Ep 131 MM: Learning to Trust Ourselves - a podcast by Megan Hale, MA, BCC

I'm trying something new today!  I'm including a transcription of today's episode in the show notes.  Let me know if you like it, would like to see more of it, or if you have no opinion either way!  I'm really looking to make this podcast the best it can be and your feedback is priceless as I continue to evolve.  

First off, if you haven't checked out episode 130 from past week on Radical Self Indulgence + Asking for What You Need, it's a must listen!  It's probably one of my favorite episodes (this one is a close second) and I received so much good feedback on it, I know it's a message so many of us need to hear.  

In fact, in less than 48 hours, it became the most downloaded episode of the Enoughness Revolution! Seriously.... go check it out!  

Now... back to our regularly scheduled programming!  

 

Learning to Trust Ourselves Again.  

 

Why again? Because we were all born knowing how to trust ourselves, but somewhere a long life’s path, a lot can happen to interrupt our ability to self-trust.

Ever feel like you’ve made a lot of mistakes in the past? Maybe you have a pattern of not following through on things so you doubt your ability to follow through on them in the future. Or maybe you’ve had a gut feeling, totally known it, and betrayed your own wisdom? Like staying in a relationship when you knew it wasn’t right or having a feeling about someone being untrustworthy, but confiding in them anyway. All of these situations are areas where we actually have learned that maybe we aren’t trustworthy. And when we don’t trust ourselves, it is incredibly difficult to be steadfast in our decisions, know what the right decisions are for us and our life path, and to feel confident in our ability to navigate the journey of life when none of us were given a map. At least not one with pretty pictures and arrows that clearly mark the way.

So, our tendency to doubt ourselves doesn’t just happen. Not only do our actions and experiences as adults play a role, but our early childhood experiences play a major part too! For instance, if you grew up in a household where you had an anxious parent, an overly involved parent, or what we call a helicopter parent in today’s language, you grew up with a parent who very vigilant about protecting you from harm. All good intentions, right? But one message this can send to a child is “I don’t trust you to make decisions and stay safe so I have to make these decisions for you”. Over time, we begin to doubt our ability to make good decisions, be independent thinkers, or have good judgment in our lives.

Having the opportunity to make decisions for ourselves, make mistakes, and learn how to navigate them is such a big piece of not only building inner trust that we can figure things out, but also for building resiliency later in life.

If you add dysfunctional dynamics to all of this, like addiction for instance, this only gets more involved. The interesting part about this is that addiction/dysfunction doesn’t even have to be present in your current generation to still be having an impact. That means that if you have addiction/dysfunction anywhere in your family history (and most of us do) there could still be left over remnants of these rules today and these patterns will repeat themselves from generation to generation until someone takes it upon themselves to heal them. Dr. Claudia Black did a lot of work at examining dysfunctional family dynamics, mostly with addiction, and she came up with three main rules are common. Don’t think – you can’t trust the way you think Don’t feel – you can’t trust the way you feel Don’t trust – you can’t trust yourself or anyone else. Now these rules are never spoken. They’re never written. They’re implied. They’re implied when we think something is wrong, but we’re told “it’s all in our head”. They’re implied when we feel something...

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