It sounds kind of funny doesn’t it – I mean if you can’t trust yourself, who can you trust? Of all the people in all of the world, the one person you should be able to count on to look after your best interests is the person looking back at you in the mirror. Yet I've worked with people who have a profound distrust for themselves, and honestly for some pretty good reasons.
Because until you’ve taken a good look at yourself, you actually might be your worst enemy.
But how can that be you ask? Well for many years I was in fact my own worst enemy. If you and I had sat down together, I would have regaled you with stories of all the things that were done wrong to me, how unfair it was, and how difficult it made my life. I would’ve probably added in about how dysfunctional my childhood was, and how the universe had set me up to fail.
If that doesn’t sound like me now, hopefully it isn’t.
But it’s been a long road to get from where I was to where I am now, and I realize that I am far from where I want to be. That change happened gradually over a period of many years, starting as I sat across from a therapist who taught me a lesson that I will never forget. It’s probably the only lesson I remember from him, but at the time he taught it to me, I really didn’t want to listen.
Because listening meant laying aside my story, and I had so much emotional energy invested in it, so much justification for my life, that I wasn’t willing to give it up.
So when he told me that my feelings were a symptom of the thoughts that were holding me back, I’ll be very honest and say I didn’t take that too kindly. I felt like he was asking me to give up all the justifications for where I was, and essentially take a sense of responsibility for all the mistakes that I had made. When you feel as badly about yourself as I did back then, the last thing you want is anything that will make you feel worse.
So I held fast to my feelings, and probably wasted several more years believing that everything I thought and felt was correct.
And in doing so I kept myself trapped. I wasn’t moving any closer to feeling happy; I wasn’t progressing in my career; I wasn’t even making any changes to me as a person. Yet I felt like I was perfectly justified in feeling the way I did, and I didn’t want to listen to anybody who would tell me otherwise. It took a long time for me to realize that by holding onto that story, I was actually hurting myself.
And when I couldn’t safely trust any of my feelings, I realize I had to go to work on myself.
It takes some pretty radical self honesty to stare into your own soul and see the truth of it. Most of us don’t have the knowledge or the understanding to do that, and it certainly took me time to learn it. I had to create a framework that allowed me to find ways to explain the patterns of behavior that I saw in myself, and I soon realized that the same systems can be applied to everybody else.
You know something is true when you see it working everywhere.
It’s been a long journey, coming to a point where I can trust myself to be my greatest strength. I can’t tell you the number of hours I’ve spent reading, studying, reflecting and meditating. I’ve lost count of the number of self-limiting beliefs that I’ve had to let go of, and the number of truths about myself and the universe that I’ve had to accept.
If that sounds difficult, then I didn’t describe it properly. It can be brutal.
But in the end, I finally found a point where I have the self that I can trust. The me who I know now is so different than the me I believed that I was. It doesn’t mean that I’m perfect right now, very far from it, but it means that I can trust myself to be honest in all of my decisions. That might mean accepting that I’m doing something out of fear, or it might mean recognizing that I have the strength to do what it is that I want to do.
Most of all, it means that in all things, I know why I’m doing it.
And I’m honest enough with myself to be okay with that. That has required me to let go of a lot of stories, or to reinterpret them in ways that strengthen me rather than make me feel good. I’m learning to live with the reality that where I am is where I am, and to work on letting go of the judgment against myself for that. On the start of this journey I blamed the world, in the middle of it I blamed myself, and at this point, I realize that things just are.
Judgment gets me nowhere; now I try to observe, reflect, decide and act.
In the end, whatever peace and happiness I find in my life will come not from an external source, but from making peace with and learning to trust myself.
Because once you have that, you realize just how little you need to get through everything else.
So the question is – do you trust yourself?
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings