PTSD Relationship, Dishonored Trust, and Self-Doubt

Any trauma that happens to you at a young age will impact on your capacity to set healthy boundaries and your ability to open up and be vulnerable.

It is as if part of you, emotionally, still lives in the past; your energy is repressed by that, limiting your level of available daily energy.

PTSD Relationships and Dishonored Trust

When you fall out with one of your parents, or there is some form of abuse or neglect or both are present when you grow up, your inherent trust as a child gets dishonored.

Out of that hurt, you will start to make certain decisions for yourself to cope, to survive. Either you ‘wall’ yourself off and retreat into your own space and, over time, chronically become distrustful of others. Or you give up your growing sense of self and identity and start to anticipate other people’s reactions in an attempt to get their approval, recognition or preventing more abuse. Or you move between those two poles, periodically trusting too much, followed by periods of retreating, shutting everybody out.

It all depends on the intensity, duration and form of support you might have had at the time. And your reactions to the given situations.

Self-Doubt as a furthering form of Dissociation to avoid Underlying Pain

When you get hurt again and again by trusting too much or trusting too little, it contributes to the confusion of who you are. It gives rise to self-doubt, as your boundaries are either not present at all or too present and you don’t know how to change it.

Your energy becomes fragmented going from; hurt and dishonored vulnerability to issues around boundaries of whom to trust or not to trust into contributing to self-worth issues, self-doubt, and anxiety.

The more we feel activated the more we default into our coping emotions and habit patterns. These emotions and habits are self-doubt, anxiety and not feeling worthy.

When that keeps going on, periods of fatigue and depression will set in as you exhaust your adrenals and energy resources.

PTSD, Relationships, and Healing

When you start to understand these patterns deeply, you will create a variable in your hard-wired reactions. When you see how you fragment and dissociate, can you negate giving all your energy to self-doubt, anxiety, or fatigue and exhaustion.

While holding that space, can you question what is the underlying emotion that is present. Then, work to contain it bit by bit. Little steps of moving from connection and disconnection, back and forth.

Till you feel yourself slowly entering more into your body, processing the emotional residue that is present there.

There is no ‘how’ to it, but do it through observation.

How are relationships and having PTSD for you and how are you dealing with trust and self-doubt?