Have you ever given your trust before someone earned it? I have, and boy, did I regret it!
Like me, you probably beat yourself up later for being stupid or gullible, or any of the myriad of insults we come up with. “How could I have been so stupid? I should have known it was too good to be true.”
Do you trust your own judgment anymore?
Ask yourself:
- Do I usually have trouble making decisions?
- Do I usually believe my decisions will prove to be wrong?
- Do my decisions always seem to blow up in my face?
Are there too many negative answers?
Then, how did you develop this problem?
Maybe you were repeatedly told that you were stupid while you were growing up. If you believed it (and it’s hard not to) that’s a common cause for not trusting your own judgment.
Maybe all your decisions and choices were made for you. Maybe you never learned how to deal with the consequences of your own mistakes and then correct them. Have you heard the term “helicopter parents”? This type swoops in to rescue their children whenever something is even slightly wrong, and it’s detrimental to the child’s development. Imagine a college student whose mother threatens to sue a professor for failing her offspring. It’s happened.
When you depend on others all your life like this, you never learn how to trust yourself. But you might trust others without reservation.
What about the opposite? Maybe you were taught that the consequences of making a bad decision were yours to bear alone. “You’ve made your bed, now lie in it!” Such a painful old saying, with no love in it. This kind of parent doesn’t teach the child how to correct a mistake or how to get back up after failing. A child living like this has trouble developing a healthy self-image and can easily see himself as a failure in life, rather than simply accepting the fact that he made a mistake and going on.
Living with that lack of support could scare you into not making decisions at all. You would be forced to trust others out of fear—usually the fear of failure.
Lack of boundaries goes hand-in-hand with all this. If you were never taught about appropriate boundaries (many of us weren’t), you won’t know how to set them or you might fear doing it. Then you will let the wrong people into your “inner circle.” You will place your trust in those who don’t deserve it. Healthy boundaries keep us safe.
Everyone doubts themselves periodically. That’s natural. If we truly never doubted ourselves, we’d be living a delusion. And we’d be massive narcissists. Ugh!
Part 2 of a 6 part series on trust
Next time: if you trust no one but yourself
Part 1| Relationship Reliability: Who Do You Trust?
Part 2| Why Did I Ever Trust You?
Part 3| Number One, Looking Out for Same
Part 4| Third Party Trust
Part 5| In God We Trust?
Part 6| Little by Little
all illustrations courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net