Repairing a Broken Trust
When your trust has been broken it’s quite difficult to bring the trust back to its previous strength. We cannot glue it like a broken cup or tie back untied shoelaces.
A broken trust leaves behind it pain, sometimes anger or self-doubt, or even the acid taste of guilt, shame or blame.
Trust is so fragile. A dew-drop held inside the fluted body of a grass blade. A cirrus cloud on a changing sky. A slender heron’s leg perched by the river waiting for his supper.
Until something or someone unmoored the invisible anchor we know as trust we don’t realise it was the ground we walked on towards new endeavours, new relationships, new spaces of life.
Can trust be repaired by understanding the other’s motives and unguided suffering that led to us being hurt?
Can trust be restored to its former strength and position?
An understanding can be useful, and can take us perhaps a few steps forward towards a renewed trust. Sometimes it happens, for example, when you understand from the distance of adulthood that your parents hurt you because they were hurt.
My experience taught me that trust can be fully rebuilt if we tend carefully to the wound.
When we start from building a safe and guided container to process the anger, doubt, disappointment, and other forms of pain, we not only find a new trust but it is stronger and closer than the one we’ve had before.
The insights, self-knowledge and resourcefulness gained from the healing form new, robust vertebras of trust.
We’re reminded of the elemental nature of trust — an opening and closing like a beating heart.
I love the words by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, that remind us how a bond of trust is not a form of intellectual understanding but an embodied movement:
“Remember and remind the fallen fruit
the leaves and the branch,
remind the hard thorns
how soft they were in spring,
and don’t forget that even the fist
was once an open palm with fingers.”
So if you want to start now, trace your steps back to the wound of trust, sit by its roots. Call all the feelings of hurt by their name and hold in your fist the one pain that feels the easiest to start with.
Then, if it feels possible, begin to open your palm, slowly and with attention, noticing what happens in your body as you begin to open. Perhaps your branches and fruits will grow immediately, perhaps it’ll take some time and more guidance. Be gentle and caring.
Sometimes it’s enough to remember that the fist of broken trust was once also an open heart with connecting fingers.
If you want further support — in my new meditation album there’s a track on trust which you can use to have an embodied experience of repairing or strengthening trust.
You can get the whole album or just the single track.
R.A.D meditation album — a 6 track guided meditations to feel Radiant, Aligned and Daring.
It’s suitable for beginners and for people with experience in meditation.
The album is a digital product which you’ll be able to download immediately after purchase.
More than two hours of guidance to follow your breath and find flow and rejuvenation, letting go and fresh expression, abundance and creativity, strength, trust and inner wisdom and courage.
50% discount on the album goes until Sep 29th
Shelly's helping women who live a connected & engaged life to heal wound and deepen their self-trust so they can be a full & authentic expression of themselves.
Learn more about Life Alignment
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