Trust plays a key role in our engagement with life.

For example, we can’t be vulnerable and intimate in a relationship unless there is trust. If someone betrays our trust, healing can be very hard.

Often as teenagers we get frustrated by our parents’ unwillingness to treat us as more capable. They still treat us habitually as children. We feel different, but they’ve not seen the evidence or changed habits yet. Sometimes, we can feel betrayed by their behaviour, like in how they present us (“my baby”) or talk about us to others.

At work, we can feel betrayed by a boss who promises one thing but does another. Or who puts the bottom line ahead of our well-being. 

This is an element of all relationships, even with brands and products we buy.

But most centrally, it is in our relationship with ourselves. Do we trust ourselves? Do we trust life? Does our body trust us? Most of us shift to a cognitive mode around the time we start grade school. We learn to favour the mind and suppress the body. This is a social norm. 

We push the body physically. We overwork. We say up late, ignoring the need for sleep. We eat for pleasure, leaving the body to figure out how to process the spicy, too cold, lifeless, excess, and so forth. This is especially true if we have an addiction that affects the body.

Then, to top it all off, we use the body as a dumping ground for all the experiences we don’t want to face. It gets to carry our orphaned child, our angry teen, our unmet needs, and more. 

No wonder we develop chronic health issues.

I say this not to suggest blame, just awareness. Recognizing our patterns is the first step in healing them.

In my case, I’d been noticing a somatic resistance that I wasn’t finding the bottom of. And then a friend mentioned they’d discovered that their body didn’t trust them. That really landed here. We had repeatedly shown our body that we’re not a reliable passenger. That we’ll dismiss its needs and overload it in various ways. And yet we expect it to be reliable and not complain. Is it our slave? Do we take better care of our car?
Davidya