Trust

I’ve had this subject going around in my mind for a couple of weeks. Trust. How do you trust when trust hasn’t been a part of your experience of life? I haven’t even had self-trust, let alone trusting other people. How do you trust when the people who you would think you could trust in your childhood have let you down, not lightly, but to a point where if you can’t trust them, who can you trust?

Trust is something that is a very basic instinct in most of us. Some definitions of trust are:

Firm reliance on the integrity, ability, or character of a person or thing.

To have or place confidence in; depend on.

To be confident; hope.

To expect with assurance; assume: I trust that you will be on time.

To believe: I trust what you say.

To have or place reliance; depend.

So as a child you place your trust in your caregivers, that they will protect you and that you can rely on them. What if that trust is abused? It becomes a lifelong battle to regain a sense of trust in other people. And in yourself. I try so hard to trust other people but somewhere inside this little voice, maybe the inner child, is saying to me “The only person you can depend on is yourself”, “You must be in control” and “Don’t trust because they will only let you down”.

There are people I have gained a trust in more than others but even then it is a battle. I am gaining a bit more trust in myself though. I came from a background where I wasn’t allowed to make a decision. Every decision had to go through my Dad and it would take me days to get up the confidence to ask him if I could do something. So when I reached adulthood I questioned every decision I made. I had no self-trust whatsoever. It didn’t make for a very good working life because I worried myself sick about decisions I made and even worried most times about actually going to work. As a nurse I restricted myself when I could have worked in a lot better environment than the one I chose.

So how does something that, from a small child has been missing, be regained? Do I trust anybody? There are people I trust more than others. I honestly don’t know how to regain that basic instinct to trust people that comes from a secure childhood or that hasn’t been abused. I know it is probably repetitiveness, learning to trust someone who has never let me down. And I try hard not to let that little voice inside take over but it is really an ongoing process. It is so deep within and has been such a part of me. I think right from the moment I was born I didn’t trust, so maybe it is saying, okay, I will never be a trusting person but if I learn to trust myself and my intuition, maybe that will be enough. It’s okay to just be me and accept that part of me that will never be able to totally trust people.

Kaz