How Do You Establish Trust After Having Been Hurt? (part 1)

Usually, I discuss relatively ambiguous topics, yet nothing too ‘sad’ so far. Recently, I have felt I need to talk about being hurt by trusting people quicker than we should. Let me explain. In my view, no one can possibly hurt us more than we can hurt ourselves. Keep in mind that I’m talking about emotionally hurting yourself or others, not physically. We can perfectly understand how we are being treated by certain ‘types’ of people, and then, it is up to us to let ourselves be affected by those individuals in the future. We are the ones that decide whom to let in into our lives, as well as how important we make someone to be for us. Therefore, when we know, or understand to a certain extent, how someone is going to treat us or how they’re going to behave towards us, then it is a completely personal decision whether to allow those people to hurt us or not. We give access to every individual in our lives; we also decide what kind of personal access to give everyone we come in contact with. We can only allow others to hurt us, they do not have that power over us.

My first advice would be to always be cautious when first spending time with someone you’re just getting to know. A lot of the time, we tend to be, what I call ‘over-trusting’, in the sense that we think we have established a certain trust ‘status’ with someone, so we start sharing more and more personal information, feelings, thoughts. It is an amazing thing and feeling to find someone to be able to do that with, in a short time of knowing that person. Yet again, it is quite rare to establish that kind of pure and strong relationship in such a short time. What would I consider to be an appropriate amount of time, having known someone, before you start sharing deeply personal issues? Firstly, it DOES depend on personalities, but normally I believe that a minimum period of one year is ‘necessary’ before starting to trust your deepest personal thoughts to someone. It takes time and different situations to get to know someone; how they behave towards others, under pressure, when happy, when stressed, when hurt.

Trusting someone blindly, and believing that they’re never going to hurt you is a mistake in every sense. We are flawed humans, we cannot put the responsibility of a perfect relationship on someone and expect them to never take a wrong step. That’s why, after having known someone for a long period of time, having been used to their pattern of behaviour (everyone has one), we can start expecting (or not) certain things from those people. Consider the fact that they’re going to do things you don’t like because that’s what they perceive the best course of action to be; do not be surprised by the behaviour (that you might not even like) of someone you have known for a long time. It is not wrong, and it is not judgmental to identify, accept, and expect certain behaviours from someone who has been a part of your life for many years (even decades).

Why am I saying all these grim-sounding things? Because I believe that raising expectations, based on existing personal patterns, saves us from being disappointed and hurt. It gives us that piece of mind, and even when a person close to us does something hurtful, that we have known them to do, then we will have ‘seen it coming’. It does seem like a very negative thing to do or think about, but the world is not the ideally perfect place we wish it would be. It is a flawed place, with beautifully complicated and flawed people, that as much as might make us happy one day, will hurt us at another. Expectations keep us prepared for most things, they help us help ourselves. I’m not saying that we should become doubtful people, not trusting anyone and being secretive. I’m just trying to explain that it is easier to accept the fact that trusting people, will get us hurt; we won’t necessarily be left heartbroken, but we will get offended and hurt by people closest to us. I guess it’s a part of us that cannot ever be ‘fixed’, sometimes hurting people we love only because they have trusted us so much (other times you will be on the receiving end as well). I do not think we make these mistakes out of lack of love, just lack of mindfulness. (I will discuss some of these reasons in the second part of this blog post seeing as it is such a vast topic.)

‘Till next time…