I’m in my 30s, and I broke down in tears after playing a social deduction game tonight. I don’t normally like social deduction games because I don’t lie well, but I’ve always enjoyed this one well enough because it’s simple and the rules are straight forward. The whole point is to lie, and I wasn’t in the least upset with anyone. The short version is I really believed my boyfriend of many years was not a traitor (in the game). I believed he wasn’t not because of any in-game actions, but simply because his body language was so completely authentic to me. When I found out he’d been lying, I felt confused. I held it in until I left, but when I left I just started crying. I wasn’t upset with him, and of course I understand it’s a game. What shook me was how convinced I was and yet how wrong I was. It shook my faith in my own judgement and left me feeling confused about how I can trust myself to form judgements about others. I know it sounds silly, and I do of course understand it’s just a game. I’m not at all upset about how the game went, it just shook me. I really thought I knew that he was telling the truth, and the experience of being unable to tell if someone I know so well is lying or not triggered something for me.
Anyway, it left me feeling really concerned about my own issues. Reality feels so unstable for me, and I just want to find a sense of peace and confidence in myself, but I don’t know how or even if I can.
Looking back on my life, I feel like I can track something akin to a disintegration of reality. My sense of the world feels like it was relatively whole until my Aunt and cousins moved in with my mom and me. She often took care of me, but she was not kind to me. She treated me differently from her children and, in my memory, seemed to resent me for reasons I didn’t understand. After that, I think I felt confused and just kept expecting the situation to change but it never did.
I think I became more internal to cope because reality must have been too confusing for me. I read a lot of books and played a lot of video games. I always had friends and a social life, but was also content by myself.
This is too long, but in short my life in retrospect appears as a series of betrayals leading to an increasingly uncertain relation to the world around me. For example, my best friend and childhood crush in first grade tricked me by making me think he liked me only to reveal in front of the class at lunch that it was a trick and he really liked my friend. My aunt who was my caretaker but treated me with contempt when I expected love. My first real boyfriend cheated on me with my best friend, and lied to me about all sorts of things I can’t even remember. I only remember my own disorientation because I never considered the possibility of someone lying like that, even when confronted with hard evidence.
Then I go to college and join a club. I had so many close friends, and three years in all of a sudden no one will speak to me. I find out eventually that another girl had started a rumor which had not even the slightest basis in reality. Unfortunately, every single person I knew, even my very best friends, stopped speaking to me. Hundreds of people, everyone I knew, hated me overnight and I suddenly had no friends. It was bizarre.
I left that group, and then I dated another guy for years who cheated on me. We were living together, he hid another woman etc. etc. I had no idea. Etc. etc.
Dated another guy who randomly had a panic about commitment, also was living with him for quite awhile, and he just suddenly kicked me out. Caught me completely off guard.
After that, I really haven’t been able to trust people. I’ve never been short of friends, but I feel unable to discern anything about the people I’m around anymore. I don’t trust my own judgement. I am constantly uncomfortable and unhappy. Everything feels unstable and I’m so afraid of everything, even though I rarely express it. It came out tonight when I just started crying about this silly game. I’m very close with my partner and would like to think I could tell if he was lying. The other couples at the table were able to recognize if their partners were lying or telling the truth. For me, when I saw his body language and reactions, I completely believed him, and when I realized my judgement was wrong I just wanted to cry. I can’t help but realize that every time I’ve experienced something like a betrayal, I have always been caught off guard. I feel like I might as well flip a coin and believe that.
There are more little examples like this in my life, but this is already so long I’ll just say that I am left wondering a couple things. Does everyone experience betrayals like this? Am I just coping with it poorly? How can anyone trust anyone else with any level of confidence when people are clearly so capable of betraying that trust? What about when one has been constantly blindsided by betrayals of trust, how do you decide who to trust moving forward?
I feel like somehow I need to develop better judgement, but trying to develop the ability to be a “good judge of character” has quite simply not been working out for me. On the one hand it’s as if I trust no one and am constantly afraid, on the other hand it seems like I’m just as gullible and unaware as I’ve always been. Literally the worst of both worlds, and it’s making my life unbearable. I’m becoming concerned that my view of the world is so untethered that I’ll never be able to establish a solid sense of anything.
