I was working with a client this week, and during our session he said
‘I don’t feel that I can trust anyone anymore…’
As we explored why he was feeling this way, we looked more deeply into the idea that perhaps the question isn’t about whether we can trust others, but that the real question is:
‘Can I trust myself?’
We so often place trust outside ourselves.
We hope and expect that we can trust the people around us – our partners, our friends, our family. our colleagues.
We also tend to put our trust in authority figures, like teachers, doctors and therapists of all manner, physical and emotional and psychological.
We put trust in the structure around us, our jobs, the systems of our society, institutions.
We’ll even put our trust in ideas, that we find in what we’re reading, or the podcasts we’re listening to – and in the information that is broadcast for us to absorb
There is nothing inherently wrong with this – we need each other, and we learn from each other, but it is important to recognise that we are choosing to trust someone or something, it is always our choice.
Understanding this can feel empowering on one level – but sometimes confronting on another – because what happens when something goes wrong?
What happens when someone we trusted makes a mistake…
When an authority lets us down…
When life unfolds in a way we didn’t expect…
When someone leaves who said that they would always stay…
We can feel very shaken, unsafe and disillusioned.
If our sense of safety depends on others behaving in the way we want them to, then trust becomes fragile – because people are human, and they act from their conditioning, their history, their beliefs, their circumstances.
They make mistakes – they want to do something different than was originally agreed – they leave.
However, what we can come to discover, is that we can always trust people to behave as they are!
Not necessarily as we wish them to be or expect them to be.
But as they are.
In seeing this clearly, it can give the opportunity for something to open inside us
We can begin to release expectation, and with it, a certain kind of suffering.
So instead of asking: ’Can I trust them?’ Instead ask, ‘Can I trust myself to meet whatever arises?
Can I trust myself to respond, to learn, to continue living fully, to stay present, even when things don’t go to plan, even when life is difficult?’
I remember, after my mother died, asking my father a question… I was trying to make sense of loss, of uncertainty, of life itself and so I asked him ‘Because this has happened, does it mean that no more bad things will happen? Or will there be more to come’?
I was searching for reassurance, for a rule, for something predictable – but all he said was ‘Darling, we have to have faith.’
At the time, I didn’t fully understand what this meant – but over the years, his words have unfolded into something very real for me.
Faith is not about controlling life, instead, it is about trusting the depth within ourselves – the stillness, the presence, the unchanging essence beneath all change
People change.
Relationships change.
Circumstances change.
Even those we trust deeply may leave, through distance, through change, or through death.
Nothing external can offer us permanent certainty.
And yet, there is something that does not change.
Stillness.
Awareness.
Presence.
This is where true trust begins.
Many of us have been hurt, betrayed, or let down, and these are valid, if painful experiences in our life – and they shape us, of course
It is also very understandable that question of trust is shaped by these moments where trust has been broken. and it can feel almost impossible to trust again.
We may carry the stories of what happened, replay them, hold onto them as a way of protecting ourselves, but an important part of the journey is learning not to live inside those stories.
We don’t deny them and it is important to work to free ourselves from any pain that they have left within us – we can seek help and guidance for this – so, we don’t dismiss them, but over time we can gradually loosen our identification with them, and ultimately we can learn to let them go – like the wake of a boat moving through water, we begin to let them fall away behind us.
Because whether we have been hurt, or whether we have hurt others, both are part of being human, and both can call us back to the same place:
To self-trust, responsibility and presence.
Trust is no longer about predicting or controlling others.
It becomes something quieter, deeper.
A trust in ourselves.
A trust that whatever happens, we will meet it.
That we will feel what we feel.
That we will learn.
That we will continue.
But healing is not about forcing ourselves to trust others again.
It is about returning to trust in ourselves.
At some point, when we gently loosen our attachment to a story, we can look at it, we can understand it, and we can recognise something simple and undeniable
That we are still here .
And even though life is unpredictable, people are unpredictable – when we stop demanding certainty from the world, something unexpected happens.
We begin to feel freer.
Because we are no longer depending on others for our inner stability.
We come back to ourselves.
To presence.
To acceptance.
And from that place, compassion naturally arises – for ourselves and for others.
And from this knowing, a deeper trust emerges – not in an outcome – or in people behaving in a certain way, but in life itself – and in our capacity to be with it.
To trust yourself is to return to self love to self honouring and to presence
‘I am here, now, and I trust myself’.
And this is where a deeper trust begins to emerge.
Not a trust that everything will go the way we want.
But a trust that we can be with life as it unfolds.
The end of seeking trust outside of ourselves is not the end of trust.
It is the beginning of something much more stable.
A return to ourselves.