What Are Trust Issues?
Trust is that belief that a person, group, or institution cares about you. Trust issues are fear of betrayal, abandonment, or manipulation. It is also the inability to trust other people, and it is also the inability to trust yourself. Projection of previous trauma, limiting beliefs and narratives onto other people, and day-to-day situations throughout your life are trust issues. Every memory that you have turns into a file of images. You have all of your previous experiences stored up in your memory, in your psyche, and in your body. What you do is project what happened in the past into your present moment. So you project your previous traumas. You project your limiting beliefs. You project all these stories you’ve accumulated into your day-to-day situations and throughout your life.
How Are Trust Issues Developed?
We’re not born with trust issues. We develop them over time. One of the first and foremost reasons we end up developing trust issues is the inconsistent responses from parents or their failure to deliver on promises. This also is very similar to unpredictable outbursts of rage from parents while growing up.
Some of the way trust issues are developed can be:
- Dishonesty from parents or actions that don’t align with their words. Bullying or being singled out by family, peers, and people you trust.
- Being dismissed or having your feelings, desires, or best interests shit on.
- Physical, emotional, verbal, or sexual abuse, by someone who was supposed to be taking care of you.
- All of these threats to your safety, needs, and feelings are how we developed trust issues in the first place.
Do You Have Trust Issues?
These are some signs and symptoms of trust issues:
- You look for reasons to prove your trust issues are real.
- You repeat patterns in relationships that prove your narratives.
- You keep your relationships shallow even though you aren’t.
- You assume or expect the worst of people or situations without giving a chance.
- You spy, stalk, and analyze what people are doing and saying.
- You look for red flags to test people to see if they really care about you.
- You expect people to let you down, or you wait for them to drop the ball. You question other people’s motives, intentions, and behaviors.
- You spend more time analyzing other people’s actions than your own.
- You stay elusive, mysterious, distant, and hard to read.
- You deflect love, compliments, genuine connection, help, and guidance.
How To Overcome Trust Issues
Self-trust is the first secret of success. So to overcome your trust issues, you have to heal the past and rebuild trust within yourself first. See your trust issues as a form of self-sabotage, not self-protection. Trust issues actually repel healthy relationships from you rather than attract them to you. With that said, self-trust is a repellent for those who are not trustworthy. When you trust yourself, you will naturally trust others. Heal the past. Forgive so that you can move forward. Be the person people trust. Be honest and follow through. Get in your body often so that you can connect to bodily sensations and learn how to trust your own gut feeling and your intuition. Gratitude practice because you cannot build trust if you are not grateful. Accept and appreciate differences between you and others, and last but not least, be open to love. You have to let people in.