Trusting People After What You Have Been Through

A lot of people struggle with trusting others after coming out of a narcissistic or unhealthy relationship. When leaving these relationships, you may experience anxiety, stress, and low self esteem, because you have dealt with abuse for a period of time and it’s hindering you from having a healthy view of yourself.

Prior to entering into this relationship, you probably didn’t have the healthiest view of yourself to begin with, so this person really just reinforced the things you were already carrying around with you before this relationship.

When a relationship ends, there are things that have happened that we keep within ourselves and never heal. We bring these things into our next relationship with us. One thing most people struggle with coming out of their relationships is trusting other people.

This relationship wasn’t healthy and chances are there was some verbal abuse, gaslighting, betrayal or maybe abandonment that caused red flags to come up. You learned through example that people cannot be trusted. When you go through unhealthy relationships, you go through trauma. You will have post traumatic stress disorder and it will stay with you unless you heal that wound.

Something to remember is that one of the biggest things that happened in this unhealthy relationship is that you gave away your power. When you entered into this relationship with past wounds and insecurities, not knowing how to take care of your mental and emotional health, you allowed this person to tell you who you are.

When you give your powers to someone else, you are at the mercy of them and are codependent. Someone else is above you calling the shots. This is so powerful because if this happens, you are going to be in a dysfunctional relationship. You will allow abuse to continue and happen over and over again until you awaken and learn how to be healthy.

If you are healthy and know who you are, your standards are high, and your self worth is where it needs to be to not be in an unhealthy relationship. Because on some level you were broken and unhealthy with past traumas, and didn’t know how to heal them, you are always going to attract a broken person into your life. They may not be broken the same way you are, but they will be broken in some way.

They will use you, abandon you and hurt you more, which all reinforces the thought that people cannot be trusted. When the relationship started to take a turn for the worse, a healthy person would have said to themselves, “Yes, I’m going to try but only so much because this is a two-way street.” But that isn’t what happened here.

You took all the blame and kept on trying instead of taking a giant step back and assessing the situation and asking yourself if this is the person you want to be in a relationship with. Is this person capable of being the person you want in your life? You can’t be the only one fixing things.

Because you wanted that control in the relationship and you wanted to try so much, you probably overlooked all of the red flags over and over again. This person has disappointed you and abused you and because this cycle kept on happening, when you hit that pain point, you created a story that you never want to feel this way again.

You linked that pain to that relationship and possibly people in general. When your mind creates the story that says pain equals being vulnerable and letting people in means they will disappoint me, it’s because you didn’t know how to take care of yourself when these experiences happened. That is what really created the story that people cannot be trusted.

This is what causes us to put walls up, and that leads to fear of intimacy and being vulnerable. Everything seems so scary but it’s not the outside world that we need to be fearful of. Even healthy, you can’t avoid pain because that’s just a part of life. The most important thing is you didn’t know how to handle the pain, have standards or self confidence and self worth. The minute you start to create a story and believe it, you believe it to be true. The only story that feels real is the one you repeated time and time again.

Until you learn the process to see these stories and break them down to realize they are not real, and that they are coming from your past and fears, you will always carry that trauma with you into your future.

It’s a big part of mental health to be able to not carry the past with you into the future. You can learn from the past and be healthier but defining what that means is essential. When we are growing up and experiencing abandonment, disappointment, and other similar feelings, we don’t know these skills; no one teaches us this type of thing and it affects our self esteem and self worth. On some level, it’s a part of life to go through this type of pain to learn these valuable lessons.

When you are an adult and learn this stuff, you get to decide how you want to handle situations and the way you handle situations will determine whether or not you will heal further. You will go into the world with the understanding that, “It’s not the person you can’t trust, but the ability to trust yourself.” The saying is true, but the part about trusting yourself is knowing what you think and feel, what you need in a relationship and being able to self soothe yourself.

That’s really the essence of mental health. When you learn all of that, you get to choose. When you don’t know that stuff and go to the table broken, you don’t get to choose. You think you are choosing your partner, but you aren’t. Your past and wounds are choosing them.