Learning to Trust Again

I have been contemplating trust, and how much deeper it goes than simply deciding whether another person is trustworthy.

Some of our deepest experiences of betrayal happen long before we have words for betrayal. They happen in the field we grow up in: through neglect, abandonment, secrets, subtle lying, broken promises, contradictions between words and actions, and the quiet denial of what we perceive.

A child lives in the concrete. “I love you” is an abstraction. Love becomes real through what repeatedly happens. Do you come when I am afraid? Do you listen when I say something hurts? Do your actions agree with your words? Can I trust that what you tell me resembles what I experience?

And even more importantly: can I trust myself to know when something feels wrong?

When a child says, “This hurts,” and hears, “Stop being so sensitive,” or “You are only looking for attention,” something profound happens. It is not only the original hurt that must be carried. The child also begins to doubt the instrument through which reality is perceived.

This was one of the deepest betrayals for me: the one I grew into.

I tried to trust, but the field I was immersed in contained deception. And naturally, I learned some of its language myself. I learned to lie. I learned to hide. I learned to adapt. Yet when my own deception was exposed, it was met with enormous shame.

This created a strange prison. I had learned behaviors that helped me survive my environment, but I was also terrified of looking at those behaviors honestly, because somewhere inside me truth had become associated with punishment, rejection and abandonment.

Later I found myself drawn towards people and situations carrying familiar inconsistencies. The scenery changed, but the field felt strangely like home. And every repetition seemed to confirm what I already believed: other people cannot be trusted, my own perception cannot entirely be trusted, and perhaps Life itself cannot be trusted.

So I learned control.

If I could anticipate enough, understand enough, plan enough and read every possible movement before it happened, perhaps I could keep myself safe.

Until one day I couldn’t.

I reached a wall where I had to admit that the way I was navigating Life was not working. And somewhere inside that collapse came an unexpected realization: if I was ever going to find the deepest parts of myself that had been lost along the way, I needed something greater than myself.

I needed God.

This surprised me. I had not grown up with faith, and the word God carried its own history of betrayal for me. I knew too much about what had been done in the name of religion, how spiritual authority had been used for violence, domination and erasure. I had confused God with the institutions and human structures claiming to represent God.

Then something became very simple.

This relationship was mine.

It did not belong to a church. It did not belong to religion. It did not require anyone else’s permission or definition.

And so I prayed.

I asked God to guide me.

Looking back, this became the silver line running through every descent that followed. Like Ninshubar in the story of Inanna, something remained connected to me when I descended into places where I could no longer see clearly myself. It did not prevent the descent. It allowed me to enter it.

There was something that would not abandon me.

And because of that, slowly, I became capable of looking at things in myself that I had previously been too ashamed to see. My manipulation. My dishonesty. My attempts to control. My people-pleasing. The ways I abandoned what I knew in order to remain loved. The secrets I kept even from myself.

I began to understand that becoming able to trust Life also required becoming someone I could trust.

That has meant learning honesty, sometimes radical honesty. Allowing truth even when it creates conflict. Asking dangerous questions. Learning to say no when I mean no and yes when I mean yes. Becoming increasingly congruent between what I perceive, what I speak and how I act.

Something else has been happening alongside all of this. I have been learning to live without knowing.

For a long time, understanding was part of how I kept myself safe. I wanted to know what something meant, where it was going, whether a person was right for me, whether a choice would lead somewhere good. Uncertainty created an almost irresistible urge to interfere.

Faith has slowly been loosening that grip.

I can see now how often I have mistaken my own idea of what should happen for guidance. I have wanted a particular door to open and exhausted myself trying to turn the handle. I have wanted something to be right because I desired it so deeply. I have interpreted delay as failure and loss as evidence that something had gone wrong.

Divine Guidance has asked something very different of me.

To become quiet enough to notice what is actually happening.

This is where active waiting entered my life. It is a strange kind of participation, because I am fully here, listening, feeling, watching, responding, while resisting the old impulse to rush ahead and arrange the outcome.

There is enormous humility in this.

I have desires. I follow them. I make choices. I listen carefully when something in me contracts or comes alive. I move when there is movement and stay still long enough to hear what silence is saying.

But I no longer want to pull the flower open to make sure it blooms.

More and more, I allow Life to reveal itself at its own pace.

This has changed my relationship with closed doors too. I don’t immediately know what they mean. The mind still wants to write the story quickly, calling something rejection, failure, a wrong turn or a lost opportunity. I have learned to leave more empty space around what happens. Meaning has a way of changing when enough time passes.

And somewhere inside that space lives God.

The God I found at the bottom was never an authority handing me instructions from above. This presence became the silver line I could hold while walking into places where my own sight failed. The deeper I went, the more I discovered that I did not need to see the whole path in order to take the next truthful step.

That has become my understanding of guidance.

I bring everything I have to the encounter: my intelligence, instinct, desire, fear, body, experience and will. I listen to all of it. I take responsibility for my choices.

And I leave room for something larger than my own understanding.

Strangely, this has given me more agency rather than less. I no longer have to spend my life trying to outsmart Life. I can meet what arrives, respond to what is actually here and change direction when reality shows me something I could not previously see.

The child in me once learned that safety depended upon anticipating the field around her.

The woman I am becoming is learning that she can meet the field as it unfolds.

This is the greatest shift trust has made in me.

I no longer need to stand at the beginning of the road demanding to know where it ends.

I need enough light for the step beneath my feet.

The rest belongs to God.