We’re on the topic of trust issues this week, and as I wrote about in the previous post, this issue isn’t just one for personal relationships … It can spill over into business and every other area of your life. Learning to trust others after you’ve been hurt takes time, but can be very beneficial. Here’s today’s Flashback Friday post from 2014 …
Often, people who have been in relationships with substance users or physical and psychological abusers find it hard to trust. Repeated times of trusting people who have proven to be less than trustworthy makes it hard to believe in others or even ourselves.
The first step to trusting again is forgiveness.
“Forgiveness is a powerful friend … It simply means to drop the charges,” wrote Rev. Mark T. Barclay in his book How to Survive a Betrayal. “To forgive is to put it in God’s hands, and not seek personal vengeance. If you don’t forgive, you will become bitter, hurting only yourself.”
You’ll often hear that you have to forgive and forget. I believe forgetting is a mistake that leads to being duped again. But I’ve found, over time, when you become healthier you let go of the pain and forget much of the wrongs that have been done to you.
“You must find a way to forgive. ‘Forget’ will come even harder and much slower. Even so, for your own sake, you must deal with this deep wound, ” Barclay wrote.
In her book The Language of Letting Go, Melody Beattie said the key to trusting others is to trust yourself first.
“The most important trust issue we face is learning to trust ourselves. The most detrimental thing that’s happened to us is that we came to believe we couldn’t trust ourselves,” she explained.
Psychology Today offers these expert tips on how to trust others again:
- Give it time. Over a period of time, your trust can be rebuilt with repeated positive experiences … when a man consistently demonstrates his reliability, despite your more critical evaluation of his actions, he might earn your trust.
- Acknowledge and evaluate. To trust a partner again, betrayal must be acknowledged. The wrongdoer must admit that he or she has inflicted a deep hurt, and the victim must look at what he or she could have done to make things different.
- Look for the good. Trust yourself to stop damning people as a whole, no matter how badly they now behave. Then you may help them to become more trustworthy.
- Go inside. The way back to trust is counterintuitive: The issue is whether we can trust ourselves to make wise decisions.
Beattie agreed, “Self-trust is a healing gift we can give ourselves. How do we acquire it? We learn it. What do we do about our mistakes, about those times we thought we could trust ourselves but were wrong? We accept them, and trust ourselves anyway.
“Trust ourselves, and we will know whom to trust. Trust ourselves, and we will know what to do. When we feel we absolutely cannot trust ourselves, trust that God will guide us into truth,” Beattie advised.
How have you learned to trust again?
You can find these Flashback Friday blogs posted every Friday. If you want to know more how to have successful relationships and peace of mind, you can get a free PDF sample chapter of “The Princess Guide to Healing a Broken Heart” by filling out the form in the sidebar on this page.
