I naïvely put my trust in everyone when I was younger.
If you were in my circle I wholeheartedly trusted what you said without question. It was innocent…and dangerous, but I didn’t know that at the time.
I kept myself away from bad situations fairly well. But people tricked me.
I was honest and believed other people were too.
The bigger problem was I didn’t trust myself or my own judgement, so I kept quiet and believed the people who voiced their opinion out loud.
My lack of trust in my own judgement made it almost impossible to recognize someone else’s opinion as a truth or lie.
I would let people walk me down the garden path right into a pile of snakes, time after time.
After a while I recognized my trust was diminishing, but I thought it was a flaw instead of a good thing.
I remember googling “how to regain trust for someone who has been abusive to you”, because I assumed everything was my fault…not being able to trust must be my fault too.
After researching that for a while and then picking up a few books and reading them, I learned you don’t.
You don’t trust those people.
I learned that once in a while these untrustworthy people will change, but it’s rare and far between.
I found some guideposts to follow that would alert me if there had been a change in someone, and they also help me to pick out the ‘good guys’ in the crowd.
I studied the red flags that would alert me of the bad apples…these people don’t get my trust. In fact they would have to work extra hard to earn it… but I have yet to meet one who shows these red flags and can turn it around. They usually prove me right instead of wrong.
My spider senses have become super tuned…now I’m working on trusting them.
Trusting myself is still a challenge for me, especially if I’m around others who doubt my judgement… I feel like I have to defend it…a lot…and quite aggressively, which is not my nature at all.
I still have some work to do and will be doing it forthwith.