I have learned to not trust others before I have even allowed them to be trustworthy. I didn’t use to be this way. I use to say to myself and others “I trust you until you give me a reason not to”. What led me to distrust others so much? When I detected incongruencies in what they said and what they did. This was a big red flag for me. Like when someone would say to you “I promise to… or I’ll call you back… and then they never do what they say they were gonna do. They say when you prompt them “OH MAN! I’m so sorry I didn’t call you back.” The reality is you were not a priority to them but they communicated to you you were when they said I’ll call you back or I promise I’ll… That feels yuck. Slowly over time, I began to hear the words people said but they fell on deaf ears. I didn’t believe them in my heart. I had been let down too many times to continue trusting people meant what they said.
So why would someone say they are going to do something and then not? Let’s give the other person the benefit of the doubt and say they did have the intention to follow through on their promise and/or call you back when they said they would. This clearly to me is someone who is doing too much and has too many spinning plates. Whatever is the least important or of least value to them is going to fall and shatter. They could also be the type of person that never actually had the intention to follow through on the promise or call you back. This person is too afraid of the confrontation and the yuck feelings to say something like “I would love to but I have too much going on right now and don’t want to make a promise I know I can’t keep right now”. Instead, they placate you to make you and them feel good in the moment instead of checking in with themselves and being honest with them and you in how they can show up.
Now you might say these things are not a big deal. On the surface, they are not. However, these surface-level interactions could be triggering much deeper emotional wounds that are a very big deal and could be a ceiling between where you are in life and where you could be. As an example, I’ve been journaling through a deep-seated feeling of abandonment. Some impactful memories came up was a time that my mom deprived me of connection with her by locking herself in her bedroom while I was pounding on the door when I was very young (feeling of abandonment). The time my dad was driving me to school and was trying to lecture me on the importance of raising my grades. When I told him that wasn’t important to me, he proceeded to get angry, yell at me and reach over from the driver’s seat to me in the back seat and hit me (feeling of abandonment). My grandfather told me repeatedly throughout my childhood to only pursue music as an avocation, not a vocation (feeling of abandonment). At the core of all of these situations, I was trying to be and express who I was to them and in so many words or actions that led to me not feeling ok to be who I was in that moment. That all felt and read to me like abandonment. It’s not my intention to point the finger or single them out. I have done the very thing I am terrified of many times to my partner who was showing up for me in so many ways. I was so closed off I could not overcome my trapped emotions to do what was best for the family and support her supporting me. An example of this was getting the ZZ Ward gig and being able to make money for the family but I would have had to miss the birth of our second child Myles. I couldn’t do it and I lost the gig. (feeling of abandonment for my partner). I love my parents and my family very much. I wouldn’t trade my parents in for any others. My dad shifted from worrying about my low grades and getting angry about it to calling me his rock star son. My grandfather called me one day out of the blue and validated my career path and the choices I made by seeing himself in me. Sharing that the best experience he got was on-the-job experience throughout his career, not in school the way he wanted me to do it. My mom to this day will often drop everything or bend over backward to connect with me.
People say to just be yourself. To do what you love and love what you do. There is a shadow side to this because everything in life has duality. If you are doing exactly what you love and loving what you do and the other person is not you are going to be a bright mirror reflecting to them all the ways that they are not choosing that. I was much more ignorant back than I am now. I see a multitude of reasons why people sacrifice themselves for the ones they love in their life. That is not an easy choice and can make anyone feel trapped. The systems of society are designed in such a way to trap and control you, not set you free, and support you to be the best version of YOU. That’s a bigger topic for another time and outside the scope of this blog post. In the case of my parents, in their heart, they want what is best for me but they might quietly resent the fact (not even consciously) that they were sacrificing and providing for me while I pursued the opportunities they never got. This would manifest in some of the circumstances and responses that I shared earlier. These quiet emotional killers hurt deep within for different reasons for each person involved. They build up and get stored in our bodies and affect everything and anything we do. My parents might have shifted which means something changed and energy did come to a resolution to a degree but the emotion from those events from childhood can still be trapped. You could still be carrying them around. If you are saying to yourself when that shift occurs “It’s about time they saw the light. I was right the whole time” then you are probably still harboring trapped emotions around the original event. If you feel your heart open up and a tear of gratitude fall from your eye for both of you and say “I’m sorry I was so stubborn and I appreciate you taking the time to call and share that, it means so much to me and I still love you very much”. That is being in a state of grace and letting go of all the baggage that you’ve been carrying around for so long.
So why does that all matter? Because like I mentioned earlier, the surface level comings and goings are a big deal if they are taunting a volcano of emotions beneath the layers of bedrock you have created to protect yourself from exploding or feeling the pain of the root of that little surface interaction that didn’t feel very good. Most people typically shrug it off and say “it’s ok that you promised and/or said you’d call but you didn’t”. We aren’t holding each other accountable. Telling them how that made you feel and/or going back and looking at your stuff on your own and saying that bothered me what happened. What has me so upset about that that I’m not seeing or am ignoring? How can I shift it? Something as simple as someone not calling you back one time could be the sweater thread to something as big as a lifelong feeling of abandonment. Interfering with things like your ability to leave your family to work because you feel you are abandoning them. Your ability to not feel safe when your partner threatens you emotionally so you stay small instead of standing tall so she won’t leave you. Not letting yourself be in a relationship, of any kind, with others because you are afraid to connect. If you don’t let someone in emotionally they can never abandon you but you will feel very very alone. This all can arise out of a simple text message of someone saying I’ll reach back out to you and we’ll hang, I promise…