No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. – CS Lewis.
If you’re somebody who has been hurt in the past, and you’re scared to be hurt again, you want to read this blog.
Well, I want to give you six tips that are actually achievable and that work so that you can overcome your fear of being hurt again.
The first one is: Whatever you focus on is what grows.
Now, we’ve all been hurt. And for some of us, it has been a really traumatic experience. And maybe you’re someone that has been hurt over and over again.
Just because you have experienced pain when it comes to love, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to keep experiencing it.
And unfortunately, when we have a history of having the same thing happen over and over again, or we’ve just been hurt really badly, even once, it can start to solidify a conviction in our brain that we will always be hurt if we love or that we’ll never have someone love us properly.
So what we need to do is we need to actually be aware of what we give our energy to, our words, our thoughts, and our actions, because whatever we feed will be magnified.
I want you to think of it this way.
If you’ve got a plant over here called hurt and pain, and you’ve got another plant over here called forgiveness, healing, and love, you have an opportunity to only water one plant.
So the question is which plant are you going to water?
Obviously the plant that you feed and give your time, your energy, and your dedication to is the plant that is going to grow. And that’s what I want you to do. Heck, even if you have to go get two plants and label them that, it at least keeps you accountable for what you’re choosing to do on a daily basis.
The second thing to do is I want you to build a fence, not a wall, fences are representative of healthy boundaries.
Walls block and they’re not a boundary. It’s basically shutting people out because you have a lot of fears.
When you see horses in the paddock, you’re driving along in the country and you see horses in the paddock.
Now, the reason why you can see them is that there is a fence and they understand that they can’t move past that barrier. You can still see in. They can still see out. You can reach over and pat them, okay? They’ve got a boundary around them, which says, okay, it stops here and you start there.
A wall, a big fat brick wall means that you can’t see in, they can’t see out. And there’s basically no transparency, no vulnerability. And no one gets any joys of patting horses. Okay?
So, that’s the way that I want you to think about it. I want you to think of guarding your heart, not blocking your heart.
Guarding means having those boundaries there, but still allowing people in who are able to respect those boundaries.
Blocking means shutting everyone out totally because you have fear.
Now, the third thing to do is you want to minimize the chances of being hurt again, right?
If we don’t actually take accountability or start to become aware of why we have these things happen over again and why people are hurting us or why we get hurt and we’re always on the defensive, then we’ll just have the same thing happen over and over again.
So we have to understand that if you’re going to love and be loved, there’s always the risk that you could be hurt. You could be rejected.
I can’t remove that for you, but what I can help you do is identify how to minimize the risk of being hurt. And there are a couple of ways to do that.
1. Look at the patterns
Look at what your patterns are in the past. Who were you attracted to? What sort of type was they? Why did you get hurt in the first place? Was it you, was it them? Is it the sort of people that you’re dating or is it something that you were doing? Okay?
2. Look at red flags.
We can’t just be going out there and becoming attached or investing in people who have toxic traits in them.
If you can be familiar with the red flags before you start entering into a relationship with them, it will help you work out their character and intentions early on.
3. Understand love more.
The reason why we get hurt is that we don’t know how to set ourselves up to not be hurt.
We assume that just because we want to love and be loved, we should just go out there and it will all magically happen.
But that’s not how it goes, especially if you’re someone who experienced problems in your childhood or some sort of traumatic event, your brain is now wired to seek out traumatic events and pain.
So, if you can understand more about themself, understand more about love and dating and how to set yourself up in a way that it actually becomes easier for you, in a way that you feel that you’re in control of your decisions and that you trust yourself, you’re more likely to have A, more confidence when it comes to dating the right people and B, you’re going to probably have a better outcome.
The fourth thing to do is take it slow.
If you’re scared to get hurt, then the last thing that you want to do is you don’t want to rush into a relationship.
Because what you’ll do is you rush into something with someone that you probably don’t know a lot about or you get love burnout.
So, pace yourself. I have actually done a blog on this, which I highly recommend that you watch on how often should you see someone when you first start dating them? The guidelines are good. This isn’t about rules.
Obviously we need to have some sort of flexibility depending on the person and depending on how we feel.
But if you are someone that, doesn’t trust yourself, or you do have this constant fear coming up, then stick to the guidelines that I’ve set out in that blog.
Pacing yourself allows you to assess that person’s character and intentions whilst you’re still slowly getting to know them and being romanced by them.
Pacing yourself allows for those boundaries to be put into place, which allows you to adjust to new feelings whilst also understanding more about who they are.
Number five: communicate along the way.
Now, when I say communicate, I don’t necessarily mean go on a date and be like, “My ex-boyfriend did this and I’ve had a traumatic past,” and blah, blah, blah. Right? And we just go, here’s my baggage, I want you to meet heart to heart, not wound to wound.
One of the things that we can do if we’ve had pain and we start dating and all we do is talk about pain, we either repel the good ones, or we attract other people who have pain.
Then we feel like, “Oh, we’re compatible because we’ve both had traumatic pasts and we both had this pain and we understand each other.” That’s meeting wound to wound. It’s not meeting heart to heart, and it’s not going to set you up for more healing.
So we need to be particular obviously about how we talk about our pain. Communicate how you feel, but understand that there are definitely guidelines between that as well.
Don’t just go and dump your baggage. Don’t expect that person to rescue you. Your healing is your responsibility and someone else can help accelerate your healing and add to your healing. However, at the end of the day, it is your job to deal with it.
And lastly, number six, start with small acts of trust and vulnerability.
If you’ve trust was broken, maybe you had someone cheat on you, or you’ve had a lot of people that you cared about really hurt you, even if it was family members, then chances are, it’s going to be hard to open up.
Don’t expect to be able to fully trust someone, it’ll be an open story straightaway. You don’t want to, okay? As I said, you want to guard, not block.
So start with little things, start with things like if you say something, follow through with your words. If they say something, hold them accountable to them, following through with actions.
We want to start feeling that we can trust ourselves in this process to be able to open up whilst also trusting the other person with our feelings and putting our hearts out there.
Trust essentially has to be a decision that you have to kind of walk that first step, even if you’re not necessarily going to get the answer that you want. It is something that involves transparency, it is something that is earned over time. And it’s something that needs to be nurtured.
Vulnerability is something that should happen in stages.
There are different things that you should be vulnerable about in the early stages of dating, as opposed to later on in a relationship.
Again, if you can get savvy with all of that, I guarantee it will help make you feel like you’ve got kind of a battle plan when it comes to going out there and loving again without having the fear of being hurt overwhelming you.