Embracing Life’s Challenges as Lessons for Growth
Our mistrust can profoundly affect our quality of life, self-esteem, and relationships. For that reason, we devote a lot of attention in the Learning Love Work to dealing with and healing this wound.
When faced with pain, betrayal, or disappointment, it’s very easy and automatic to close off, become bitter, and guard ourselves against future harm.
However, the beauty of life lies in the lessons embedded in every challenge. Through these challenges, we have the opportunity to grow, heal, and transform mistrust into a foundation of deeper trust—not just in others but in life itself.
The mistrust that we experience in our life today has its origin in the ways we were treated as a child and adolescent and what we observed in those who raised us – how they related to life, how they dealt with life challenges, with each other and people in general.
Mistrust often begins as a self-protective mechanism. When someone betrays or hurts us, our immediate reaction is to protect ourselves. This instinctual response is understandable; it’s designed to keep us safe. However, over time, if left unchecked, mistrust can turn into a deep-seated habit that isolates us from others and blocks our ability to form meaningful connections.
One of the great risks of mistrust is that it can narrow our perspective, leading us to see the world in terms of threats and risks rather than opportunities and potential. The walls we build to protect ourselves may also keep out experiences that could bring healing and growth. Over time, mistrust can harden into cynicism, bitterness, and isolation—making it harder to trust, even when it’s safe to do so.
In our work, we explore five aspects in the journey of transforming this powerful wound of mistrust.
1. The first is looking at how we deny, minimize, and bury it.
2. The second is seeing how it shows up in our life today and feel the pain of it.
3. The third is exploring its roots in our early experiences as a child and adolescent.
4. The fourth is changing our perspective when faced with a challenge from feeling victimized to embracing the growth and embracing vulnerability as strength.
5. The fifth is beginning to trust ourselves. Learning the tools of transforming mistrust with awareness, building self-esteem and confidence in our ability to feel and deal with whatever life brings us.
Often, it is not easy to penetrate the depth of mistrust because it may be covered in belief, fantasies, denial, strategies of control, projection, blame, and complaint.
For instance,
Andrew, a client of ours, believes that he is very trusting of life and others. He tells us, “it’s good to trust and if you trust, things just work out better. So when mistrust thoughts come up, I just ignore them.” But his trust holds only if others behave and relate to him as he believes they should. He argues continually with his partner about her weight, how she spends money, and he is upset when she is not available for love making. He doesn’t see that it’s his mistrust that get’s triggered. And when he engages in discussions about politics, he raves and rages, “that they are all idiots, the whole system is crazy, and you can’t trust anyone in power!”
The first step is recognizing our mistrust and come out of the idea that we trust.
It’s difficult to be honest with ourselves and admit that our sense of trust is an illusion and only lasts until we get tested by life giving us set backs.
When life brings us difficulties, we can view it as if we are being punished or being supported to grow.
The way we frame it will determine our experience.
It takes a lot of courage to admit our mistrust and open up to feeling the pain, anger and disturbance, when we are triggered.
In daily life, our basic trust is not really tested until something happens that provokes it; especially in intimate relationships. Usually in the beginning both people mystify each other and project their wants and needs with the naïve belief that they will be met.
For instance, Peter and Diane came for a session because they were fighting. They shared that in the beginning, they were deeply in love and rarely if ever argued. But after a year together all that had changed. She claimed that she could no longer trust him because “he is not as available, as communicative, and as open as he used to be.” He shared that he has pulled away because all her expectations and demands “never end.” She strongly believed that he should meet her expectations for her to trust him. He also thought that he couldn’t possibly trust her again until she “gets off my back.” His mistrust was triggered by her not tuning into him and giving him space.
When we rely on things or people changing, we can’t penetrate the depth of our mistrust. We avoid our core mistrust by mystifying people and life with ideas like Andrew’s or by spiritually bypassing it with substances such as plant medicines which can take us out of mistrust temporarily until we have come down and back into our regular life.
When our mistrust does get triggered, rather than seeing it as mistrust that has been provoked, we can get lost in blaming the cause of it and by becoming angry, bitter, resigned, resentful, and feel like a victim.
Anna felt betrayed by her boyfriend when she discovered that he was having an affair. Only after working with us for a while, she was able to see that she was mystified by his charisma and confidence and could not see that he was not someone who could or was interested in honestly committing to being with one person. Her growth was to learn to trust her intuition and to work with her shame that she didn’t feel worthy of having someone for whom she was enough.
When mistrust gets triggered, we can also get distracted by blaming ourselves and ruminating why we didn’t see a situation or a person as they were earlier and do something about it. We may also obsess about why we keep attracting “the wrong kind of people.” Instead of digging deeper into our shame and our wounds from the past, we stay focused on how other people behave and should behave or judging ourselves for what is wrong with us that we can’t seem to find the relationships, the job, the friends, the lifestyle we dream of.
When mistrust is unconsciously running our life, we easily assume and interpret experiences based on how we are treated by life and others; especially in our intimate relationships.
For instance, when David‘s mother comes to visit, Sheila notices that suddenly, he cleans the house, washes the dishes, and listens very attentively to what his mother is saying. When they are just the two of them he is often preoccupied and doesn’t listen to her as much as she would like. She jumps to the conclusion that he doesn’t really care for her, not realizing that when his mother is visiting he regresses into a little boy wanting his mother’s approval.
Sometimes all it takes for our mistrust to take over is if someone makes a comment or reacts to us in a certain way for us to interpret that we are being misunderstood, or treated insensitively, unlovingly, or disrespectfully.
We have experienced this quite a bit in our work with clients because the therapy environment is such a pregnant place for mistrust to get triggered. Once, while a woman was sharing in a seminar, I mentioned to Amana on the side that we needed to tell the kitchen that the lunch was going to be late. The woman was so offended that she has not spoken to us since.
I (Krish) was having ongoing sessions with another woman and felt that our connection was very deep and loving. But when I had a session with her together with her partner because they were having difficulties, she felt that I was giving too much time listening to him and not enough time to her. That was enough for her to no longer trust me and stop sessions. Unfortunately, she was believing her mistrust so deeply that she was not willing to repair the break.
It’s difficult to be honest with the ways in which we’ve been hurt or disappointed because we want to minimize, “forgive” and idealize our past traumas.
It’s very common to force positivity rather than sitting with the discomfort and allow ourselves to feel it. Often people are not in touch with how deeply they learned not to trust themselves, life and others based on what happened when they were a child. Or they believe that there is no way that it is safe to trust and open again.
Let’s review the five steps for how to Transform Mistrust into Trust Through Life’s Challenges:
1. Coming out of denial and acknowledge your pain: Trust begins by being honest with yourself about the ways in which you’ve been hurt or disappointed. Suppressing your emotions only deepens the wound. Don’t rush to “move on” or force positivity. Sit with the discomfort and allow yourself to process it. Only by facing the wound can you begin to heal it.By confronting the discomfort, you take the first step toward healing and understanding.
2. Recognizing how mistrust shows up in our life today. This means realizing that when we get triggered today, our mistrust is being activated. Rather than going into anger, blame, complaint, victimization, or resignation, we take full responsibility that it is our growth process to get triggered and go deeper into the fears and insecurities underneath.
3. Find its origins in the early experiences, impressions, and ways we were treated and related to in our life. Each of us came out of childhood with set ideas about life, other people, and ourselves based on what we learned. These have been called “mental models.” They are incredibly powerful because they are strongly held beliefs not only based on what we experienced and learned but also on how we survived.
These “mental models” are routinely divided into two. One is the beliefs we developed about life and others. The other is the beliefs we developed about ourselves. It is valuable to bring them into awareness because rarely are we in touch with what they are or how much they run our lives.
Here are some of the most common beliefs in the first category – about life and others:
• You can’t trust people because they will take advantage of you.
• All that people are really interested in is money, power, and sex – kindness takes a back seat.
• If I allow myself to show my vulnerability, I will be judged and rejected.
• It’s important to keep my relationships superficial, otherwise I will be rejected or invaded.
• Nobody is sensitive enough for me. I can’t find anyone who is a good fit for me.
• All that matters in life is success, getting ahead, and having money – that’s how you get respect, and appreciation and can manage in this competitive world.
• To belong I have to adapt and be unauthentic
Here are some of the most common negative mistrustful beliefs about ourselves:
• I am not worthy of being loved or having someone who truly cares for me.
• I am not attractive enough to be with the person I want to be with.
• Success and love are for other people but not for me.
• There is basically something wrong with me.
• I have to put on a mask and pretend, otherwise I will be rejected, judged , or hurt.
• When I compare myself to others, I always feel inferior and less than.
• I am better than others. Nobody is good enough for me.
If we can relate to any or perhaps all of these negative beliefs, we can begin to understand why we have so much mistrust in our lives. The next step is to see how as a child and adolescent, we developed these beliefs.
For this, it’s helpful to imagine ourselves back in time, to see, feel, and experience where these beliefs came from. As a child, we believe everything we see and hear from the “big people.” We don’t have the awareness or resources to question them.
We often ask the participants in our seminars what they saw and experienced as a child and later that caused them to develop so much mistrust in life, others, and yourself. Even though each person’s experience was obviously different, the answers are often quite similar.
Here are some of the most common answers we get:
• “I saw my parents fighting very often and honestly, I didn’t learn anything about healthy love and relating.”
• “My father could not deal with his anger and would yell a lot at us and at my mother, especially when he had something to drink.”
• “My parents divorced when I was small, and I was raised without a father and with a mother who was always telling me that men can’t be trusted.”
• “I didn’t learn to trust myself. I was raised to meet my parents expectations and think and behave they way they wanted me to.”
• “I was humiliated by my father for being too sensitive and not being strong enough.”
• “My father abused me sexually but when I told my mother, she wouldn’t believe me.”
• “My father abused me and my siblings physically and my mother did nothing to protect us.”
It’s important for each of us to reconstruct our own story to understand how we developed mistrust in life, others, and ourselves; but first of all, we have to take away the blanket of denial and “premature forgiveness” that many of us hide behind.
If we don’t see clearly how as a child we were indoctrinated and conditioned with negative beliefs about life, we end up blaming ourselves and holding onto negativity about others and life without realizing where it comes from.
4. Shifting our perspective and embracing every challenge as a potential teacher. The next step in transforming our mistrust is changing our perspective. We can begin to see that each life challenge we face is an invitation to learn, grow, and open ourselves to the world again.
By shifting our perspective, embracing vulnerability, and trusting ourselves, we begin to build a foundation of trust with life.
This perspective helps prevent bitterness and mistrust from taking root, as we begin to see difficulties not as obstacles to happiness but as stepping stones toward deeper strength and wisdom. When painful things are happening in our life it’s natural to ask: Why is this happening to me? But this question closes the door and comes from a victim mentality. Rather than asking Why is this happening to me? We can begin to question: How can I find space to be with the feelings that this situation brings up for me? What am I learning?
Trust cannot grow where walls exist. If you’ve been hurt, your instinct may be to build emotional walls to protect yourself. However, these barriers also block out the possibility of connection, love, and new experiences. Trust involves risk. Vulnerability can feel risky, but it is essential to creating meaningful relationships.
By choosing to remain open, you show immense courage. Vulnerability is the path to deeper connection with others and with life itself. Remember, being vulnerable is not a sign of weakness; it’s a sign of strength and resilience. Being vulnerable does not mean being naive or allowing others to walk all over you. Instead, it means trusting in your ability to handle whatever life brings. It’s the insight that even if you’re hurt again, you have the strength to recover and keep growing.
Vulnerability means having the courage to face the unknown, to engage with others, and to risk trust again, even in the face of past disappointments. By embracing vulnerability, we create opportunities for new connections, understanding, and trust to form.
5. Learning to trust ourselves: Before we can fully trust others, it’s essential to trust ourselves – trust in our own judgment, resilience, and ability to handle whatever comes our way. The more we learn from life’s challenges, the more confidence we build in our own capabilities. Slowly, we can learn that we have navigated through difficult times before, and we can do it again. Trusting ourselves means believing that we are capable of making sound decisions, even when they involve risk or vulnerability. It also means trusting that life, with all its ups and downs, is supporting us to grow up.
Growing up means:
• Seeing that life is a mixture of encouraging and challenging experiences which help us find the inner resources to accept both.
• Beginning to stand on our own without needing to be rescued, to rescue, or needing others to change.
• Seeing others clearly without projecting our wants and needs on them.
• Being able to be alone and take care of ourselves financially and emotionally even when we are with someone.
• Noticing when we regress into negative beliefs, opinions, and judgments and recognizing its consequences.
• Love and intimacy require us to be vulnerable even though sometimes we may get rejected, judged, or disrespected. Realizing that we have the inner space to be with the painful feelings that may happen as we are more vulnerable and open to life and love.
• Learning to set boundaries to take care of our own space, body, and wellbeing.
In short, transforming mistrust into trust is not an overnight process—it’s a journey.
Each new challenge in life invites us to make a choice – either to close down in bitterness, or to open ourselves up to learning and growth.
By embracing life’s difficulties with curiosity and resilience, we not only transform mistrust into trust, but we also expand our capacity for empathy, connection, and inner strength.
In the end, it is not life’s challenges but our response to them that shapes our sense of trust in ourselves and the world around us. By facing difficulties with openness and a willingness to learn, we discover that trust—like resilience—is something we can cultivate, grow, and renew, even after it has been broken.
Instead of closing down, we can ask ourselves:
• What can this challenge teach me about myself?
• How can I grow through this experience, rather than shrink from it?
• What strengths can I develop through this situation?
Each life challenge we face is an invitation to learn, grow, and open ourselves to the world again. By shifting our perspective, embracing vulnerability, and beginning to trust ourselves, we begin to build a solid foundation of trust with life.