When Love Teaches You Not to Trust Yourself
June 08, 2025
Sometimes the deepest wound isn’t just being unloved — it’s being loved in a way that makes you doubt your own instincts forever.
It’s one thing to be unloved.
It’s another thing entirely to be loved in a way that teaches you not to trust yourself.
That’s the wound I’m trying to work through.
I felt that my dad loved me.
I really did.
Somewhere in my body, in the quiet moments, in the way I looked at him — I knew it.
But his actions told a different story.
He pushed me away.
Treated me with disdain.
Made home so unbearable I had no choice but to leave.
💔 A Love That Confused Me
As a child, you don’t need perfect love — but you do need love that’s recognizable.
What I got was love wrapped in rejection.
Care disguised as coldness.
Distance offered as protection.
And when those are the messages you grow up with, you don’t stop loving your parent —
you stop trusting yourself.
❓ Did I Make It Up?
That’s what lingers.
Even now, even as an adult, part of me wonders:
Was I wrong? Did I project love onto someone who couldn’t give it? Was I a fool for believing I mattered to him at all?
And that part of me — the part that second-guesses everything — is the wound he left behind.
He may have loved me.
Maybe he even thought he was helping me by pushing me away.
But none of that undoes the deep confusion he planted inside me.
🧠 The Cost of That Kind of Love
When someone tells you one thing with their presence and another with their actions, it shatters your inner compass.
Especially when you’re young.
You stop asking: Is this love?
And start asking: What’s wrong with me that it hurts so much?
You start performing.
People-pleasing.
Overthinking.
You doubt your gut because it once led you straight into heartbreak.
🧩 Trying to Make Sense of It
I’ve spent years trying to understand it.
Maybe he couldn’t love me softly because he was never loved that way himself.
Maybe he pushed me away because he believed I wouldn’t survive if I stayed.
Maybe he thought I wouldn’t understand, so he made himself the villain.
But even if all that’s true —
it still hurt.
It still left me carrying a question I couldn’t answer for decades:
If someone loved me, why did it feel like abandonment?
🛠 Rebuilding Self-Trust
This is the work now:
- To feel the love that was there without denying the pain it caused.
- To recognize that my instincts weren’t wrong — the expression of love was.
- To start trusting that what I feel is real, even if someone else couldn’t honour it.
The goal isn’t to rewrite the past.
It’s to reclaim my inner compass — to believe myself again.
💬 Final Thought
If you grew up being loved in a way that made you question yourself — you are not alone.
And you’re not broken.
Sometimes love comes through broken people with broken tools.
It doesn’t mean you weren’t worthy of being held with care.
It just means they didn’t know how.
But you can learn how now.
You can be the one who listens to yourself, trusts your gut, and heals the gap between what you knew and what you were told.
That kind of love — the one that rebuilds self-trust — starts with you.