Well, hello there, and welcome to this episode of The Terri Cole Show
where I'm gonna be talking to you about trust. So let me ask you a question. Do you either make
assumptions about other people like they're like you, like they have good intentions,
that they're good people, even though you don't really know them? Or on the other hand, do you
make assumptions about other people that they're bad, you don't know them, and you don't have any
evidence to tell you that they're untrustworthy? But do you make that assumption? So either way, if
you're too trusting or completely untrusting, this video is for you. I'm gonna be walking you through
why you may be like that. I'm gonna be talking to you about your trust blueprint,
your downloaded trust blueprint. I'm gonna be giving you different questions that you can answer
to really deepen your self-understanding of like, why you are the way you are.
And I'm giving you steps so that you can become more discerning in a real way. So before we get
into that, before we get started, if you happen to be new to this channel, well, hello and welcome. I
am so happy you're here. Please introduce yourself in the comments because we are a happy and very
welcoming group. Don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell icon so that you get notified every time
I roll out new content, which is every Tuesday and every Thursday, because I don't want you to
miss a thing. I also wanna say thank you so much for all your comments. You know I read everything.
I so appreciate you, and I love to highlight your comments. So this is a comment from Linda Winters
under the video, How to Communicate Effectively During Conflict Without Making it Worse. "OMG,
another beautiful video. My personal goal is after watching this,
to slow down and breathe, find my clarity, use my words, and speak the truth in a loving way without
retreating into my cocoon, becoming defensive or blaming. I'm learning so much from your
explanation, tips and scripts. Thank you so much." Well, I super appreciate you, Linda Winters,
taking the time to drop a comment, and that really does inspire other people to work on
themselves because you are working on yourself. So thank you for taking the time. I appreciate you.
All right, let's move it on into today's content. So raise your hand: who's got trust issues? Raise
your hand. I'm gonna say most people have some kind of trust issues, right? Everyone's hand
is up to a degree, a little or a lot, because we're all human. When something happens to us
in life that breaks our trust, let's say, it can actually change the way we view the world,
the way we view ourselves, the way we view the people that we love.
It can be very devastating when our trust is broken and that itself right?, isn't necessarily
the problem because of course, every experience we have in life has the potential to change the
way that we interact in the world. The problem is that when our trust is violated, especially
if it happens repeatedly, we can also start to project distrust onto others. So either way,
if you're too trusting, which my personal story is being that, of being too trusting, of doing
what I've talked about in other episodes called positive projecting, where I would just assume,
and I still , I gotta say, I still, I mean, I'm more discerning, obviously now
in my fifth decade of life, than I was in my twenties, but I really fell into the category of
positively projecting my decency onto other people. I just thought,
I really did honestly think that everybody was like me. And not saying I'm so freaking great,
but just saying that what my moral compass is, is what everybody's moral compass is.
And of course, we know that is not true, and I found out the hard way more than once
about being too trusting and trusting people who are untrustworthy. So I feel like that's the way
that my disordered relationship to trust went for me. But I know from being a therapist for 25 years
that lots of people are the other way around, where they are very distrusting, almost bordering
on paranoid. And either way, these things can legitimately block intimate relationships from
really being close. You know, it's exhausting too, especially if you're suspicious all the time,
it's just exhausting. So we're gonna be talking about your downloaded blueprint, right? So what
is this- a downloaded trust blueprint? So I talk about blueprints all the time. This is like,
the way we believe life is supposed to work. So it's a paradigm in your unconscious mind.
I want you to think of it like an architectural blueprint for a house that someone else designed.
And so much of the time, because this is the unconscious material, we're not aware of how
much that blueprint is impacting the way that we look at the world. So let's say you grew up
in a family system and there was infidelity. You might have grown up thinking that all men or all
women cheat because of what your childhood experiences. You'd have a predisposition
towards having some feeling about infidelity. I don't know exactly what that feeling would
be because it would be individual to you, but it isn't like we get out of that experience
unscathed, right? It it impacts us in some way. So let's just start, I mean, in the guide,
which you could just get at terricole.com/guide, I will be dropping your entire trust blueprint
questions in there. But for what we're doing today, I want you to think about right now,
what did trust mean in your family? So I grew up with three older sisters.
We had trust like between us, meaning that we would protect each other
at all costs, that we would lie for each other when it came to boyfriends, that we would cover up
what someone was doing. But there was infidelity between my parents. And so I think that impacted
how I was in relationships. And in my younger life, I had an experience where I had a boyfriend
who cheated on me. And listen, this is not super uncommon. And I also was unfaithful
in my young relationships until I was in like my early twenties. A lot of them, I would say. And
part of this is modeled behavior, and part of this is I'm gonna do it before they can do it,
right? There's a lot of different things that impact why we're behaving the way that we are.
And for me, once I got into therapy, I was able to sort of unpack that whole thing about trust
and be like, oh, this is what was going on. So think about your family. What did trust mean?
Was it an important thing? Was it talked about? Did people act in a trustworthy way
or not? Would they keep your confidence or would they tell
everyone what you said? Like think about how trusting was your family system?
Think about your parents. Was there trust between them or the adults, whoever raised you?
Or was that a distrusting relationship? Did people in your family make positive assumptions?
Your parents make positive assumptions about each other, or negative assumptions about each other?
A really important part of your trust blueprint is did the adults in your life keep their word to
you? So did your parents do what they said they were gonna do? Because this really does impact
how we feel about ourselves, about our value. Because if the adults in your life
were not trustworthy, emotionally and in actual practice,
you learned something either about your value, right? You might have interpreted that, that
you weren't worth it, right? I had a friend whose father would, you know, her parents were divorced.
She would sit in her bay window every Saturday hoping that her father was gonna show up.
And I would say half the time he didn't, even though he was supposed to.
So half the time, 50% of the time. So what did my friend learn and what did she then
end up getting into? Relationships, right? She learned that people are 50% trustworthy.
She learned that she was 50% valuable. She wasn't a hundred percent of value, but half the time she
was valuable enough for someone to show up for her, especially when it's a parent or caregiver,
primary caregiver, because these are the folks who are supposed to value you the most.
So it is really damaging to our self-esteem. And then we stop expecting people
to do what they say they're gonna do. A lot of my high functioning codependent clients,
we become hyper independent from these experiences because we're like, well, I can't count on you,
so I'm going to not count on anyone but myself. And I see that a lot in my therapy
practice with my incredibly capable women. But these childhood experiences
make there be a lack of a desire to be vulnerable to anybody, really. I mean,
and they have relationships and friendships and all of those things, but a lot of times there's
almost a surface value to them. Because if you can't be truly vulnerable, if you never feel safe
in your relationships to show the shadow side of yourself, right? It's like we
all wanna be loved, warts and all. None of us wanna be loved conditionally
because that feels terrible. So if your parents didn't keep their word, that's not great for your
downloaded trust blueprint or for how you're interacting in your relationships right now.
And emotional trustworthiness, you know, could you tell them something and not have them tell
someone else? I remember when my husband and I got married, I inherited three teenage boys
and you know, I was 10- I am 10 years younger than my husband. I was a generation closer to them,
you know, in a way. And I remember talking to them and saying, you can tell me anything, but
if it's something that I need to tell dad, then know that I'm going to tell him. So meaning
there was emotional safety with me. They could tell me how they felt about girls,
about anybody, about anything, about, and I wouldn't divulge that to anyone else.
If they told me they were doing drugs, I would have to tell Vic, right? That would make sense.
Or if I suspected that they were smoking weed or whatever, whatever the thing was.
So I wanted to get really clear because I knew even then how important it is to be
a trustworthy adult in a kid's life, so that they knew exactly what they would get with me. I really
worked hard to be someone who kept my word, but also who didn't mislead them to think that they
could tell me anything and that I would collude with them and not involve Vic, because of course
that is unhealthy and I wouldn't do that. Were there any breaks in trust? This is another
question for you to contemplate right now. Were there any breaks in trust between family
members or between you and family members? And that could be someone stealing money from
you or borrowing money and not paying it back. It could be infidelity, within the, of the parental
relationship or the caregiver's relationship. Anything that would break your trust:
having a sister who stole your boyfriend, that would do it. I've never had that
experience, but I'm just, I'm just trying to think of like,
what are other ways that trust can be broken? A lot of it is just not keeping
your confidence, right? Like actually not keeping what you wanted to be private or throwing it in
your face later in a fight that is super untrustworthy. That will break trust.
If someone takes something that you told them when you were being vulnerable and they mock you with
it at a later date. So what do we do about this? I mean, you'll have the downloaded blueprint,
so you're gonna answer a bunch of questions and get clarity. But just a couple of pointers that
I have some thoughts about this. Avoid the self-trust sabotagers, right? Or saboteur,
I guess is how I should actually say it. These are people who undermine your actual self-trust.
They're the ones who are like the dream smashers or the naysayers. It's almost like they don't
want you to succeed in life. We don't need those people. We don't want those people. You wanna
avoid anyone who is kind of a hater and you know they're out there,
right? The second thought is you keeping your word to you how incredibly important this is
in life. So developing self-trust, this really includes becoming someone that you can count on,
right? It's so easy to self-abandon for other people. Trust me,
it's so easy. But don't because self-trust means that you know that your needs, your wants, your
desires, what you think, what you want, how you feel matters. And it can't just matter in theory.
It has to matter in actual life. Meaning your behaviors have to reflect that you
know you matter. This is how you create a sacred relationship with yourself. And it's a beautiful
thing. You don't have to be your own enemy. It's a beautiful thing to have a sacred and loving
relationship with yourself. The third point to think about is that inner mean girl committee.
You just have to be super aware of any inner critical dialogue. It's so important to build
real self-trust. You cannot be tearing yourself down all day. And you may not even be aware of it,
but I'm asking you to become aware of it. We wanna work to shift towards more kind language,
words, feelings towards ourselves, loving feelings towards ourselves and words.
It's okay if you're tired, right? Like, give yourself a break. Don't be so mean. Don't call
yourself bad names. And a lot of times that's an internalized voice. A lot of times it's not even
us. That's literally you had a critical parent or an older sister or somebody. We internalized that
voice. We no longer live with those people, but we keep doing this to ourselves. So this act alone,
changing that inner dialogue from critical to kind, can revolutionize
your self-trust and how you are in the world. It's really, really powerful.
So those are my thoughts for you. What I was gonna say about the self-trust,
I mean the downloaded blueprint, right? We're gonna do the download blueprint,
but I also want you to take a bit of a self-trust inventory. And in the guide, I'll give you
those questions as well, because this is where we really have to get real
about in what ways are you treating yourself like crap? Like where is it? How are you treating
yourself right now in your life, mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, financially?
This matters, how you treat yourself. And a lot of times we don't even think about it,
but it's very real and has everything to do with how self-trusting we can be. Second thing to
think about in what areas of your life are you already good at keeping your word to yourself,
right? Maybe you have a yoga practice that you're really committed to, or
maybe you have great friendships that you tell the truth about how you feel in.
So we wanna give ourselves credit where we're already doing a pretty good job. And then really
highlight what areas do you struggle to keep your word to yourself? And the last thing I'm
gonna say about this is that we need to learn from the past. So if we are having a repeated,
what I would call repeating relationship realities with people who are untrustworthy, right?
We need to look at those relationships and those experiences from a therapeutic point of view. We
need to look at what are the red flags that maybe you ignored? What are the similarities
with those relationships? And then I'm gonna give you in the guide, and this is something
that if you know my work, you know I talk about the three Qs tool. I wrote about it in Boundary
Boss. So this is, we ask these questions and then we write down the answers.
We think about someone who was untrustworthy, and then we say, who does this person remind me of?
Where have I felt like this before? And how or why is the way that I'm interacting with
this person familiar to me? And we start to understand and gain a deeper understanding
of what else might be driving this behavior. It's most likely historical. And when we get
some of that information, it is so much easier to change our behavior. So I hope that this episode
inspired you. Maybe you had an aha moment. I would love to hear all about it. Please make sure that
you download the guide that I made for you that has all of the stuff I told you that's in it,
terricole.com/guide. I hope you guys have the most amazing week, and as always, take care of you.