Trusting Yourself

For many of us, the issue is not whether we can trust another person again; it’s whether we can trust our own judgment again. Many of us have trusted people who went on to deceive, abuse, manipulate, or otherwise exploit us because we trusted them. We may have found these people charming, kind, decent. There may have been a small voice that s aid, “No–something’s wrong.” Or we may have been comfortable with trusting that person and shocked when we found out our instincts were wrong. The issue may then reverberate through our life for years. Our trust in others may have been shaken, but our trust in ourselves may have been shattered worse. How could something feel so right, flow so good, and be such a total mistake? We may wonder. How can I ever trust my selection process again, when it showed itself to be so faulty? We may never have the answers. I believe I needed to make certain “mistakes” to learn critical lessons I’m not certain I would have otherwise learned. We cannot let our past interfere with our ability to trust ourselves. If we are always making the wrong decision in business or in love, we may need to learn why we insist on defeating ourselves. But most of us do improve. We learn. We grow from our mistakes. Slowly, in increments, our relationships improve. Our decisions about how to handle situations with friends or children improve. We benefit from our mistakes. We benefit from our past. And if we have made mistakes, we needed to make them in order to learn along the way.

— From “The Language of Letting Go” by Melody Beattie