Can You Trust Yourself?
You tell yourself you'll have only two drinks at the party. A few hours later, you have had five. The next morning, you are frustrated because this is not the first time you have made that promise to yourself and broken it.
That broken promise to yourself gives you needed information when you ask if you can trust yourself. You learn if you can trust other people by paying attention to their behavior over time, and you can do the same with yourself. When something happens repeatedly, note the pattern. If you notice that you are continually breaking promises you made to yourself, it may be time to renew trust in your relationship with yourself.
Self-Trustworthiness Is Earned Too
Trustworthiness is consistency over time, including in your relationship with yourself. When you do what you said you would do repeatedly, you build evidence that you can rely on yourself. When you notice you can rely on yourself over and over again, you become trustworthy in the context of your self-relationship. However, it is important to remind yourself that one behavior does not establish a pattern; it is the repeated behaviors over time that give you the information you need to establish the behavioral pattern.
Go back to the party. Maybe two drinks have been the plan for the last four parties, and each time you have had more. Promising yourself that the next party will be different does not change the information you already have, but behaving differently the next time gives you new information to consider. If you commit to having two drinks on purpose, and leave after the second drink, you demonstrate to yourself that what you say to yourself can be demonstrated in what you actually do. That’s what we call the say-do ratio. When you get to a 1:1 say-do ratio, you may notice that you start to trust yourself in situations that were challenging in the past, and that’s because you have become more trustworthy in your relationship with yourself.
Believe Your Own Pattern
Sometimes the information you discover in your own pattern can leave you feeling disappointed or scared. In situations like these, it is understandable that you’d rather see yourself differently. But explaining away the pattern doesn’t get you to the point of trustworthiness in your self-relationship. You may be able to explain what happened, but you demonstrated distrust of yourself based on your own behavior.
Paying attention to the pattern gives you information you can use. Maybe having two drinks at a party is not a commitment you can reliably keep right now. Recognizing that reality gives you an opportunity to adjust your commitments to yourself. If you can commit to three drinks now with the goal of two drinks later, and do so, that behavioral adjustment may help you restore trust in your relationship with yourself. Remember, most of us are looking for progress, not immediate perfection.
Self-trustworthiness develops over time through the relationship between what you tell yourself you are going to do and what you actually do. Paying attention to both can teach you something about how much you currently rely on your own commitments. As the pattern changes, the information changes too.
The Trauma-Informed You examines trustworthiness, transparency, and the relationship you build with yourself through your own experiences. The free Trauma-Informed You Journey gives you another way to examine that relationship.
