TRANSCRIPT
Trust Yourself
I think it’s the number one rule of self therapy. Self therapy for healing from childhood trauma: trust yourself. And maybe it’s easier said than done. I’ve heard a lot of people say, “How can I trust myself? I don’t even know who I am. How can I trust, you know, what’s right or wrong? I, I, I don’t know.” And I hear you. I hear people when they say that.
I’ve heard some people say, “How can I do self therapy if I can’t trust myself? That’s why I need to go to a therapist.” But then I often hear those very same people later say, “Well, I couldn’t trust my therapist either because I couldn’t trust myself to know if they were good or not, if they were helping me or not, if they were coming from a good place or not, if they were manipulating me or not.” So how does one trust oneself? Because I think to move forward in life, to trust anything, to know what’s good and what isn’t, one has to trust oneself. That’s where one has to start.
And how does one start? Before I started making this video, I started thinking about that question: how does one start to trust oneself when one doesn’t really know how to do it? And then I thought, well, there’s something that I think everybody has at some level. That’s a place to start, and that’s trusting our own core fundamental goodness.
I’ve talked to a lot of people who have done some things that even they would admit are horrible. They’ve even said, “I’ve done terrible things, and I’m a very bad person for what I have done.” But what I’ve seen is underneath it, when I talk with these people, when I connect with them, even they deep down know that they are good inside. Everybody knows it, deep, deep down, that they are good and well. And it’s simple. Why? Because everybody at their core is good. Every baby is good. Every little child is good. Even children who do terrible and bad things and are nasty and acting out, they’re good at their core. They are acting out the things which have been done to them, and they’re acting it out on the world, replicating it on the world so the world can hopefully help them and see, “Ah, you are acting out these bad things on the drama of life to show the bad things that have been done to you.” But at your core, you’re still good.
So that’s the place I think anyone can start. And even myself, ’cause I’m not always in a good place. Sometimes I’m in a very anxious or stressed out or even self-hating place, sometimes a very insecure place. I can always start by going within. Sometimes it’s a lot of work; sometimes it’s really easy. But to go within and connect with that little voice inside myself that just knows that I’m good, and I can trust that. And I see sometimes it takes a lot of work for people, but people can do this: to start by trusting their own goodness and then building a relationship, rebuilding a relationship sometimes with that deep and inherent good part of us, nurturing that connection with our self.
And what I’ve found in my own life experience and by watching others is that the more we connect with that good part of us, the more our healthy antenna come out that allow us to trust ourselves. Oh, and by the way, trust yourself. Yourself is that good part of you. So if we can connect with that good part of us, that true self within us can tell us what is right and what is wrong, what is healthy and what is not, can teach us so much about ourselves, teach us about what we like and what we don’t like, can teach us about who we were when we were younger, can tell us the truth about our own history, tell us the truth about who were our allies and who were our enemies, tell us the truth about our parents, tell us the truth about the parts of our parents that loved us and didn’t love us.
And when we reflect on that true good part of us on the inside, and when we trust what that part of us tells us, we can know with confidence these things—these things about our past, these things about our inner selves—and we can begin to sort them out.
Now I want to share another reason why it can be so hard for us to trust ourselves. Why it’s so hard to trust yourself so often is a lot of times, often if we really trust ourselves, the answers we get are horrible. They’re painful. The truth is ugly. So often the truth of our histories is often very disturbing and upsetting. The truth of what’s going on in the world is often very upsetting. Often the truth of certain parts of us isn’t nice all the time. If only we haven’t treated ourselves very nicely. Sometimes we’ve been our own worst enemy. That’s not easy to look at. That’s very painful.
And when we dig in, what I’ve seen again and again is when people find that they are their own worst enemy, when that true good voice in them says, “You don’t love yourself very much,” digging deeper, we find that that’s how we were treated by the people who were supposed to love us the most: our parents. The people whose job it was to nurture us and love us unconditionally and raise us to trust ourselves. The people who we were supposed to trust most easily often betrayed our trust. These were the people who were our mirrors of self. These were the people whose job it was to mirror our goodness. These were the people who were supposed to be fully good and were supposed to mirror goodness to us. And when they didn’t do it, it became very confusing.
How does one trust oneself when one’s primary mirrors are broken and distorted, twisted, very deficient, too small, neglectful? This is why self therapy is so hard, and also trusting ourselves deep, deep down. Woo, it’s the road right into breaking denial. And denial is a protection against pain. All the psychological defenses are dissociation. It’s a defense against really painful feelings. It’s a lot easier to split off painful feelings, push them down, bury them deep into the unconscious, even use them to block off our basic goodness.
What I have seen again and again is the people who trust themselves the least have the least faith that they actually are fundamentally good. They are the most wounded people, the most harmed people, the most abused people. And unpacking all this abuse, oo, it’s ugly. It’s like swallowing poison, and the poison is within us, and it hurts going down. But sometimes you got to get it out. You got to vomit it up. And we vomit up the poison; it hurts coming back. So it’s like the double-edged sword of trauma. The trauma hurts, and healing from the trauma hurts. Yet we can do it, and it starts with that orientation of trusting ourselves on the inside, giving ourselves the space to trust ourselves on the inside.
Sometimes getting away from the people who we thought loved us the most or the people we’re most confused about, being alone with ourselves. I think it takes a lot of time alone sometimes to gain the strength or to develop the strength to open up the channel within ourselves to trust ourselves. But we can do it. And if we’re going to heal, we have to.