I don’t particularly like the person I have become. This is the web I never meant to weave.

That’s a difficult thing to admit, but lately I find myself looking at my own reflection, not necessarily in the mirror, but in the way I think, feel, react and exist, and wondering where the person I used to be has gone.

My mind feels like a spider’s web. Intricate, tangled, sticky and seemingly impossible to escape. Every thought connects to another. Every unanswered question catches on something else. I pull at one thread, hoping to find an explanation, only to discover another hundred threads waiting underneath it.

And somewhere in the middle of all this is me, caught in the very web my own mind has constructed.

I imagine spiders constantly weaving, adding layer upon layer, responding to every vibration. Perhaps that’s what my brain has become. Every little movement, every change in behaviour, every inconsistency sends a signal. I watch, I listen, I analyse. I look for patterns, contradictions and things that don’t quite fit. Not because I particularly want to, but because somewhere along the way, feeling safe stopped coming naturally.

There is a particular kind of mental anguish that comes from having your sense of security damaged. When trust becomes uncertain, when things you thought you understood turn out to have hidden layers, and when the explanations you are given don’t necessarily settle the questions in your head.

You start questioning everything.

Your memories. Your judgement. Your instincts. Your interpretation of events.

And then, somewhere along the way, you’re called paranoid.

Perhaps that’s the cruelest part. To be so frightened, so hurt and so desperately trying to make sense of things, only to feel that the very distress you’re experiencing is being used to question your credibility.

I don’t know how to explain what that does to a person. I am angry, my femine energy, my matriarchal core, has been triggered to a rage so ferocious I can’t find myself beneath it. I can’t breath.

The fear is exhausting. The uncertainty is relentless. The hurt doesn’t simply disappear because a conversation ends or because another day begins. The mental pain follows you. It sits quietly in the background, waiting for the next vibration in the web.

I find myself caught between wanting answers and being terrified of what those answers might be. Between wanting to trust and feeling unable to. Between wanting to let things go and feeling that letting go means abandoning something I still need to understand.

It’s an awful place to exist.

And I don’t particularly like what it has brought out in me.

I don’t like the suspicion. I don’t like the overthinking. I don’t like the constant internal conversations, the need to revisit things, the heightened awareness or the way seemingly insignificant details can send my thoughts spiralling. I don’t like feeling defensive when I used to feel comfortable. I don’t like how quickly fear can turn into anger, or how easily hurt can become a wall.

I don’t like feeling as though I’m always waiting for something else to unravel.

I miss the quieter version of my mind. The one that didn’t feel compelled to investigate every thread. The one that could accept an explanation without mentally examining it from all the different angles. The one that could simply exist without feeling the need to anticipate, prepare and protect.

I miss feeling light.

I miss feeling uncomplicated.

And perhaps most painfully, I miss liking myself.

I know that some of these reactions come from being hurt. I know that a mind exposed to repeated uncertainty can become hyperaware, that when trust is damaged, the brain can start looking for danger even when it desperately wants to find peace.

But understanding why something happens doesn’t make living with it any easier.

I am tired of being inside my own head. Tired of the noise, the fear, the endless connections between thoughts that should have been allowed to end where they began.

I want to stop being the spider and the trapped thing in its web at the same time.

I want to stop weaving explanations around things I cannot control. I want to stop searching every strand for evidence of something I fear might be there. I want to feel that I can put my guard down without leaving myself vulnerable.

I don’t know how to untangle all of this yet.

I don’t know which threads need cutting, which need understanding and which were never mine to carry in the first place.

But I do know this.

I don’t want to become permanently defined by what has hurt me. I don’t want fear to become my personality or uncertainty to become my permanent state of mind.

I don’t like myself very much at the moment, and that is perhaps the saddest thread of all.

Because underneath all the tangled thoughts, the anger, the fear and the anguish, I am still here.

Somewhere beneath the web, I am still trying to find my way back to myself.

I don’t think people truly understand what betrayal trauma does to you until they’ve experienced it themselves.

It’s not just about what someone has done. It’s about how their actions change your ability to trust, to feel safe, and to believe in the reality you thought you were living.

When someone you love crosses boundaries through secret online sexual conversations, or hidden behaviours, it changes something inside you. You start questioning things you once felt certain about. You replay conversations, search for answers, and wonder what else you don’t know. The person you trusted becomes the person whose actions have left you doubting your own judgement.

The hardest part is that the pain doesn’t simply disappear when the behaviour stops. A memory, a comment, or an unexpected thought can pull me straight back into it. My body reacts before my mind has time to catch up, and suddenly I’m overwhelmed by fear, anger, and questions I still don’t have answers to.

It’s exhausting living with the aftermath of something I didn’t choose. That feeling of doom that starts in the pit of your stomach, that nagging doubt, the patterns you’ve seen, the ‘tells’. Like a game of cards.

There’s a grief that comes with betrayal that I struggle to put into words. I’m grieving the relationship I thought I had, the security I believed existed, and the version of myself who could love without wondering what might be happening behind closed doors.

Perhaps one of the cruellest parts is how easily betrayal makes you question your own worth. I find myself wondering whether I was enough, even though I know, deep down, that I could have given everything and still wouldn’t have been responsible for somebody else’s choices.

I am so frightened of the same behaviours happening again that I am trying to offer something to counter an addiction. A responsibility that shouldn’t sit on my shoulders.

I’m learning that my reactions have a history. I’m not simply being difficult or choosing to dwell on the past. I’m trying to make sense of something that has fundamentally changed how safe I feel. Wanting honesty, consistency, and trust shouldn’t be something I have to justify.

I can’t force myself to heal on somebody else’s timeline, and I can’t simply switch off the hurt because time has passed. Rebuilding trust isn’t just about believing someone else’s words; it’s about finding a sense of safety in myself.

I want to stop questioning my instincts. I want to feel at peace in my own mind rather than constantly trying to make sense of what happened. More than anything, I want to feel like myself again.

I’m beginning to understand that healing isn’t about finding a way to make what happened hurt less by pretending it didn’t matter. It’s about accepting that it did matter, that it changed me, and that I deserve the time and space to recover.

I didn’t choose this pain, and somebody else’s choices are not a reflection of my worth.

I deserve honesty. I deserve emotional safety. And I deserve a life where the past no longer has such a powerful hold on my present.

I may not know exactly what healing will look like yet, but I’m learning that finding my way back to myself matters just as much as trying to understand how I got here.

Carrie. Her name was Carrie.

For years, you hid that truth from me. You hid her identity, concealed the details, and left me questioning my own reality. You drove me to some of the darkest places I have ever known, all while I was trying to make sense of the person I thought I loved.

And it continued to happen. So many incidents it’s difficult to tell which name caused which pain. I know there are more names that have come and gone over the years, before me and right up until now.

Secret conversations held on the way home from work, in the hours when you believed there would be no questions and no consequences.

Her name wasn’t saved in your phone. There was a message from you, alluding to sex. And slowly, the truth began to seep through the cracks in your carefully constructed lies. It clung to you, impossible to disguise. A stench of infidelity which you consider flirting.

By then, we had a child. A little one. I had made the ultimate choice to build a family with you, to bring your world and mine together, believing we were creating something lasting. Something safe. Something real.

If I had known what was to come, if I had listened to my instincts during those first few months together, I wonder whether I would ever have stayed.

Perhaps the signs were there all along. Perhaps I simply didn’t yet know how to read them.

Because this wasn’t the first time.

In those very early days, your phone pinged while you slept. I remember it. But I gave you the benefit of the doubt. I didn’t question your integrity or look for hidden meanings. We were new to each other, and I understood that we had both lived lives before we met. I chose trust over suspicion. I believed that the past belonged to the past.

I had no idea that, one day, I would look back at those seemingly insignificant moments and wonder what I had missed.

Later, I came to understand that this wasn’t an isolated incident. It was a pattern. One that had existed before me, one that had continued through our relationship, and one that I learned had played out with other partners, too. Other women whose characters you had questioned, whose stories you had discredited, whose experiences I had no reason to doubt until I began to recognise the similarities.

Different women. Different relationships. Different circumstances.

Yet somehow, the same story kept emerging.

And that is the thing about patterns.

At first, they look like coincidences. A message here. An unexplained absence there. A detail that doesn’t quite fit, an answer that leaves you more confused than reassured. You dismiss one thing, rationalise another, and explain away the rest because you want to believe in the person standing in front of you.

You want love to be enough to make the inconsistencies disappear.

Until one day, the pieces begin to fit together.

And once you recognise a pattern, you start seeing it everywhere. In the stories that don’t quite align. In the familiar excuses. In the way the blame shifts, the truth changes shape, and the same behaviours resurface beneath different explanations.

You begin to look backwards, re-examining moments you once accepted without question. Then you look forwards, wondering how many times you might have to live through the same thing again.

Eventually, you realise that the hardest part isn’t simply discovering what happened.

It’s discovering how long the pattern was there before you had the words to name it.

And once you see it, you cannot unsee it.