(My client Güneş Güller wrote this piece from her own experience, hoping it will help you in similar situations. I’m deeply grateful for her kindness and generosity. — Turker Manavoglu)
Trusting, being able to lean on someone, living in peace — or being constantly on edge, on your own and lonely…
Which do we choose? Put that way, the answer seems obvious: trusting is the better option. But what about the disappointments, betrayals and heartbreaks that can follow trust? In short, what happens when the very people you trusted most let you down?
Life Like a Ball of Play-Dough
Yes, I was once all for boundless trust. For years I lived in the peaceful arms of trusting. Life was like a ball made of play-dough. As it rolled along, I would easily press the people I met — the ones I thought I could trust — into the ball, and carry on as an even bigger ball.
Until the biggest piece decided to leave. That’s when the balance was lost. Now there was a huge hole where that piece had been. The ball lost its roundness and limped along the road. Thanks to that misshapen form, I realised that some of the other pieces weren’t so solid either, and they too fell away one by one along the road.
What I experienced was months of believing I could never trust anyone again, looking at every friendly hand reaching out to me with suspicion, sadness, depression and boundless loneliness. The ball was now coated in hard glass; it felt the smallest bump in the road and rolled aimlessly along, ready to shatter at the first collision. My life was heading somewhere I didn’t want it to go at all.
Trust Comes Back — Within Limits
Then one day, by chance, I met a life coach — Turker. Without realising it, I had actually been searching for something like this, and once again I approached it with suspicion. I was nervous, with a hundred questions in my head. Once we started working together, we changed the whole flow of my life. I was overjoyed at having easily solved a problem I’d been convinced had no solution. Trust began to come back — but this time within certain limits… And our work continued, for every topic and every problem. We started giving my life a complete overhaul.
Through our work I came to understand that you can’t live without trusting anyone — it’s in the nature of every living being. You simply have to learn to trust yourself without limits first. You have to keep the promises you make to yourself and believe in yourself and what you can do. Then, slowly, you begin to trust the people around you — not blindly, not by depending on them entirely, but within certain limits.
The other people you trust should be the bricks you lay on a building whose foundation is your trust in yourself. That way, if one turns out to be rotten, you can pull it out and put another in its place. At worst, you knock a nail into the rotten one, hang a photo full of lovely memories from the past on it — and that’s that. Of course, it isn’t as easy to do as it is to describe. It takes effort and work. But above all, it takes time and patience.
But it isn’t impossible — believe me, it happens.
If I could do it, so can you.
If I could make it, so can you!
Written by Güneş Güller
Want help rebuilding trust — in yourself first? Discover ClearMind™ coaching.