The key points are: Trust is a belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something. It involves vulnerability and is earned over time through consistent actions. What are the areas where you trust easily (labeled "green") versus areas where trust is difficult (labeled "yellow" or "red"). This provides insight into your trust patterns. Identify the original rupture of trust, acknowledging any unresolved pain, and releasing the unhelpful beliefs formed as a result. We repeat what we don't repair. Practice discernment - choosing carefully who to share vulnerabilities with and observing how they respond. This builds trust through informed choices, not blind faith.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Have you gone through a breakup and you're tired of feeling low lonely or lost? I've got a pep talk for you. I'm Sarah Curnoles, your breakup bestie. I'm a certified life coach with years of coaching experience, helping people just like you turn your breakup into the best thing that ever happened to them. Each week, tune in to get a pep talk, to heal your heart. Let go of the past, reclaim your power and get back into your main character energy. Your breakup may have shattered your world as you know it, but together let's build a new better world. Let's go.
(00:45)
Hello, my friends. Today I want to start with a question. What if every betrayal you've ever felt is still driving the bus in your love life? By the end of today's episode, you're going to know exactly why trust feels so hard and how to rebuild it without becoming totally naive. I'm Sarah Curnoles your breakup bestie. I'm here to help you heal from heartbreak and get back into a relationship that you want that feels healthy, happy, and fulfilling. So today we're going to be talking about trust. It's a question I get a lot. How do I trust myself again after I've been burned? Or how do I trust somebody else again after I've been burned? And I can really understand why this is such a struggle because what we want to do after our trust has been broken is that we want to totally withdraw our trust.
(01:45)
We want to pull it inward so that we never get hurt in this way again. But you see, that's not really how life or love or relationships work. If we are always withholding our trust and we are never giving our trust, we're actually going to have some really unfulfilling relationships. And life is going to feel like you're always driving with one foot on the gas. And actually, I had this planned, this episode, I had this topic planned for a couple of weeks, but I was on a run today and I'm listening to my Peloton app and the coach says, trust your pace targets, trust your training. And it hit me.
(02:37)
I have trouble with trust. I haven't been trusting myself, whether it's in my training as a runner or in my relationships, and I literally can see how I doubted myself the entire time I trained for a marathon, oh gosh, five years ago now to the point where I showed up so terrified, so scared I wasn't going to get through it, and I've kind of coasted and sorted through it. It was a really easy experience compared to what I had built it up to be in my head because, and actually I probably was slower than I could have been because I was not trusting myself. I was not trusting the process, not trusting the fact that I was putting in the time because my story is always like, I'm not good enough. It's not good enough. I need to do more. And that's one way of showing up without trust of it's not good enough or I'm not good enough. That's not trusting yourself. And so when this shows up for my clients, I see it really often after there's been a betrayal and I've heard a number of stories recently or they found out either directly or indirectly that their partner had been cheating on them and they feel ruined for any future relationship that I've been so hurt and betrayed that I couldn't ever love again.
(04:16)
And if that's what you're going through, I hear you and I feel you and I know how scary this is, and you're in the right place. If you just got out of a relationship and that person really just broke your heart and you didn't see it coming and now you're blaming yourself for picking the wrong person, you are also in the right place. I got you. We are going to be in this together and we're going to be talking about this. Trust is a really nuanced topic, which is what makes it really difficult and trust goes hand in hand with vulnerability. So a lot of my research that I did to prepare for this episode was really looking back at a lot of Brene Brown's work because it weaves in so perfectly. So we're going to talk a lot about that. But before I get too far into it, I want to talk about the definition of trust so that we can really wrap our minds around what exactly does it mean to trust.
(05:14)
So trust is the belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something. Truth is the belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something. And so I actually wanted to take that a step further because if trust is a belief, what is a belief? A lot of times people think that a belief is truth and that's not the case. It's a misunderstanding. Belief is simply a thought that you've had a lot. So we can actually change our beliefs by changing our thoughts and we change our thoughts by gaining new perspective.
(06:05)
And so in order to trust, again, we have to change our beliefs and we change our beliefs by changing our thoughts and our perspective. That's the roadmap of what we're doing here together today. I want you to have a better system so that you can rebuild trust and you have the ability to trust again in the future. So first we always want to start with where are you right now? If you came to me and you said, Sarah, I want to go to la, I'm going to ask you, great, where are you? Because we need to know where you're starting. It's going to make a big difference. If I tell you to go east and you are starting in Japan, or if I tell you to go east and you're starting in New York.
(07:00)
So if you're going to go to la, if you're going to go to a place which I'm considering, that's trust. If you're going to a place where you're going to trust somebody, we need to know where you starting. That's how we find the path forward. So you're going to start with a little self-assessment. I want to know and understand where is it easy for you to trust? Where do you feel like you are in a good relationship with trust? Are there people that you trust easily and you feel comfortable and you feel safe doing that? Are there things that you trust? Like I sit in this chair every day and I trust it's not going to break. I trust this chair is going to hold me. Do you trust in gravity? I'm not going to go floating away in this universe. I trust in our collective understanding of road rules, we stop at stop signs. We use our signal, right? I want you to find where is it easy for me to trust?
(08:13)
And I actually want you to spend a good amount of time thinking about this. This might be great homework for the week because sometimes the best thing that we can do when something is difficult is we look for the areas where it's already easy. Why is it easy for you to trust that certain person or that thing or that system or structure? What are you believing about that thing? And you don't need to get too far ahead of yourself. You don't need to think of already, how do I apply my trust and gravity to my trust in my future romantic partner? I don't want you to go that far. I don't want you to go that deep. Why do you believe in gravity?
(08:59)
If I trip, I fall down, I see proof of it all the time. I haven't floated away yet. I don't know anyone that has floated away, right? So all these examples of trust in a person, a thing, a system, a structure, find where it's easy. And now I want you to look for where the areas where I have an out of balance relationship with trust. Where are you handing out trust like it's candy from where you are giving it out too easily and maybe you are being too vulnerable and it's not working out for you.
(09:44)
And where are you struggling to trust? Where does it feel like you have it locked up like a Swiss bank vault? Do you have people, certain types of people that you test them? Are they worthy of my trust? Are they going to pass my test? Or you go the other route and you just hand it out like a blank check that might look like oversharing. That person that automatically goes right into all of their deep stuff. And so it might be easy to look at this with a stoplight system. So you're going to start labeling areas green, yellow, and red. So the green areas green light go. It's the areas where you feel like you can relax and receive where you can just relax into trust. You receive trust. It feels easy. Those areas that are yellow are the places where you need constant proof, where you are kind of struggling. Maybe you're testing them, give out some trust and you test them again, red is the areas where it feels damn near impossible and you are bracing for betrayal. So there's no judgment here and there's no shame. I just want you to notice and give things that green, yellow, or red label purely so that you have an understanding of where you're starting.
(11:35)
Alright? Your next step is we're going to take this and we're going to get a little bit more specific because this is a breakup podcast. And so you've probably had some rough experiences where your trust has been broken. I hear that a lot. I had a client recently who is struggling with dating again because he was blindsided by his last breakup. So his ex kind of broke up with him out of nowhere and now he's having a hard time getting back into dating because he's just scared. Whoever he dates next is going to do the same thing.
(12:12)
So I want you to think about this like you have a wound on your arm and this wound is open and it's bleeding. What we don't want to do is go running into the next relationship with a bleeding wound because you're just going to get blood on the next person. That wound is your responsibility to identify it and repair it so that you can come into your next relationship clean. Yes, another person hurt you. Yes, they need to be accountable for their actions, which usually means I'm not giving my trust to you. Again, you don't get my vulnerability because you broke it. That's one way that we hold people accountable. That's a lesson I've had to learn a lot of not going back to your ex because they broke your heart the first time, but what we don't do is we don't hold our next partner accountable for mistakes that happened with previous partners. That's not fair. Your new partner is a new person.
(13:27)
Sure, they have their own flaws. And I'm not saying be all willy-nilly with your trust. That's not at all what we're doing. But just because your last partner cheated on you does not mean your new partner will. So what you want to look for is you want to find the original rupture of your trust. There might be multiples. Who was it that originally broke your trust? What happened? When was it? And you want to identify the belief that you created from that. So one of my beliefs that I've had to do a lot of work on is that people who love me leave me. That was created when my trust had been broken.
(14:35)
Yours might be like all men cheat. All women just are out for the money. Now, this might just seem like a truth to you and that's why this might be a little tricky, but remember, this was created as a reaction to protect yourself after some wounding had happened and a belief is just a thought that you were thinking a lot. So after you've identified the original rupture and the belief that you created, I want you to acknowledge any pain that you haven't felt. This is kind of like cleaning the wound. We're going to take the splinters out. We're going to take out all the dirt and debris. So any pain or unfelt emotion that you have around it, you have full permission to feel it and express it privately and feel your emotions. I actually do this with music. I will put on a song that aligns with how I feel. I will move. I might punch a pillow, I'll make some sound so that I can express the emotion.
(15:59)
And then you're going to go into a self-compassion exercise where you acknowledge what happened. You're going to notice I did the best I could at the time by creating that belief. And you're going to release the belief by saying that belief no longer serves me. I will learn from this experience, but I no longer need to believe something that is now hurting me. And the reason we do this, we repair our ruptures because whatever we don't repair, we repeat. So for me, with my example of anyone who loves me leaves me, I had to take a long time before I healed that because it was unconscious that that was my belief. And after I'd had a number of bad breakups and I was dating unavailable men, and I would get really stuck on that. I was taking my experience to my therapist and to my coach, and we really worked on identifying that belief so that I no longer have to keep dating unavailable people who just leave.
(17:20)
I had to heal that so that I stop repeating it in my life. And I chose to replace that with our next step, which is discernment. Discernment is what happens when we take what we've learned and we use it to create better criteria or better judgment about our situations. It's the power of the informed choice. That's what discernment is. And I think it's one of the best ways to use our wisdom. And remember, this isn't about making a big sweeping declaration of like, I'm never dating again. That's not discernment. Discernment is choosing who you're going to date. And so this is really where I turned a lot to the Brene Brown work. Brene Brown says that trust is choosing to make something that is important to you, vulnerable to someone else, right?
(18:28)
When we take the vulnerable parts of us and we allow somebody else to have that or see that be a part of it, we are trusting that they will take care of it. And so how do we choose who we share our vulnerabilities with? Well, this is the act of discernment. She uses a story with her daughter who was in school and they had this jar of marbles, and the teacher would add marbles when the class did something good and they would remove marbles if the class did something that was out of line. And at certain points the marble jar would get full and they would get rewards.
(19:10)
Brene Brown made an analogy of this is also how we learn how to trust. We expose ourselves in little ways. We expose our vulnerabilities, I should say. We share those in small ways and we watch and we notice how the person responds. Does that line up with our values? Does that show compassion? Does that show understanding? Does that show that they're worthy of trust? And we notice we don't make it wrong. We don't have to make judgements about it. We are just paying attention and this is how we learn to trust. We open up a little bit and we notice and we open up a little bit more and we notice and you see how do people handle these things? You can also, this is very different, I should say. This is very different than testing energy where it's like you set up a situation where, I don't know, you put your new partner in front of your really hot best friend just to see if they're going to hit on them, right? That's setting up a test and a trap that's very different than I mentioned that my mom had been sick on a phone call and he asked about her the next time we talked the right. That's something that builds trust of like, I'm listening to you. I care about what you care about.
(20:34)
And so we want to use the wisdom of what we've learned in the past to make choices about how we trust. And these are informed choices. We aren't just doling out trust like candy and we aren't just withholding all of it and locking it all away. And we gain more wisdom about a person by asking clarifying questions, by communicating, by looking at actions, not just their words, and just know that it's okay to go slow because it takes time to understand somebody's consistency. You don't see consistency right away. You have to over time pay attention and notice what's happening.
(21:29)
So we want you to think about this as curiosity, not suspicion, very different energies. To put this into practice, I want you to choose one relationship and maybe start with a relationship that's not a romantic one. Maybe it's a friend or a work colleague or a family member. And name your current belief about trust with this person. Does it feel green, yellow, or red? Identify if there has been any past rupture in this relationship or another one, right? Because we could have let it bleed from another old relationship. Do you have any past rupture that is coloring your belief?
(22:30)
And then I want you to identify either what do you need to do to heal, to repair or heal the rupture? Or what is one thing that I can do to create more trust in this relationship? Or if trust isn't inappropriate, maybe it's creating a boundary, right? Because our deepest vulnerabilities aren't necessarily for everybody. They're for inner circle Boundaries are appropriate because that teaches people how to love us. So that's something I'm going to leave you with for the week of something that you can take to deepen your practice with trust so that you begin to rebuild trust and start putting it into practice. And I am encouraging you to do this with a relationship that's not romantic because we're going to take some of the pressure off. This is a relationship you already have. It's already familiar. And sometimes the easiest thing to do is to practice a difficult thing in a place where it's already easy so that when you do get back into dating again, you have some better practice, you have some better discernment skills, you have some better curiosity skills, and so then it feels more familiar when you put it into practice.
(24:05)
So as always, I always want to hear from you of how this is going. I want you to tag me on Instagram and tell me where are you at? Are you at a green level, a yellow level or red level with trust in your romantic life? And what is your one big takeaway from today? What are you going to remember from this? Remember that this isn't about blind faith. Trust is earned over time and it's a daily commitment to consistent honesty, vulnerability, and so I look forward so much to connecting with you. If you have a big betrayal that you're working through and you're feeling really stuck, I want to help you through that because you do not have to be stuck in there forever. You still deserve love and you deserve to heal so that you do not feel this level of rage and anger and betrayal.
(25:06)
Let's work through that together. I want to invite you to a free consultation call. On this call, I'm going to ask you a lot of questions that I really understand your problem that you're having, and I'm going to give you a diagnosis essentially and a prescription of what is really getting in your way and how you can actually overcome it. This free call has the power to change your entire life because you do not need to keep suffering alone. I want to help empower you to make positive change. And whether that changes with me as your coach or you just take that hour and you make the most of it on your own. Either way, I want to help you make positive change. I'm also going to give you a link to my calendar in the show notes that you can set up time with me and we can have a deeper conversation about this. And I would love to work with you as your coach. Alright, my friends, that's all we have for today, and I can't wait to hear what is resonating with you and what you want to put into practice. Have a good one.