Self Love, Self Trust and Forgiveness

It’s been a little over a year since I discovered my now ex-husband’s affair. During this year, I have discovered more about myself than I did in our entire sixteen year relationship. I have gotten on and off and back on and off the insane roller coaster of emotions that happens when someone betrays you like that. The hurt went away quickly, the anger lingered, and the shame and embarrassment were hiding behind the anger so it took me much longer to process it. Feeling like a fool has kept me stuck in a liminal space. A disoriented place where I wasn’t who I was before, but I couldn’t move into who I would become because, I didn’t trust myself, I couldn’t forgive myself.

To hide his truth in the last years, he became a manipulative and emotionally abusive person to me. I felt like it was my fault for being manipulated, my fault for believing his lies. But I now see that the shame and embarrassment of his betrayal and manipulation are not mine to carry, they are his. Why did it take me so long?! People change, people lie and people do heinous things to keep the truth from being revealed. I made the mistake of trusting an untrustworthy person. That mistake came from a beautiful part of myself, a place of loyalty, and there is no real shame in making that mistake.

I have spent a lot of time disassembling everything in our relationship since 2006. What I found was journal entry after journal entry detailing my discontent, our conversations about said discontent and nothing ever changing. When there were difficulties in our relationship, I assumed I was the problem. I didn’t look at his lack, his emotional unavailability, or his toxic underpinnings beyond his frustrating behaviors. I found recaps from our couples therapy appointments, recaps from my own therapy appointments and it was painfully obvious to me in hindsight, that this person was unable to meet my emotional needs from the very beginning. Why this didn’t occur to me in the relationship was a painful realization for me.

And now, in this space of honesty that I have created for myself, I discover that the most hurtful thing in the aftermath, was that I abandoned myself. I didn’t listen to my intuition. I didn’t identify, let alone prioritize my needs as a human being in a relationship with another. I let someone get inside my most vulnerable mindsets and use them against me. I deluded myself, I believed that love was about making sacrifices and compromising. I believed that my loyalty and commitment meant I could trust his. And so, in this healing journey of the last year, I had to face that self abandonment and answer why I did that.

In therapy, themes always come up around self love and self trust for me, but I didn’t understand that because I feel like I do love myself. I am committed to myself, I take care of myself, show up for myself and prioritize my well being for the most part. Turns out, I was taking the concept too literally. Internally, I love myself, I love being myself. But in relationships, I love being a person who is loved…or rather, I will shrink, stifle or contort myself so that I am not too much, too sensitive, too loud, too demanding, etc. I no longer love being myself, I abandon whole parts of myself to feel loved.

Like many people, that abandonment was taught to me by my parents and our society, that love is earned through hiding yourself, through making yourself smaller, quieter, and less needy. We are taught that our emotional needs are selfish and irrelevant. And the consequence of that type of parenting and our patriarchal society, generations of people, especially women, who think it’s okay to lose, deny or shrink whole parts of themselves to be “loved”.

Self love is not about how you feel about yourself. It is about loving who you are when you are being your most authentic self. It’s about honoring all the parts of yourself, even if they are off-putting. Your eccentric parts, your goofy parts, your wounded parts, your intelligent parts, any of your parts that make other people uncomfortable. It is about knowing deep in your soul that all your parts are stunning when viewed as a whole. Love is only really beautiful when it is unconditional, otherwise, it is just another prison. And no love can really be unconditional without first embodying true self love.

With self trust, I know I am a trustworthy person, I am reliable and responsible. I trust myself in general. But in relation to others that I love, I am untrustworthy. I silence my intuition, I ignore the signals and the pain in my body, I make excuses for their red flags, and I abandon and blame myself. After being repeatedly gaslit by someone who claimed they loved you, it feels impossible to trust your thoughts, your recollections, and your opinions. So how could I really trust myself? This lesson has been much, much harder for me to sort out. And honestly, I feel like it will probably take the rest of my life. It’s not just about the present, it’s about the past and the traumas that eroded trust both in myself and others.

But I am working on it. In the peace of his absence, my thoughts are clear, my nervous system is calm, I am able to identify my emotions and I am learning not to judge them. I’m learning to be aware of how intuition feels in my body, leaning into it and having some faith in it. I’m using my discernment and not needing anyone to validate or co-sign it. I am slowly rebuilding my internal structures, reevaluating my values, and realizing what my emotional needs are in relationships. Self trust as it pertains to being with another person will come, I hope.

Forgiveness has always been hard for me. I believe people when they show me who they are, and while I can accept what happened and move on, I never truly absolve or forgive. I’ve read all the reasons why people and professionals interpret this as a problem. They say you will carry resentment, feel like a victim, or suffer in some way and I call bullshit on all of that. Sometimes it’s not about forgiving the person who betrayed you, but it is only really about forgiving yourself.

I forgive myself for who I was in that relationship. I forgive myself for trusting an untrustworthy person. I forgive myself for not listening to my gut and putting myself and my needs last. In order for me to let go and move out of this liminality, in order for me to grow and evolve, I have to forgive myself. In that forgiveness, I accept that he was not who I thought he was and genuine indifference is left in the space where anger once sat.

I came here today to organize my thoughts, but I’m leaving with the hope that someone else can find some wisdom in these perspectives. In a betrayal, we have usually betrayed ourselves in some way, and that wound is often the hardest one to heal. It may take time to see that you are not actually bleeding from their sword because your very valid anger will camouflage it. But at some point, abandoning ourselves is the only thing left to investigate and the most important thing to forgive.