Trust Offenders & Lie Forgivers

I want to us to examine the concept of offense and forgiveness. How does this play out and what should be the action and corresponding reaction when you are wronged or you wrong someone.

Firstly let’s deal with being wronged. By “being wronged” I mean when an individual or group of individuals offend you. They either betray the trust you have vested in them or were outrightly deceptive.

It really hurts deeply if it is found out that someone you trust has betrayed your trust. You feel abused, stupid and taken for granted.

The annoying thing about being ‘lied to’ or betrayed is that it downgrades your intelligence. Onlookers think you are very stupid. Largely because most people forget that when you are dealing with someone from the premise of trust, intellect is suspended and one operates mostly from the realms emotions.

Investing emotional resource in someone is not supposed to be taken lightly. Even though man was created to love and be trusting, but for most people, our experiences has taught us otherwise. So the moment you meet someone, the first thing we all subconsciously do is to subject the person to an assessment. While profiling the person we determine if the person is worthy of our relationship or not. After we accept someone and a relationship kicks off, then little by little, precepts upon precepts, we begin to let down our guards until we become absolutely trusting – sometimes even in the presence of obvious faults.

The reason for trusting someone with an obvious fault is simply because when you are familiar with or love someone, you are hopeful that your relationship with them (a form of investment) will produce a change in them. You also feel that because of the bond you share they are incapable of despising you like they do others. All these are borne out of the love you have developed for such an individual.

In actuality, for someone to look beyond an individual’s faults and still decide to invest trust in them shouldn’t be taken lightly by the receptor. It is a huge investment and trust offenders should understand the gravity.

Unfortunately, some people take other people’s trust for granted. It is especially painful in love relationships to experience such betrayals. Catching your partner/spouse cheating on you with someone else, or discovering most of what you were told was false or that they pretended to be loving and caring during courtship but changed right after marriage could be very disheartening. But now that the deed has been done, you have been betrayed, how do you respond to the offense?

The next article will explore how to deal with this situation in detail (Click HERE to read the next article)  but for now, this is what you should know after your trust has been violated.

• First, stop blaming yourself for what happened. It is not your fault.
• Don’t entertain the thought that you are stupid. You have acted in good faith. Your betrayer is the one that is not deserving of trust.
• Don’t take responsibility for their bad behavior.
• Ignore negative and harsh comments passed by people; they are not isolated from such people too.
• It can happen to the best of us, stop thinking you were singled out for destruction.
• Ensure that when you are in a relationship, never embark on a journey with your heart without your brain.
• Don’t throw a pity party, the most important aspect of a bad experience is to learn from it and dump the pain

See you soon!