Betrayal Trauma makes you doubt. EVERYTHING and EVERYONE.
You may feel anger towards yourself and those who harmed you, so you doubt your ability to love.
Gaslighting and blame shifting over many years makes you feel crazy, so you may doubt your own instincts.
You may doubt every decision you've ever made, including your choice of spouse.
You may doubt the very day you were born.
And you may doubt God.
Being skeptical is part of the territory of betrayal trauma recovery. This is a natural reaction when those you trust have deliberately betrayed you. All of these big emotions like anger, distrust, and grief are normal and healthy. But what happens when you doubt everything and don't deal with those emotions directly? They fester and skew our outlook. Doubt turns to cynicism. Cynicism can distort us. Cynicism makes a person become bitterly or sneeringly distrustful, contemptuous, or pessimistic. I went through a phase of being a cynic, so I know first hand what it feels like. UGLY. I was a fault-finder. I hated myself for it, yet couldn’t magically make it go away. Even though I didn’t “feel” like it, I made a choice to trust God, even IN my doubt of who He was and is. I invited Jesus into that dark place in me, asked for His help, and together we began the process of rebuilding. With professional help, I began reframing who I thought God was, which then reframed who I thought I was. My book outlines all the ways I learned how to reframe my core beliefs that were hindering my growth and healing.
How about you? Have you lost faith? If so, it's okay. God is not intimidated by your doubt, your skepticism or your cynical spirit. With Christ in our hearts to help us remove the anger and dissolve the bitterness, He can make us a new creation.
Instead of praying for God to take your doubt away, try this. Invite Him IN to it. This is exactly what He LOVES doing. I’m so glad I invited His Living Water in to my scorched, dark places. His love and grace planted newness in me, and I love Him so much for helping me find my way back into the LIGHT. I'm a little seedling, planted and rooted in TRUTH, growing stronger every day as I reach for the sun.
