GOT TRUST ISSUES?
“I have a hard time trusting people.”
“I never feel like I can trust my partner.”
It is very common for us, in our work as counselors, to hear these statements. Trust issues are extremely common in relationships. However, resolving trust issues may not be about getting the other person to be trustworthy. It is probably about becoming a trustworthy person with yourself and learning to trust yourself.
Reasons You Don’t Trust Yourself:
1) Dwelling on the past
Besides making you anxious and depressed, chronically ruminating over past mistakes and failures trains your brain to believe you are not trustworthy.
If you are constantly reminding yourself that you are a screw-up, is it any surprise that you have a hard time trusting yourself?
2) Worrying about the future
The only thing worry leads to is stress and anxiety in the moment; low self-confidence and lack of trust in the long-term.
How much trust are you engendering in your mind if you are constantly worrying about every possible negative outcome in the future?
3) Trusting your emotions
Your emotions will lead you astray just as often as they will help you.
How could you trust yourself to focus and get important work done if you always trust your anxiety and use procrastination to assuage it?
How could you trust yourself to be a loving partner if you always trust your frustration and act out all your anger with your spouse?
4) Perfectionism
If you are holding yourself to impossibly high standards, of course you are never going to trust yourself to reach them!
5) Procrastination
When you procrastinate and break a promise to yourself, you are teaching your brain that you can’t be trusted to follow through on your commitments.
6) Reassurance-seeking
This is essentially outsourcing the hard work of managing difficult emotions to someone else. Besides leading to resentment and conflict in your relationships, reassurance-seeking has the other downside of absolutely killing your self-confidence and ability to trust yourself. If you habitually shirk the responsibility of managing your own painful emotions, you are telling your brain that you can’t handle them yourself.
7) Ignoring your curiosity
Many people give up on their childhood dreams and passions because they were not approved of by parents or authority figures.
What are you telling your own mind if you spend decades suppressing your genuine interests and curiosity in favor of what society or your family thinks is important?
You are teaching your mind that what you want and are curious about isn’t important. You took one of the most important decisions of your entire life – your profession and career – and said, “I can’t be trusted to follow my own curiosity and interests when it comes to my work so I am going to rely on other people to make that decision for me.”
– 7 Psychological Reasons You Don’t Trust Yourself by Nick Wignall
Application:
Is it possible to look at trust in an unhealthy way? Have I given trust too much power?
Have I judged trust? Can trust determine who I am?
Before we can fully trust there needs to be acceptance.
Those who: Accept the gift of Righteousness
Accept the abundance of Grace
Will reign in life through Christ (Romans 5:17)
The Apostle Paul said, “He who is joined to the Lord is one Spirit.” (1 Cor. 6:17)
Reigning in life begins with me taking God’s acceptance of me and accepting me with it. I accept that God has established my new identity and good or poor behavior will not change it. I trust God. I trust the New Me; and together we are trustworthy! Therefore, I can risk trusting others.
Gratitude:
In January we developed a Financial Philosophy for Simply Grace, Inc. One point in that agreement is that we will continue to reflect an abiding posture of trust. Thank you, current financial partners! Thank you, future partners! We trust and rest in the promises of abundance!
Ken & Debbie Pallone
SIMPLY GRACE, INC.,1090 Cambridge Square, Suite D, Alpharetta, GA 30009, 678.965.4055 simply-grace.org