Psalms 55

A Heart Besieged: The Inner Drama of Betrayal, Lament, and Refuge

Psalm 55, read as an inner drama, is a portrait of consciousness under siege and the creative role imagination plays in its rescue. The Psalm is not a chronicle of external events so much as a map of the movements within the human mind: panic, betrayal, desire to escape, inner litigation, and finally the choice to transfer the burden to a higher state of awareness. Each character and place in the poem corresponds to a state of mind; the storyline is the making and unmaking of reality by imagination.

The opening cry, Give ear to my prayer, O God; and hide not thyself from my supplication, names a primary psychological posture. The supplicant is the center of awareness addressing its own higher faculty, the part of consciousness that can redeem the scene. God in this reading is not an external judge but the principle of higher imagining, the I AM that can re-state identity. The plea to be attended to is the decision to redirect attention inwardly from outer circumstances to the creating power of inner vision.

Terror, trembling, the terrors of death: these phrases stage fear of annihilation, the sense that identity is threatened. Psychologically, death here signifies the collapse of a self-image. When the psalmist says Oh that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away, and be at rest, the longing is to assume an imaginal state that transcends current limitation. The dove-winged escape is a metaphor for the imaginative assumption of peacefulness; it is the rehearsal of a new state as if already true and thereby changing the felt center.

The city, described as full of violence, deceit, and guile, is not a geographic location but the cognitive environment that surrounds awareness: the habitual thought-structures and social narratives crowding the mind with alarm. Day and night they go about it upon the walls thereof summarizes how ideas patrol the perimeter of identity, sieging the self with repetitive storylines. When the Psalmist sees mischief and sorrow in the midst, he is reporting the felt result of bad imaginal rehearsals: the mind that entertains suspicion and betrayal experiences a world of hostile faces and anxious circumstances.

Crucially, the enemy that wounds most deeply is a man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance. This is the moment of inner betrayal—when the part of consciousness once allied with you now acts against you. Psychologically this often manifests as self-sabotage: a voice that once gave counsel now whispers doubt, and a familiar pattern of behavior becomes the instrument of the attack. The friend in the house of God is not an external person first; it is an earlier image of safety and authority within your psyche that has been turned into an instrument of insecurity. The shock of this betrayal creates the fiercest terror, because it breaks the covenant between parts of the self.

The Psalmist’s demand, Destroy, O Lord, and divide their tongues, can be read as a command to the higher imaginative faculty to disrupt the persuasive inner language that sustains the hostile scene. Tongues are the habitual self-talk that plants images. To divide them is to sever the script that has been running unnoticed. This is not a call for outer violence but for the corrective power of imagination to interrupt and reprogram inner dialogue.

Selah is a structural and practical hinge in the Psalm. Psychologically, these pauses mark the moments when we are invited to stop and live the new scene, to act in imagination. They are instructions to dwell upon the desired state until it gains dominance. The Psalmist’s repetition of times of prayer—Evening, and morning, and at noon—is an instruction about the rhythm of imaginative practice: repeated, sustained assumption at several points of the day stabilizes a new state and thereby reorders outer events.

Observe the insight that the words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war was in his heart. Here is the key law of creative psychology: language alone is not the generator; the feeling and conviction beneath words are. Imagination is the womb of reality; what is conceived there is given life only when it carries the feeling of already being. Soft speech with hostile intent is the double agent of consciousness: it placates outwardly while recreating inner conflict. The creative power operates by the congruence of imagined state and felt reality. Where there is dissonance, the imagination will create a world corresponding to the deeper feeling, not the outward words.

The Psalmist’s alternation between vengeance and surrender maps two common responses to betrayal. Let death seize upon them or Let them go down quick into hell expresses the primitive urge to make outer justice match inner pain. In imaginal terms, this is projecting one’s need for justice onto the world, which multiplies conflict. The corrective offered is Cast thy burden upon the LORD; and he shall sustain thee. The Lord here is the sustaining imaginative state that accepts responsibility for inner narrative and holds it as finished. Casting the burden is not passive resignation but the active imaginative assumption that your inner story has been rewritten by a higher consciousness.

He hath delivered my soul in peace from the battle that was against me: for there were many with me. This verse sketches the result of sustained imaginative discipline. The battle is resolved not by arguing with every hostile thought but by assuming the victorious state so completely that the formerly allied voices fall silent or rejoin you. The many that were with you become the witnesses to your new assumption; they shift allegiance because imagination, practiced persistently, rewrites the whole psychic scene.

Another important psychological truth in this Psalm is the observation that those who have no changes therefore fear not God. The unchanging are rigidly identified with present circumstances; they fear the power of an imaginal principle precisely because they are invested in their ongoing story. The capacity to be changed—by imagination—is the capacity to be freed. The admonition that bloody and deceitful men shall not live out half their days can be read symbolically: the patterns of deceit in the mind have a short lifespan when exposed to sustained, creative imagination. The inner lies lose their vitality when confronted by a living, imagined truth.

The Psalm ends with a posture of confident trust: but I will trust in thee. Psychologically this is the decision to ground identity in the creative faculty rather than in shifting appearances or treacherous acquaintances. To trust in this inner creative power is to adopt the posture that your imagination, rehearsed and felt, constitutes the reality you inhabit. The righteous he will never suffer to be moved becomes a promise about the stabilizing effect of living consistently from an imagined, fulfilled state.

Practically, Psalm 55 teaches how to transform what feels like persecution into inner renewal. First, identify the scene: who are the characters in the drama and what feelings do they represent? Second, silence the tongues: interrupt habitual inner speech that reinforces the hostile picture. Third, use the Selah—pause and assume the new state vividly and with feeling, moving into that scene at evening, morning, and noon. Fourth, relinquish the urge to enact outer vengeance; instead, cast the burden upon the sustaining imaginative center and let it recompose the narrative. Fifth, persist; repeated, embodied imagining is the engine by which the inner city changes its character and the formerly faithful acquaintance is reconciled or exposed.

Read in this way, Psalm 55 is not a lamentation to an absent deity but a guidebook for the creative operations at work in consciousness. It shows the anatomy of fear, the shock of betrayal, the weapon of language, and the antidote of imaginal assumption. The Psalm’s arc—from panic to peace—demonstrates the essential truth: that the world we inhabit is the out-picture of what we live and accept in imagination. Change the inner scene, and the external drama will follow.