I can never trust again!
If you have ever been unfortunate enough to have your trust betrayed by someone close to you, then you will understand how painful that process of change is. You would have experienced all of these feelings - Denial, anger, sadness, bitterness, self doubt and self hate. Additionally a lack of self worth and self trust are some of the biggest things that stay with you for the longest period of time. The feeling of “not being good enough” will be there constantly. Overcoming this will be one of the hardest things you’ve ever done, because your paradigm has been shattered into a million pieces, and somehow you have to put it all back together. I hope you have got to a point where you are ready to try again, it may take years and the fear will always be there, but I promise if you keep trying, you will find the love you are looking for.
You have to allow yourself to be vulnerable again to find “the one”. (That’s a topic for another post). - I always believed in love. I had this romantic view of being with someone for my whole life, to be with one person forever and live happily in a castle somewhere…I blame Disney films for this. I now understand that a relationship with someone is the hardest task you will ever undergo in your whole life. It will be the most challenging adventure you ever go on and without a Win/Win mentality, it will almost surely fail.
Now I do believe that there is someone for everyone, I think that if you keep looking, you will always find someone who is also searching for love but once you’ve found them, that is when it gets tricky.
If you have had your trust broken before, the honeymoon period can quickly turn into the hardest period. The moment you should be loving each others company and falling deeper and deeper in love, BOOM! The Fear, anxiety, self doubt, lack of trust and insecurity lights all turn on in the main control room of our brain. The fear that this person who you are falling in love with, may one day turn round and leave. You may find yourself assuming that this person doesn’t love you or feel the way you feel, you may also question whether or not they are trustworthy, even if up to this point they have shown no signs of betraying you or your trust. This is a defence mechanism, our brain remembers this feeling and the security guards tell us that we do not want to be hurt again… Now how do we stop this?
When we first get into a relationships we have to make a lot of deposits into the trust bank account, we have to show someone we can be trusted, that we stick to our word and vice versa. Building trust takes time but if you are willing and you are both working together, you will find a way to trust each other fully. Let me ask you a question, do you ever feel as if your partner does everything right, yet you still struggle to trust them? They haven’t given you any reason to doubt their trust, or show you that they don’t love you? No matter what they do, it isn’t enough?
Here it is important to understand that there are two types of love.
Unconditional Love -
Unconditional love is love with no strings attached, there is no criteria to be met here. Love is given and received without question or proof, we just accept that someone loves us for us. If you have a pet you will get unconditional love, a grandparent or best friend. All of these will often give unconditional love.
Conditional love -
This means the love is only given once certain conditions are met. For example,
“I can’t believe you didn’t put the bins out, after all the things I have ever done for you” - If you don’t put the bins out, your showing me that you don’t love me
“We bought you that car, I can’t believe you won’t give me a lift” - You have to give me a lift to show that you love me, I didn’t buy you that car because I loved you
“If you walk out that door then we are never talking again!” - You walking out that door show’s that you don’t love me.
Conditional love is based on a tit for tat agreement, it’s a “I do this for you, you must do this for me” it’s “If you do that I will not give you my love” “you must do that for me to prove you love me”
Conditional love is often our own doing. When we go through broken relationships and times where trust has been broken, we will assess the situation and look for why this happened, often looking inwards at what we could have done better. What was the thing that I did so wrong? Why did this person break my trust? Then we question intentions of people around us, every time someone doesn’t do what we want them to do.
Conditional love is us projecting our own insecurities onto someone else, I fell into this trap a lot with my partner, It got extremely petty, but in my head it was normal. I only ever knew conditional love. “She said ‘love you’ not ‘ I LOVE YOU’, she obviously doesn’t mean it.” “Why would she chose to go out with her friends rather than staying home with me? She must not love me, if she did she wouldn’t of left” “If I go out and don’t stay with her she might leave me”. - I know, when you read it, it’s obvious, or your reading it thinking, “this guys nuts”, Kind of , but hear me out.
Emotional intelligence is one of the hardest skills to master, I think we need to learn it from a young age and the constantly try to improve it for the rest of our lives. We don’t ever get taught to question if our feelings are legit or not, we just assume that if we feel something, we must be right.
I struggled to understand that the feeling of abandonment that I would get every time a micro scenario like the ones above played out, not only with my partner but with friends and family also, was because I was constantly putting conditions on the love people were giving me.
Conditional love leads to frustration from both parties. If I continued to put conditions on the love my partner was giving to me, I would have created a scenario that she has to start proving her love to me. Frustration would build into “Nothing I do is good enough” and rightly so… because there wouldn’t be. Every time there was a situation that I can put a condition to, I would. Conditional love highlights your lack of trust, you may say and feel like you trust this person but do you really? If you constantly ask them to prove that they love you.
Conditional love is a defence mechanism, used by people who have been let down, who have been hurt and don’t want it to happen again. So we try to workout who can we trust and who can we not? With this mindset we assume everyone is out to get us, that no one can be trusted. So if no one can be trusted, and we keep putting conditions on love, we will soon set the bar so high that no one could reach it, and right there we have been let down, again. Our deepest fears that no one can be trusted have come true. Or have they?
Conditional love is basically an expectation. “I expect my partner to take out the bins, if he doesn’t he has let me down”. On a a bigger scale it is, “I expect my partner to choose staying with me instead of going out with her friends, If she doesn’t, she obviously doesn’t love me”. Having expectations of someone is what leads to being let down, which leads to questioning their love for you, which leads to you not trusting them and questioning if you are even good enough.
By setting conditions on love we build a wall so high no one could climb it. Conditional love makes the job of the other person really difficult, it suffocates them, it traps them. Conditional love kills an interdependent relationship, it makes love a set of rules rather than a mutual combining of people. It stops the other person from trying. It creates a positive feedback loop.
There are a few things I did to highlight to myself when I would use conditional love.
At first I had to understand that people love me for me, they love me unconditionally, something I couldn’t ever do myself. I remember having a conversation with my life coach when talking about my partner, I said “I know she loves me, but I can’t help but question her love, I always feel as if I am not good enough, I feel like she could do everything for me and It still wouldn’t be enough” - I was literally not accepting the love my partner was trying to give me, she was doing everything she could and I still refused it.
Understanding that having conditions and expectations always lead to being let down was a hard pill to swallow, I was literally stopping myself from being loved. I started to become extremely self aware that anytime I felt as if my partner didnt love me, it was because I had set an expectation of her that was not met. Most of the time she was not even aware of this condition that I had set, and nor was I. So I used the task at the bottom of the page, as well as talking with my life coach, and finally understood that the reasons I would never trust again was because of my own conditions that I put on love.
Accepting that your partner can love you unconditionally is a huge weight lifted from your shoulders. It frees up so much thinking space. You no longer have to question intent, you no longer have to worry about this person proving their love for you, it is just accepted.
Learn to love unconditionally and learn that people will love you unconditionally.
Remember - You deserve be loved, and they deserve your trust.
Task -
In your diary recall a recent time that you felt you were let down or felt like you were not good enough.
Answer the following questions.
What you were hoping to happen?
What actually happened and how this made you feel?
What expectations did you set and was the other person was aware of these expectations?
If they were aware then did you explain the importance of the matter to the other person?
If they were not aware, were the expectations too high?
If you didn't have these expectations, would you of still felt let down?
