Trusting someone again…
The ending of any relationship is always difficult, but the aftermath of a toxic relationship or a narcissistic relationship can leave you with emotional scars and trauma that you never asked for.
So much so, that you don’t think you’ll ever be able to trust someone else in that way with your heart ever again.
It can be a difficult road in finding your way back to a place of peace, calm, and normality again without feeling constantly triggered.
Those lingering thoughts, memories, and echos of the things they said and did remain like persistent ghosts that just continue to haunt you.
The more times passes, the more you begin to realise the truth about what they really did, who they really were, and to the extent they played their hand.
The realisations about what they did continue to dawn on you, and you feel like you’re destined to now be on your own forever because you’re now afraid to trust someone again.
The thing that no one tells you is that quite often you don’t realise the full extent of the damage that someone did to you until much later on.
Sometimes you don’t even realise it until someone else listens to you explaining what happened, and then they’re the one to tell you what really happened because they were able to piece everything together that you couldn’t see.
Because when you’re in amongst the chaos, you’re simply just trying to survive the pain that exists, without even fully understanding or being able to make sense of why the pain exists.
Maybe the person you were with was just very good at what they did.
They knew all the right words to say, all the rights things to do, and all the right ways to manipulate you without you even noticing.
They ended up being such a destructive force in your life that you’re left in a state of confusion unable to make sense of who they really were, or what was real and what wasn’t.
This places you in a situation later on where you start questioning your own inner trust mechanisms.
It’s only later on once you start to look back, dissect, and explain what happened to others that you begin to understand and unpack the real damage, destruction, and lasting trauma that they have caused you.
I bet if you look back on a relationship that has left you with a degree of trauma, you can now see the small signs or the red flags that you ignored at the time.
You think to yourself; they seem so obvious now, so how could you have not seen them at the time?
The simple answer is because you ignored them, and because you didn’t trust yourself.
You didn’t trust your inner judgement and what your instincts were telling you because over time your manipulator (that’s exactly what they were) planted seeds of doubt in your mind that made you begin to doubt your own instincts.
They made you believe that you couldn’t trust what your inner voice was trying to tell you, maybe they even told you not to listen to it because they knew that you were right, but they wanted to gaslight you into disbelieving what your instincts were trying to tell you so that they weren’t found out.
So instead, you learnt to fight against it, suppress it, and eventually ignore it altogether.
Your instincts and all of those gut feelings you receive is actually your subconscious mind trying to sending you a warning.
Your subconscious mind is so powerful that it registers and remembers every single traumatic and hurtful event you’ve ever experienced in your entire life.
When it senses that you’re in danger it will release an alert to warn you, but if you start ignoring these warnings, you begin the process of starting to distrust yourself; and that’s what happened…
You now need to start the process of healing that scared, vulnerable, person that now lives inside of you.
You have to stop feeling like you weren’t enough, and you have to stop telling yourself that you were foolish for trusting the wrong person.
You weren’t foolish!
You trusted someone in good faith and they took advantage of that, plain and simple!
They used your vulnerabilities and your emotions against you.
You now need to allow yourself time to heal this part of you, because not taking the time to heal this part of you now, will prevent you from being able to have a deep meaningful connection or a healthy relationship with someone else later on, because you’re going to be so scared that if you reveal your true self to another person that it will be used to hurt you.
In order to heal from this, you have to rebuild and reclaim your self-esteem, your confidence, and your sense of worth.
It’s only once 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 to another person.
It’s only once you’ve rediscovered your self-worth again that you can begin to feel confident enough to trust yourself again and listen to what your instincts are trying to tell you.
Once you begin to trust yourself again, you’re then able to be open to trusting someone else again, because you know that you have everything inside of you that you need for you to be okay.
But you’re going to need give yourself time away from any form of relationship, or rebound in order to get back to this place again.
Don’t even think about any temporary rebound relationship or a promiscuous fling to help sooth the pain; it’s the absolute worst thing that you can do!
In fact studies have shown that by jumping into rebound relationships or entertaining temporary relationships of any kind, that it significantly increases the amount of time it takes for you to properly heal, and the likelihood of you eventually experience problems in your next long term relationship is almost all but guaranteed.
So take your time to heal properly, because if you try to mask or suppress your trauma and what you’re feeling, it’s only going to resurface later on with a much greater ferocity, which means it’s going to take you much longer to work through it all and heal from it.
If you don’t take the time now to heal properly you’ll only end up sabotaging what could have been a really healthy and beautiful new relationship later on.
Reclaim who you are again by giving yourself the gift of time.
Reclaim who you are again by learning to trust yourself again.
Yes, it’s going to be a process and it’s definitely going to be a journey for you, but it’s absolutely one worth taking, because the person you become will be completely unrecognisable compared to that scared, vulnerable person that currently resides inside of you.
And remember, the real version of you will always be so beautiful to the right person even with your scars, and the right person won’t ever take advantage of that or use that or who you are against you.
~ Mark Smith