Dropping our defences: learning to trust again

All of us have had the experience of being hurt or feeling betrayed by someone, whether that’s family, friends or in a relationship. We can feel damaged as a result and decide, consciously or unconsciously that being close to other people is dangerous and to protect ourselves we need to keep others at a distance . Doing this doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with you, as human beings we learned to survive by developing aversions to things that hurt us.  

The danger is that we lead a life where even with other people around us we lack a sense of intimacy and connection. Noone can see who we really are because we don’t want to reveal our true selves and as a result we feel lost, alone and lack the strength and resilience to face our difficult emotions. Having someone who practices deep listening massively increases our chances of being able to accept our difficult feelings.  

So how do we break down the walls and let other people in? Well, it has to start inside ourselves, by accepting our own vulnerability and getting comfortable with that. We can understand and listen to our pain, understand the roots and listen to it, even smile to it if you’re comfortable. If we can pin down the specific event that led to our way of being, we can choose, if we’re ready, to understand the suffering and ignorance of others that led to our being hurt. We can choose to forgive that person and over time, let go of our resentment. Then we can look at the ways we choose to withdraw from other people. Is it when someone tries to get close to us? Is it putting on a front, pretending that we’re OK when we’re really not? Is it in a relationship, where we jump to conclusions and get defensive based on our own bad experiences? We can hold these situations in our awareness, smile to them and plant a little flag in them, so that when they come up rather than reacting on autopilot we can stop, breathe and make a conscious choice.  

This is a huge amount of work in practice but choosing to let people in is essential to living a happy and fulfilling life. Our experience may have taught us (repeatedly) that other people will hurt you - and at some point you will be hurt again. But living without intimacy is a hard life, living without people knowing the real you is lonely. At some point you have to take a leap of faith and make the conscious decision to open yourself up to people again, even if its scary. Because the sad irony is that when we isolate our true selves from other people, rather than protecting ourselves we hurt ourselves. And you’re a pretty great person, why shouldn’t the world experience that?