How can you learn to trust someone again and feel safe again after you’ve been in an abusive or neglectful relationship?
The thing people don’t tell you is that quite often you don’t realise that you were even in an abusive or neglectful relationship until later on when you’re trying to heal from the confusion that it’s left you in.
The reason for this is because your abuser or your narcissist was so clever at making you believe that everything was always your fault, or they were constantly projecting their own short comings onto you.
This leaves you in a permanently confused state to the point where that then becomes your normal in your relationship.
It’s only once you start to look back and unpack what went wrong, do you begin to understand the damage and destruction that they caused.
Emotional trauma from a relationship isn’t always obvious; it can be emotional manipulation over time such as someone always promising to spend time with you but then they never do and give that time to everyone else instead, which disintegrates your self-worth and how you feel about yourself.
It could be your partner demonstrating a lack of emotional intelligence or maturity when they communicate with you and instead communicate with deflection or avoidance.
They may gaslight you or manipulate your thoughts and make you believe that you are the problem; when in actual fact it wasn’t you that was the problem at all, it was them all along.
I was in a relationship with someone who would so often say they were going to do something, or spend time with me, or plan something with me; but they never did. They always gave this time to everyone else.
It’s the constant toll of the back and forth effect on your emotions of believing they want to spend time with you and then having it taken away, that erodes your self-confidence and self-worth in yourself because your mind interprets that as you not being good enough.
This person behind closed doors would say emotionally damaging and hurtful things to me and also to my children.
They created false accusations and then sold these lies to everyone else, because it was a way for them to deflect blame and to avoid taking accountability for the things they had done.
In the end, they ended up demonstrating their true colours as someone that just simply did not have a conscience at all about the damage they had inflicted on others, nor were they willing or even capable of taking any accountability for the damage they had caused.
We often think that what happens to us is because of us, but that’s often not the case at all.
It’s just that the other person hasn’t yet taken responsibility and accountability for their own healing from past traumas.
What this creates is a toxicity where they then project all of their own fears and insecurities onto you.
They push you so far that when you do eventually react, they use that very moment to make you look like the villain, when all along you’ve just been trying to hold yourself together from their mistreatment, neglect, or abuse.
This leaves the victim in a traumatised and confused state; and the cycle continues for the abuser in their future relationships until they do some deep level work on themselves and heal the parts of them that need healing.
What I learnt was that after you’ve been emotionally manipulated, gaslighted, neglected, and groomed in such a way that it made it normalised, you have to learn how to undo that damage.
You have to learn how to trust again, not just other people, but also yourself.
The most important thing you can do is to give yourself time alone to heal so that you can learn to trust yourself and trust your instincts again.
I bet that if you’ve been in a relationship that has caused you a degree of trauma and you look back, you can see the small signs or the red flags that you ignored, you probably ignored them because you didn’t trust yourself.
You didn’t trust yourself because over time your partner planted seeds of doubt in your mind that made you doubt your own instincts and believe that you couldn’t trust your own inner voice.
Instead you learnt to fight against it, suppress it, and ignore it.
Your instincts are actually your subconscious mind sending you warning signals.
Your subconscious mind is so powerful that it registers and remembers every single traumatic and hurtful moment in your life.
When it senses that you’re in danger it will release a pulse, but if you start ignoring those pulses you start the process of distrusting yourself.
You need to allow yourself to stop minimising the pain you feel and start the process of healing that scared, vulnerable, person that now exists inside of you.
You have to stop feeling like you weren’t enough, and you have to stop telling yourself that you were stupid for trusting the wrong person.
You weren’t stupid.
We all do stupid things, but that doesn’t make us stupid.
You trusted someone in good faith and they took advantage of you.
I remember in my relationship that if I ever showed any sign of vulnerability with this particular person, it was later used as a weapon against me.
What that does is it prevents you from being able to have a deep meaningful connection or a healthy relationship later on because you’re so scared that if you reveal your true self that it will be used to hurt you.
So to heal from this, it’s really important that you take some time to heal and rebuild your self-esteem and rebuild your sense of self-worth.
It’s only once you’ve worked on your healing and you’ve rediscovered your self-worth again that you’re then able to once again no longer feel fearful of being vulnerable enough to reveal your true self.
It’s only once you’ve discovered your self-worth again that you can regain the ability to trust someone again and build that deep meaningful connection and experience a new healthy relationship.
Yes, this is a process, but it’s definitely one that you WILL heal from.
I hope if this speaks to you or if you’ve been through something similar; that it helps you in some way on your healing journey.
Remember, the real version of you is so beautiful to the right person, and they won’t ever take advantage of that or use who you are against you.
~ Mark