Trust is rarely absolute, but more restricted to particular situations.
You may trust your partner to choose you the perfect birthday gift but you would not trust them to perform surgery on your leg. To trust people, you must feel good about them, their character and their capabilities. To trust is an act of placing confidence in someone or something else other than yourself. It is the super glue, the binding for the strongest and deepest love, friendships, and communities. Our whole world is built on trust because without it we would be forced to live in fear.
When you think about your own life, relationships, love affairs and disappointments, your interpersonal relationships, you recognise it can take years to build trust and only seconds to break it. People who have big issues with trusting others have often had negative experiences in the past that prevent them being able to trust in the future. People from divorced families or anyone who has been a victim of trauma or abuse as a child suffer from trust issues with intimacy and commitment issues later in life.
When a person’s trust is repeatedly violated their belief system can be severely affected causing concerns with placing trust in anything going forward. Letting your guard down takes having complete confidence in your own instincts and intuition, having worked on your confidence in self therapy it's important to remember we are masters at lying to ourselves to get what we want, not always what we need.
Trust is the foundation of most healthy relationships but often foundations are shaky because of deep buried issues from the past. Once again that lying mind can have you believing things based on your emotions and not on common sense or actual facts, memories are easily distorted. We all know deep down inside when something is not right, the reason we have our gut feelings and instincts but these can become clogged or clouded by past experiences. We may be insecure when we enter a new romantic relationship and be so needy we by pass our instincts, connecting with the wrong person just to fill the emotional hole inside instead. We may confide in the wrong person because we are desperate to get stuff off our chest, only to discover the secrets we had are no longer secrets.
I have been hurt many times in my past and when I think about it today, I believe a large part of the reason for this comes from placing too much faith in something or someone else and then it or them not living up to my high expectations. I understand now this behaviour of high expectation was my own fault and I would not have felt so let down had I had the confidence to place all the trust in myself and not leaving my destiny up to others.
We are unfortunately living in a world today where too many times we place hope and expectation in other people. Often these people are not deliberately trying to hurt us or betray us but they are often in the pursuit of their own needs as a priority. This is a classic example of how the things that happen in your life when you are young and immature can carry on and continue to hurt as an adult. We may not even realise this is where the hurt we carry around with us comes from.
The burden for those of us with trust issues who keep being hurt need to somehow learn to trust themselves again to live a happy healthy life. I have learned over the years; you get what you expect. If you expect bad things to happen in your relationships, you will have bad things happen. I believe most of us with trust issues struggle with negativity. We are sure we know (based on past experience) things will go wrong and lack the ability to be positive.
If you have experienced a terrible relationship with your father, you may grow up to subconsciously not trusting men and over trusting women. This could completely ruin all your relationships going forward because you will always subconsciously expect the worse to happen. Having faith in yourself to trust your instincts and reach out for help is key here too because without it some will definitely struggle maintaining relationships over the long term. Trusting a good talk therapist to guide you will allow you to open up any old wounds from the past and heal them in the right way. Talking therapy will also allow you to learn to trust and bond with others without subconsciously sabotaging something before it begins. It will teach you to let go of what happened in the past and empower you to trust your own judgement in the moment in the future.
A place of greater self awareness tips the balance in favour of self sufficiency, the knowing you completely trust yourself opens you up to trust in your relationships going forward.
Photo by: Sabine Ojeil Unsplash