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I've always had
a hard time trusting people, especially when it came to how they treated
me. I never thought that people really wanted to be around me; I
always thought they were doing me some sort of favor to spend time with
me. Whenever I was supposed to get together with someone, I always
feared that that someone would cancel out on me. I know the source
of these feelings--my father's alcoholism. Our childhoods (mine and
my siblings') were filled with broken promises and lack of stability,
especially when the fact that my father was in the navy was factored
in. We moved constantly, and none of us were ever able to establish
any sort of stable relationships. But the alcoholism was the main
factor--I can't tell you how many plans fell through because my dad got
drunk and spent entire paychecks in a night or two. We'd be planning
on doing something come Saturday, but when he didn't come home Friday
after work, we all knew that those plans were no more.
The problem for
me in my adult years, though, was not the alcoholism, but the behavior
patterns I carried around with me. The mistrust with which I treated
others was my doing, not my father's. To be fair to myself, I did
this unwittingly, and it wasn't pointed out to me until I was well into
adulthood, but the fact is still that it was my doing. The people I
mistrusted didn't deserve my mistrust, and I spent quite a long time
constantly wondering when someone was going to let me down.
I've finally
been able to witness other models, though.
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I've been able to meet
many people who haven't let me down at all, who have been faithful to me
and have treated me well. I've also been able to witness their trust
in others--in their families, friends, and other loved ones--and it's been
a revelation to me to see how rarely people let them down. Because
of their models and my awareness (finally!) of my own self-sabotaging
behavior, I'm finally able, for the most part, to trust.
The lack of
trust that's hurt me hasn't been limited to people, either. I
typically haven't trusted situations, especially when things have been
going well for me. I've always had the worry in the back of my mind
that things would fall through, that I'd lose the positive things in my
life, that I'd lose my job and not have enough money to pay for things I
needed to pay for, and I'd lose those, too. If a friendship was
going well, I'd be waiting for it to end somehow, probably from that
person getting mad at me for something I didn't do, or something I did
that he or she misunderstood.
At the root of
all this, I've found, was a fundamental lack of trust in God. With
the way my early life went, how could God possibly have loved me and my
siblings? I prayed a lot when I was young, but I never saw answers
to those prayers. My mother prayed a lot, but my father still drank,
denying that he even had a problem. Because the father figure in my
life wasn't trustworthy, I wasn't able to believe in the love of the
ultimate father figure, our God. I used to think that prayers worked
for other people, but not for me, because somehow I was doomed to live
life being miserable. I didn't trust God to take care of me, so I
tried to control every aspect of my own life, and the mistrust became a
self-perpetuating vicious circle.
Once I started
trusting other people, though, a trust in God naturally flowed from that
trust. I was able to see that my prayers hadn't been
unanswered--they had been answered in ways I couldn't see and didn't
understand. In many ways, the early life I went through has turned
into a blessing in my adult years, as I have many gifts that come directly
from my trials. I have insight that I never could have hoped to have
otherwise, I have an incredible ability to adapt quickly and easily to
almost any situation, and I'm still in touch with the childhood that I
never really had, but never really let go of, and that I think is the
greatest gift of all. This gift allows me to see the world with
wonder and awe, and it's the one gift I never want to lose.
If you have a
hard time trusting other people, there's probably a good reason for
it. You can explain the origin of the mistrust, but that's all it
is: the origin. If you're carrying it around with you, that's
your doing, not the doing of whoever caused it in the first place.
If you don't trust others or your situations, you're hurting yourself
rather drastically, for you're not allowing yourself to feel fully the
world that surrounds you, the beauty in the people and the things in your
life. Perhaps someone will let you down again sometime in the
future--in fact, I can almost guarantee it--but what you do with that is
what determines how it affects your life, not what that person has
done. If you allow it to make you mistrust others, you're doing a
disservice to yourself and those others. If you accept it for what
it is--one person's actions that needn't affect you forever--you'll find
life much brighter in the future.
Give yourself a
chance to let go of mistrust, and allow yourself the freedom that trust
can give you. When you can trust, a huge burden is taken from your
shoulders, for you no longer have to control every situation in your
life. When people say "let go and let God," they're
talking about trust, and the letting go of mistrust. It's not as
hard as you think--start by trusting people with little things, and build
up a history of people you've trusted having come through for you.
You'll soon see that most of the people in this world are trustworthy, and
that most of the "betrayals" we've gone through have been rather
trivial in nature. (Just one word of caution: if you're
anything like me, your lack of trust causes you to associate with people
who may be very nice and friendly, but not all that trustworthy.
Learn to identify them!)
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