How To Restore Your Trust Again After Narcissistic Abuse

 

I asked the Community this week, what people would like me to write about in this week’s upcoming blog article.

The most common request people asked about was, “How can I trust again?” …

It’s a great topic, and I’m really going to enjoy talking about that with you.

So here goes ….

One of the cruel ironies of life is this … protecting ourselves and being distrustful is counter productive in regard to granting us healthy and trustworthy experiences.

Not trusting Life and others doesn’t feel good in our body and doesn’t make for healthy, happy, loving connections either.

Intuitively we all know we need to SOMEHOW trust. We need to feel loving and open and accepting of other people’s energy in order to have any chance of participating in and enjoying our life, and sharing life and love with special others.

So … protecting ourselves is clearly NOT the answer to a happy, healthy life.

When we are fearful about who and what we can trust, we would like to think that being “distrustful” can help us … that it will somehow protect us.

Yet it doesn’t. In fact, we are more likely to continue to experience people and situations who hurt us, who we find out weren’t able to be trusted.

However, the other end of the spectrum, “blind trust” is not helpful either; it is in fact foolish and putting ourselves at risk significantly … and that doesn’t work either.

Didn’t narcissistic abuse show us that believing in people and trusting what they told us wasn’t a path to health or safety? Especially when our Inner Guidance was screaming at us something is really wrong here and there were smoke signals appearing everywhere and we kept convincing ourselves of the versions that we wanted to believe – the versions we thought were “what we wanted.”

So what is the solution?

What is the happy medium?

What is the way to have appropriate trust without being shut down or defensive or unknowingly keep creating the situations that we can’t trust?

And why does this happen?

That’s what I am going to go deeply into, explore and peel back for you within this article – and it my greatest wish that a deeper healing of this topic will come about for you as a result.

 

How Trust Gets Smashed As a Result Of Abuse

To start off this article, I want to deeply validate you … and have compassion for you … because all of us (myself included) know the absolute soul agony of being betrayed deeply by people we thought that we could trust.

People who we thought we could trust with our lives and souls.

In the case of love partners, narcissists turned up in our lives (generally) as the people who “got” us, “validated” us and “held” our souls in tender care the most.

We felt like we had come home; that we were finally safe and loved and had connected with our True Soul Mate.

Or, even if we did not experience these deep feelings, we may have had the beliefs that love partners or husbands and wives are supposed to love, revere and honour us and be loyal.

We believed relationship at this level was supposed to be “trustworthy”.

It came as a huge shock when we discovered that this was not necessarily the case.

If the narcissist in our life was a family member, it was understandable that we had similar programmed beliefs – that a mother, father, brother or sister (or whoever this person was) is supposed to be loyal, love us and unquestionably have our best interest at heart.

When they didn’t, the very fabric of our existence was threatened.

If these people – love partners or blood related relatives or trusted authorities, teachers, church figures or therapists or people of standing, stature, reputation or responsibility … are able to hurt you to the point of your demise for their own self-interest … then WHO can be trusted?

Can we trust humanity?

Many of us even got to the point of suicidal depression, wondering how on earth we were going to survive in a world where humankind (including the people who we were supposed to be able to TRUST the most) had the capacity to be so cruel, heartless and downright “evil”.

After narcissistic abuse these traumatised, helpless feelings are incredibly common.

 

How We Deal With Trust – Before Awakening

There is an awakening – all to do with “trust” in regard to narcissistic abuse, but before I get to that, I want to go through with you what generally happens to us before this awakening.

What happens is this … we implement the normal human defences of fear and contraction.

We establish the beliefs that there ARE evil people in the world who are not to be trusted and we start to contract ourselves and protect ourselves against them.

In the initial stages that is helpful in getting away from people who abuse us, staying away from them, and to stop putting our hand on the stove that is continually burning us.

But this stage is not the true answer – it is a stage of “survival” only. It is not a step of evolution regarding trust.

And it is a short term solution only because in this stage in contraction, if continued for any length of time, the direst problem is the trauma we trap inside our body when we stay locked down in fear, protection and contraction.

The trauma that we are trying so desperately to avoid from outside of ourselves, is still eating us alive from the inside.

Additionally, when we are in contraction we have just shut ourselves off from the possibility of Lifeforce flowing through us. And this contradicts and compromises our entire being, because nature is about expansion – growth, experiences and cycles moving forward as evolution.

In contraction we “stop”; we back out of this energy and contract into survival.

Immediately we start to dissolve instead of evolve.

In other words, this begins a process of disintegration instead of integration (growth).

In the short term contracting is useful in times of danger. Imagine crouching in a cave to escape a bear … however if we stay in the cave for an extended period of time we won’t survive.

Emotionally our danger of prolonged contraction is exactly the same.

We start to literally die.

We can survive in contraction if we can still manage to have a roof over our head, food on the table and our survival needs met … but we are not living … we are merely attempting to emotionally survive our wounds, whilst continually breaking down further.

The more Lifeforce we are disconnected from, the more we feel depression and anxiety – which are all signals from our emotions telling us “Wrong Town” … these are NOT soul truths that we are supposed to be living.

But yet, we may feel there is no option … and that is perfectly understandable … when we are terrified about getting smashed again. We are terrified about being opened up to more abuse and manipulation.

The terror is “I could be duped and taken, exploited, pillaged and soul raped again!”

Can we see any other way other than to hide out in a cave?

Have we realised that the bear we are trying to escape, is our own internal wounds and trauma that we have locked ourselves in the cave with?

Did we know that the cleaning up of these fears and traumas is our ONLY ticket to freedom and IS our pardon into life with a way to be fearless and safe?

No …

Before our awakening we did not know this.

 

The Shift of Core Beliefs Which is Necessary

When we have been smashed by narcissistic abuse we are undergoing a powerful Spiritual Awakening at the Highest Level.

I have said so many times that narcissistic abuse is a make or break experience where we either shift profoundly into a Higher Version of ourselves or we remain broken and break down further as a result of not rising to the Soul Truths we have been presented with.

After being narcissistically abused these are the original False Beliefs that cannot remain in our psyches and beings if we want to create a Thriver Recovery.

“Life is happening to me from the outside in.”

“I fear the evil people in the world that I am absolutely defenceless against.”

“I am a human being whose life is precariously dependent on what other people are or aren’t doing.”

“Other people are responsible for my own safety, boundaries, love, approval and security and if they don’t provide it healthily my life is in peril.”

“I am a victim and life is happening to me regardless of how I am showing up in life.”

After narcissistic abuse when we are living within these False Beliefs and “outside in” framework the concept of “trust” is terrifying. If we felt helpless, victimised and defenceless before narcissistic abuse on certain levels, NOW this has escalated to a whole new level of fear.

It is usual that we are suffering C-PTSD and agoraphobia as well as many adrenal disorders, because we do NOT feel safe in Life.

Now our natural dependencies on Life and other people outside of our own connection with ourselves, feels precarious and untrustworthy … and is fraught with danger.

For those of us who were narcissistically abused, it is very likely that by the time we found out that these people were not to be trusted, we had already over-invested ourselves.

Which meant that our lives depended on these people to “do the right thing” … or that what was we truly believed.

And we were in serious trouble when they didn’t, because we had so much pinned on them.

This describes both my relationships with narcissists. I was hugely invested, hugely enmeshed and suffered massive losses on many levels because I NEEDED to trust these men for my life to be healthy, secure and go ahead.

And looking back with what I know now, and my own levels of development … back then I allowed the enmeshments and takeovers in so many areas in my life because I feared I could not survive alone.

At that stage of my journey I was NOT a source of love, approval, security and survival to myself. I totally believed (ancient female DNA wounding) that without a man I was no-one and without a man I could not survive.

Thank goodness those wounds are gone now and there is no NEED for me to need a man for fun, joy, travel, life experiences, love, approval or survival or security.

Due to full self-partnering and the up-levelling of those crippling wounds that were causing me to hand over my power and my life time and time again, I am now an adult woman in my own body generating my own wonderful life.

I am no longer a broken child posing as a woman really subconsciously looking for a man to be my “parent”.

What was totally necessary for me, was a shifting of core beliefs that Life was NOT happening from the outside in … it needed to happen from the inside out … THEN Life on the outside could match, because I would be showing up in ways that were not generating more of my wounds, but instead would be reflecting the new beliefs about empowering and trusting myself.

The following were the necessary shifts in core beliefs in order to start to TRUST myself, life and others.

“Life is happening to me from the inside out, depending on my beliefs and emotional alignment regarding any given topic.”

“How Life happens for me is going to be in accordance with what I start generating for myself.”

“All sorts of people exist in the world from the Highest Good to the Lowest Evil, and it is up to me what I start creating, aligning with, choosing and generating.”

“No-one else is responsible for my wellbeing, healthy life and healthy boundaries. I am … and if people are not granting that, and I resent that or are shattered by that, it is because I am not taking responsibility for myself in these areas.”

“If others don’t provide me with more of the love, approval, security and survival that I am committed to generating for myself, then I can detach, walk away and align with and generate authentic relationships with people and situations who ARE capable. The world is a very BIG place!”

“When I start showing up in Life and making choices from within, with the dedication of my own healing, development and growth, EVERYTHING will shift with me to reflect these changes.“

When you read and FEEL the difference between the False Beliefs which weren’t serving us and these beliefs, you will sense …

Powerlessness versus powerfulness.

Hopelessness versus hope.

Instability and fear versus inspiration and courage.

Emotional pain and suffering versus emotional growth and life.

 

The Bottom Line With Trust

The REAL bottom line of “trust” I believe is this …

Life is happening FOR me and not TO me.

In the human “asleep consciousness” we don’t know that there is a connection between the outer and the inner.

We don’t know that when we have our fears turn up outside of us that our unconscious just became conscious and we NOW have the opportunity to heal something that we have never had the opportunity to heal before.

And because we haven’t recognised this growth opportunity, we don’t understand the truth about “Soul Contacts” or the gift toward our own evolution – so we just feel it was a victimised random act with no purpose to it.

When we don’t understand the purpose or take our graduation – then YES we are doomed to relive it again – because the soul lesson needs to happen for us to go to the next level of our evolution.

And we FEEL it … it is like we “know” somewhere in our intuition … that we are still “precarious” that we are still “unsafe” … meaning that there is every chance it WILL happened again.

What this really is about is the Fed X parcel of evolution opportunity showed up on our doorstep, but we were “not home”, we didn’t “get it”.

So another delivery is on its way.

At some level we sense this and we try to hide out from it, and this is what the protection, backing away and focusing all on the perpetrator but not coming inside ourselves to commit to our own healing is all about.

And this doesn’t work … because our soul is on an agenda … it knows it’s time to heal this … meaning that we cannot evolve to our next Highest and Best version of ourselves with these Limiting and False Beliefs still on board.

They have to go .. and that is why they have been brought to our attention. And they will not let up until they have their way with us … so either the “abuse trauma” is going to find us again from the outside, or / and it is going to keep smashing us from the inside …

That is until we accept the Fed X parcel.

This is the delivery … The awakening of the unconscious wounds into our conscious – so that we go within, find our original wounds, up-level them and graduate beyond them … freeing ourselves to our Next Highest Version of ourselves.

The beliefs such as “fear of abandonment”, “I’m not enough to be loved”, “I have to earn love and approval”, “I am not lovable unless I do or am (conditional love)”

And until this is healed we are a diminished self – we are limited in our abilities to be radiant, large, magnetic, empowered and fulfilling our greatest joys, aspirations and missions in the world – and this is NOT how our soul intended to be living.

Ironically, getting on-board with what our soul wants is the only thing that WILL ever truly gratify us or fill us with joy.

What our soul wants for us is exactly what we want.

And, because we are not presently living at this level – it HURTS.

So hence the “abuse” came to us – as all the evidence of what we still hadn’t healed within us in order to LIVE at this LEVEL.

And in no way is this about “blaming victims” or “excusing abusers” … it isn’t … it is about taking the gift (no matter what it looks like) emancipating ourselves and growing ourselves to our level of development that we never need another identical Fed Ex parcel delivered again.

When we can start to realise that there is a system of life that is life-affirming, life-granting and consciousness and growth creating, we can stop judging it.

We can stop being in resistance to the life lessons we are learning and start to heal beyond our wounds and unpleasant experiences to create an incredible Life.

Therefore, we can stop thinking our life depends on trusting people … because it totally doesn’t … and we can start depending on trusting and generating life through ourselves.

Then we WILL start trusting what WE are creating and with whom.

 

Who Are People Really?

I remember when I was struggling to connect with people and trust them after narcissistic abuse.

Before my development in the areas I am talking about in this article, I was on the lookout for narcissists everywhere … and unconscious and underdeveloped people used to freak me out.

I used to feel like everyone had the potential to be “unsafe” – and was therefore capable of hurting me or letting me down.

I looked at family and friends and thought “look at what they have done at times, and look at how they are capable of behaving.”

Even as my journey in this Community was taking place with people who were wounded and still unconscious, I was still at times triggered and feeling an anxiety that I had to “change them” and get them to “see it” in order to be safe.

I still had a lot of work to do on wounds that I was carrying about other people and their supposed impact on my life.

“If I don’t fix sick people then I will be at peril.”

“If people don’t agree with me I’ll be annihilated by them.”

“I am at risk for my survival when people are damaged.”

These were fears from childhood, and also deep DNA survival programs that I was still carrying.

One of the most powerful Life orientations I have learned since recovery from narcissistic abuse is to go inside and work through ANY “off emotions”, because they are ALL telling me my subconscious programming is not in agreement with my True Self on these topics and needs adjustment.

And when I uplevelled and healed these wounds, a great peace and compassion entered where the anxiety once was.

My organic wisdom and True Self took over.

My son Zac was one of my greatest teachers on this topic – he was the person who prompted me to go inside and heal this … after I expressed my frustration about how I wanted to pull away and be on my own rather than connect with unconscious people.

He said to me, “Mum everyone is wounded and everyone has issues. So do you. Are you going to resent and judge everyone and pull away from everyone because of that?”

He was right – we are all in this together.

My job was to heal my beliefs to know that I was safe and healthy as my own Source connected to my own Infinite Wisdom, self-partnering and Higher Power (ongoing healing and development) and then from THAT place I can guide and help others awaken and heal without needing to drown in it – or being attached to any conditional outcome.

I could also pull away from people who were not teachable or willing to awaken and take personal responsibility for their own healing – and in NO WAY was this any reflection or peril on my life.

This is never about “who can I trust”, it is simply about being engaged in the human experience, releasing and healing my own traumas and becoming freer myself so that I can love myself and others in healthy ways.

Now that I have released the judgement and can honour people no matter where they are at – I am constantly and beautifully rewarded with seeing people’s expanding consciousness everywhere.

It truly is a case of Namaste … “The divinity in me sees the divinity in you”.

When I see anything less than divine I know that people are responding from their own unhealed traumas … and for that I have compassion and I work on myself to release any judgement of that (I am getting so much better at it) – leaving simply the observation of where they are at.

If that person is willing to awaken and take responsibility for their wounding then that is easy to be around and inspiring to join in with. And if they don’t and wish to blame, shame and condemn others for it and hold them responsible, then they are not ready to escape their own torture, and in the current moment they have zero ability to heal.

To continue to stay attached to people like this would only be abusing myself, but there is still NO requirement for this person to be any different for my life to be what it is.

I can bless them, allow them to be themselves and chose healthier realities for myself.

In regard to being “taken in”, “duped” or “abused” … I just DON’T believe that is possible when we are showing up authentically – when we are honest about concerns, ask the difficult questions and confronting anything directly that feels “off”.

I also don’t believe we are susceptible to tolerating abuse when we are ALREADY a solid source of love, approval, survival and security to ourselves.

When we are not desperate, needy or dependent we don’t over-commit to people straight away. We can retain ourselves, our lives and our resources and blend at a respectful and sensible pace.

Most of us in this Community are not teenagers. We are adult people who have had histories of previous relationships and intense learning. There is no need for us to act like reckless teenagers and be swept into ways of living with people in ANY capacity which are foolish.

If people won’t slow down and accept healthy boundaries and your due diligence and respecting yourself in regard to them, then they are either severely co-dependent and needy, and / or narcissistic … and there is NO way you want to have business or love relationships with them.

This level of development and solidness – I am whole within myself and I will honour sensibility and self-love because I am NO longer fearful of handing over my power because I fear rejection, abandonment, criticism or punishment and I am no longer NEEDY for someone else to provide me with love, approval, survival and security … is the total formula for TRUST.

Because no longer will you ever pin your life on people outside of yourself, and for the first time ever you will be truly capable of generating healthy relationships and walking away without the agony if you discover they are not.

We can begin an investment in someone and at any time break the deal when it is no longer wholesome for us.

Which means we are are no longer living in fear, paranoia and defences looking out for abusers.

Now here is the real deeper truth about all of this … IF we do get derailed by someone who shows up as unwholesome – we can STILL bless that, know it is a gift and it was meant to be – because it gave us the incredible stepping stone opportunity to heal something within us that we had not healed before, and go up an even higher level with our evolution in regard to “relationship”.

That orientation is a far cry from staying in unconsciousness, victimisation, fear and continual suffering.

The truth is we can pull away …

IF we don’t overcommit before appropriate.

IF we have not pinned our love, approval. survival and security on this person.

IF we are solid, healthy and happy within ourselves (no-one can give us our own happiness.)

IF we are sharing the love we already have for ourselves and life and are not with this person to try to GET LOVE and take away the pain of NOT having it in our lives.

Can you see how this changes everything?

 

The Necessary Development of Ourselves In All of This

If we were wounded by narcissists and have always unconsciously carried the fears of “trying to play it safe”, “dimming down to keep others happy”, “not having a voice” and if we have been “fearful of upsetting others because of the risk of criticism, rejection, abandonment or punishment”, then we have a lot of work to do on these wounded young child parts of ourselves that have not as yet grown up and which have kept handing power and our truth away.

Because if we don’t, we are going to keep co-generating untrustworthy situations, and we are likely to powerlessly blame others for our pain and we will contract, shut down and keep it locked inside ourselves …

IF we don’t wake up from the trance and do the inner work.

And we are going to be agonised with the feelings of “how can I ever trust again?”

 

When We Don’t Trust and When We Do

Not trusting life and others … means we are not anchored into our own development and healing.

It means we keep experiencing all the things we don’t trust.

It means we are stunted in our ability to heal.

It means we still have the trapped feelings inside us – the traumas that we have not healed yet and ironically those which we WILL assign someone else to cater to – not a person who is the saviour of our wounds, but a person who brings more evidence of them.

When we do “trust” we know it is never about what other people are or aren’t doing, it is about generating and creating our own life from the inside out.

It is about cleaning up our original wounds that made us not trust ourselves, not show up truthfully, not have boundaries, not let go and cling to another adult to grant us the love, approval,security and survival that we have as yet healed and provided within ourselves.

As children we were powerless to do this, as adults we are not.

And for goodness sake we need to stop having the conversations that focus on ALL the reasons WHY we can’t trust people … such as: “All men do that” and “All women are that” and thinking SOMEHOW all that focus on distrust and pain is somehow going to STOP IT happening in our life!

That is the victim mentality that only creates MORE of the same.

Our own evolution and development realises – everyone is doing what they do given their level of woundeness versus how healed and developed they are … and THEIR life is NOT ours to worry about.

What IS valid, in regard to us generating change in our life, is the releasing and evolving ourselves beyond our OWN levels of woundedness.

Then we can TRUST life.

Because we are in it consciously creating it healthily.

I so hope this article has helped.

I encourage you, if you are struggling with trusting again, to join me in my next Webinar Group where you will learn EXACTLY how to heal everything I have talked about in this article.

I look forward, as always, to answering your comments and questions …