Learning to Trust When Your Environment Taught you to Doubt

The other night, I had an amazing revelation inspired, of course, by a TikTok. The creator shared that when you never learned to trust your primary caretakers or your parents, it’s hard to truly trust anyone in life, especially if you’re operating under the belief that you had all of your needs fulfilled during childhood. One thing I’ve learned on my healing journey is “you don’t know what you don’t know”. Sometimes we spend our whole lives believing that what we’ve been given was enough, but then you get exposed to another level of love, another level of care, another level of intimacy, and you look back and realize that you never had what you thought you did. As an adult, I’ve had to reparent myself, saying the things to myself that I never heard in childhood. I’ve learned to be gentle with myself and loving with myself. I want my mind to be my ally and not my enemy, pushing me to perfectionism and scolding me with failure every time I perceive myself to be falling short. It’s a process, but in short, I’m learning to trust myself.

In my life, I’ve had what I always thought was a “normal” childhood in a working-class immigrant family. I knew that my parents worked hard for everything that we had, and I considered myself lucky that we usually had enough if not a little more than my classmates. We had a computer at home, a printer, and I even had an ipod mini! That means I was taken care of, right? My mom always told me to eat every grain of rice because “Some kid in Africa is starving right now,” and till this day, wasting food makes me anxious. So I was well-clothed, fed, and sheltered with a few luxuries, but mentally and emotionally, I often felt alone.

I’ve always been a sensitive person with a deep well of emotions and an active imagination, call it my Scorpio nature. But to my family, my shy, sensitive and introverted nature was often viewed as something I had to grow out of. I was told I was “Soft” and “Too sensitive”. Sometimes when I was crying, my dad would say “It’s just because she’s happy” and I hated that because to me, I was trying to express how I was feeling inside and he was making light of it rather than addressing it. It’s like a form of gaslighting that never really stops. Eventually, you just stop expressing your emotions with people who dismiss you. And how can trust grow in an environment like that? It can’t. When I came to my parents with my mental and emotional needs, they often didn’t know how to deal with it or would take it as me being difficult, I guess because they didn’t know how to resolve my feelings. You see, I come from a Caribbean family where sensitivity is frowned upon, mental health is not discussed, and emotional trauma is swept under the rug. Being emotionless and “Hard” was praised. For a while, I tried to be that way, but it only led to depression and anxiety. I was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Depression by age seventeen.

It was like a mystery to my parents why I would be depressed when all of my material needs were taken care of. Stories of trauma and desperation from our home country of Guyana were always easily at hand. Now THAT was something to be depressed about but not my spoiled American life. Emotional intelligence was not something that was considered necessary for parenting.

Into my twenties, I began to notice that I had “trust issues” which sounds so cute and flippant. I have gone through years of therapy, but I never dug into what trust really meant. I never knew if I truly trusted anyone or not. My parents taught me to be suspicious of everyone. Not to trust anyone. Part of this had to do with growing up as a young woman in the south side of Jamaica, Queens. Yes, your “friends” would steal your prized iPod mini (in case you were wondering what happened to that) and my mom always instilled that I should be an “Independent woman” because men were fundamentally unreliable. But I guess I didn’t realize the depth of my trust issues until I got married.

My husband is a dedicated and loving guy. As I mentioned in my Motherhood Strikes Back post, we’ve had a lot of ups and downs figuring out our relationship. I knew that I had trouble trusting him with my heart 100%, but I guess, after a while, I gave up on identifying how my trust issues would show up in my relationship. Basically anytime it seemed that he wasn’t acting in my best interest, even if I didn’t know the full story or if it was an innocent mistake or misunderstanding, I would go into full panic mode and start throwing accusations. I would withdraw or send him away, wanting to protect myself at all costs. Rarely did I extend the benefit of the doubt. And now that I’m thinking more about it, I guess that’s what trust is. Giving people the benefit of the doubt. Giving folks the room to show who they are before you tell them who they are.

As we get older and gain experience, as we get burned again and again by multiple jobs, relationships, and anything else that involves vulnerability or taking a chance, trusting gets harder. The truth is, most people and situations will turn sour eventually. But you’re not most people. You are your own unique energy signature. That means every opportunity isn’t for you, every friend isn’t for you, and yes, when it comes to love, every potential partner isn’t for you. But that doesn’t rule out the fact that there are tons of good people and situations out there for you. If you close your heart off completely, you have a 100% chance of never finding them. Love and true connection are rare, but not impossible. Sometimes you have to wonder if everyone is terrible, or if you were never really taught to trust other people in the first place. So that’s the challenge in life - to remain vulnerable ( which doesn’t mean you don’t have boundaries or standards). Be discerning, but more optimistic than pessimistic. After all, if the door is slammed shut, even the blessings can’t get in.