IS TRUST OVERRATED?
There is a lot of pressure and favourability towards trusting people, yet what does trusting someone actually mean?
We think of trust as meaning fidelity, being able to confide in someone, trust their word. But the actual permutations of trusting someone goes much further than that. Trusting a love interest usually goes hand in hand with bonding, and from that usually comes opening up your energy field.
When you open up your field to someone, you very easily, and usually unconsciously give them access to your life force energy, your power, spirit. This is something you should never allow unless you first completely trust your own self, understand the energetic interplay, and are dealing with someone who also understands this energetic interplay and in whose level of consciousness and integrity you can trust - through sufficient evidence over time - NOT through the bonding effect of hormones realised via intimacy, nor the emotional petitioning of the other, and nor through loving someone and trusting them to be a reasonably good person.
But even with someone who meets the aforementioned quota, it is questionable as to whether trusting them should ever equate to opening oneself to this extent. For many people it is our parents who we can trust the most, for no one else would care for us as unconditionally and have invested so much time and energy on our safety and positive upbringing. And yet - can you imagine surrendering your life force energy and spirit to them now as an adult?
My Dad always told me not to trust anyone - except him. I rejected this obviously negative limiting belief about people. Yet the fact is, when I look back at all my relationships, there are a few times when I should have trusted more. They are significantly outnumbered by the times I should have trusted less. I trusted so easily, because the person was presenting his best self to me and the chemicals that are released through the brain and body during cuddles and intimacy fooled me into feeling trust.
The person that warrants your fullest trust is the person who you can share the deepest, littlest and biggest parts of your raw self with, and they witness you with deep love, who you can shine with all your might and they stand clapping, who you can voice your most irrational fears and darkest wounds with and they will hold you and not let you go. There are few who will do this. Many of those who had earlier petitioned passionately for your trust will turn away, judge, or use your trust and energy for their own interests.
When you trust someone, you open up your energy field. You can also then give your power away so very easily. I am happy to share a couple of personal examples of this.
In 2012, I received professional training to become an Aura Mediator. About 2 hours into the 4 hour transmission, my trainer, whose experience and ability I have rarely seen before, paused her work on me. She said we could not continue because she has seen that someone is effectively ‘inside my womb.’ This person had gotten access to my precious sacral energy and was stealing my creative source energy to use for her own ideas. My trainer described the person in vast detail until I realised who it was - a student of mine, who I felt trust and openness towards simply because she presented with love and light, but who recently had begun to step over some boundaries in a way that made me feel slightly uncomfortable. The rest of the session with the trainer was then spent remedying the situation, and I received the rest of the transmission later in the training.
Not so long after this experience I began a new relationship. I felt whole and balanced within myself and inspired about where I was in my life, and wanted to take it slowly with my partner without fully merging our lives and beings into one. But my partner was wounded and could not connect with me in a whole place. He wanted us to bond over our wounds, and to dive into a full love experience, which he petitioned me to trust in. Due to the lessons I still had to learn about discernment and magical thinking, I eventually surrendered to meet him where he was at, and this followed by an inexplicable ‘illness.’ A paralysing, horrifically uncomfortable tension arose in my chest that sometimes seemed to suffocate me and kept me pretty much bedridden for a week. A couple months after the relationship ended, a shaman friend was performing a simple healing on my head to help me sleep. Unexpectedly to him and unknown to me until the next day, mid session, he began to pull out an entity - that looked like a long tapeworm - from my nervous system and which had the energetic blueprint of my ex partner. I knew instantly that this entity had entered the moment I had ‘surrendered.’
Yet trusting these others in these examples here was not the problem. I had not yet learnt how to fully trust my self. I was easily impressed by a presentation of love and light, and swayed by the earnest desires of another. In the same vein, there were times I should have trusted the other more, but due to my own shakeable core, I was easily hurt, so could not trust them.
No matter how trustworthy the other actually is, until you have got your self, truly, you cannot trust the other, or that trust will fail. Until you have yourself, you will look to the other too much, giving your power away and therefore leaving yourself open to sensitivities, so when the other says or does something that does not fulfill your need, you will easily react with hurt. You will then become suspicious of the other and may judge that you should not have trusted them. When you trust yourself, you do not react so easily to the mood fluctuations or momentary misgivings of the other, who may not be perfect even though they deserve your trust in them.
The difficulty is getting the balance right. If you walk around being untrusting of everyone, then obviously you will be closed and give off a vibe that will repel people. If you enter a relationship full of barriers, then there will be no softness with which any trust and love stands a chance to grow. Yet to give one’s trust and power over too easily leaves you sensitive to the experience of being betrayed - whether that betrayal is truly by the other or only oneself.
Trusting someone does not mean you see them as perfect. It should not ask that you to hand over your own ideas, wisdom, intuition, and power to the trusted other - as if you now no longer require these things for yourself. The most that you can ever trust in someone is that they will do their best - all the while you are doing yours.
♥
There is more on this subject, and so I meant to add to the article later, yet not coincidently, days after I wrote it, a Facebook friend began a thread about the same topic, and from there ended up compiling a brilliant lighthearted and wonderfully comprehensive blog of the whole topic of trusting another - so there's no need for me to write what has already been written :) You can read Shakti Sundari's blog 'Making Discerning Partner Choices' here.
With love,
Karen
Please check out my related posts on relationships and magical thinking for more essential life mastery assistance!
