Weaponisation is a verb and attached to that behaviour is an intention. I think key to emotional and mental health is understanding the difference between when a behaviour is happening subconsciously and when it is being enacted deliberately and to what end. A subconscious act of weaponisation might be an oversight, it could also be a result of miscommunication or misinterpretation. But when something is being knowingly clouded, obscured, manipulated or expressed incompletely, with the end goal being a desired outcome that benefits one party over an other, this can be harmful. We should all be looking in the mirror as often as possible, careful you don’t fall in!

Overcorrecting is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, during a Counselling relationship, it can be seen as a way to test boundaries and their stability, try challenging and scary things as a way of exposure in a safe space, or even perhaps investigate our own limitations and the things we don’t want, to discover what stability and the right path is. Sometimes you have to get things wrong and over do it, to have a benchmark for returning to where you need to be.

So how do we re-establish the ability to trust when it has been lost and damaged repeatedly over a long period of time, from as far back as infancy, for example? If having a sense of danger and lack all the time is all a person has ever known, if they have never experienced a sense of safety and ease, how do they rebuild that inability from the inside out?

…being able to trust is not something that stays constant and strong throughout your life. It is something that needs to be reflected on, reassessed, developed and maintained.