The question is, "Why can't she just trust me? I've done everything right, I've never done anything to cause her to be suspicious of me...and she still won't trust me!"

And the answer is so obvious that you'll never see it on your own, if you've not survived the kinds of betrayal that she has. You claim you're not like all the other people in her life, you're not all the men and women who have taken her trust, who have abused her, who have hurt her.

But in reality, you are.

Sounds harsh, huh? Let me get a little bit deeper.

You're human, right? You share that simple characteristic with all the other humans who have hurt her. Maybe you share some other characteristics. Maybe you care about her. Maybe you claim to be thinking about what's best for her. Maybe you'd like her to tell you about her emotions, to expose her gentle anger and her festering pain.

Guess what--it's more than likely that most of the people who have hurt have claimed and wanted the very same things. That's the real casualty of being abused by someone close to you, your ability to tell when caring is genuine and when it's dangerous.

So you say that she trusted you once, and you're wondering why she can't keep trusting you. There's a good answer for that, too.

Trusting someone is like jumping off a cliff. You hope that the person who said they'd be there when you fell is going to be there, you take a deep breath, and fling yourself off.

People who have been betrayed have to jump off of that same cliff. It's a tall, scary cliff, and you're not allowed to look over the edge before you jump. You have to have faith that whoever said they'd be there is going to be there, is going to catch you before you dash yourself to pieces on the rocks below.

The real catch, though, is that the betrayed have the certain knowledge that someday, there will be nobody there to catch them. They've experienced the fall before, and the pain at the end. It may not happen soon, but it will happen, eventually. The betrayed cannot conveniently forget that everything ends, that people go away and die, that mistakes happen, the miscommunication occurs, that people have intentions other than what they show. So every leap off of the cliff is done with the knowledge that it may very well be this time that the rocks below are what catches them instead of a pair of arms.

This decision to leap is being made, continually. You have to keep deciding to jump, every second of every day of every year that you trust someone. Stop making the decision, and you stop leaping, you stop trusting, and your life is suddenly fraught with a lot less peril.

But because we want to trust people, because we want to feel loved, to feel close to other people, we keep on making the decision, in the sure knowledge that the fall, eventually, is going to be fatal.

Next question doesn't this mean that she'll never be able to trust me? I'm not perfect!

And the answer is, well, maybe. You could be the most perfect person in the world and she'd still be afraid to trust you. But your lack of perfection doesn't mean that she'll never trust you, she is probably perfectly capable of trust, and she's probably willing to at least try.

This isn't about perfection or the lack of it. This is about a sense of horror. You see, most people can forget that people are unreliable. They can have faith that someone isn't going to deliberately hurt them if they've never done it before. They're always surprised when someone's malicious towards them, their first reaction to assume that the other person is the one with the problem.

Abuse survivors aren't surprised any more when someone hurts them. In fact, lack of hurt is pretty surprising. After a while, they expect the blows, and eventually the begin to precipitate them themselves. But the result of years of this is that survivors can't pretend to themselves that the blows aren't going to happen. Faith is very hard for them.

How can I explain the horror of knowing, day after day, that the end is approaching inexorably? Of knowing and not being able to do anything about it, of knowing and not being able to forget about it?

Author and a special thanks to Magdalen for allowing us to use this piece.