Betrayal and Abandonment...

Betrayal and Abandonment...
T

TrailofTears

Registrant
Two of my biggest fears are betrayal and abandonment and although I know I can survive these things, I live in constant fear of them both. When I am in a relationship, the fear is intensified. I guess this makes sense considering what my experience has taught me and this is the problem. I want to believe in a loving, intimate and sexually healthy relationship, but cannot trust that one exists. I have learned to only depend on myself and to never trust another soul, but look at all the happiness I mess myself out of with this view. It is not as easy as changing my mind, my experience cannot be challenged and I hate that I believe that this is truly a dog-eat-dog world. Any suggestions on how to overcome my fears of abandonment and betrayal? (My T said I am not willing to trust, but I say How do you know I can?)
ToT
 
you have stumbled on one of the biggest challenges, how do you trust? trust is a hard thing to recover once it is lost. first, i believe you begin by discovering your own strength and power. to give trust you have to allow yourself to become vulernable and exposed, and it actually takes a lot of self-confidence to get there. you have to have faith in yourself. it is easy to say i know i will be okay no matter what, but you not only have to say it, you have to feel it deep down in your soul. i have discovered saying something and really feeling it down deep is often two different things.

once you have that self-confidence, you have to let yourself relax and get comfortable in another person's care and love. that is a very hard thing to do, and again saying you're doing it doesnt count. you have to really be doing it deep down inside, and there is a difference.

to trust someone that completely is a huge, huge risk. it means you could be hurt, and hurt badly. it is a leap of faith, where you push all those fears and worries out and just exist in someone else's care. i am not sure how you get there, because it is one of those things when you do, you know. all i know is you keep working on it, and you keep learning and growing, and somewhere along the way it just happens.
 
This is exactly what I was looking for. Of course, as a male survivor (52 yo) I am aware of my trust issues. It is funny what can happen though...5 years ago I met a most wonderful and enchanting woman. Intelligent, funny, highly educated and sexy as all hell. We lived together but not before we both carefully negotiated the terms and conditions of this cohabitation.

We both had major issues with trust. She came from a working class family with a physically (not sexually) and emotionally abusive father and she had one experience of sexual assault at age 12. I had entered psychotherapy (at last) for my sex abuse issues and was feeling pretty cautious about how things would work out under the circumstances.

She had an extensive sexual history as did I because we were both survivors of the seventies! And we both identified that our sexual conquistador attitude was a type of acting out. I was (am) a Buddhist. We felt secure that we could work things through, be together, be happy and be safe with each other.

In the course of the early years she had some professional friends and associates who were jealous of her relationship with me. I think that, for them, I came out of left field. She didn't tell them about me (she is an academic and professional associations in that area tend to be personal ones as well) so when I turned up on the scene as her new lover they were pretty resentful. Two of these other people in particular were extremely rude and hostile to me. One would ring and ask to speak to my partner (who oddly has the same name as me) but would never address me by my name; the other guy we went out with together a few times and on those occasions he didn't speak to me at all. Ignored me totally and spoke only to the woman I was asking (at that point) to be my wife.

This was all acted out over a period of years, by the way.

In the meantime, I formed a good relationship with her (then 18 yo and now 23 yo) son and she formed a good relationship with my (then 5 yo and ten yo and now 10 yo and 15 yo) son and daughter. These were children from our previous relationships. The woman and I got along like a house on fire. Best relationship we'd ever had; best sex ever.

These other guys insisted on not recognising the primacy of her relationship with me. She never really included me in those relationships despite us working in a similar academic field. Then there were a series of events - strange absences, unaccounted movements, ambiguous phone messages from these guys - that really roused my suspicions. I could not believe, after all we had been through in terms of revelation and careful negotiation about trust issues, that what was happening had all the appearances of an affair between her and one of these guys.

I became jealous, suspicious, paranoid. I descended into the pit where none of us wants to go. A real hell realm. I begged her to end the association with one of these men. She refused on the grounds that the association was innocent, was a residual friendship from before me, said that she wasn't interested in him. She said that I was projecting stuff onto her that was about my relationship with my mother and ny sexuallly abusive father; that it had nothing to do with her; that it was all me. She said I was delusional. Over and over. She said her therapist advised her against ending her association with him because if I wasn't jealous of him, then it would be somebody else.

At the time I was undergoing EMDR (rapid eye movement desensitisation) and she made a highly plausible case for my delusionality. I readily accepted that I could be delusional and the wierdness of the EMDR experience, going down into the deep levels of embodied (pre-cognitive and pre-verbal) memory, certainly meant that my mind state was pretty unusual.

I tracked phone calls, hacked her computer, listened to her phone messages to both of them on their work phones. I withdrew slowly but lacked the money or the psychological capacity to move out of her house. I became a complete basket case. The EMDR released the physical feelings associated with early age sex assault. I did not know what was real or not. I won't bore you all with the details of what she said, what I heard and so on. Through all of this I kept a diary as a means of cross checking what I was being told and what I was experiencing.

It was really creepy. I now know that what happened to me is common among the unfaithful and is called gaslighting.

And then one day...three years ago now ... she went to work at 3.30 pm on a Friday. Who goes to work on a Friday at that time? She 'bumped into' the special guy who has an office next to the one she was using ... not her usual office. She came home with what looked to me like a carpet graze on her knee. I started to slip, slip, slip away. The woman with whom I had trusted everything, all the information, my material security, ny children's welfare, my very soul ... was she a liar and a cheater? Even then, how could I tell for sure? Was the cuckolding attitude of the other man real? Had I really been treated with contempt because he was fucking her? And was she complicit in it? Had she enjoyed my humiliation?

So I did the most awful thing I've ever done in my life. She always wears (wore) a tampon after sex. That Friday night, a night when my children routinely stayed with us at our house, I went to the wastebasket and looked in...to find a recently discarded tampon. I picked it up and smelt it and it smelt of condom rubber.

Look up olfactory delusions or hallucinations and see how rare they are. Not this time. No delusion.

My world fell apart completely and I lost my mind. For years.

I couldn't leave. I had no money. My children were banking on me in this relationship being happy. I had told themmit was a permanent and loving relationship and they had been working so hard to try and come to terms with it...

So I tried. I redoubled my efforts in therapy. I worked hard to forgive her in my heart without ever having the benefit of a discussion in which she admitted the truth, apologised, and promised never to do it again. I demanded (and did not get) the termination of any association between her and this other guy.

A lot of other things happened. I assaulted her and now have an ADVO and a suspended sentence (suspended on the grounds that I remain in therapy and don't touch alcohol). No kicking or punching, I'm at least pleased to say, but I dragged her from the car one day. Great. To treat the love of your life like that. What a worm I became.

It has taken three years since then. Unhappy that she couldn't end her association with these other men (one of whom, believe it or not, is an international expert on gender and now takes hormones to be a woman) and that even at the beginning of this year she has re-initiated her association with Mr Office Floor, I moved out.

Her problems, I realised, were always going to be there.

Now, I live in a huge shared house with my best friend (a man). I see my children, with whom I have fantastic relationships) and I wonder how on earth I will ever again be able to relax into trust again.

I did it once. I really did. I really trusted her. I believed her and believed in her.

I know I'll be able to trust again. I believe in myself now. I believe that I'm so strong now that even if someone does betray me then I'll be able to see that their betrayal is ther problem, not mine. I am proud and have nothing to be ashamed of.

I am a survivor.

AKN
 
i just don't trust anybody EVER, it's easier that way

trevor
 
I greatly appreciate everyone's responses!!! Before my first, nearest and dearest "T", left to do another line of work, I told her,"I don't trust anyone very much...she said,"Good!!!" I now see her point and I am learning how to trust gradually with the help of my new therapist, but the first "T" will always be the voice in my head that warns me of what humans are capable of doing. She will always be the voice (along with my mother) that tells me that I should not put "all of my eggs into one basket." I love her for that and feel I was lucky to have her help me along for so many years. Learning to trust is very hard, but I have come to understand how much happiness you can miss out on, if you are not willing to risk being hurt emotionally. Still, What I am learning now is; that what others do has everything to do with them and little (if anything) to do with me. I like this approach because I cannot afford to ever give people that much power over me again, it is my life and I deserve to be happy. For once, I am not going to give all of my trust away nor so easily or quickly, but knowing that it could happen again, perhaps it is time I think more of myself than what others do and say, can you "feel" me on this one? Perhaps, it is ok now to finally err and give myself the benefit of the doubt, rather than the other person, maybe it is my time to not invest so much of who and what I am, into other people nor let anyone have that much power over me again. I should reserve that kind of deep loveand devotion and give it to the little boy in me that never knew that kind of love.
ToT
 
Absolutely! Trust yourself, trust your intuitions about people, your own judgement. I think survivors don't trust themselves because what happened to us was so beyond belief, so savage, so negating. But, you learn that you are OK as a person; a good person, worthy of love and respect.

Your words "For once, I am not going to give all of my trust away nor so easily" resonate very powerfully with me. We give ourselves away, a gift of little value, because we learnt that we are of no value.

Fuck that bro!

Best wishes
AKN
 
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