I keep bringing this reading to my therapist's office but we have had some other big ones to cover. I plan on talking more about it next visit (after the holiday)
We can trust Ourselves by Melody Beattie in the Language of Letting Go 11/27
For many of us, the issue is not whether we can trust another person again; it's whether we can trust out own judgement again.
"The last mistake I made almost cost my my sanity," said one recovering woman who married a sex addict. "I can't afford to make another mistake like that."
Many of us have trusted people who went on to deceive, abuse, manipulate, or otherwise exploit us because we trusted them. We may have found these people, charming, kind, decent. There may have been a small voice that said "No-something's wrong." Or we may have been comfortable with trusting that person and shocked when we found our instincts were wrong.
The issue may then reverberate through our life for years. Our trust in other may have been shaken, but our trust in ourselves may have been shattered worse.
How could something feel so right, flow so good and be such a total mistake? We may wonder. How can I ever truste my selection process again, when it showed itself to be so faulty?
We many never have the answers. I believe I needed to make certain "mistakes" to learn critical lessons I'm not certain I would have otherwise learned. We cannot let our past interfere with our ability to trust ourselves. We cannot afford to function with fear.
If we are always making the wrong decision in business or in love, we may need to learn why we insist on defeating ourselves.
But most of us do improve. We learn. We grow from our mistakes. Slowly, in increments, our relationships improve. Our business choices improve. Our decision about how to handle situation with friends or children improve. Oure decision about how to handle situations with friends or children improve. We benefit from our mistakes. We benefit from our past. An is we have made mistakes, we needed to make them in order the learn along the way.