9.  Learning to trust again

The wounds of deception and betrayal cut deep. But being wounded is not the end of your journey – it’s the beginning. It’s what you do with your wounds that will determine the quality of the rest of your life.

In your post betrayal universe, part of you may be tempted to lock your heart away behind a new kind of armor, a harsher view of life and love that’s more skeptical, more guarded. You’ve promised yourself that you will do everything necessary to guard your heart, even if that means retreating into isolation,  building an impenetrable wall around yourself that no one can get through, or treating partners as if they’re disposable as you may have once felt.

But the work that you’ve done so far has changed you forever. It has re-introduced you to a woman who has been able to face a painful situation with courage, and live with intense and difficult emotions without crumbling. Please do not underestimate the tremendous resources you called up from deep within yourself to move through the crisis of being lied to by a partner you trusted.

The process of healing involves making the continuing choice to find and use the best parts of yourself. True healing is when you can see your emotional scars as proof of your strength rather than as a badge of vulnerability.

You can risk opening yourself up again when you’re ready, and even risk being deceived again, because now you have survival skills you didn’t have before. That means you don’t have to fear or wear armor for protection. Instead you can tap the wisdom that resides in your wounds.

The first step is trust:

It’s very normal to tell yourself that your pain was punishment for bad judgment and for being too trusting of someone that didn’t deserve it. The emotional scars look like convincing evidence that you were a fool to trust, to make yourself vulnerable, to believe in your partners promises. But that’s a serious misreading of what it means to be wounded, and it’s based on a misunderstanding of what trust is and where it really comes from.

For most of us, trust has been a quality that’s completely dependent on the other person. We’ve offered it, then waited to see if we were right. Trust was a game of chance, or a step onto a diving board above a pool that might or might not be filled. No wonder it feels so precarious to consider trusting again.   

Innocent, unquestioning love is a casualty of betrayal, and when we realize it’s gone we don’t know what to replace it with. You doubt men, you doubt yourself, and you were struggling as never before with the issue of trust. But what if from here on out you decided to look at trust is something that is not a tentative fearful adventure toward another person but rather a safe, clear path that leads you home to the strength in yourself. What if you were to change your idea of trust from something to be given away to something that resides in you? What if you stopped worrying so much about trusting the other person and instead focused on trusting yourself?   

The kind of trust in yourself where are you can say, I trust my judgment, I trust my courage to confront lying if and when I encounter it again, and most of all, I trust myself to be able to handle whatever life throws at me. You can’t take all your trust and just hand it over to someone else for safekeeping. They need to earn your trust.

You need to hang onto a lot of trust for yourself. That means that you continue to build your emotional and intellectual resources so that the time will come when you can truly know: if I’m hurt again I can stand it. I will deal with it, and ultimately I will get over it. Once you believe that, you can open your heart again knowing that you’ll be OK no matter what. That’s the kind of trust you can always count on.

There’s an early warning system that was giving you clues that something was amiss in your relationship. An important part of learning to trust yourself is to recognize that you probably knew much more than you were willing to admit.

We women are very perceptive creatures. Intuition seems to be almost encoded in our genetic structure. Feelings and hunches reveal themselves to us in the form of that wise inner voice that usually tells us what we need to know. Unfortunately, many of us brush away that voice because many times it’s not what we want to hear.

As you reflect on your experience with liars, you too may be able to see that something inside you was telling you troubling things about your partner‘s behavior, but you chose to turn down the volume and not listen. Instead you embraced denial and rationalization because they were more comfortable. Now, because of what you’ve been through, you have the ability to tune into what you know and to trust your perceptions. When that inner voice says something’s wrong pay attention.

It always tells you the truth.

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