Being responsible for your healing after betrayal trauma.

The first part of betrayal is the devastation. The realization that the person you trusted, the one who vowed to love you, the one you invested so much in, is not who they claimed to be. It doesn't always happen over night. The mask, the illusion, can be ripped away suddenly, without warning and you are totally unprepared to process the shock of it all. This is a form of trauma. No there are not always physical scars (broken bones, bruises) to accompany injury but emotional wounds that take just as much time if not longer to heal. Posttraumatic stress disorder is not necessarily a disorder but an injury. it is something that happens to us. We don't ask people to hurt us. we don't see the hurt coming or we would avoid it. No, the hurt just happens to us and now we must heal.

One of the biggest myths in being a victim of narcissistic abuse is that we do not have to work on healing because we are the victim. Therefore the narcissist should pay the price for our sufferings. Well good luck with that. Although I believe in karma, karma comes at its own pace so if you're holding your breath you may not live to see it.

Let me explain. March of 2021 tragedy struck. I received the call I thought would change my life forever and in some ways it has. My daughter had been in an automobile accident that almost took her life. She was air lifted to the nearest trauma center with tremendous loss of blood, several compound fractures, shattered pelvis, broken clavicles and the list goes on. Fortunately she survived but it took tremendous amount of work and a two month stay in the hospital several surgeries and several different types of therapies. Today she is still in recovery.

My daughter did not ask to get in the accident, she didn't see the car coming and she certainly didn't ask for the injuries and the suffering. The car accident happened to her. That's all there is to it and she didn't deserve it. But now she has to heal.

Healing is her choice. If she would have left the hospital with out treatment I would have thought she was crazy. But she chose to heal, to undergo surgery, to participate in occupational and physical therapy. She could have just given up on her recovery after all she didn't ask for it. But she didn't. She took responsibility for her healing and until this day she forges through to complete her recovery.

The same is true for you. You didn't ask the narcissist to hurt you, to traumatize you. You didn't deserve the trauma of their betrayal. But you do deserve to get better. Take responsibility for your recovery and healing. Call a therapist, do the things you enjoy, invest in your future. Don't give up!