Daring to Trust…
In my personal life and the life of my clients and students the theme of this month that is appearing is daring to trust. In the next few weeks, I will be focusing on some writing and personal sharing about…
- What is trust?
- How did we develop trust from our early childhood years?
- How to listen to our feelings and needs to establish trust within ourselves.
- How to regain trust once its been broken.
Its going to be a juicy and empowering month. I hope what I share is helpful to you. Lets jump into the love pool.
What is Trust?
The American Heritage Dictionary defines trust as “a firm and hopeful reliance on the fidelity, integrity, or ability of a person or thing.”
Trust is therefore a reliance on reliability. The reliability element, however is based on our perception or expectation and may not be forthcoming or lasting when push comes to shove. It is in the hands of someone else. This complexity that it isn’t within our control makes trust a challenging issue.
Trust is not a feeling. It begins as a belief about the other, based on our experience of this person or the promises made to us. Then as evidence and data arises that someone is indeed reliable, our trust continues and flourishes. Then security, safety, and reliability flows in the relationship. Ahhh 🙂 If someone doesn’t show themselves to be reliable, then we feel mistrust.
Over time we become more adept at telling the difference between a con artist and a straight up guy. When we feel unsafe with someone and stay with him or her, we damage our ability to discern trustworthiness in those we will meet in the future.
One of the first steps to trusting another is trusting ourselves. When we can tune into our feelings and thus our needs and “be with” ourselves before reacting, we develop an ability to self soothe. No one is going to be able to soothe ourselves better than we can, so this act of knowing oneself establishes that we can take care of ourselves.
Trust is broken for all types of reasons, but a dominant theme is one person reacted violently or impulsively to difficult feelings that were arising for them and created a feeling of “not safe” and insecurity in the connection.
Lets break it down….
Thought- “I don’t believe that she/he really likes me or can accept me for who I am.”
Feelings- “Sad, Anger, Disappointment”
Need- Safety, Love, Acceptance
Action- The feelings are too difficult to be with (we don’t feel safe) and as a result our sympathetic nervous moves into fight, flight, or freeze. We push away (fight), run (flee, disappear, evade), or freeze.
Every feeling has a need. I teach on mindfulness of feelings and needs in almost all of my classes. Tuning into our feelings and asking for what we need within ourselves and with others is how we establish healthy relationships and trust. When we can tune into trusting that our feelings and needs matter, then we can better trust others because we know that we can take care of ourselves even if the other breaks our trust. Try this…
What am I feeling right now?
Ex: I am feeling disappointment that my partner, family member, co worker, etc are not connecting.
What need is connected to this feeling?
I have a need to re-connect and establish safety, communication, and closeness.
How can I fulfill that need?
I can ask to have a conversation with this person and share these feelings and try and establish a safe space where we can both listen and be heard.
“It’s ok to feel,
Whatever arises within,
It’s when I distract, deny, and suppress,
That my troubles are soon to begin.
The challenge is to find the balance between, and honor both your inner personal needs and feelings while also showing up for others.
“This mantra does not imply that whatever urge arises needs to be acted on. The important thing is that the feeling is felt, recognized, and used for increased self knowledge and inner growth. Followed to its source, each feeling holds important information about who we are, what we need, and where to go, and why we are here….. tune in and check it out”
Courtesy of Mystic Mamma
