Your Lies Don’t Protect Me
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I remember the first time I lied as a child, it was an imaginative story made to make my five year old life sound more interesting than it was, but I was caught out as it happened and became fearful of lying ever since. Lying is apparently a necessary stage in childhood development and then we are shaped to make sure we don’t tell lies. The thing is there are too many adults out there who live their lives telling one lie to the next, so many lies that I think even they can no longer tell what is their reality and what is fabricated. Lies are the things that have hurt me the most in my life. They have broken me, exhausted me and torn my trust to pieces. As a result I’m very slow to trust, then one small slip up with me and my trust will shake like it’s in a high magnitude earthquake while I try to hold on to the hope that you’re a good person that isn’t going to hurt me like the last one did. The thing is, your lies don’t protect me, you think they protect you. They make me believe in a version of you that doesn’t actually exist and you fear the truth coming to the surface because you know that if I discover that you had so little respect for me that a lie could come from your lips that I’m going to see who you really are and leave. The truth always comes out.
My marriage was built on lies and broken promises. Lies by omission, things being kept from me and deleted but eventually the lies faded because I just didn’t care about him anymore enough to question or go looking for them. He was happy being awful to my face so I can only imagine what was going on about that I didn’t know about. I didn’t care though, I felt no love and actually wished every day he would cheat on me or hit me so that I had a valid reason to leave. The emotional and mental abuse didn’t feel like enough of a reason to leave even though these forms of abuse cut me so much deeper than him laying a hand on me would have. He chipped away at me until I was so emotionally shut down that I don’t remember most of that period of my life because I wasn’t feeling anything. I just remember knowing that when the moment came I would leave, and I did.
The worst relationship of my life was built on so many lies that I don’t even know where to begin with unpacking them. He told me he hadn’t been with a woman for the five years before me to make out I was special and he was respectful and then I…
