like you was not meant to occupy this much space.

And then, beneath even that, is the deepest layer. The one that catches you mid-sermon on a Sunday morning. The one that asks the question you are most ashamed to be asking: If I were truly loved — by God, by the universe, by life itself — would this have been allowed to happen to me?

There is another kind of pain I need to name, because I have never seen it written about honestly.

It comes when you are driving through a neighborhood and see a beautiful home. It comes when you read about an entrepreneur who has built something extraordinary, something that looks — from the outside — like what you once had, what you built, what was taken. It comes quietly, with no warning, and it sits in your chest like a stone.

I have been digging another well for eighteen years.

Eighteen years of Soul Purpose. Eighteen years of faith-driven, integrity-rooted, generosity-centered work. And when I am honest with myself — in the way that I ask my clients to be honest with me — I have not yet reaped the kind of harvest that eighteen years of faithful labor should yield. And I do not always know what to do with that truth.

I feel alone in it. I feel betrayed by it. I feel, on the hardest days, like damaged goods. Like a woman marked by something invisible — some wound the world cannot see but somehow keeps responding to.

I know I am not the only one who has stood in this place. Who has worked faithfully and waited faithfully and loved faithfully and still found themselves on the outside of the abundance they were promised. If you are there too, I want you to know that I see you. I am you.

I am a woman of faith. I have built my life, my clinical practice, my business philosophy on the belief that God moves, that prayer precedes action, that generosity of spirit returns to its source.

And yet.

There are seasons when faith is not a comfort. It is an accusation. Because if God is sovereign — if He numbers the hairs on our heads and notices the sparrow — then what does it mean that He watched what happened and did not intervene? What does it mean to pray move your feet and move them faithfully, only to be betrayed by the very ground you stepped onto?

I will not offer you easy answers here. I do not have them.

What I will say is this: the pain of feeling unseen by God, forgotten by God, is one of the most isolating experiences a human being can have — because we are rarely given permission to name it. We are told to trust. To praise Him anyway. To believe that all things work together for good even when the evidence is, at best, unclear.

Here is what I want to say plainly, because it rarely gets said plainly enough:

When a Black woman is betrayed in a professional space, the wound is not simply personal. It is structural. She does not just lose a business relationship or an opportunity. She loses something that took decades to build — the armor of credibility, the carefully tended proof that she belongs, the exhausting work of being twice as prepared, twice as professional, twice as gracious in rooms that were never designed with her in mind.

And when that is taken — by someone who exploited her trust, her vision, her labor — the world does not rush to her side. The world, more often, questions what she did wrong.

That is the particular cruelty of this intersection. The racism says you were naive to believe you were an equal. The sexism says you were too emotional, too ambitious, too much. And together they press the oldest lie into the newest wound: you brought this on yourself.

You did not bring this on yourself.

There is a Japanese art form called Kintsugi. When a bowl is broken, the cracks are repaired not with glue meant to hide the damage, but with gold. The breaking becomes visible. The mending becomes beautiful. The wound becomes the most luminous part of the whole.

I have thought about Kintsugi for a long time. I think I finally understand why it touches something so deep in me.

I am a broken bowl.

I do not say that with despair, though despair has been part of it. I say it as plainly and honestly as I know how. I have been broken — by betrayal, by racism, by sexism, by eighteen years of faithful labor that has not yet yielded what I was promised, by sermons about a love I sometimes cannot feel. I have cracks running through me that I have learned to carry with a kind of dignity, because there was no other choice.

And the gold in my cracks — if I am being generous with myself, if I am trying to see what others seem to see — is resilience. It is the one blessing I can name without hesitation. Not abundance. Not ease. Not the harvest I have been waiting for. Resilience.

On my best days, I understand that this is not a small thing. That the women who sit across from me in my practice, the broken ones, the ones who feel forgotten and damaged and alone — they come to me because I know the territory. I recognize them because I am them.

But I will not pretend that resilience always feels like a gift. Sometimes it feels like the only thing left after everything else was taken. Sometimes the gold in the cracks is beautiful. And sometimes you just wish the bowl had never been broken.

I want to be honest with you about something, because I think you deserve honesty more than you deserve comfort.

The light does come back. It has come back for me, in seasons and in glimpses — in my garden, in the faces of my grandchildren, in the work I have built, in the women who have exhaled for the first time in years sitting across from me.

But I will not tell you the pain goes away. For some wounds — the ones that touched your sense of your own worth, your place in God’s story, your right to belong — the healing is not a destination. It is a practice. Some mornings you will wake and the ache will be as fresh as it ever was. Some Sundays the sermon will land like a closed door. That is not failure. That is the honest shape of a deep wound.

What I have learned — slowly, imperfectly — is that the pain and the light are not opposites. They are companions. The women I trust most in this world are the ones who have been broken open and have not pretended otherwise. Their tenderness comes from exactly the place that was wounded. Yours does too. Even when you cannot feel it.

If you are reading this from that deep and ugly place — the one where God feels absent and love feels impossible and the wound is so old it has become part of your landscape — I want to sit with you here for a moment.

You are not crazy. You are not faithless. You are not damaged goods.

You are a woman who trusted deeply and was hurt profoundly. You are carrying something real. You may have been digging a new well for years and not yet tasted the water. You may have sat in a pew last Sunday and felt more alone than you expected. You may be looking at someone else’s beautiful home or flourishing business and feeling a grief you don’t know how to explain.

I see you. I am with you. And the fact that you are still standing — still breathing, still reaching, still digging — is not nothing.

It is everything.

The wells run dry. We dig again. Not because we are not tired. Not because the grief is not real. But because the water is still in us. And sometimes the most honest, most faithful, most courageous thing we can do is admit that the bowl is broken — and keep it anyway, gold cracks and all.