The aftermath of a toxic relationship with a toxic or narcissistic partner can leave you with lasting emotional scars and trauma that you never asked for.
To such a degree that you don’t think you’ll ever be able to trust someone else in that way and with your heart ever again.
The lingering thoughts, the painful memories, and the echos of the things they would say and do over and over again remain like persistent ghosts that just continue to haunt you day in day out.
The thing that no one tells you is that quite often you don’t realise or understand the full extent of the damage that someone did to you until much later on, because the person who did this to you, was so very good at what they did.
They’ve done it before; they knew all the right words to say, all the rights things to do, and all the right people to manipulate.
They were a master of manipulation, and they groomed you so well that you didn’t even notice until it was too late and you were being blamed for everything that they did and that they caused.
This leaves you 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 and destruction that they’ve caused of 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.
They seem so obvious now, so how could you have not seen them at the time?
The simple answer is because you ignored them because you didn’t trust yourself…
You didn’t trust your inner judgement and what your instincts were trying to tell you because over time the person you were in a relationship with planted seeds of doubt in your mind so that you’d doubt your own instincts.
They made you believe that you couldn’t trust what your inner voice was trying to tell you.
So instead, you learnt to fight against it, suppress it, and eventually ignore it altogether.
Your instincts and all of those gut feelings you get is actually your subconscious mind trying to sending you an urgent warning.
Your subconscious mind is so powerful that it registers and remembers every single traumatic and hurtful event 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 them, 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 stupid for trusting the wrong person.
You weren’t stupid!
You trusted someone in good faith and they took advantage of that.
They used your vulnerabilities and your emotions as weapons against you.
Healing this part of you is important.
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 work on and slowly rebuild and reclaim your self-esteem, your confidence, and your sense of self-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, because you know you’re enough.
It’s only once you’ve rediscovered your self-worth again that you can then feel confident enough to trust yourself again.
And once you trust yourself again, you’re then able to be open to start 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.
Time away from any form of relationship in order to properly get back to this place again.
Don’t even think about a rebound relationship or any type of temporary or promiscuous fling either, 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 because unconsciously you’re suppressing what you need to heal from.
If you try to mask or suppress your trauma, it’s only going to resurface later on with a much greater level of intensity, which means it’s going to take you much longer to work through it all.
If you don’t take the time now to heal properly before beginning a new relationship you’ll likely at some stage end up sabotaging what could have been a really healthy and beautiful new relationship.
Take the time to learn to trust yourself and your instincts again.
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 lives inside of you.
And remember, the real version of you will always be so beautiful to the right person, and they won’t ever take advantage of that or use who you are against you…
~ Mark Smith