Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Trusting Yourself

Just trust yourself,
then you will know how to live. ~Goethe

A month or so after D-Day #1, a friend, one of the few who knew of my husband's affair, gave me a bracelet with that quote inscribed in it.
I've rarely gone a day since without that silver bangle – and those words – circling my wrist.

How many times have I reminded myself, when conflicted, to simply trust myself.
And how often have I wished that I had been able to do that all along.

The thing is, most of us know what's good for us. We might struggle with the path...but we know the destination. How often, though, do we forget that? How often do we rely on others to make those decisions for us because what if...? What if we're wrong?

Just trust yourself.
That's not always easy to do. Especially if you've thought yourself wrong so often before.
Especially if you've been told, over and over, that you couldn't possibly know what's best. What's right.

I hadn't trusted myself. When my instincts were telling me that my husband, the one I thought absolutely couldn't – wouldn't! – cheat on me, was involved with another woman, I convinced myself that my instincts were wrong. When I felt that familiar panic each time he announced he would be home "late" because he had "work", I would talk myself out of it. When I finally knew, in spite of wanting desperately to not know, and confronted my husband, I ended up accepting his assurance that "nothing was going on."
At least until I couldn't anymore.

Finally, after the screaming in my head became too loud to ignore, I trusted myself. And when my husband again denied. And insisted I was wrong. And begged me to believe him, I did not. I trusted myself.

And I will never betray myself again.

3 comments:

  1. Experience has taught me to trust my gut feelings.
    I couldn't have put my finger on what was making me uneasy - but I was right every time.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I grew up with an abusive mother who gaslighted me for years. As a consequence, I didn't trust my own instincts. I thought I was being paranoid. But I wasn't. I thought he was using porn again (he's a recovering porn addict), but he swore he wasn't. I wanted so badly to believe him that I told myself that my instincts were wrong. Turns out they weren't. I have very good instincts. I had to develop them to survive my childhood. I will never ignore my instincts again.

    ~Gee

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Gee,
      It's amazing to me how many of us on this site grew up in homes in which our voices were silenced. I grew up in a home marked by serious addiction and was routinely told that up was down, black was white, etc. Consequently I questioned my own sanity. Fast-forward a couple of decades and I was the perfect candidate to doubt my instincts. Never again.

      Delete

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