Humans devote so much bandwidth into trying to dodge vulnerability, controlling the uncontrollable, and belatedly addressing boundary issues to allay their fears and insecurities. But our habits wreck our confidence, sabotage intimacy, and can inadvertently cause us to behave in untrustworthy ways.
In this week’s episode of The Baggage Reclaim Sessions, I delve into trust, the confidence we place in others and ourselves. By shifting our relationship with trust, we get to give and receive more love, care, trust and respect.
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5 key topics in this episode
- If we don’t have a great relationship with trust, including repeatedly trusting the wrong people and writing people off for the wrong reasons, we can make a big shift by becoming aware of our biases, the mental shortcuts we use to favour, disapprove of and distrust others.
- Trust requires us to depend on others while also retaining our sense of self. We need to be someone we can trust otherwise our ability to trust others will be messy as hell.
- Our relationship with trust and its health is based on what we did and didn’t learn about trust. We may have learned to distrust our feelings, to avoid intimacy, to rely on intensity, speed, charm and wishful thinking to guide our way. In fact, it’s very possible that we use the likes of people-pleasing, perfectionism, over-giving, over-responsibility and overthinking to try to make others trustworthy as well as to feel ‘safe and secure’. Messy!
- Our relationship with our boundaries, including whether we have any, is an expression of our relationship with trust. When we, for instance, don’t say no when we need, should or want to or we avoid honesty and being ourselves, we’re saying “I don’t trust you or myself”. We’re saying “I don’t think you can handle boundaries, and I think you might screw me over, hurt or abandon me.”
- If experience or straight-up common sense has taught us that we require certain things to feel safe and secure, to feel as if we have a jump-off point for trust, the onus is on us to handle that and sort it before doing anything that requires a higher level of trust. Having sex and then belatedly asking questions or demanding change about things we dislike and distrust is like closing the door after the horse has bolted.
Links mentioned
- The Debit and Credit Trust System (ep 29)
- You’ll learn to trust again when you learn to trust yourself
- What is gaslighting? (ep 185)
- The Justifying Zone
- Waiting for the other shoe to drop (ep 171)
- My book, Love, Care, Trust and Respect
- My book, Mr Unavailable and the Fallback Girl
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