The Abandonment of Sedna | What Betrayal Creates

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]Today I'm going to share with you an incredibly tragic but also incredibly powerful myth about a sea goddess named Sedna. Now it's probably a new myth to most of you as it comes from the Inuit tradition where Sedna is one of the most important goddesses in their entire mythology. But she didn't always start as a goddess. I love stories like that.

[00:00:19]In fact, she starts as a mere mortal, and it's only after this abhorentt act of betrayal that she sinks to the bottom of the sea to become the goddess that she is. This story is so rich and so layered, has so much depth and also beauty. I cannot wait to get into it with you today, and that's going to be the plan here. I'm going to share kind of an amalgamated condensed version of the story. As it goes with oral traditions, you don't have that one cohesive tale. But there's a few main points that happen in each iteration of the story, and those I want to get into and pull apart and really understand how they map on to us. What they say about the human condition. Let's get into it.

[00:01:00]Sedna is said to be a young, beautiful maiden living with her father who is the best hunter around. He is an incredible provider and they want for nothing. She is so cared for, so comforted, and in her position lives a life of ease and plenty. So much so that she rejects all the suitors that come by to ask her parents for her hand in marriage.

[00:01:26]However, and again, only in some versions of the story, she is tricked into marriage by someone that ends up actually being a raven, a bird spirit.

[00:01:36]She is taken away, trapped on an island and isolated and only realizes the ruse after the fact and she's miserable. It's not a good hunter like her father. All it brings her is fish that she grows tired of. And it doesn't treat her well either. It laughs at her realization of what has actually happened to her. Now her father comes to check on her and eventually understands what is going on and rescues her. again being the source of light and power in her life. But a storm comes as they are kayaking off the island. In some it is the bird spirit and his companions that are using their wings and flapping to create the storm.

[00:02:18]In others, it is just them out on a hunt together and the waves start going in the wrong direction. But either way, the father panics and to save himself, he throws his daughter overboard. A terrible betrayal already, but the scene gets so much darker. She's freezing.

[00:02:34]She's drowning. His precious little daughter, grasping up at him and eventually grabbing onto the kayak for dear life. She's not a goddess yet.

[00:02:44]She's not the ruler of the deep. She's just his daughter. Scared, terrified, confused, and on the brink of death. And then her father commits the rest of the betrayal. To save himself from the boat tipping, he reaches in, grabs out his knife, and cuts off her fingers, forcing her to let go of the kayak, and sink to the bottom of the sea. In most versions, each joint of her fingers actually becomes a different part of the sea life. Seals, walruses, whales, etc. And as she sinks from this great betrayal, she becomes a sea spirit who now actually controls the very animals that the people above still depend on. People like her father, the great hunter.

[00:03:31]That's the story. And we're going to start right away with the central human theme here, abandonment, which is its own unique layer within betrayal. You can be betrayed by anybody, but the word abandonment usually has a connotation of someone that should have been taking care of you that didn't. That to me is the ultimate betrayal. Not the betrayal of a stranger or a friend or even a sibling, even other family, but from the hand that was meant to protect you, that raised you, that guided you, to be the very hand that commits the act that leads to your destruction. is a kind of abandonment, betrayal, and trauma that is so much deeper than so many other forms. You might already be very aware that the world is not safe, that not everyone can be trusted. But this kind of act takes the one place that should have been your safety and demolishes it.

[00:04:31]The person you trust more than anybody chose themselves over you. Your need became an inconvenience.

[00:04:38]Your reaching out was punished. And so begins Sedna's transformation where her psyche has to reorganize itself around the unbearable fact that help didn't come and in fact what was supposed to be your help became your harm. What does that do to someone? We see that her pain becomes power as she sank to the depths and became something greater. But I think it goes deeper than that. That feels like kind of a cheap motivational thing like what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. We just talked about that and its ineptness on the last episode.

[00:05:17]But some people do reorganize or transform their trauma into something else. It doesn't always mean it's greater just because there's new allowances that weren't there before.

[00:05:30]And we're going to see that as we dive into the rest of the story here. But before I tell you anymore, let's get into some of the symbolism that we have here. The severed fingers. It is such a vivid description. So awful for us to really visualize the brutality of that act from her own father. It's really the perfect metaphor for betrayal trauma.

[00:05:55]Fingers are what connects us to others.

[00:05:57]It's how we reach out. It's how we touch. It's how we feel. It's how we sense. But now the instinct to trust is damaged. The instinct to reach out is damaged. The ability to hold on to our old identity, that last moment of, well, he threw me over, but maybe it was a quick impulsive decision and he'll pull me back in. Grasping at that old concept only to have it truly severed. No, this is it. Things have changed and they will never be the same. And so the body remembers that reaching out did not save you. In fact, reaching out only made things worse. It only escalated the intensity of your horror and ultimately led to your demise. With Medusa, we talked about this as well. She has her petrifying gaze and the snakes that are now part of her hair. And these are bodily metaphors for her reaction to trauma. She is hypervigilant and aware.

[00:06:58]With Sedna, the body metaphor is different, though. Medusa's trauma became defense. Sedna's trauma becomes depth. Medusa says, "Do not come any closer." Sedna says, "You'll have to come down to where I am now." And again, you'll see this as we get to the rest of the story. I think that contrast is very interesting. But let's get to this next part, the descent. What happens after this violent act? Sedna sinks. That is always what happens across each version of the oral tradition. But sinking is not the same thing as disappearing. A lot of people do this though. They mix the two up. They think that buried pain is gone, that time heals all wounds, that if we just stuff it down, if we don't focus on it, if we can't see it, if it's too murky down there, it's like it never happened. But Sedna teaches us that's not the case. We all have this going on. We have this surface life and this deeper life. The surface is what people see, the social self, the personality, who you are with your friends and family and at work, the version of us that is out there in the world functioning. But beneath down in the depths is the emotional self. The betrayals we don't talk about. The abandonments that we minimized. The old wounds that still control what we can and can't accept. What we can and cannot receive. Sedna now becomes queen of this underworld. And her pain down there has real effects for the surface world. when she is in pain or when she is angered, when she is frustrated, when she is distressed. The animals that she controls are withheld. Hunger comes above and humans suffer. The world above is affected by what's going on below.

[00:08:53]Again, the point of these myths that mirror us is always to tie it back to our humanity. So, you might think I'm reaching too far, but I think that in all of these stories, there are these incredible life lessons for us. what is unadressed underneath will almost always eventually in some way manifest itself on our surface. This to me is the philosophical heart of the descent of Sedna. Part of that distress for her that is physically represented in the story is the fact that she's still severed. She's still not whole from what happened. And it has real effects physically for her in her new life. The main one being, and it sounds shallow, but it's really not because it's supposed to, I think, show that even the simplest of things is now so complicated for her. This is what trauma does. And it's the fact that she cannot untangle her own care. She can't even take care of herself in the most basic ways. I think it's actually a fascinating symbolic part of the story whether it is a choice to punish or just out of her emotion a reality that emerges. The animals don't surface. The hunters can't hunt. And again, it affects everybody negatively on the surface. So what is the solution from the people? The shaman has to actually transform into a fish and descend to the bottom of the ocean to be with her, to tend to her, to help untangle her hair, to care for her. Once tended to, she releases the animals and all goes back to normal. This whole part of the story really is such a perfect and powerful metaphor. Some wounds leave us unable to do the very thing that healing requires. That's why it's so frustrating when people that haven't been through these kinds of traumas just expect that you should choose to feel better or get over it or it's been long enough, it's time to move on. It's not that people don't want to. In many cases, it's that they're simply unable to because of the initial hurt. You need trust to help heal. But betrayal damaged your ability to trust. You need connection, but abandonment makes connection feel unsafe and out of reach.

[00:11:17]You need softness, but survival made you hard. You need to reach out, but the last time you reached out was the time you got the most hurt. But we can go further here because the shaman's role is also fascinating. Healing requires dissent. You have to be willing to go to where the unadressed issues are. Someone has to go into the dark and tend to what has been neglected, what has been abused. He doesn't go down there to conquer her, nor to lecture her, nor to demand from her, nor to negotiate with her. He simply combs her hair. He starts building a bridge back to normaly. What a beautifully gentle image in this otherwise brutal myth that again I told you the layers of beauty here are so surprising and delightful. There's so much wisdom here. And just because it's represented in another character, the shaman doesn't mean that you need someone else to fix you. It's a story where we see multiple characters. But in many fashions, all the characters are you, the self. I don't want you to get too hung up on, well, who's the shaman?

[00:12:26]You can be the shaman, but you have to be willing to descend, to look into the depths. Now, returning to another point here, and I tried to call this out in the Medusa story. I think it's really important. Just because in the myth Sedna or Medusa becomes powerful, it doesn't justify the pain. And just because the pain or the trauma happened doesn't justify the bad actions of Sedna or Medusa. It's just showing a reality that hurt people hurt people. Which is why we all need to take responsibility for ourselves and how we affect each other. This isn't some moral tale of Sedna was abused and therefore is some holy image of a girl turned goddess.

[00:13:13]That's not what's happening here. So, I just wanted to be really clear about that. And it shouldn't go off in the other directions either. This isn't romanticizing the wound over seeking healing. Without getting too personal or sidetracking, I like so many of you probably have some trauma responses that I've realized in the last few years as I've been working through things that actually were things I liked about myself, things I thought made me better.

[00:13:40]Not better than other people, but better than I had been before. And of course, they did. They were self-protective. But that didn't mean there weren't negatives to them. It didn't mean that they weren't impeded on my relationships with others, but it was a big part of my identity. These were the things, my hyperindependence, for example, is something I always prided myself on. But I see now it was a trauma response. And yeah, it worked for me because it had to, but it doesn't mean it was what was optimal or what was healthy. There's so much nuance when we get into these discussions. So, I just wanted to give you some quick food for thought there. Now, I do want to take a quick second and talk about the father.

[00:14:20]The role of the father here. I don't think that we can ignore this one. He's used to show the dichotomy. No one is all good or all bad. That's why I really like the iterations where he is actually not only her initial provider, but also her rescuer. And it's in the process of rescuing her that he actually makes her worse off than she was before. We are complicated multitudes, each and every one of us. and we can do great things and we can do horrendous things. There's just a human acceptance there. Not a permission, not a condoning, an understanding. It would be easier if he was some cartoonish like villain where he was all bad and always hated and didn't care for and eventually just did away with his daughter. But that's not it. He seems to love her and want the best for her and help her until he can't. Probably because of his own issues. We don't want to potentially see ourselves as capable of doing something so horrendous. But look at history and it's not hard to see that we're not special and under the right conditions, many of us can do things many of us would never have thought we could do otherwise. So there's that portion of it. Secondly, I think it's important to understand where trauma can come from.

[00:15:35]It doesn't come from that kind of not always evil malice, someone absolutely out to get you. It comes from weakness, cowardice, selfishness, convenience, fear, and self-preservation. The father's logic as we see him make this decision is brutally again human and pretty honest. If I let her hold on, I may go down too with her. And so, he cuts her off figuratively and literally.

[00:16:05]This is what we all do. We cut people off when our suffering becomes too much for us, too costly. We've all probably seen this acted out in some lesser form, like the family who cuts off the child that tells the truth too much. It's too much to bear. They don't want to hear about what they did that messed up their kid. Communities who exile the individual, specifically the victim, because it threatens the whole group.

[00:16:31]That again is something we see with the story of Medusa. Institutions that protect themselves over the wounded.

[00:16:37]friends who disappear when grief becomes too inconvenient. I hope you don't think I'm going on too long here. There's just so many parts of this myth that have so much meaning packed into it. I want to talk about the sea animals next. What comes from her severed finger joints.

[00:16:55]This myth becomes almost unbearable the longer that you sit with it and process it in terms of what it actually shows about humanity. Sedna's fingers become seals and whales and walruses, the lifeline both for food and shelter for the Inuit people. It's an original myth for the animals that sustain the people in the Arctic. That means the community survives because of what was taken from her. It's haunting. the wound becomes the food supply and thus human life is becoming dependent off of the body of the wounded girl. There's a lot that you could read into there. But even if we just keep it more simple, the people above the water live because of the one who was thrown into it. It's actually a story about sacrifice. How easy is this to connect to humanity? How much of society is built on people's pain that became useful? The emotionally neglected child that becomes the therapist in the friend group. The exploited worker who becomes the backbone for the company.

[00:18:04]The child that has to take on the parent role and becomes the stabilizing force in the family dynamic. Even with most art comes from such a place of suffering and others devour and enjoy the outcome, the animals from the wound. There's a reality that we and others often benefit from the untended wounds. I do it here on this channel all the time. I am sharing the fire that I think is useful or beautiful, but how many times is it off of some tortured artist or some almost gone mad crazy philosopher who really looked death or life in the eyes.

[00:18:46]So, I didn't want that part to become lost in this myth either. So, we covered a lot here, but what do we do with all of this? My goal in showing it today was ideally awareness or at least getting you to the point where you could ask questions. What part of you was thrown overboard? What part of you learned that reaching out is dangerous? What part of you sank because nobody else came back for it? What part of you is now ruling from beneath the surface? These are the questions I think we should ask based off the story of Sedna. But everyone's seda shows up in different ways. For some people it's anger. For some it's withdrawal. For others it's control or numbness or distrust or refusing to need anybody. That hyperindependence.

[00:19:35]Maybe you've worked hard to become indispensable so that abandonment can never happen to you again. Maybe you're constantly testing people. Are you going to leave or are you withholding some abundance, creativity, intimacy, warmth, trust, tenderness, sexuality, play? We get so messed up in so many ways because of the trauma we experience. And the only thing I think the story does a disservice to, and it has to, is it makes the trauma look so big. the being thrown over and abandoned by your own father and at a last desperate attempt having your own father sever your fingers off so that your only option is to sink to the bottom of the freezing sea. Just because that is the example of the trauma here doesn't mean that your small issue with your friend or your sibling or your parent or your coworker hasn't created the same thing. I forget what book on trauma I was reading, but it gave the example that for many people, their first trauma is the first time that a strange adult in their life spoke to them in a harsh way. We forget what it's like to have the psyche of a child to be without experience or understanding or even the words to describe what is happening. It's not always this huge horrific thing. And so many of us either refuse to believe that we have it or we don't know enough about it to even know that it's there and it's still lurking beneath the depths controlling your surface right now. So the main thing I would hope to communicate here besides the awareness and part of the awareness is to look poke your head under the waves. That's really why I love the shaman aspect to it. Be willing to descend into the depths. Healing means going down there, facing the dark, seeing what's there, and tending to it. And then lastly, there's the warning. Do not become the father. To me, the way I envisioned this whole thing, the father is the one who has not gone into the depths. The father is the one who has his own trauma. The hurt person that hurts others and perpetuates the cycle. It's why I got so interested in trauma work when I became a parent. I did not want to pass this down for my own ignorance or my own ego or anything like that. I quite literally did not want to become this father, sacrificing in some way the precious or more innocent parts of their children because of their unawareness. This is the gift you get to give to others is to face yourself. So that's it for today.

[00:22:19]Thank you so much for being here. I hope this helps anyone. It's the goal of the entire channel. I am sharing the fire with you that has meant so much to me.

[00:22:30]Fire that is a light, that is warmth, that is creation. Hopefully I'll see you Saturday with a new video. And until then, keep sharing. I wanted to personally thank our top tiers of support. Alone in the inferno tier is Lori. Thank you so much for your incredibly generous giving. Then really keeping the channel going in the blaze tier is Decox, Dark Side of Delight Productions, James Gder, Lynn WD, and Noel Divergent. Our flame tier is now up to 10 very kind supporters, and we have even more in our ember tier listed in the description of each video.