Letting Go of Trust Issues So You Can Live and Love More Fully

Working through trust issues can feel like walking on broken glass. You just know you’re going to bleed.

This will take more courage than you’ve given yourself the luxury of exercising in a while. And it will be worth the effort, and the blood, if you persist.

I won’t sugar coat it because I’ve been there. The above signs of trust issues didn’t come through academic research.

They came from my own memory. I’ve been there.

Learning to trust someone with your mind and heart in spite of a mountain of trust issues is the accomplishment of a lifetime. And it’s an emotionally demanding process.

You’ll probably need a trust partner to help you.

Letting go, regardless, requires one thing above all: Taking the risk of being hurt.

The process looks something like this:

1. Be willing to risk the pain of learning to trust.
2. Find a trust partner (a therapist or coach can work, if they understand trust issues).
3. Learn how trust works (how it is earned and how to extend it).
3. Take emotional risks with your trust partner.
4. Confront your trust prejudice, suspicions, fears and painful feelings around trust as you take calculated risks.
5. Learn from the process, rinse and repeat until you can consciously trust and know how to extend trust well.

The Elephant in the Room

The elusive obvious is that if you trust people, even when you do it well, you are inevitably going to be let down. People aren’t perfect. They make their choices and that doesn’t always work in your favor. Some people are not empathetic at all in their decisions. You’ll get hurt from time to time.

This is life.

They key here is not to avoid emotional pain, but to learn to hurt well. Since no one is exempt from pain, you should aspire to endure it, to process it thoroughly and learn the right lessons, not those ‘lessons’ that come from fear and avoidance. This means feeling things fully. It means shedding tears of grief and loss. You can feel vulnerable and afraid and yet press on with faith that there are people in this world who are indeed worthy of your trust.

Truly trustworthy people may be few and far between, actually. The good news is you only need a couple of people in your life that you know and feel you can trust deeply.