Trust can be a minefield when connected to trauma. The minefield can be centered in trusting ourselves, trusting others or a little bit of both.

Ourselves….

Wondering, can I trust my body, my response, my experience, my reality….? And I’m sure you can add so many more things that you question about trusting yourself.

Others…..

Can I trust the people I am in relationships with? Family, friends, kids, spouse, partner, community, neighbors…..and again, I’m sure you can add more people to this list.

Trust and safety can go hand, in hand….

Is it safe to trust me, or this person, or this situation?

Sometimes it’s good judgment not to trust.

Sometimes we need to heal before we can trust.

Sometimes trusting is part of the healing.

I want to honor how tricky trust can be as we heal….

It can fill us with so much dread, fear, uncontrolled emotions and uncontrolled body responses…..

It can also fill us with healing moments as we work through and process the trauma trust brings up….

It can be awful and beautiful…it can be both.

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I would like to offer some ideas and things to add to your toolkit and they focus around developing our felt sense of choice and safety.

Felt Sense of Choice

The felt sense of choice means, feeling within our body and believing in our mind and spirit, that we do have choices over who we trust and around trusting ourselves.

It also means that we have access to reframes within our mind and within our body and spirit about what trust really is from our wisdom's perspective.

We also know what our trauma says (again, within both our mind, body & spirit) about trust. We know what our trauma tells us to do, think, believe, feel and act around trust.

It’s powerful to know the difference between wisdom and trauma trust patterns so we have access to choices.

Felt Sense of Safety

The felt sense of safety means that we feel within our body what feels safe about trust and what doesn’t.

We also feel within our mind and spirit what feels safe and what doesn’t in our relationship to trust. The felt sense of safety involves connecting our mind, body and spirit as we seek to understand safety within our system.

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So, now the how....how do we develop this felt sense?

It is learned through lots of small practices, exercises and moments where our body gets a chance to teach us about ourselves. We create this trust through choice and safety as we use tools of mindfulness, mindset reframes, somatic movement, playful movement, yoga, inner child work, and polyvagal states.

There are lots of tools and lots of ways and your body knows exactly what you need to let trust help you heal.

Brene Brown’s said, “Trust isn't built in grand gestures…..but in the small moments that people treat what is important to you with care.” And I want to add when we seek to offer these small moments of treating what is important to ourselves with care, we also build trust with ourselves.

I have found this "little by little work" to be powerful in trauma healing. Building trust within ourselves, as well as trust with others, slowly, and with care.

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Remember, ❤️

You Matter. Your Healing Matters. You Are Worth It!

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