cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/10262667
I recently made a post in relationship advice and got a lot of great advice and tons of support which I really appreciate! I love how suportive the lemmy community has been and continutes to be. I still find myself after all of the trama and many months of therapy finding it hard to feel safe anymore as a man in the united states. I’ve talked to my therapist a lot about this and she feels it might be a good thing for me to chase my more asperational goals in life and maybe move to europe for a while when the opportunity presents itself at least when I can find the money to do so (as that’s been a life goal of mine for a while)
I guess in the mean time, I’m trying to keep myself alive and feeling ok with myself and the place that I live. I’ve moved back in with my parents for financial reasons and now finding it hard to want to “get back out there”. My trama has left me to not trust others which has made my job search very hard.
I guess what I’m really asking is what are some strategies I can do to cope with my trama? it’s been months since the incident and my family grows increasingly worried that I don’t leave the house anymore and havn’t found a job yet. Have you had a similar expeirence with not trusting others and found a way to pull yourself out? Any comment would be appreciated!
recently I had a relationship that took a turn for the worst. I started working part time at a coffee shop in my town and found a girl that took a liking to me. Me also being intreseted, we started hanging out outside of work a lot. The more we hung out the more and started developinig feelings for eachother. Eventually both of us got together after a steamy night out despite my better judgement.
She had expressed being in a lot of abusive relationships, struggling with addiction to many substances in the past, and had terrilble parents and family. I empathized and thought I could be a better person in her life. at this point, I planned a camping trip for the two of us to get away from all the crazy for a bit.
fast forward, she moves out of her parents place and becomes very distant. me being concerned, I keep asking whats going on but she keeps pushing away. eventually after 3 weeks of her not responding, I ask if she ever really even wanted to be in a relationship with me and she said no. Devistated, I cancel and trip and avoid her during work. She then get’s frustrated that I’m not acting the same way around her anymore and that I had cancled the trip. I express to her how I felt about the situation and why I canceled the trip and I felt like she understood.
a few weeks later, after I get back from the camping trip I had planned where I had decided to go by myself, she texts me she’s feeling suicidal and needs some support right now. I drop everything and go to her place consul her as I’ve been there. she then expresses to me she’s been struggling with bpd for a while. I tell her if she ever needs help or needs anything from me to just let me know.
A week later, she starts to flirt with me again at work and I take it as she’s intrested in me again. despite my better judgement, I take the flirting too far by touching her butt briefly as she was showing me her holes in the back pockets of her pants, wiggling her fingers through. Without giving it a second thought, I do the same with my left hand thinking nothing of it as we had been intimate. After doing so, she looks disgusted and I say I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that.
I then go to her place the next day with some snacks to appologize. She wasn’t home so I just left them at her door with a snapchat explain myself. She then takes a screenshot of my snapchat out of context, sends it to the police, and claims that I’ve raped her, sexually assulted her, and have been stalking her. claims we never had any kind of relationship and gets me thrown in jail for a couple of days.
TLDR: girl I’ve been dating for a few months makes false claims I’ve raped her and have been stalking her. Without question or evidence, I get thrown in jail and have been dealing with legal fallout, mental, emotional, and financial struggles since.
It’s been a few month since, lots of therapy sessions, tons of meds, and I’ve gone through most of the legal stuff. I’m now left feeling I’m no longer safe as a man. I’m so traumatized I finding it hard to leave the house anymore and increasling hard to talk to and trust others.
I guess what I really want to know is how can I protect myself as a man in the future from these kinds of things? I’ve asked my therapist, many of my friends, and family members to no avail. Most of them come from a religous background or havn’t dealt with anything remotly similar. Let me know your thoughts bellow.
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You cannot protect yourself against such things, not if you intend to have a relationship with a woman in the future.
What you need to do is steer clear of “being the positive person” in someone’s life. Especially if you’re young and inexperienced.
As you’ve now seen for yourself, people can be very nasty to one another, in a really serious way. Someone whom a naive teenage boy might be tempted to save, because their life seems like the down and out character in a movie, has seen horrors beyond that boy’s imagination.
And might even be willing to just drop some of those horrors on him.
I can understand your being scared to trust right now. My advice would be to trust your own gut and slowly build some trust.
You can’t get back to the same place you were before, where you trusted people fully. But you can build your trust up from where it is now, and in a way that doesn’t allow you to get burnt quite so easily.
The way to build trust is to willingly take small risks with how you trust people. Perhaps you trust sometime to pick you up for a thing. Then see if they do. The trick is, have it be a thing where you can survive it if they don’t fulfill your trust.
Don’t trust someone to pack your parachute for you. Trust someone to order you a soda while you go to the bathroom. Come back and see if they ordered you a good one. If they did, trust them 1% more. Little things.
Also trust can be scoped. It doesn’t just mean a number from “no trust” to “fully trust”. It’s also trust in different areas of life. Maybe there’s someone you trust to feed your dog, but not to comfort you while you’re sad. Someone else you might trust when you’re emotionally vulnerable, but they’re too scattered to be trusted with feeding your dog while you’re out of town.
To summarize:
- Full trust won’t come back
- Which is a good thing because full naive trust burned you
- You can build your trust up from where it is now
- You build trust by choosing to trust in small ways where you can afford to get burned if you choose wrong
- As you build trust you can trust specific people with specific things, to different degrees
Key point is your trust (feeling) grows when you choose to trust (action).
The difference between trust as an action and trust as a feeling is important too. Trust is a feeling you can have about someone. You feel safe with them.
But trust is an active conscious choice in other contexts. Like, if you walk across a rickety old bridge on a trail, you are trusting that bridge. Even if you don’t have the feeling, and you feel like it could break at any time, by choosing to walk across it you are choosing to trust the bridge.
When I say you trust people with small things, I mean trust as an action. You trust them with a loan of $10, or you trust them to tell you if your tie is straight. Put yourself in their hands and open yourself to the possibility of them fulfilling or disappointing the trust. And it should always be small enough you can survive it if they disappoint.
And finally. Learn to listen to your gut
It takes a while to develop the gut sense of things. But you will have gut feelings in life about people or situations and you need to learn to take them seriously.
If everything looks right but your gut says something’s wrong, then something’s wrong.
I’ve always had a hard time listening to gut feelings and its something I’m working on with my therapist atm. hopefully when I get back out there I can be more aware of it. I like the idea of small amounts of trust and building it up, I’ll definitely use that. thanks for the wise words and for reading through my long post its much appreciated :)
Next time you have a hard time trusting your gut, ask yourself what the downside of ignoring it might be, and remember your nights in jail.
it’s not that I ignored it, it’s just I couldn’t hear it. therapist believes it’s due to having adults in my life growing up who’ve weaponized my love. at some point I just turned it off as it just hurt too much. it’s been a process but I’ll remember, thanks
It’s probably also due to lack of body awareness. If you meditate by focusing on your belly, it will gradually increase the resolution of your body perception. It takes practice to read signals from the body. You have to spend time paying attention to it.
5 minutes a day, just set a timer, sit down, and pay attention to the spot just below your belly button and a little inward. Keep your mind empty except for the focused perception. Any time other thoughts come up, just look back at your belly.
You don’t have to point your eyes there, just feel there. You can look at the floor in front of you. Take the whole visual scene in at once instead of focusing in one some point. Don’t look intently just passively receive the image.
The active focus is proprioceptive, and you’re just paying attention to that spot in your belly.
Then when the timer goes off, stop trying and go do other things.
Trick is not to worry about how successful you are at keeping the focus centered. Just try and keep trying. It’s okay if you fail as long as you keep trying. It’s the trying that matters not the success. Like lifting weights. The work is the ingredient that makes growth, not the accomplishment.
I learned from my own past that those who’ve suffered from hurt learn the best ways to cause the most of it. It is a skill that is taught to the unwilling.
The truth is that you will have to forgive them, and if you blame yourself, you must forgive yourself too. Forgiveness isn’t anything but a tool to move on. You wrote the redflags to look out for in your post. You’ll have to bail when you see them the next time you go to trust again. You’re going to have to face the fears created by your trauma head on. You’re going to have to be brave. It will not be easy. It will be hard as shit. But you cannot let this person control you anymore. Do not give this person the power to keep you from enjoying life. You will stumble and struggle putting yourself back out there. You will think recovery is impossible.
I had a long road recovering from my trauma, and I believe in your own power to heal from this. Just please do your best to not allow your own traumas to continue the cycle of pain.
I don’t think I can forgive her or my community, at least any time soon. all I wanted was to lift her up but she choose to tear me down. my community choose to tear me down. how can I feel safe to be myself if it feels like the world is out to get me? why should I forgive myself if the world around me tells me I should be ashamed for being a man. for having needs. for wanting love…
you’re right though, in order to move on I have to forgive. I have to forgive her, I have to forgive my coworkers who choose to stay silent, I have to forgive my community for throwing me in jail, I have to forgive the world that shames men for existing…
I’m just having a hard time letting go. I feel so empty and hollowed out and I just don’t know where to start. I’ve been taking my therapists and family’s advice and working on my self esteem.
sorry for the rant I just needed to vent a little. thanks for the advice I really appreciate it.