How To Recognize When You’re TRUSTING Yourself ❤️
What to look for in your behaviors, feel for in your chest, stomach, and throat, how to listen to your internal thoughts and hear the language of trust in what you are saying to others.
Let’s start with recruiting your mind by defining trust and self-trust:
My favorite definition of trust is from Charles Feltman:
Trust is choosing to risk making something you value vulnerable to another person's actions.
Self-trust to me is choosing to listen for where my internal younger parts are scared to be vulnerable.
Now, let’s invite your nervous system to the definition of trust.
What are you already noticing inside your chest, stomach, jaw, head, neck, and shoulders when you read about making what you value vulnerable to another person's actions?
You may already notice a freeze in your body or like you want to run and stop reading this post.
Totally natural.
Nothing wrong or right here.
Let’s keep noticing.
Often what happens when the body responds with the idea of trust is you are flooded with sensation or lack of sensation and you lose access to the smarter parts of your brain.
When you lose access to the part of your brain that can differentiate between safety & danger it is easy to shut down or start thinking so many thoughts you begin to spin out.
In these moments it is EASY to go into your mind and create a story that you can NEVER be vulnerable, nothing will ever change and you dont trust yourself or others with what you value or be vulnerable.
I like to suggest starting here because there is an opportunity to bring in compassion and see that your body is scared, even if you’re mind is not, but when your body is scared your mind creates a story to keep you scared and often out of self-trust and trusting others.
Totally natural.
You make sense.
When you start here, notice your body is scared & you are not.
You begin to recruit your mind to a different story which will naturally affect the sensations in your body to relax.
You can then begin to notice where you are experiencing more openness to trusting yourself and start scanning for cues of trust that you are experiencing.
Some cues you may be scanning for inside your own experience:
Are you acting sincerely or do you have an anterior motive here?
Do you feel you can commit to showing up reliably for yourself here?
Are you acting in compassionate, caring ways to yourself and your younger parts?
If you answer no to any of the questions above, you are already recognizing places you TRUST yourself because you are being honest in the moment with your intentions, thoughts, feelings and behaviors
And this is the foundation to cultivating trust within yourself and feeling safe to be vulnerable when practicing trusting others.
For more practices on how to cultivate trust check out my online course called Cultivate Trust. Cultivate Trust is a 5-Day Self-Paced Experience to cultivate self-trust, befriend your unique nervous system, and learn how your nervous system responds to your lived traumas. Buy it now for only $33USD.
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