Latest / Back Porch Confessions / Betrayal Trauma
Transcript
- Gravesb41: Y'all, let me tell you about one of my favorite little gyms back home in Robinson, Illinois. If you're looking for boutique style that feels good, fits right, and doesn't break the bank, you have to stop by Polished Boutique, owned by my sweet friend, Mindy, and her two friends, Jennifer and Valerie. And it's ran with heart, y'all. Polished is one of those places where you're not just shopping, you're family. From on-trend outfits, cozy everyday staples, Sometimes my soul is just tired, tired of being strong, tired of carrying the heaviness, tired of fighting battles nobody else can see. And maybe you know that kind of tired too. The kind of tired that doesn't come from sleep, the kind of tired that settles deep in your heart, your mind and your spirit, the kind that comes from surviving, enduring, holding it all together and still showing up when your life had tried to take everything out of you. But here's the truth. Hey, hey, welcome to Backport's Confessions. Welcome in again. Today I'm going to jump into that raw conversation that we all not, we try to avoid anyway. And so I am just here to put it out there and in the front like I always do. Today we're talking along the lines of trust being shattered, nervous system survival, emotional confusion, grief healing, rebuilding safety and learning how to trust yourself again. That's a wrap on this episode of Back Porch Confessions. Where the tea is hot, the stories are real, and we never apologize for keeping it honest. Produced and edited by the magic makers over at Zay Media. Until next time, keep your porch talk spicy and your secrets safe, mostly. Welcome to Back Porch Confessions, where the sweet tea is strong, the stories are stronger, and no topic is too taboo for the porch. Grab a seat, kick off your shoes, and let's get into the kind of conversation your mama warned you about, but you listen anyway. Hey beautiful people, it's Barbara here from Backport's Confessions. You know, I am only gonna share what I truly love. And y'all, this one's a game changer. Our Way Skin by AYXA is a simple, luxurious skincare created with real women in mind. Think clean ingredients, formulas you can see and feel, smoother texture, that healthy glow and confidence looking back at you in the mirror. Whether you're juggling family, work, or just need a little self-care moment, If you're looking for beautiful, meaningful, and custom-made creations that tell a story, Little Butterfly Design and Print is where creativity and compassion come together. Cheryl specializes in personalized designs that celebrate life's most important moments, from custom shirts and prints to heartfelt gifts, memorial pieces and unique creations made just for you. Every design is crafted with intention, care, and a personal touch that you can feel. 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Being tired does not mean you are weak, it does not mean you are broken, and it does not mean your story is over. At Renewed Mind we talk about the hard things, the hidden heaviness, the silent battles, the trauma, the grief, the healing, and the fight to keep going when your soul feels weary. This is the place where strong people can finally tell the truth, where healing gets honest, where pain is spoken out loud. Ixa's products give you spa quality results right at home. I'm obsessed with Our Way Skin and the way it makes my skin feel buttery soft. Go check out Our Way Skin by Ixa at ourwayskin.com and tell them Barbara sent you because your skin deserves to be cared for your way. ⁓ all in one podcast. Are you all ready? Buckle up buttercups. Here we go. Welcome back into Back Forge Confessions. You know, the place, the back porch where healing gets honest, truth gets unpacked, and sometimes we laugh through the pain. Because if we cry through all of it, we need what? Industrial size, tissues, and the therapy coat pay. Anyway, I love the fact that And where the ones who have spent their whole lives pouring into others can find a space to breathe, be seen, and remember they are worth the battle too because sometimes the healer needs healing. Sometimes the strong ones need somewhere soft to land, and sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is admit you're tired and keep choosing to heal anyway. This is renewed mind, real talk, real pain, real healing. chat GPT gives me these little catchy things to say. It's so funny. ⁓ I incorporate my stuff that I want to put, like I put in the thoughts and all the things that I laid all out and then I ask it to kind of break it down a little bit for me. And anyway, together we make this amazing thing together. So I am Barbara, as you always know, and today we are diving into one of the deepest wounds a human heart can actually experience. And when I say One honest conversation at a time. It's deep. It's the betrayal trauma. Betrayal wounds. Nope, that's not just heartbreak. That's not just disappointment. Not just somebody out here making a bad choice. I'm talking about the kind of betrayal that shakes your nervous system, changes how safe the world feels to you and makes you question everything you thought was real. That kind of pain, that kind of betrayal, it cuts so deep. ⁓ The kind that leaves you replaying conversations and questioning memories, wondering if what you believed was ever true. Kind of like when I was in a two year relationship with somebody and found out he was in an entirely other relationship the entire freaking time. Two years of my life was just. Not real. like I was living in some kind of time capsule or something. I don't know. Anyway, was the strangest feeling. That kind of betrayal goes deep. ⁓ And if you ever have asked yourself things like, how did I not see it? Why does this hurt so deeply? Why can't I just move on? Why do I still love someone who hurt me? Well, we're going to get into unpacking all of it right here in this podcast today. Because betrayal trauma doesn't just break trust. It breaks trust in everyone around you. It often breaks trust even in ourselves. And then we question whether or not any decision we've ever made in life was the right one. So what betrayal trauma actually is? Let's define that. Betrayal trauma occurs when the people or systems we depended on, you know, for our safety, our emotional safety, that gets violated. The trust gets violated in ways that create psychological and physiological distress. simpler terms without me stopping and beating around the bush is betrayal. Betrayal trauma occurs when the people or systems we depend on for our emotional safety violate trust in ways that create psychological and physiological distress. That's betrayal trauma. And I know there are some listeners that are going. That's what that is. That's what that was. That's what I'm feeling. if you are. Stay here. Stay with me for the next hour. 40 minutes, 50 minutes, however long it takes me to get through this. So why? The why. Why does betrayal feel different than just ordinary hurt? hurt nonetheless, right? Well, because betrayal attacks the attachment security. So the person that has that type of betrayal trauma with you, you have an actual attachment to. They were a safe space. They were safe, you thought. So when pain comes from strangers, it just hurts. It just hurts. We don't like it. It doesn't feel good. It just hurts. But when pain comes from the people we trusted to protect us, to be our safe space, to be the person that was never going to turn on us. It destabilizes our internal sense of safety. It destabilizes our entire world. And it shakes you to the core. Betrayal trauma is one of the most difficult things you will ever recover from. Ever. Butyrial trauma isn't just about what happened. It's about who. That's right. It's about who it happened through. Who did it? To you. It's one thing for life to hurt you, things in life, things to not go right. It's one thing for that to happen. It's quite another. for the people you trusted or the person that you trusted to become the source of pain. That is a pain that is entirely different and it hurts deep. Have you ever questioned your reality after betrayal? be questioned what reality really was because everything that was happening with this person for this many years it doesn't seem like it was true. So it wasn't true. These things, these things were happening. The fake love, all the stuff, it was. It was supposed to be reality. I thought it was real. How did I not see it wasn't real? Did you blame yourself at first? There's something wrong with me. I'm just, I just can't be loved. No one's ever going to love me. I'm unlovable. I'm too much. I deserved this some way. Do you blame yourself first or did you? So why does it feel like your whole world is shattered? because we go through pain every day. There's something every day that causes some kind of ick in our life. And we just keep putting one foot in front of the other and keep moving forward. But when that kind of pain happens, it'll stop us dead in our tracks and probably sit us back down on our butts. Betrayal often causes emotional disorientation because your brain is then forced to reconcile to conflicting realities. So you have the reality of what you thought was. who all of a sudden have an entirely different reality that you're immediately supposed to accept. The brain doesn't work that way. Like you're having to separate these two and understand what reality is and what actuality is. because this over here was fake. This is what's really happened. And when those two collide. It puts a crack in your world. That's shakeable. It shakes your whole entire being. So the brain struggles with this. I don't mind it, my brain struggled with it. So the person who made you feel safe also made you feel unsafe. all in one fail swoop. Our brains are not equipped to put those two together. Like it's confusing. It's distressing. It's disorienting. It seems so incredibly hard to even think about trying to get through. So. This contradiction that's the contradiction creates an actual, how do I say this? Like a cognitive dissonance. That contradiction is going to create that cognitive dissonance. And it's not going to be an overnight success in your head to figure out how to overcome that mountain. Because before it was just a little pebble of sugar or salt on the ground. to all of a sudden, bam, there's this mountain right in front of your face and you got to figure out how to climb it. and leave what was reality to what actually is reality on the other side. your brain starts to search for answers. You want to know why. You're so angry. You want to know why. You want to understand it. You have to have the answers. And that's how you feel. And you're valid in feeling that way. You're going to question everything about yourself, every decision you've ever made. Did I miss the signs? I should have seen it when this happened or that happened. Was any of it real? Did they ever really love me? How long was I blind in this? How long was this going on? How long have they been hiding this? How did I not see what was going on? How could I if so completely and utterly love somebody so blindly that I couldn't see reality? And your mind then becomes a detective trying to solve a case. that your heart never wanted opened. So now you're fighting your heart because it still loves and your mind wants nothing but answers. It wants to understand. It wants to not be confused. betrayal. It activates survival mode in us again. And I know I talk about this a lot. But so many of us live in survival mode for so many different reasons. And there's so many different subjects that I will talk on that's survival mode. because it's the nervous system's protective state. when it perceives a threat. That's a threat. It's a genuine, legitimate threat. Your reality has been turned upside down. This person is not who they said they were. So you get this betrayal trigger. which I've talked about in another podcast. And when that trigger comes, the fight, flight, freeze, and fawn reactions. because you have emotional danger in place. An emotional danger is processed similarly to like a physical danger. So it doesn't just affect your mind. It affects your entire body. Many people will not be able to eat, not be able to think, not be able to hold a conversation without breaking down, not be able to hear a TV show or some song without spiraling out of control. That's the reality of what's right at that moment. And I think I just misspoke about something. Anyway, we are talking about betrayal trauma right now, in case I confused you. Betrayal can make your body feel all kinds of things. it can throw you off course. It can make your chest tight. sleep disappears, insomnia rolls in, nightmares, your stomach drops, you might gain an ulcer, you get sick anytime you try to eat, your body, it reacts before your mind ever catches up. in your body at that point. Your body is saying, danger is detected. Nervous system takeover. Survival mode uploaded. And that's exactly where it goes. I know. that many of us have gone through this maybe even more than once in our lives. And I know there's plenty of you listening to me right now that are going. She hears me. she's talking to me. I know exactly what she's talking about. I have that feeling or I've had that feeling. Why do we at some points with these things, why do we sometimes stay, defend them, or struggle to leave? Well, because it becomes a trauma bond at that point. What is a trauma bond? Trauma bond forms through cycles of pain, relief, affection, and then emotional inconsistency. and I'm going to say the last part again. It's not emotional safety. Trauma bond is emotional inconsistency. So the nervous system, it becomes addicted to the inner men reinforcement. Okay, so then that creates that bond. That creates that need for the, ⁓ the momentary approval. Okay, things are great today. Okay, now it's not good for another week or so. ⁓ okay, it's good. It's that back and forth. They give you little... kibbles not kibbles not kibbles not kibbles ⁓ little breadcrumbs of hope you're living around and you're limping around daily on on hopium Unpredictable affection does what? What do you think it does to you, your mind, your body? Unpredictable affection creates dependency, which equates to trauma bonds, which equates to defending them, struggling to leave, and all the things that make you want to run back to the person that has shattered you. Some people do. Some people stay there forever. Some people walk away, shut that door and never want to go back. I want to get the people that need to heal to that point to be able to slam that door and step forward and honor them and not that person that created that trauma bond in you. Sometimes people are gonna ask things like, why didn't you just leave when you're in that trauma bond situation? not that easy. For some people it's not that easy. For some people they don't have safety outside and the safest place they've ever felt was in that trauma bond. And that's sad. That's so sad. So they don't have the cognitive ability, the strength to step away for themselves. The fear of doing that is greater than dealing with the trauma bond. And some people just don't even know they're in one. That question though, why didn't you just leave? It comes from people who have never had their nervous system hacked. They've never had their nervous system wired for ⁓ this type of thing. Like to chase the emotional safety. Cause that's what you're doing in trauma bonding. You're just chasing emotional safety. That's why when people say their picker is broke, they're chasing emotional safety. And oftentimes they find it in somebody. Who's going to put them in betrayal trauma? Who's going to shatter their world? Because we're vulnerable. Those type of people are vulnerable. Understand this though. It wasn't weakness that got you there. It wasn't weakness at all. It was conditioning. You were conditioned. to a trauma bond survivor. You were conditioned to chase emotional safety. because of something in your life somewhere along the line. As a child, as a young adult, somewhere you were taught to chase emotional safety. Have you ever defended someone who deeply hurt you? Did leaving feels harder than staying? Yeah, I've kind of alluded to that. Leaving definitely feels harder than saving for some people. So. Why love and hurt can coexist? Why is that? Why can it coexist? It seems impossible. It seems like it shouldn't be. But quite literally, it happens all the time around us. All the time. Humans can hold contradictory emotions. truth per se, all at once. You can have this truth over here and this truth over here and you're just walking in both of them. And they contradict one another. We as humans do it all the time. I see it around me all the time. So. attachment. It doesn't disappear instantly because the betrayal occurs. No. It sticks for a while. That's why it's so hard for the person that was betrayed to move forward in a way. ⁓ Love often lingers, hangs out for quite a while after trust collapses in a relationship. So still feeling those ounces of love for the person that betrayed you and broke that trust is contradictory. It doesn't make sense to someone on the outside who's not lived through it. They can't understand it. They don't get it. I would just leave. I would just this. I would just that. No, you wouldn't. Not if you actually were in my shoes and that person's shoes. If you've spent your entire life chasing emotional safety, love lingers. It's hard to break that tie. You could love someone. and still be completely devastated by them. You can have a deep rooted love for someone and still be devastated by something they did, by a betrayal. You can miss them. At least the them that you thought you knew. and yet still know they wounded you. Still know they are the source of every ounce of pain in your body at the moment, but you still miss them. those things can and do coexist. It's contradictory. but it exists. If you've ever walked in those shoes, I guarantee you, you're sitting here right now shaking your head, absolutely, She's right. She's right, I did. And there wasn't anything wrong with me because of it. So when I say that, I say that because oftentimes we go from those moments that coexist that shouldn't into moments of shame. We spiral down this shame staircase and we take this little walk with ourselves. ⁓ Shame is just a belief that the betrayal says something about your worth. You start questioning your worth. So you go down that shame spiral. Why do we do it? Well, victims often do. ⁓ They often internalize the betrayal. and they turn it on themselves and make it a personal failure. I am the reason this happened. I am the reason they chose to do this. There's something about me. There's something wrong with me that made them do that. They're such a good person. They would have never done that had I not pushed them to it. It becomes a personal failure. You take that whole thing on. You take the responsibility for their actions. Why? You start asking yourself questions like, what's wrong with me? What did I miss? Why wasn't I enough? Here's the thing. Betrayal is not proof of your inadequacy. I promise you it's not. Betrayal is not proof of your inadequacy. It is proof of someone else's brokenness. They are broken. Not you. You loved wholly. You loved completely. You loved without any conditions. They probably never really loved you. You were a place marker in their life. to which shatters you, because that's not the reality that you lived in. So what is the aftermath of this? What is the psychology behind the aftermath of this? A lot of us end up in hypervigilance. Hypervigilance is constant. It's a constant scanning for danger, any signs of betrayal, anything suspicious. We are looking for something to be wrong all the time. That is a psychological aftermath of betrayal. The nervous system becomes over alert. especially when trust is broken. When the betrayal happens, your nervous system goes into overdrive and it tries to prevent the future pain. So you'll find yourself doing things like analyzing stuff. ⁓ you know, after betrayal, find ourselves wanting to go through their text messages, wanting to, ⁓ how many miles are on the vehicle? You you start calculating all the tiny little things, every little, why are they holding their phone a certain way? What are they trying to hide? ⁓ You start reading facial expressions, body language. ⁓ You overanalyze every text that's between the two of you. You overanalyze any text messages you may see on the phone from somebody else. ⁓ You're always looking for hidden meanings. Always looking for it because you are stuck in hypervigilance. You're just waiting for the next betrayal to happen. your nervous system becomes a private investigator. And if something is going to be found, you're going to find it. And if you go looking for something, you're probably going to find it. It may not be what your brain is making it because you're stuck in the betrayal trauma. It may be completely innocent, but you're going to turn it into something else. Part of your healing is going to be not doing that because if you do not heal that before you go on to the next relationship and or try to continue this one depending on what the betrayal was you will have to Well, no, not you'll have to. You will basically ruin that relationship. You will, without a doubt, ruin that relationship. You will drive it in the ground. And you will drive every single one after that into the ground until you heal. So it's very important when you go through this that you try and heal. Be it with a therapist, be it with whatever, whatever choice you choose to fix yourself in this whole situation. and understand that it wasn't you, there was nothing about you, it was the character of the person in front of you that did the betrayal. You will obsessively replay things. The mind replays betrayal. over and over again. And when it's replaying the situation, what your mind is really doing is it's searching for control. You want some point in it to be able to find control back because you feel chaotic at the moment. ⁓ If the brain, if the brain can find where it missed the signs, those answers that you're looking for. believes it can prevent any future betrayal. So if I figure out where I should have seen this coming. When I see it again, I'll be able to stop it. No. I guess that's pretty harsh. Maybe. ⁓ But if you're going to have a long term healed relationship. You still looking for that control and how to prevent things means that you're still stuck in that betrayal trauma and you haven't really moved forward. to which point you most likely will drive that person away, even though they're the ones who started the whole thing. because you lose your ability to actually love them and trust them. and you question every single thing they do and eventually that gets old for the person on the other side. preventing the future betrayal. if you live with the thought that there will be one. they're probably will. But if you move forward honestly with the relationship, healed, both of you healed, you can honestly move forward without waiting for that next betrayal and you looking for the signs the entire time. Because if you keep looking, you're just creating more havoc in your relationship. I'm telling you, if you look for it, you will find it. You will find yourself replaying conversations. You are going to revisit moments. You will mentally reconstruct timelines. You will have them broke down. ⁓ Not because you're stuck. because your brain is trying to make sense of the chaos. It can't make the chaos make sense. That's the part that's stuck, is your brain is stuck in all of the hypervigilance, the overthinking, the questioning every moment, questioning every point in life. So when your brain is stuck in all of that, it can't literally move forward. It stays in chaos. It's constantly looking for the next thing to happen. you have to unstuck the brain. sometimes in this situation, people will go into emotional numbness. Emotional numbing, is it? Emotional numbing is... ⁓ Is it a protective shutdown, essentially? ⁓ turn it into the landing hairpiece of you all sorry. You know emotional limiting protective shutdown that's all it is that's that's all it is you're just protecting yourself ⁓ while you're shutting while while you're trying to go through these things so you shut down it's your nervous system way of protecting itself the nervous system is suppressing emotions ⁓ generally because we're so overwhelmed. It's so intense. The overwhelm is so intense that it's literally breaking us. So the nervous system jumps in to protect and it shuts down because it's too intense. sometimes betrayal doesn't make you cry. You're numb, you can't feel nothing. Sometimes it makes you feel absolutely nothing. that numbness? That's your mind protecting itself. and you will question, okay, what's wrong with me? Why don't I feel anything? Why am I not shook like this? because your mind is protecting itself because you've been through butyrial in your life before. You kind of expected it. Did you become numb after betrayal? I have. Did you stop trusting your instincts? I have. Yep. I've literally told myself that my instincts are broke. goes along with my picker stroke. How do you rebuild? How do we rebuild after betrayal? Can you? Is it possible? It can. I've seen people do it. I've seen them go on and have an incredibly amazing marriage afterward. I've seen him go on and have a marriage afterward. Sometimes they heal together and have an amazing marriage. They work each other's issues out and why this happened, did that happen, and they break the betrayal down and they walk the process through. Others stay, defend, and struggle to leave, never do, and just sweep it under the carpet ⁓ and live with betrayal for the rest of their lives because They don't trust themselves enough outside that situation to ever get it right. So they just live with what they've been handed because they feel like they deserve it. But can it be rebuilt? It can. You have to relearn self-trust first. Not trust with the other person. You have to start with you. You have to understand you have to rebuild your ability to trust your instincts. ⁓ Self-trust is confidence. Confidence in your ability, in yourself. to discern what's reality and what's not. betrayal, it often damages that. It damages your faith. ⁓ your own judgment? ⁓ I don't know have you questioned your own judgment at times? Have you had betrayal? ⁓ trauma and you question your own reality at times? Yeah. In this situation you really do because it definitely damages your faith in your judgment. ⁓ But healing, healing it means to restore the internal trust. You have to learn to restore that internal trust that you have. You have to restore your ability to believe in yourself. And that's not easy. Not easy whatsoever. Because betrayal whispers in your ear, hey, guess what? You can't trust yourself. It does. It just sits in your ear. It's a little birdie on your shoulder saying, mm-mm, no. Don't trust yourself. You have to flick that little birdie off your shoulder. You have to learn to restore that trust because healing teaches us. You miss some things. Should have had your eyes open a little bit more, but you also survived them. You made it through this, whether it's with that person or without that person, you made it through the situation. You came out the better for it on the other end. Stronger, wiser, but not stuck in hypervigilance, not stuck in overwhelm, not stuck in all those things that keep you in that betrayal trauma. Heal, you have to heal beyond that. Yourself, believe in yourself. You have to put up boundaries. Boundaries are there for protection. Boundaries define what access others get to have in your life. What they get to have in your emotional space. What are those boundaries that you're going to create now? Well, healing will require safety. And with which safety requires what? What does safety require? It requires limits. Safety requires limits. ⁓ Boundaries are not punishments. And the person on the receiving end of that boundary has to understand that. Boundaries are not punishments. You also have to understand that you're not punishing someone. You're just setting the boundaries. So don't feel guilty about setting that boundary. You're not punishing them. Boundaries are necessary. especially in healing from bacterial trauma. They are an emotional security system. What are the security systems we got out here? ATD, ADT or whatever, or CPI or whatever they are. ⁓ Blink, winks and all the things. They are emotional security systems. That's what boundaries are. They don't say anything other than, I need this to be in place for me. It doesn't say that you hate someone. That... you are trying to punish them, what it says is, I value me and this is my hard boundary. After this situation, this is me healing me and this is where I have to be. This is my boundary, period. And that's okay. It's not punishment to the other person. If they feel like it's punishment, that's their own insecurities. That's their own issues. You can't fix that part for them. And if they feel that way, It's probably not gonna work out because they're gonna become defensive and ugly and it's gonna get messy. And you have to hold your boundary if they don't like it. One of the ways we say this is they can bump it. They can go. Close that door because you have to protect you. You have to have your boundary. They're the ones who betrayed you. It's not a punishment. It's a healing tool. It's a safety system. Will you grieve? You will have to grieve it. Grieve in the story you believed was reality. Because betrayal. you know, grief includes. mourning, guess, sadness, ⁓ emotional unrest, betrayal, grief creates all of those things. It includes it. and for the imagined future. it's that grief is gonna, it's gonna be there. It's gonna creep up. It's gonna be, it's gonna be like this right here in your face and then it's gonna go down a little bit and then it's gonna come back up. It's gonna be right in your face again and then it's good. And you're just gonna have this roller coaster of emotions for a while because you're grieving, you're mourning and that's okay. You have to grieve what you believed. It's a loss. It's an actual loss. You're not just grieving what happened. You're grieving what you thought would happen. You're grieving the person you thought you were with. You're grieving the future that you thought that you had. You're going to grieve it. It's a wound. It's like they've unalived only in my opinion and then several other people that I know. It hurts worse when they're still walking this earth. It's a different type of grief. It's a different level of grief than when somebody does leave the earth and you're Grief is layered. You grieve the person you believed they were, the future you imagined. and the safety that you thought that you had in that person. You're going to grieve all of that. You have to heal from it though. Please heal from it. It's so important to heal from it. healing equates to freedom and to trusting again. healing doesn't happen overnight. Neither does grief. There's so many stages of both. Forgiving without forgetting. ⁓ boy. If any of you all have listened to my TikTok lives and you listen to the book, Forgiving What You Can't Forget, it's a pretty powerful book. It's by Lisa Terkhurst. So forgiving without forgetting. Forgiveness. is releasing emotional captivity. Let me say that again. In case you weren't listening in the back, forgiveness is releasing emotional captivity. Don't stay captive by grief. Don't stay captive by something that hurt you. Don't stay captive by refusing to heal and forgive. Does it mean you forgot? Does it mean it lessens what happened? The forgiveness is for you. You don't even ever have to tell them you forgive them. Forgiveness is for your internal peace. It's not for external reconciliation. It doesn't mean you're to have a relationship with that person again. It means that you're doing it for your own peace. Forgiveness does not mean what happened was okay. It means I refuse to let pain. conform me. I refuse to let pain control my future. I refuse to let pain be my leader and control my life. Because that's not a pretty place to be. It's not fun. It's an emotional train wreck. So learning to trust again. Trust after betrayal. It's rebuilt slowly. It's just like grieving and healing. It takes time. It doesn't just happen in a blink of an eye or overnight. ⁓ Healing requires evidence-based safety. Like the person or the thing or the situation that created that pain in you, it has to be consistent. Safety has to keep showing up over and over and over again. And you cannot slip up and do something that's going to trigger the person that you've wounded. It's not a blind faith. I'm not saying you should walk in a blind faith because that allows room for error. but it's requiring evidence-based safety. You do not owe immediate trust, nor will they get it. Trust is earned, like I said, through consistency. But it's so hard for the one who did the betraying to understand that. Because after a while they get to a point, especially if you get stuck in that and don't actually heal, you're just stuck in the hypervigilance, the overthinking, the overanalyzing. If you get stuck in that and you're just waiting on the other shoe to fall. the relationship will fall apart. may as well just walk away. If you can't get past that, you have to learn to jump past that and make the choice to heal or let go. So there is a gift hidden, and this probably is gonna sound ludicrous, but there is actually a gift hidden in betrayal. Hear me out. Post-traumatic growth is transformational. It's transformation after adversity. Post-traumatic growth is transformational. after adversity. Pain often will sharpen discernment and deepen self-awareness. So in a way, betrayal kind of changes you and how you see things. And it can be in a good way if you heal and not get stuck in hypervigilance. It doesn't have to destroy you. You don't have to let it destroy you. It can teach you how to trust your instincts even better than you did before. It can teach you how to honor your worth and set those boundaries that you've never set before in your life. You've found your truth, your value, your worth, and you've taken it and you're going to keep it. It can teach you how to stop settling for half safe love. So many people settle for half safe love. What I like to showing up half-assed. just making an appearance in the relationship every once in a while. It will stop you from settling if you choose to heal. You won't settle. And if this person that betrayed you is still showing up halfway in your relationship. I mean, to me, that's an answer for you. They don't want to show up. And they can't do the dang thing. then you set your boundary, you move on with your life, but you heal so that your instincts can help you pick a better partner that's gonna fully show up for you. That's the hidden gem in betrayal trauma. If betrayal shatters you, hear me clearly as I always say, you are not broken. You're not weak. They're not beyond repair. You are rebuilding. You must rebuild. and rebuilding, ⁓ boy, rebuilding is holy work y'all. I'm telling you, it is holy work. But the you that comes out on the other end of that. That is one strong woman. Poor man. Your heart can carry scars. We do. We have many of them through life. But scars, they're just proof of healing, right? become any scars we women carry. That's proof of love and healing. Scars are proof of healing. Proof that you loved once. I hope this helps somebody. I hope this helps set you on the path to healing instead of self-destruction over somebody else's inability to truly love and see you for the value and worth that you have. Thank you as always for sitting with me here on the back porch. I'm hoping the new house that can maybe close in some of that back porch and actually have a back porch that I can do my lives in once in a while. Anyway, as always, this is Back Porch Confessions where healing gets honest, truth gets messy, and sometimes the deepest rebuilding starts. right after everything falls apart. You guys got this. You got life. You got boundaries. Set them. Stay true to you. Know your worth. Know your value. But also know there's hidden gems hidden behind all these things to make you a better you. I think I got a few questions. I'm just gonna lay these three questions out here and then I'll let y'all go. What betrayal are you still healing from? Speak it out loud. Write it down. Put it in your phone notes. What did it teach you about yourself? What boundary do you need now? What would trusting yourself again look like? Spend some time in those questions. Write it out, speak it out, put it in your notes, whatever it is. They'll help you. They'll help you build that bridge to the other side. betrayal trauma, the wounds you didn't see coming, the golden gem you didn't know was there. As always, check out the commercials, check out all the things, make sure you're looking into Little Butterfly to do any of your ⁓ design needs to put on any kind of product, Polish Boutique for any of your newest clothes fashions, ⁓ Michaela or her... esthetician stuff, our way skin for your ⁓ beauty needs. Make sure you're listening to everything. Check me out. Make an appointment with me. Renewed mind counseling. 336-383-0236. I know I said that fast, but hey, give me a look. Send me an email. backportsconfessions.gmail.com. Thank you guys as always. Thank you so much. Have a great one. Bye bye.