missing link

Hello All...

I just would like to say that I was an abuse victom for about 18 years throughout my life. I am a female who has made terrible choices in relationships. My issue is, I have a wonderful man now. Why do I have trust issues, and low self estem? I have hurt him for things done to me in the past that are not his fault.. Will I ever heal, and be free?

Hi, and welcome to PC.

For 18 years you learned a set of relationship skills designed to help you cope with the abusive relationships that you had to survive with at that time. That means that the relationship skills you have to draw from might have worked for you back then, but lead to problems now. Maybe you can look at your choices and see how they have lead to trouble, but if you look back a little further you can also see that you did what you know how to do. How could you not have trust issues when you grew up depending on people that were not trustworthy? As an adult, you have the freedom to choose who you trust, but it might not feel right to you at some level when people do live up to yout trust, because that wasn't what you learned that people do. You might believe that there is or was something wrong with you that makes you unworthy of being treated right. A lot of children who are abused come to that conclusion, because they have a need for loving caregivers, and for security, and it doesn't feel safe to believe that it is the caregivers who are unreliable. It feels safer for a child to conclude that they don't deserve to be loved and cared for, because the child can control her own actions, and may believe that if she can be good enough, she will be loved. When it doesn't work (because the caregivers really are unreliable), that child continues believing that she isn't good enough because if she would have gotten it right, she would have gotten her needs met.

Does that make sense to you? Now, you are an adult and you can make choices and have relationships with people who are trustworthy. But you are going to have to learn new strategies, and learn to trust, and learn to feel worthy of being loved. It's hard work, and it takes support, usually from someone trained to give that kind of support, like a therapist. It isn't easy to relearn a lifetime of relationship patterns, but it can be done and you can heal and be free.

TC, and come back and tell us how it's going!

Rap