This is going to be for all those who have gone through abusive, harmful, or brutal relationships in the past, people who want to be able to love again but find it hard to because of their history. Before you dive into a new relationship, you need to prepare yourself. Learn from the past, try to remember everything about it, everything you did wrong, and everything you did right.
We all go through bad relationships, and some of them leave us too damaged to date again. Still, we can’t let it kill our future off like that, and we need to come out of the pain and learn to love again, this article is going to focus on just that, the necessary preparations before you even think about giving your heart to someone still.
Starting A New Relationship
7. Make sure your closet is clean
From personal experience, I can say this with the utmost surety: Your past always catches up with you. No matter how hard you try to run away from it, no matter how far back it was, it will always come back around to make you miserable; and, when you are trying to move on and start your life anew that can be extremely devastating, so the best thing you can do is to make sure you embrace your past and learn to deal with it in such a way that it does not influence your relationships.
I know this is easier said than done. Still, it’s necessary for a healthy relationship in the future, because if you try to hide your past, it ultimately leads to lying and that can compromise your relationship. You are human; we all mistakes, but we have to learn how to embrace them no matter how painful it is.
Remember, your past is nothing to be ashamed of; it’s just part of the process that made you into the amazing person that you are, be proud of it. Try and share your past with your new significant other, talk to them confide in them. You never know, they might even be able to help you get over it, or your attempt to share your past may allow them the opportunity to open up and share their own. This can help you build an even better relationship because you’ll know all the stupid little mistakes you have made an try to keep each other from making them.
Before you can be a part of someone else’s life, you need to make sure you don’t have any unnecessary dirt hidden away in your closet. Take care of your past, make sure it’s far away from your present, far enough to never affect your present or your future.
Only commit to someone new when you’re sure you have closure with your past because if it comes back to haunt you, it’ll not only hurt you but the new person you’re trying to have a new life with as well. So take your time, as much time as you need, but do not commit until your closet is clean.
6. Make sure you can trust again
Relationships are built on trust, and once that trust is gone, it is unimaginably hard to get it back still. All scars heal, but the ones caused by your faith is broken, take the longest to heal. Before you start a new relationship, give yourself the time to improve and develop the ability to trust again. Take baby steps, but do take them; don’t just let go of bothering to trust again because of what one person has done to you.
There are billions of people on this planet, and not all of them are out to break your trust and hurt you. Of these billions of people, there is one person who will make you learn to love and trust again, but for that to happen, you need to open yourself to the idea of trusting again. Remember, if you are not willing to trust again, you will never be able to build a lasting relationship with anyone.
A lot of times in your new relationship, there are going to be deep conversations in the dark, under the starry sky. If you aren’t able to open up to your partner during these conversations, you mostly run the risk of damaging what could have been a beautiful relationship.
Your partner loves you and will want to know when you are hurting and what bugs or bothers you, and if you are unwilling to cooperate or communicate with him/her, you will be stuck in the same old rut of feeling misunderstood and alone. Relationships in which the people are unable to trust each other can last for only so long, till they crumble and collapse because the very foundation which was trust was never there in the first place.
One of the hardest challenges I had faced to this day, learning to trust again. It’s not easy when you’re so scared of having your trust broken into pieces again. When we fall in love for the first time, it’s magical; the feeling is beyond compare and words, we feel like we can achieve anything in the world as long as we have that person next to us, we trust that person with everything we have, and when that trust gets broken, we get broken along with it.
Life is hard, and the ability to trust people again is even harder, but you can’t torture yourself because of someone else’s mistakes. Let yourself heal, give yourself enough time, and surround yourself with positive energy. Know that not everyone in this world is terrible; not everyone is out to break your heart.
5. Make sure you don’t forget the lessons
For a long time, I looked at my past as being extremely regrettable and something I never wanted to be reminded of. Still, as I have developed as a person and experienced life in so many ways, I have learned that the past is filled with mistakes, yes. Still, those mistakes are a massive part of the person I am today, and there is nothing to regret in them, instead of looking at them as lessons that I have learned to improve my life.
Humans learn based on trial and error, and without that, we would be utterly lost. The only time your past can be regrettable is if you aren’t willing to learn anything from it. Making mistakes isn’t the worst thing that you can do; instead, the worst thing you can do is to not learn from them.
Remember the lessons you have learned and try to apply them to your life. Things happen for a reason, and so all the bad things that have happened to you are not without cause. So accept them and learn from them.
We all make the mistake of guilt-tripping ourselves for the times we have hurt someone, learn to not guilt trip yourself, instead learn never to make the same mistake again. Life is a test, actual. And if we are unable to learn from the lessons it gives, and we forget them, we are going to fail this test. The best part about lessons from life is that you get to realize your worth, you get to control whether you are going to allow someone to hurt you or not.
We all learn lessons from the past; lessons are worth remembering, you can forget everything else about your history except for the lessons it gave you because that’s how you grow as a person. Don’t forget the mistakes you made that hurt someone, and don’t forget the way someone made you feel low about yourself because you’re not meant to feel that way about yourself, ever. Take every lesson from the past and move forward with those lessons.
4. Make sure you’re willing to forgive
I cannot stress this one enough; you can never move on from a relationship if you are not willing to forgive and forget. When someone hurts you, one of the most painful things to do is to forgive them, but it’s also one of the healthiest things a person can do.
Unwillingness to forgive changes us into cold, bitter, and hard people, who are out for vengeance against the whole world. One of the best ways to bring yourself to forgive someone is to place yourself in their shoes and empathize.
Place yourself in their shoes and try to understand why they broke your heart and hurt you. It’s hard for sure, but it’s the only way to move on from your past relationships. Remember this, if you are unwilling to forgive and forget, it won’t affect the person who hurt you, but it will affect you for sure.
You will be in a continuous battle with yourself, torn between hating someone who hurt you or just altogether removing them from your life. Hate is never the way to go about it, so you need to remove them from your life is to forgive and forget them, so that you can start again.
The most active, most fearsome people are those who can take life in stride and are willing to forgive no matter what people do to them. They know that carrying around that hate will affect them negatively, and so they be the bigger person and forgive. One of the most significant steps in moving on and letting go is forgiveness, which, if we are unable to do, harm us and is almost equivalent to shooting yourself in the foot and ruining your own life.
You don’t need to carry the weight of all that resentment around. You forgive them for yourself and not because they deserve it, revel in that. When we come out of a very negative relationship, it sort of changes us in a way we don’t want to change, in a way we never wanted to change. Being in a brutal relationship made me a cruel person when I fell in love with the girl I’m with now I hurt her a lot in the beginning because of my past, because of the person I had become because of the person I was with.
Don’t let that happen to you. The first time I saw her cry was the time I felt horrible about myself, I was always the guy to make sure my girl is smiling and happy, how could I let that happen? So I apologized, never to go back to my mean ways again, and I never did. Make sure you regain your ability to forgive. Don’t torture someone new for the mistakes of someone who isn’t even there anymore; it’s not fair to them.
3. Make sure you can give it your all again
Okay, so, a lot of times in relationships, we realize that we are giving it our all, but the other person isn’t, and that is a harrowing and hurtful realization. The amount of contempt we feel for someone who does that can also be directed towards us by someone else if we get involved in a relationship without realizing that we are not ready to give it our all.
The first step to being ready to give it our all is by learning to love ourselves. One of the essential things in any aspect of life is self-love. How can you expect yourself to love someone utterly and entirely if you can’t even love yourself? Take some time to analyze yourself, your insecurities, and your flaws.
Write them down and then tell yourself why they don’t matter and or how you can fix them once you have done that throw the paper away. If you get into a relationship with someone when you aren’t ready, you are just as bad or even worse than the person who broke your heart, because you got into a relationship, knowing you weren’t prepared to love someone totally and give them you’re all. Make yourself feel good about yourself. Do things that make you feel happy, learn to accept yourself as you are.
Realize that it is okay to be alone and that you do not need someone to make you feel good about yourself because you can do it on your own. Once you have done that, once you have learned to love yourself, only then should you be ready to start a new relationship because now you love yourself enough that you can direct yourself to love somebody entirely and that you can give them your 100%. Don’t be the person who broke somebody to pieces just because you weren’t able to provide them with you’re all. Don’t commit to someone unless you can honestly give your all to that new relationship.
Nobody likes half-assed relationships, nobody likes it when they’re doing their best to make you happy, and you’re nowhere to be found. Yes, you suffered a lot in the past, but it does not mean you make someone who had nothing to do with it hurt in the future.
2. Make sure a shell does not surround you
As humans, our primary defense mechanism is to protect ourselves the minute we get hurt. We immediately curl into a ball if we get punched in the stomach so that it doesn’t happen again, we cover our hand quickly if it gets burned in the same way when someone hurts us. We immediately withdraw into ourselves and refuse to leave. By this refusal, we miss so many chances to open up to people who genuinely care about us and want to help. This shell we hide within stops us from growing, and it prevents us from trusting people who are more than worthy.
If we have any chance of having a great relationship, we screw it up by refusing to let them in. Don’t do that to yourself; don’t ruin your life because of one idiot who was not smart enough to realize your worth. You can hide behind the walls you build around yourself, but sooner or later, these walls crumble, and the magnitude of our pain hits us, and it’s almost impossible to recover from. Don’t let that happen to you. Let down your walls and embrace the pain and all the opportunities that come your way.
If you shut your door on love because of one bad experience, chances are you’ll lock yourself away from actually experiencing what love is. You are someone who deserves the best in life, and the only way you can get it is if you leave the door open for all that love to enter.
You have the power to change your life; you are in control. Show all the people who hurt you that they can’t bring you down, that you will get up no matter what. Don’t let the people who love you suffer because of someone else. When we get abused or mistreated by someone, we slowly develop a protective shell around ourselves to protect us from the pain. The person who causes the pain and causes the tank to appear, that person will go far away from your life, but the shell will stay as long as you want it to.
It’s not fair to the new person in your life if you’ve already surrounded yourself with a shell if you don’t give them a fair shot at love and tell them to deal with it. Make yourself vulnerable, yes, I know it’s scary, but love is a terrifying thing at first, but the rewards are beyond compare when you finally achieve it.
1. Make sure you don’t have any pent up aggression
Most of the times when I am angry or hurting, I tend to keep all my frustration locked up inside me, and it is excellent for a bit, but then, I reach a point where I can’t hold it in anymore, and I blow up at the wrong people, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and later on, I am filled with regret.
A lot of times, when people hurt us and break our hearts, more than pain, we feel angry. We feel mad at ourselves for loving them for trusting them for being fooled by them. Since we don’t have them around anymore to get rid of all those negative feelings, we tend to direct our anger at people who adore us; we hurt them because we are hurting, and we ruin our relationships that way.
We are plagued with guilt and pain, and just so many negative feelings that we tend to become extremely aggressive people who hate the world and its inhabitants. We are always on the defensive, and that pushes away all the people who love us. Just like forgiving is a part of letting go, so is getting rid of the aggression.
Understand that the past is the past. You can’t change it in any way, whatever has happened, has happened, it is beyond your influence. There is no purpose in being angry over something you can’t change. Understand that it was never your fault, so let go of the anger and aggression. This entire article is about making go, in different ways and forms.
Pent up aggression is something that sometimes is left in us from our past relationships when we don’t get proper closure. And it’s dangerous when it gets thrown at the wrong person, a person who is new in your life and is trying their best to make you happy, they don’t deserve any of that negativity, and neither do you.
Take a deep breath, let go of your fears, let go of the pain, hold their hand and hope never to let go, that’s how you continue a prosperous life for yourself and for the person who’s trying to show you what love is.
Your turn
Did you deal with a bad relationship? How did you come out of it? Let me know your story in the comments below. As always, stay blessed and keep the love alive!
