Understanding why trusting again after narcissistic abuse is so hard.
Learning to discern between safe and unsafe is hard when you’ve been abused. This is why.
All abuse changes you.
Narcissistic abuse is designed to hit you at your core. At who you are as a person.
It makes you doubt your instincts and leads you to feel uncomfortable with your own decisions.
To explain what is happening, I’m going to use a visual technique.
Visualization- A Room Full Of Dogs
Imagine you are following a person you trust into a home and they lead you into a room that has 10 dogs in it. You don’t know any of these dogs. They are different sizes and breeds. You also don’t know the temperament of any of them.
The person who led you in there asks you to trust them and says you need to stay in the room while they step out. They then move toward the door. As they shut the door behind them, they turn to you and say, “Be careful, one of these dogs bites.”
But they never tell you which one.
What now? What would you be thinking and feeling about that person? How would you feel about the dogs?
Would you trust any of them? Be wary of them? Give them the benefit of the doubt? Expect the best? The worst?
What would the threat center in your brain be telling you?
Abusers Come In All Shapes And Sizes
If someone abusive had a warning bell on them things would be a lot easier. Unfortunately, most of the time there’s no way to know who is going to perpetrate.
Is it the one who was nice to you initially? The one who was aloof? The one who was passive aggressive? The one that took you to a fancy restaurant? The one who you grew up with?
There’s no way to know.
You don’t know which one will bite.
Abuse Dismantles Your Intuition
When you have been abused by someone you trusted, you begin to question your gut instincts. You ask yourself how you got it so wrong.
It’s destabilizing.
The world is like that room full of dogs. You were led in there by a past abuser. They set you up for anxiety and mistrust with their deception. If you don’t know how to discern who is safe and who isn’t, how can you trust what you see in front of you?
This is why the relationship after the abusive one is difficult to manage.
- When they are nice, you don’t trust it.
- If they are showing you support, it may not be real.
- When they tell you they love you, they might be lying.
- If they show kindness, it’s a trick to manipulate you.
These secondary thoughts may not always be conscious, they happen automatically. It is the new instinct that has replaced the one you lost in yourself. This new instinct to doubt and question yourself first, and the other person second.
Why Wouldn’t You Do This?
It seems like a DUH statement when you think about it.
You trusted your gut before and it led you into a danger zone. Why wouldn’t you think your gut is untrustworthy?
You didn’t know what you didn’t know. If you could go back, would you blindly follow that person again? If NO, then you grew a bit. You learned something from it. That is a win!
Morphing Mistrust Into Healthy Skepticism
The mistrust you feel in future partners is part of that growth phase. It’s protective and necessary to get to the next stage. You may find yourself going a bit too far for a little while and not trusting anyone. That’s OK too as long as you eventually come out of that.
If you were on the far side of the trust spectrum, you may need to swing all the way to heavy mistrust for a bit before you find that middle ground you’ll eventually live in. At least you’ll have both perspectives now to guide you.
Many people feel guilty for feeling this way. That’s normal to feel that way and it’s normal to do.
The end goal is to end up in the land of Healthy Skepticism. This is where boundaries live. Healthy skepticism is where you learn to listen to your gut and trust that it may not always be right, but it sometimes is and you learn to honor it and what it is trying to do for you. Our gut wants us to live. It wants us to get the happy ending we desire.
It’s a great feeling when you can trust yourself again.