Asklemmy

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:

1. The harm of feeling insulted or sad that another experiences when they see that you do not trust them.
2. The harm of being unable to avoid danger, seek joy, find people you truly connect with, and feel secure in life that you experience if you sacrifice your personal sense of trust/distrust to protect another’s feelings

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.