TRUST, once it's broken it's one of the hardest things to ever get back...
But what if it's your own trust that you're fighting to get back again.
Because someone manipulated you, and confused you so much that you stopped trusting your own instincts...
What if they were the one person that you trusted after years of being betrayed.
You said that you'd never trust another person ever again, but you finally managed to find the courage to place your trust in their hands; only for them to betray you worse than anyone ever had before...
How on earth can you possibly bring yourself to trust someone ever again?
Because now you don't even trust yourself anymore...
If you've been through a manipulative relationship, you’re probably asking yourself these questions.
Because the aftermath of dealing with someone who's toxic or narcissistic, can leave you with a level of unwanted emotional trauma.
It can leave you with an unwanted inability to be able to trust your heart with another person ever again.
It can be a difficult road to find your way back to a place of peace and normality again.
Because those lingering flashbacks and memories of what happened to you continue to haunt you day in day out like persistent ghosts.
It almost feels as though you're destined to be trapped on the wrong side of yesterday forever, locked inside a mental prison cell with no key to escape.
The thing that no one tells you is that quite often you don’t realise the extent of the damage until much later on.
Because when a manipulative or toxic person is so good at what they do, you don't even realise what's happening to you because they've done such a good job of conditioning you.
This ends up leaving you in a state of confusion long after they've disappeared, and it leads you to start questioning your own inner trust mechanisms.
You start to question your inner voice, your instincts...
The damage they caused is real.
In order to recover and heal from this, the most important thing you can do is to give yourself time ALONE to heal.
Because you'll never properly heal from this type of trauma if you're constantly around other people.
You must spend some considerable time alone.
You need to rewire and repair your inner voice and you can't do that with other people's voices, opinions, thoughts, and noise surrounding you.
You NEED to do this so that you can learn to trust YOURSELF and trust YOUR instincts again.
I’m pretty sure that 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.
They seem so obvious now but you didn’t see them at the time.
This is because you ignored them because you didn’t trust yourself.
You didn’t trust yourself and what your instincts were telling you because over time your abuser made you question your reality by deliberately confusing your thoughts.
They planted seeds of doubt in your mind that made you doubt your 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 ignore it.
But it's not just surface level, it goes much deeper than that...
Your instincts and those gut feelings you get is actually your subconscious mind trying to sending you a warning signal.
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 a pulse to warn you.
But if you start ignoring them, you begin the process of starting to distrust yourself.
You need to allow yourself 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.
Because you weren’t stupid.
You trusted someone in good faith and they took advantage of you.
They used your vulnerabilities and your emotions as weapons against you.
And if you don't heal from this; what this actually does is it prevents you from being able to have a deep meaningful connection or a healthy relationship with someone else later on.
Because you’re so scared that if you reveal your true self to another person that it will be used to hurt you.
So it's so incredibly important to heal properly or you'll end up trapped in a never ending cycle.
To properly heal from this, you have to take some time to rebuild your self-esteem, your confidence, and also rebuild your intrinsic 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 and vulnerabilities to another person.
It’s only once you’ve rediscovered your self-worth and you trust yourself again that you can regain the ability to then trust someone else again, and go on to build that deep meaningful connection and experience a new healthy relationship.
You’re going to need time to get back to this place again.
Allow yourself the time to heal properly before you even think about moving on or getting involved with someone else, even if it's only something short or temporary.
It's hands down the absolute worst thing you can do.
It's going to do far more long term damage than any short term sense of relief.
The problems are only going to resurface later on.
And you’ll only end up sabotaging what could have been a really healthy and beautiful new relationship.
Heal properly.
It’s going to be a process and it’s going to be a journey for you, but it’s definitely one worth taking.
And remember, the real version of you vulnerabilities and all, will never be used against you by the right person...
~ Mark