Trust is Tangible

You are proof that Trust is a tangible thing

Please don't get me wrong - by stating that you being in the presence or lives of people makes it so that you trust them or that they trust you is NOT what I am talking about. Abuse survivors know one thing is truth - we all know that trust is a thing that has to be in any relationship or else it turns into a master/servant thing at best, and well, we all know what happens that can mark the part that is "at worst." 

By my stating and thinking that trust is a tangible thing and that you are proof of it is that all abuse survivors end up with new people in our lives, people who we may have had the luck of coming into contact with a second time around, or people who we never met before and that all of us have to relearn how to trust other people. It is not an easy thing to do, either. We all want to have people in our lives, all want to be loved and cherished and want to have closeness with people, but how we handled not being trusted by the ones who were supposed to trust us, and the ones who made us work for their trust even as they demanded that we not question their trustworthiness, how we handled others not trusting us for no reason at all versus how we handle our being able to trust anyone at all after the fact are two very different things.

That anyone who has gone through something as awful as any kind of abuse is one thing, but to expect that anyone who has gone through it at all and come out at the other end able to deal with things and also able to try and trust other people again is almost impossible to believe, given  the circumstances, that anyone in that situation can trust again. Trust is not easy. Once it has been fractured it takes a bit of time to regain it, not in the person who broke it, but with anyone. Abuse survivors know what it is to feel like no one and no one's words can be trusted, and we find out that no matter how many excuses we are willing to make for people who have done us wrong, at the bottom of it all we know what is the truth, and the truth is that trusting others is not only something that needs to be regained in us, but more, is something that we have to try hard not to falter on. 

We second guess everything and everyone, but no one more do we do this with than ourselves. You have to remember that we have been physically assaulted, accused of cheating, of lying, of stealing, of doing things that are all chalked up to an assumption, and the assumption is the thing that keeps an abuser in control. They want to own us, not love us, because they have no idea the truth that is Love. This is what we, the abused and the formerly abused, know as our reality. We have a hard time taking people for their word, and we have an even harder time with trusting ourselves with trusting anyone, ever again. When a survivor of abuse comes into your life, it is a gift. It is a gift because you have the opportunity to watch trust become a part of a person's life. 

Too often in life we take for granted that we will be trusted, and then one day we meet someone who we trust our whole self with and that one person ends up breaking that trust, either by not trusting us or outright accusing us for doing things that we would never do. It is immediate that we have to try hard to come out of our selves, to reach out and to be with people who, at the onset, we so dearly want to trust - and it hurts to not trust another person. As humans we are not meant to be anything other than with each other, and when the trust has been broken we become confused as to how it is that this happened. We do not know when it started, all we do know is that it hurts, that it cuts all the way to the bones, all the way to the soul. The first thing that anyone experiences with someone who is going to put us to task with our ability to trust others is the idea that we are not anywhere near good enough to be taken for the words that are coming out of our mouths. When all you have is the words that you speak, and someone who is meant to just trust you because we so readily trust them, does not extend that same energy in return, it creates a climate of "master/servant."

When we have to beg to be who we are, and beg to be able to feel okay with ourselves and someone who we wanted at one time to so dearly trust us, and they think the thoughts that they do that make it difficult for those who have been abused, those who have survived the abuse, those who are still in the throes of the abuse to be able to get out of that mold, that energy that we do not fit into, but that we are being told is who we are. When we are not allowed to be who we are, this creates a serious sense of mistrust. It is an energy that tells us each that who we are is not good enough to be trusted, that we are "not up to spec" with the person who we gave our whole selves to. Our whole self is the only thing that we really can claim to having and when it is that we are told that who we are somehow is not good enough to behave in a manner that is befitting of someone who is meant to be loved and means only to love, and we get told, perhaps not in so many words that the way we are is so irritating to another person and that we feel like we are not even liked by them, let alone loved, it creates an energy of mistrust - not only in other people, but more, and sadly, within ourselves. 

Trust is a tangible thing, a tangible energy, much as is everything, because trust is us. We are the embodiment of trust. We are trust come to life. When an abuse survivor can become trusting with themselves is when it becomes tangible, because with that trust in ourselves also comes the luxury of just being able to sit in our skin and finally, after many, many years, we can feel our wholeness coming back to us, can feel like we are meant to be this person who we have fought so long and so hard to be again. My thought about not being trusted is that because an abuser is such an insecure person with their own selves and with their own thoughts and essentially are not happy with themselves, they must find others to help them understand this part of them, and the best person to do that is someone who is like them in opposition. 

To believe otherwise- that we are anything other than the most purest of evidence that trust is a tangible thing, is to take away the things from us, the lessons that we learned, which tell everyone, including ourselves, that we have not been through everything that we know we have been. It is like telling a child that he or she has no reason to fear the monsters in the closet after we have told them that monsters exist. The only monsters that exist are those who are willing to breach our trust and expect that we should just deal with the idea that who they are in their own mind is so important to the benefit of mankind that somehow, to not trust them and their words and their actions is somehow a sin against man and nature.

The idea that we are not willing to trust them as well as a lot of other people is not giving credence to the fact that we know what we went through, we know how we felt and now, how we feel. We know that who we are is important, and we also know that there is an energy between us and our abusers, no matter who they are or where they are, that only with our own ability to rebuild trust in ourselves and for ourselves, that there will never be trust for another again until that happens. 

This is how we know that we are trust come to life. Because we are cautious, because we hurt, because we bear the scars and the wounds of the battle within ourselves is why it is that trust is a tangible thing. 

It is tangible because in order to trust someone enough to love them, we must be able to give ourselves to them, in every way that we can imagine.

Without trust within, there can never be trust on the outside, either...

I Love You All
ROX