Trust issues – we’ve heard it all before.
You’ll hear an offhand comment at a restaurant
“that’d be great if I didn’t have trust issues!”
and watch the whole table laugh it off.
Who doesn’t have at least a little bit of trust issues, right?
We brush it off with humor and continue on with our lives.
But when you look closer and examine the beliefs behind it, you begin to realize your “trust issues” cause a lot of harm in your relationships, and to yourself.
Trusting relationships begins with self-trust. Our most fundamental trust wound is the sense of “I can’t trust myself”. When self-trust is established, trusting one’s intuition and judgment about other relationships becomes possible.
Of course, not everyone is trustworthy.
There are unhealthy, wounded individuals who are incapable of keeping trust with their current belief system.
However, it’s not all people who’re untrustworthy.
When we form a generalized belief like “people can’t be trusted”, we invite the untrustworthy ones in and shut the trustworthy ones out.
Why am I dealing with trust issues?
Trust issues are sadly common because we grow up in environments where integrity is not honored. We’ve all had moments of disappointment. We’ve seen someone we love break our trust. At some point, most of us have broken our own agreements and violated our own intentions from a place of fear. The degree to which we’ve experienced severe violations of trust in our past is the degree to which we’re dealing with trust issues today.
As young children, we don’t have the life experience or wisdom to compassionately explain why trust is violated by those we love. At this stage in our development, every new, painful experience was the most painful one we’d ever felt. In response, we create generalized beliefs around who and what people are in order to maximize our odds of survival.
The beliefs we form often make some logical sense to us at the time.
“I see that Mom is always correcting me.
When she does, I feel sadness and fear in my chest.
These feelings mean “I can’t do anything right”.
Therefore, “I can’t trust myself.”
“I see the kids at school are always making fun of me.
They point and speak nasty words at me.
When they do, I feel pain and anxiety in my gut.
These feelings mean they don’t care about me.”
Therefore, “I can’t trust people.”
At the time, these were valid coping strategies that you took on to survive.
They served you well, because you’re still here!
However, adult life is very different from childhood. There’s a lot more freedom and responsibility that comes with it. You can now choose the relationships you want and don’t want based on your values.
You also have a lot more wisdom and life experience than you did back then. The first step of clearing any belief is awareness, and understanding why it formed so you can find healing and sovereignty in your own mind.
This is the top 7 limiting beliefs list around trust.
The 7 most common limiting beliefs list about trust
- I can’t trust myself
- I can’t trust men
- I can’t trust women
- I can’t trust people / others
- Never trust anyone
- If I trust I’ll get hurt
- If I trust I’ll be betrayed
How did I form these beliefs?
As children, the world revolves around us.
And that’s a good thing! It’s a vitally important stage of cognitive development.
We’re trying to learn how the world works, how to get our needs met, and how to interact with others.
As children, we are fully dependent on the people around us. We don’t know any different. We don’t have the life experience to combat beliefs with “logic”.
So, what happens?
We inevitably experience trauma in some form. Or we’re simply introduced to ideas and a way of life through our surroundings.
We face experiences like:
- Dad is overly controlling
- Mom left me
- The kids at school bullied me
In these situations, our needs are threatened.
Our survival is threatened.
We must learn a new strategy to cope.
So we form beliefs to make sense out of the situations and give meaning to them. Because we were in a state of fear, we were cut off from love. Because we were in fear, the meaning we assigned to our experience was a lie. When we create a belief that is fundamentally a lie, that lie saps our willpower indefinitely as a self-fulfilling prophecy of fear until we break the agreement with the lie.
“Dad gets mad anytime I do something wrong. He’s always correcting me. I can’t do anything right. The way to survive is to please him. Therefore, I can’t trust myself.”
“Mom left. I needed her. She betrayed me. Therefore, If I trust, I’ll get betrayed. I can’t trust women.”
“The kids at school bully me. It hurts. They don’t care. Therefore, I can’t trust anyone.”
See how easily it happens?
But of course, as an adult, you can view these with logic and know that these were certain people. Not all people.
However, beliefs are multi-sense constructs.
Beliefs don’t just make Logical sense. They make Emotional sense. They’re formed through Logic, Vision, and Emotions/Sensations. That’s why, reframing your belief system with pure logic is almost always ineffective.
To free yourself from toxic, self limiting beliefs, you must process them Visually and Emotionally too.
What happens when we leave trust issues unaddressed
It’s easy to think that struggling to trust anyone will keep you safe.
“If I don’t trust anyone, then I won’t let anyone in. And if I don’t let anyone in, then I won’t get hurt, right?”
But that’s not accurate.
Yes, you’ll reject people. It’ll disconnect you from the bad, but also the good. Love, connection, and safe relationships.
On top of that, it does something equally as damaging – it invites untrustworthy people into your space.
Why?
Because beliefs created from fear always produce the opposite of the intended result.
Because according to your belief system, trustworthy people are “weird” while untrustworthy people are “normal”.
When you come across a trustworthy person, it’s going to feel uncomfortable to you because you believe that all people are untrustworthy.
So if someone is trustworthy, it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t align with how you’ve made sense of the world.
So where will you go? To what’s comfortable – to untrustworthy individuals.
Then the cycle repeats. The belief is reaffirmed, and you become stuck in a loop.
In reality, it does the exact opposite of what the survival strategy was intending to protect you from.
Say you’re someone who, either just as much or more, is dealing with trust issues regarding yourself.
These beliefs are dangerous, for multiple reasons.
For one, you’re the only one living your life. You are the only one within yourself. The only one who truly knows what’s best for your own self. You are in the driver’s seat of your own life.
If you have beliefs such as “I can’t trust myself”, you’ll
- a) lean on others to make the choices for you
- b) most likely suffer from an unhealthy amount of overthinking and self-questioning
- c) stay in a place of “freeze”
You don’t trust the decisions you make, so you stay stuck, unable to move.
And, if you have untrustworthy people in your life because it aligns with your beliefs, AND you believe you can’t trust yourself and rely on others to make decisions…
You can see how that’s a problem.
Which is why these core beliefs are so important to clear. De-programing these beliefs leads to life-changing results, in every aspect of life.
This may all be resonating with you strongly right now. If it is, don’t worry! The first step is awareness, and there is a solution.
Before we dive into the solution – why beliefs’ wording and spelling matter
Your Belief System was created largely by you in your own words and the words in your surrounding environment.
Different people resonate with different spellings/wordings of different beliefs, even if the essential meaning is the same.
Some people resonate with “I don’t trust myself”, but not “I can’t trust myself”.
Others resonate with “I can’t trust people” while others resonate with “I can’t trust anyone”.
Words and phrases carry different meanings for different individuals.
Nobody’s two experiences are the exact same.
Your Belief System is just as unique as your fingerprint.
To discover your own limiting beliefs list, you must first learn how you spelled and worded them in your mind when you created them.
We teach a simple way to achieve this with 100% accuracy in our Limitless Quiz.
If you’re wondering what other beliefs might be affecting your life, you can read our Top 10 Most Common Limiting Beliefs List here.
How do I free myself from trust issues?
The Sovereign Mind Method is the simplest way to clear these limiting beliefs about trust forever.
It’s an invaluable tool that allows you to:
- DISCOVER your belief system
- CLEAR the toxic beliefs
- REPLACE those beliefs with empowering truths
Ready to get started? Take the Limitless Quiz and discover the root cause beliefs underlying your trust issues today.