Trust Transcript

Rhea: You’re talking to a real trust skeptic 

Liz: Trust is probably your least favourite word.  

Rhea: I really don’t like it. I genuinely don’t like it. 

Liz: You really don’t.

Rhea: But I think it’s because I’m not very good at trusting. I think that trust has to be earned. 

Liz: There are 4 concepts around trust. There is knowing. There is faith. There is hope and there is trust. So not everybody has trust issues. Not everybody has faith issues. Not everyone carries hope or feels hopeless, and not everyone is in touch with their knowing. 

Rhea: Knowing means what? 

Liz: Discernment, knowing the difference

Rhea: So knowing the difference

Liz: Yes. That’s really connecting to truth. The absolute truth, not some biased idea that you have that’s been shaped by previous experience.

Rhea: So knowing is objective analysis.

Liz: Well, not even analysis. It’s just instant. You recognize it. When you are in touch with your truth that is not based on some pain or trauma that is shaped by your mind, it’s instantaneous and some call it intuition but it’s not. It’s instant recognition. It could happen with a person. It could happen with your purpose, or you could see somebody and just know. You know what? I have to know that person. It’s your knowing.

 Rhea: That’s knowing 

Liz: That’s knowing.

Rhea: Hope is just hope as we know what hope is

Liz: Hope reflects our deepest desires. Not wants, desires. 

Rhea: Faith?

Liz: It’s believing that an unknown force or something will intervene or ensure our highest good, but that you are not alone. 

Rhea: And then trust is…?

Liz: Trust is believing that no matter the motivation or an act or the outcome, it will be in our highest good always 

Rhea: So the basic trust is there’s a reason for everything?

Liz: Yes 

Rhea: I feel hope in knowing all the right words. Faith and trust—shit shows, and actually I would say personally my trust issues are related to my faith issues.

Liz: Everything exists on a spectrum. You can have trust without faith, or you can have hope without knowing. Now we are just sort of flowing between things, so it’s okay if you are not 100% in trust, 100% in hope and faith and knowing, but what happens is that if you don’t have any at all, what happens is that in relationship, what we tend to do then, we are looking for people to complete that. 

Rhea: So let’s say I’m not very good at trusting, so I pick people who trust me more?

Liz: Yes, because it reinforces this idea that ‘oh maybe I can be trusted and then they can trust.’ 

Rhea: But I feel like the people I pick tend to show me that I shouldn’t trust them, not the other way round. I feel like when I have trusted, it’s blown up in my face in some way. 

Liz: So what underpins our lack of trust is usually an experience of betrayal. We’ve been betrayed by somebody. We have some unmet expectation in which we were pretty invested emotionally.  

Rhea: I think it was more lots of little ones. What we have always kind of said about these patterns repeating, at some point something happened where I felt betrayed and then that betrayal just echoed and echoed till eventually I just stopped trusting, and it’s not that I don’t think they love me and it’s not that I don’t think they care about me or anything like that. That’s not it. 

Liz: You didn’t say: I feel that they love me, so it’s the emotional connection that builds that trust, but we have shut down emotionally because we have been so hurt that a lot of these connections come through the mind. And yet, the lack of trust is telling you, this could all change. One day I could send a text and they will be gone because you are not sure that they care about you as much as you care about them. You believe that you are much more emotionally invested in the relationship than anyone else, and so for you not trusting that is not trusting your motivation for being emotionally invested or that somehow, that is a misguided feeling. 

Rhea: I would say that my past experiences taught me to not trust my emotions towards someone else, because a lot of the time, it had blown up in my face, and by extension, not trust their motivations towards me. I trust myself, apart from when it comes to reading the emotions of others, knowing where I stand with others. I trust that I know how to get people to react in a way that will be in my best interest at the time, as much as I can control that. But I don’t trust that I am recognizing the situations I am in, accurately. 

Liz: Yes.

Rhea: And so how do you avoid that? How do you stop that pattern? Accept that’s what happened and that’s okay? 

Liz: Exactly. Making your peace with that moment or those moments, and holding that. Okay, I understand where this came from. 

Rhea: How can I have compassion for something I don’t remember? 

Liz: You don’t have to. If you don’t know what the thing was, then it’s just knowing that, okay I don’t trust people, going to that very core piece. 

Rhea: How do you learn to trust?

Liz: Elevating every experience to the why? What am I believing about myself that they are reinforcing? Well first of all, there’s always the initial question—what is the worst that can happen? Will it kill you? Because that’s what most people are afraid of. There’s that fear. There’s the fear that underpins the issue. That’s what you are perpetuating over and over. It’s not going to kill you.

Rhea: No, but we’re all scared of getting to that place where we find out that we are unlovable, and that will kill us. 

Liz: Exactly, because we are then realizing, I am not enough love, and that’s a lie we have been told time and again, that we then internalized and then created the stories that we created for ourselves. 

Rhea: I am not enough love, meaning I cannot love enough, or I am not loved enough? 

Liz: It’s both. So many of us came into this world believing in our own power, not just to effect change but that people would see our light, see who we are and that things would just sort of click. The deeper experience of our betrayal has to do with the fact that our existence, this experience in this world was not at all what we expected, and you’re not alone. I find that I think that most people lack that trust because they came into this world expecting one thing and got an entirely different experience. On a spiritual level is what I’m talking about, on that soul level and that created a great deal of pain and that pain led to this dissonance. Well, if I’m going to make it, I’m going to survive this lifetime, then I’m going to have to shut down. When we shut down emotionally, what happens? You are not sourced by love, and when you are not connected to your emotional body, you’re only able to function from your mental body and your physical body. 

Rhea: If you have had experiences where you felt betrayed and you shut down, then you can only ever live so far.

Liz: Exactly. It’s not your heart telling you, oh let’s not get hurt again so let’s not do this. It’s your mind telling you.

Rhea: So when you say the mind, you say think and when you say the heart, you say feel.

Liz: Exactly. Yes. 

Rhea: Okay 

Liz: When you’re operating from your mind, and your mind is telling you, you can trust this person, you can’t trust this person.

Rhea: Look at the evidence. 

Liz: Ultimately, it is telling you, you cannot trust yourself. You cannot trust what your heart is telling you to love or care about this person. Does the mind really know that? Because our greatest intuition, our greatest knowing comes from the heart. The heart is what’s discerning. The heart can recognize that yes, I can love you and this experience, whether you betray me or not, whether you meet my expectations or not, this discernment and expectations of disappointment, unmet expectation is what teaches us boundaries. These disappointing experiences, that’s what they are meant to teach you. Okay. Well, now my heart knows. Boundaries are set by the heart. Not showing trust in your capacity to love and shutting down then only limits your experience. I am just going to do whatever my mind tells me to do.

Rhea: So what you are saying is loving people isn’t the problem. It’s knowing when to walk away. 

Liz: Knowing when that person is not deserving of your love. So when you go back to really loving yourself, fully accepting yourself . . .

Rhea: Which is just accepting it is what it is. 

Liz: Exactly, but that was just an experience. When we can find that level of self-love that no matter what happens, that doesn’t change because that’s what we were taught either by our parents, someone else who betrayed us —oh wait, I’m going to be hurt. Someone that I loved unconditionally hurt me so I cannot fully love and then we start to shut down, shut down. When you break open that love, that’s when it’s all possible again. 

Rhea: So how can you break open that love? 

Liz: Well first of all, stop telling yourself by your relationships and your actions that you are not lovable. It’s easier for me to say this than for some to do it, but walk away from the situations that continually hurt you, because so many people have pretty much set up their lives to reinforce the lie that most of them are in these toxic relationships or scenarios, or job situations, things that they cannot get out of or they believe that they cannot get out of because they don’t have the courage to say ‘I love myself enough to not.’ The moment you take that single step of love, it’s a house of cards. The cards fall. 

Rhea: I have had good and bad experiences in a romantic setting. Because I am not so keen on trusting and because I maybe don’t think it’s going to work out in my favour, I tend to remember the bad stories and tend to ignore the good ones. I also tend to be attracted more to the bad stories than to enjoy the good ones because it reinforces the story. Because you are always picking experiences that are going to reinforce your belief that you will be disappointed, that you shouldn’t trust, that there is no faith, what happens is those experiences keep happening to you, so you keep reinforcing it and it keeps going on and on and on. So if you want to learn how to trust, the first thing you need to do is put yourself in situations where it is possible to trust. 

Liz: Trust yourself to put yourself in those situations, because as much as you think you’re trusting yourself, you’re not.

Rhea: So for example of late, instead of doing what I could have done in the past, which is continually text someone who didn’t seem that interested or show myself to be available in situations where I wasn’t really available, or compromise my time in order to give it to someone else for whatever reason, I now go, no actually that doesn’t suit me or no, I don’t think you are going to give me what I want, or just saying no to things that aren’t a hell yes basically. I am choosing myself and that’s how you break the cycle of trust.

Liz: Precisely. Yes. 

Rhea: Because then eventually you start trusting yourself, which means you can trust other people.

 Liz: Exactly, and it’s choosing yourself, not your pain.

Rhea: So it’s choosing a different story than choosing to perpetuate the pain you have already experienced. Liz: Or being willing to end the story, sort of recognizing that if I walk away from this, I can end the story and that’s scary for some people because they usually want to jump from one story to the next without a break.

Rhea: So let’s say you were expecting to have your trust broken, or you were expecting someone to do something and they don’t and that inadvertently breaks your trust, what’s the relationship between expectation and trust then? 

Liz: When we don’t believe in our purpose or in ourselves, when we are not connected to our paths or when we can’t read the other person, our minds tend to fill in the blanks, tend to start to fill in the story. Kind of starts to think about all the ways in which they could serve us or we need to serve them to elicit a particular response, and that’s because we don’t trust that however this is going to play out, it is going to be fine. I will be fine at the end of this. I don’t know what that means. Maybe this person will disappoint me, who knows? And that’s when I go back to well, what’s the worst that can happen? This person disappoints you and then what? Trust tells us that in any time and place, however things played out, it was never going to be any other way, and that’s your lesson. 

Rhea: My need for control is to avoid the situation where had I done something differently, the outcome could have been in my favour. So maybe if I had said something different, maybe if I had worn something different, maybe I looked different, felt differently. It didn’t work out in my favour and it’s my fault. 

Liz: Yes. Somebody is assuming blame, whether it’s you or the other person. 

Rhea: Then there is no trust, because you are saying that you are the only person that’s in charge of your whole destiny, which is obviously where faith comes in, because obviously you will have no faith if you think that you are the only one in control of your own destiny. You are trying to control everything because you are trying to get your desired outcome which is going to make you happy, and you think it makes you happy for whatever reasons or stories you have created throughout your life, that that is what will make you happy and we are putting aside the idea right now that often people, they know what makes them happy and sometimes they are not exactly quite right about that.

Liz: That’s the next podcast.

Rhea: Exactly. So you leave nothing to chance. 

Liz: Right

Rhea: Because if you don’t control it, it will hurt you because in the past when I didn’t see it coming, it blew up in my face so let me try and cover all eventualities. 

Liz: Which is exhausting. It’s an exhausting way to live.

Rhea: But if what you say is true, it was always going to happen the way it was meant to happen, and control is just a construct that we tell ourselves which goes to that faith and destiny thing, which I have had huge issues with, which I guess is tying in with these trust  and faith stuff. If it was always going to work out the way it was going to work out.  

Liz: In that given time and place.

Rhea: That frees you from the control because you might as well just do whatever the fuck you want to do, because it is going to be the way it’s meant to be anyway. 

Liz: Follow your heart’s desires and let the chips fall where they may because it will not kill you as much as you feared it will. As a parent, I live with this. There’s a lot of trust and faith and hope and knowing that a parent has to exercise all the time. I mean I have all of that in spades when it comes to myself, my husband, other people, but when it comes to your children where you feel so terribly responsible for their life experiences, I also have to trust but there’s also free will. We are allowed free will. It’s the one thing that we don’t really get a say in is the will of another person and their choice. You cannot control that. 

Rhea: So funnily enough the one thing that can hurt us is the one thing we can’t control, and it’s the one thing we desperately try to control. 

Liz: Yes, but then I want to go back to the fate and destiny thing because I know you struggle with that.

Rhea: Massively.

Liz: Most people do, and it goes back to that concept of contracts – how we are going to recognize love in this lifetime. I once had a mentor who said the moment you are very clear about your purpose, everything in the universe will conspire to get you to your destiny. But it’s really about getting to know your purpose that’s often the greatest challenge and so everything we do, what we invest ourselves in—projects, work, etcetera —is merely an expression of that love, which is why so many things have become so intolerable. Because the more tuned in to love we are, the less we are tuned into all the artifice that we thought love was, like sacrifice. And so the lesson in that, in understanding where we can’t necessarily control our fate and destiny, especially in relationship, is then knowing that I know I will be okay no matter what happens. 

Rhea: You’re saying the only thing you can trust is that you are going to be okay. That’s trusting yourself, but how then do you trust other people?

 Liz: Because your well-being and your happiness is not to ever be predicated on somebody else, or their actions.

Rhea: So you don’t trust other people?

Liz: No, you trust them. You trust that your interaction with them is genuine.

Rhea: That’s how you trust other people? You trust that how you feel when you’re around them, they feel towards you is right?

Liz: I will say this—like attracts like. The more you trust yourself, the more you are going to attract people who trust themselves, which makes them trustworthy. It’s often the self-doubt that gets picked up on.

Rhea: So if I trust myself, I am much more likely to attract someone who trusts themselves, we are much more likely to be trustworthy to each other. So it starts and end with trusting yourself, trust is a choice. I can either choose to believe that it’s going to continue happening, or I can choose a different story. When we are saying how do you learn to trust, how do you break open? It’s very simple. You choose to, with the knowledge that if it doesn’t work out in your way, the worse that happens is that you just pick yourself up, dust yourself off, you learn whatever lesson you were meant to learn, and you keep going and you trust that that was meant to happen too.

 Liz: That it probably wasn’t in your highest good

 Rhea: So you do. You get what you give. If I choose, that it’ll be a different story. It will be a different story

 Liz: And whatever the outcome, it is still a different story.