One of the biggest challenges in the dating world is getting back out there and dating after you’ve been on the sidelines letting your heart heal.
How do you trust after you’ve had your heart broken? How do you move forward and wipe the slate clean with someone new?
Even if the relationship ended on friendly terms, it’s hard to put yourself out there and have a heart that’s ready and open enough to allow a new relationship to work. How can you be appropriately cautious while having a heart that’s not too jaded to love?
“I believe that you will be in the place to trust again when your heart has the right conditions to love.”
Just like a plant needs good soil, sun, water, the perfect temperature and nutrition to grow, your heart needs the right conditions to love as well.
What you need to be ready to trust again
- A safe environment where you can be yourself
- A safe person who you feel you can be vulnerable with
- A trustworthy decision-making process
- A feeling of forgiveness
- A feeling of trust that you’re ready to love again
- A sense of confidence that you’ve faced your fears
1. A Safe Environment can help you learn to trust again
In order to feel safe enough to trust and love, you need to find yourself in a place where you feel comfortable physically, spiritually, emotionally and mentally. This means a place — whether physical or emotional — where you can be your whole and true self. You need to feel free to make mistakes, to be goofy and silly and without too many pretenses. You need to feel like you never have to fake the funk.
Although some of this is related to your environment, a bit of it is related to your level of self-confidence. Some people can be in the White House and still be totally and completely themselves. Others will spend a lifetime hiding behind a mask no matter where they are.
When you are in a place to feel safe and to be yourself you’re moving down the road to being in a good place to love and trust again.
2. A Safe Person
A safe environment is created by a safe person who gives you permission to be yourself. That person is rooting for you. They’re in your corner cheering you on. They know and love you because of the person you are.
Now, you won’t feel all of this at the beginning of a new love, but you can start to assess whether or not the person is going to be trustworthy enough to grow into your safe person.
People tell you so much about who they are without ever saying a word. Make sure you’re always listening.
People give off little signs all the time and you should learn to read their cues. Let their actions start to tell you a story about them. Learn from how they have reacted in past relationships. Pay attention to how they treat their families, people in positions of service, like waiters, taxicab drivers and cleaning staff at work.
3. A Trustworthy Decision-Making Process
Do you trust your own decision-making process? This one is great because it’s in your control. All the other signs have been external but this one is totally dependent on your level of self-trust.
Have you gotten in the habit of trusting your gut? Do you have a group of people around you in your support system who you can trust you to tell you the truth?
Sometimes, in order to learn to trust after a heartbreak, you need to learn to trust your own decision-making process.
Often, we see all of the red flags but we don’t use them to guide our decisions. We know we shouldn’t do certain things but we do them anyway and later we suffer the consequences of it. And we think back, I KNEW I shouldn’t have done that. I had that feeling in my stomach that told me it was a bad move.
As you continuously ignore your gut and your guiding compass, you start to lose trust in your own decision-making process and you start shutting out your inner voice.
Being ready to trust in a new relationship is also about putting yourself in the position to trust yourself before you can begin to trust someone else.
4. A Feeling of Forgiveness
One of the best ways to begin to trust yourself is to first forgive yourself.
As relationship blogger Brandy Yates shared, “We need to forgive ourselves because we beat ourselves up for being blindly in love.”
As much as we need to learn to trust our decision-making process, sometimes it can throw us off, people can be deceptive and life can work out in ways we don’t anticipate.
In those cases, we need to give ourselves grace and chalk it up to the risks we take when we decide to love.
Not every relationship will work out. Not every guy we fall in love with will turn out to be “the one”.
This process of forgiving, according to relationship blogger Judaea Payne “doesn’t mean you want your EX back. It means you’re letting go and moving on from that pain to make sure you don’t carry past pains into any future relationships.”
And that will put you in a better position to kick back and enjoy any future love interests.
5. A Feeling of Trust
Love feels amazing — especially that new love that’s warm like a fresh load of laundry just taken from the dryer, lightly scented with fabric softener. Mmmmm! That’s the best kind of love.
In order to love, you need to be open to the process of love and receptive to trust. In other words are you gonna question every third thing your man does because you’re scared you can’t trust him?
If you’re taking the risk of love and getting into a relationship, if you’ve learned to trust your decision making process and you’ve listened to all the messages your guy is saying verbally and non-verbally, then you need to develop a feeling of trust. You need to create an environment in which you new love interest feels trusted, even if you’re still gathering information and building up towards trusting him with your whole self.
You don’t have to trust him completely on Day 1, but you do have to create an environment of trust.
You can’t make him feel like every day with you will be like a police interrogation because who wants to sign up for that?
6. A Sense of Confidence
In order to develop the ability to trust again, you must develop a sense of confidence and one of the best ways to do that is to deal with your fears head on.
Have you figured out what you’re really scared of?
Sometimes, if we dig down deep into our hearts, we can put our finger on our fears and identify them. When we can give them names and figure out what they truly are, we can deal with them.
Have you figured out what you’re really scared of? Have you faced it head on?
Trusting again after a Heart Break
A heartbreak only represents a moment in time in your life. I hope and pray for you that you can move forward with a healed heart that’s ready and willing to love again.
