Afraid to Trust? These 2 Metaphors Will Help | Complex Trauma Metaphors - Part 3/7

[00:00:00]Well, welcome to another chat with Tim, where I've been sharing some of my favorite metaphors that relate to recovery.

[00:00:07]And I want to share today two metaphors that have to do with trust.

[00:00:13]And I hope these are very helpful to you cuz often metaphors just put things in perspective in a way that maybe we haven't seen it before and just take us to a new level of acceptance and then growth. I think that one of the biggest issues for many people coming into recovery is has to do with trust.

[00:00:35]Number one, they've trusted people growing up and those people have let them down repeatedly. And they have got to the point where they just are not going to trust anybody else again cuz trust leads to being hurt.

[00:00:49]And so trust has been shattered so many times that they don't know how to trust. But then they come into recovery and all of a sudden, I need to learn to trust again.

[00:00:58]You can't have a healthy intimate relationship without trust. You can't connect without trust. And so that becomes a challenge. But more than that, they don't even know how to trust themself. Part of what's happened in breaking trust in other people is they've stopped trusting themself. They don't trust their own thinking, their own gut. They've made so many bad decisions, hurt so many people, hurt themself, disconnected from themself that their trust of themself has been lost. They don't even know who they are. They don't even know what they should trust. So, I would like to share first about learning to trust yourself again. It's a process, but I love the story of the baby eagles in the nest.

[00:01:46]And how a mother teaches that baby to trust itself. So, if you know anything about eagles, their nests are very, very, very high on a cliff called Aries.

[00:02:00]A- and up there on the cliff, the mother builds this great big nest out of twigs and branches, but then she lines it with this down that's very comfortable for the babies.

[00:02:14]But as the babies start to get a bit older, the mother sees them getting stronger. She knows that it's soon going to be time for them to learn to fly.

[00:02:23]And so she starts taking the down, the feathers out of the nest so that the nest now is just twigs. It becomes more uncomfortable to these babies.

[00:02:35]>> [snorts] >> And then the babies, they start moving around. They start stretching their wings. They stand on the edge of the nest and they flap their wings, but they don't know how to fly. They they They have no experience in flying and they're way, way, way, way high in the air and now they're getting really big.

[00:02:55]There's a lot of weight there now.

[00:02:58]And so how does the mother get them to fly?

[00:03:02]They don't know themselves as the babies whether they're ready. They don't know any of that, but the mother does.

[00:03:08]And when she sees them stretch their wings and flap their wings and off and she sees that the muscles are building in their wings, one day she pushes them out of the nest.

[00:03:19]You can imagine the baby eagle. It's starting to tumble. It it doesn't know what to do. It's starting to crash towards the ground.

[00:03:29]It's thinking, "My mom is so mean. What is mom doing? This is awful. I hate my mom."

[00:03:36]And it feels like it's going to die.

[00:03:39]But then mom swoops down and goes underneath the baby and the baby lands on mother's back and mom takes it back up to the nest.

[00:03:49]Then she pushes it out again.

[00:03:52]And the same thing happens, and mom swoops it down, and she goes underneath it, and it lands on her back, and she takes it back up to the nest.

[00:04:00]One time when she pushes it out, and the baby is flopping and struggling, the wind will catch its wings cuz it's falling from a great height, and the wind will catch its wings, and all of a sudden, she'll realize she's flying, and she'll move her wings and flap her wings and and get in the air currents and begin to soar.

[00:04:26]And she'll realize, "Mom knew I was ready to fly. I didn't.

[00:04:32]Mom [snorts] pushed me out. I thought Mom was being cruel, but she was putting me in circumstances where I would use what I had to figure out the rest and learn how to fly."

[00:04:47]And so, what I want you to see from this is when you have grown to not know yourself because of shame, you had to cut shut down and basically fawn and wear masks and adopt roles, and therefore you stop trusting yourself [snorts] because you don't think you're trustworthy, you disconnect from yourself. Now, in recovery, when you start to get to know yourself, you don't know if you're ready to serve. You don't know if you're ready for a certain career. You don't know if you're able to use some of the tools you're learning.

[00:05:20]You don't know if you're ready to go into a relationship again. That's why you need a surrogate parent who's able to watch you, who knows the signs of growth, who knows when you're getting ready, but you don't feel ready.

[00:05:37]Your limbic brain is so afraid of failure, so afraid of bad things happening, that you're overly cautious, and so you need somebody to push you a little bit, and that might feel like they're being mean. That might feel like they they don't care, like they're being cruel to you, but they're doing it cuz they sense you're ready.

[00:05:58]But then you go out and it it looks like you're failing. It looks like you aren't ready. You're flopping around. But then they come and they help you. They rescue you. They get you back up on your feet, and they give you another push out of your comfort zone.

[00:06:14]And then all of a sudden it starts clicking. All of a sudden you start using the tools, and you start to fly.

[00:06:24]That is so helpful to me is that we all need people in our lives who know us even better than ourselves, cuz at the beginning of recovery we really don't know.

[00:06:40]And they're able to lovingly push us from the nest, protect us, make sure we don't fall, and hurt ourself, and work with us until we start to soar.

[00:06:53]The second one is about the learning to trust others. And I love this story of Charles Blondin, who was a tightrope walker back in the 1800s.

[00:07:05]And one day he set up a tightrope across Niagara Falls.

[00:07:10]And as you can imagine, a huge crowd began to gather, and they watched him go back and forth.

[00:07:16]And then just to be dramatic, he did different things. He went across blindfolded. He went across carrying a stove. He went and he stopped halfway, and he just stood there.

[00:07:29]And at one point, he took a wheelbarrow, and he pushed the wheelbarrow across and back.

[00:07:35]And everybody was a cheering him, "You're the greatest. You're wonderful.

[00:07:40]You're You're the best tightrope walker in the world. And Charles Blondin came back to the crowd and he said, "How many of you think that I could take somebody in the wheelbarrow and push them across?"

[00:07:52]And they said, "Oh, yeah, you're so good you could do that."

[00:07:55]And he said, "Well, one of you hop in."

[00:07:58]And nobody moved. And I love that story because what it says is they had intellectual trust, but they weren't quite ready to fully commit to that trust.

[00:08:14]>> [snorts] >> So, let me break that down for how that applies today. When we build trust again after trust has been demolished from our complex trauma childhood, first we just need to watch somebody to see if they're fully trustworthy. We watch their actions. We're not just listening to what they say cuz we know words can be empty. We're watching if they keep their promises, if they do what they say, if they live out their beliefs, if there's no hypocrisy in them. We're observing. And so we're gathering evidence whether or not they're trustworthy. And if we find that they are, now we face an internal battle. Our cortex knows that they're trustworthy, but our limbic brain is still thinking of our history that we have been let down every time we've trusted somebody. And so now we've got this internal war where we have confidence in our cortex and fear in our limbic brain. At some point, if we are going to grow to trust again, our cortex has to win out over our limbic brain. We have to face our fear. Now, this isn't a blind leap of faith where there's no evidence. No, this is a step of faith based on tons of evidence.

[00:09:38]So, the bottom line is our cortex, our intellectual faith, has to translate into action.

[00:09:46]And that means going against our limbic brain with all of its fear.

[00:09:54]You face the fear, you walk into the fear.

[00:09:57]Now, I just want to qualify this. This doesn't mean, like the metaphor of the Niagara Falls and Charles Blondin, that you jump in 100% the first time and commit yourself totally to trust 100%.

[00:10:14]That's usually not wise.

[00:10:16]What I want you to do is be able to go, "I'm going to trust them a little bit.

[00:10:22]Fear's kicking in, but I see enough evidence that I choose to trust a little bit. I am going to have my cortex overpower the limbic brain fear. I have enough evidence to say I'm going to trust the evidence, not the fear.

[00:10:40]Then, if they prove trustworthy, my faith grows, my confidence grows, my trust grows, then I trust them a little bit more, then a little bit more.

[00:10:51]And then trust begins to be rebuilt.

[00:10:54]That takes time. That's not some magical one act event.

[00:11:00]But this metaphor just shows you the internal dynamic of what happens when we are starting to trust again.

[00:11:11]And I hope it helps you just put it in perspective.

[00:11:15]Well, thanks again. If this was helpful, like, subscribe, share, make a comment.

[00:11:21]It helps with the YouTube algorithm so that this material gets out to others.

[00:11:27]Have a great day.

[00:11:28]Bye now.

[00:11:43]>> Mhm.