Your trust has been eroded, now what do you do?
How on earth can you possibly trust someone ever again?
Once you've been through a traumatic relationship or experienced something that has been so incredibly toxic and soul destroying, you’re probably asking yourself these questions.
Because the aftermath of a toxic relationship or toxic partner 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, calm, and normality again.
Those lingering thoughts and memories of what happened to you act as persistent ghosts that just continue to haunt you.
It almost feels as though you're destined to be trapped on the wrong side of yesterday forever with no key to escape the prison your mind now reluctantly resides in.
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 the person that took advantage of your heart, was very good at manipulating and gaslighting you.
They were masters at what they did...
This leaves you in a state of confusion and it leads you to start questioning your own inner trust mechanisms.
It’s only later once you start to look back, dissect, and explain what happened to others that you begin to understand the damage and destruction that they caused.
In order to recover from this, the most important thing you can do is to give yourself some much needed time alone to heal.
It’s absolutely beneficial to surround yourself with a support network during these times, but you MUST spend time alone as well.
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 planted seeds 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.
Instead, you learnt to fight against it, suppress it, and ignore it.
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 an alert 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.
You weren’t stupid.
You trusted someone in good faith and they took advantage of you.
They used your vulnerabilities and your emotions as a weapon against you.
What this then does later on is it prevents you from being able to have a deep meaningful connection or a healthy relationship later.
Because you’re so scared that if you reveal your true self to another person that it will be used to hurt you.
To properly heal from this, you have to take some time to rebuild your self-esteem, your confidence, and 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 to another person.
It’s only once you’ve rediscovered your self-worth and trust yourself again that you can regain the ability to trust someone else again and 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.
Because if you move on too quickly and you try and mask it without healing the trauma first, it’s going to prolong your healing process and the problems are only going to resurface later on.
You’ll end up sabotaging what could have been a really healthy and beautiful new relationship.
Reclaim your power by giving yourself the gift of time.
Reclaim your power by learning to trust yourself again.
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 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
