this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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Well I'm causing a lot of grief by trying to heal and struggling through the emotional&mental confusion I have from past things, and I'm hurting them because I'm doubting them, and it feels so horrible to me to experience myself that way so that I think/feel
How dare you u/TheLemming, that you don't trust those exact people that already invested so much effort into you!?!! How Dare You!!Hypothetically, if someone asked you how they could earn your trust fair and square, what would you say to them?
Maybe with
It's a tough question, honestly... I don't know how to answer it actually 😭
spoiler
shit's too realIf I doubted them, that behavior is unacceptable to me. Like, right a couple of hours ago - I thought how could I doubt them, what kind of ... who'd do such an "evil" thing?! maybe they do have my trust already, otherwise I wouldn't try to process my trauma with them 🙈 I can't stand myself causing even the littlest annoyance in anyone's world
Well, you might have trusted this person with your trauma because you were foolish. Just because you trusted someone before doesn’t mean you are obliged to continue trusting them.
Far more than you owe anyone else trust, you owe your own self trust. You owe your trust to … your own sense of trust.
If you don’t feel that a person is trustworthy, you must trust that feeling. Trust is not, primarily, a social signal you use to be polite to others. You never owe anyone your trust more than you owe it to yourself to trust or distrust honestly.
What I’m hearing from you is a conflict between a part of you that does not trust someone, and another part of you that thinks you owe them trust and are rotten for not giving it to them.
There are two potential forms of harm at play here:
You seem to be totally ignoring #2. Perhaps you don’t know how much you’re endangering your sense of trust by trying to play people pleasing games with it. Perhaps you don’t know how utterly valuable and life enhancing it is to have an intact ability to assess trustworthiness, and the vow to live by that sense.
For whatever reason, you’re really devaluing your own feelings to weigh another person’s claim on your trust, more heavily than you weigh your own natural sense of trust or distrust.
Develop it and be skeptical of it by all means, but please don’t abandon it or be ashamed of it. You’re allowed to distrust people.
So that’s the whole extent of your hurting others? That you don’t trust them and you think it’s the wrong call not to trust them?
I think it’s okay not to trust people. Distrust is a useful thing. Sometimes it might get pointed in the wrong direction but you can fix that.
Maybe you’ve had reasons to distrust people in the past. Maybe you still do.
If people put a lot of effort into you, does that mean they must be trustworthy? Maybe there’s someone who’s put a lot of effort into you, but they haven’t put a lot of effort into themselves to be the kind of person you can easily trust.
The main point is that you are allowed to trust according to your own model of trust. What you’re doing is called invalidating your own feelings, and you need to honor your own sense of trust and distrust. It’s not a disease you’re carrying it’s a natural part of your mind, and it’s a necessary part of being alive to trust and to distrust, and to make your own decisions about that.
Maybe someone has been guilt tripping you, and maybe it’s got your head all mixed up about whether you’re allowed to feel what you feel. That does happen sometimes.