Learning To Trust
If you’ve experienced any type of betrayal, deceit, or mistrust in the past, you may do whatever you can to create a sense of stability and certainty for yourself. This can include becoming hypervigilant, where you constantly scan and monitor your environment, relationships, and surroundings for any indication of deception. This can include testing others, where you create scenarios to try and gauge how important you are the someone. This can include becoming closed off and invulnerable to protect yourself, or becoming very attached very quickly to try and prove that trust can’t be violated. In any of these instances, it’s important to ask how these actions are serving you and what they are serving. Do these actions make you feel good and secure, or anxious and insecure? Are you performing these actions from a place of love or fear?
With relationships, it’s also important to ask if the other person has ever given you a reason not to trust them. Avoiding trust doesn’t help you learn to trust. Quite simply, the best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them. But trust shouldn’t be given away freely, especially if you’ve struggled to trust in the past. Trusting should be an intentional action—it should be given to someone who has shown you who they are, and whose care and concern for you are felt and obvious. Learning this about someone can (and should) take some time, but it’s worth it.
Trusting requires courage and vulnerability. You may fear that the more someone knows about you and gets inside your inner world, the more they can hurt you and the deeper that hurt can feel. But did you ever consider that they might understand you better and love you deeper instead?