Painful Things to Learn...

Hello. My name is Julie and I have a problem with trust.

There. I said it. In fact, I only just realized it!

It's been an interesting evening in my head as I have contemplated this reality. Now, this is not something that jut popped into my head. For some reason I was feeling...shall we say... INSECURE. Stupid but yes, at my age we still feel insecure and scared and all those crazy emotions we like to attribute to teenagers or small children. So, I was feeling insecure and I guess that came through in a phone conversation with a dear friend. To which my friend replied "Jules. I need you to trust me." Plain. Simple. Direct. I need to trust.

Now, for some people this may seem easy. "OK, I'll trust you. No problem." For me? Not so much. When things like that happen or people express things like that, I need to figure out myself and where this comes from. I don't like the fact that someone close to me, whose friendship is very important, senses that I don't trust them. I see how my words and behaviours are reflecting that but why am I doing it? And, how do I fix it!?

So, I have begun the quest for inner truth. I have begun the process off self-analysis and research to see if I can decipher from whence this lack of trust stems and how I can learn new patters in order to create stronger, more trusting relationships.

Trust is an interesting thing. I trust most people. I am very open about who I am. My students are very free and comfortable with me and know they can trust me with their problems and challenges. What I notice, as I look at my life is that my trust falters when the relationship involves my heart. Whenever I have broached a significant relationship, I stop trusting.

Aha! It is not THEM I don't trust! It's ME!!! In beginning my research (in the last 3 hours of reading about trust in general and the roots of these kinds of issues) I am seeing a pattern. First, it is mostly women who struggle with these kinds of issues. Secondly, most trust issues are not really about the other person but about the one who can't trust.

Concrete example: you buy a new car. It's in perfect shape. You go on a road trip. Middle of nowhere and your car dies. You are stranded. What is your biggest fear? Being alone, being lost and stranded, etc. After this experience do you buy another car or possibly get the dead one repaired? Do you keep driving a car? For most of us, absolutely. We have not lost our trust in cars from this bad experience. We do, however, prepare more carefully the next time we take a trip, we plan our route to avoid the "nowhere" routes. It is not that we do not trust our car, we do not trust ourselves to handle the situation and thus we may end up "alone and stranded."

So, while I would love to blame this on someone, the person I don't trust...is me. I don't trust myself not to screw up relationships. I don't trust that I am worthy of a great relationship. I don't trust that I could make someone happy. Wow...that's a lot of mistrust to load on myself in one night! It's okay, I am not wandering down the path of self-destruction here so don't call the suicide hot line on me, it's just sort of a revelation and a clarification and now I can figure out how to turn it around.

Tomorrow, maybe a bit on where this stems from...still have some thinking and probing to do on that front. Trust is an awesome thing and even at my age, I can learn to do it better!