My values # 1 Trust

Trust

In an earlier post I explored my basic life needs. At the time, I was in complete crisis due to my husband leaving our marriage. I had lost companionship, dreams for the future, family order, stability, self-esteem, emotional and financial security. I had been thrown into a world of chaos. It helped to nurture my basic needs and I spent some months focussing on my home, health, diet and cocooning myself in a familiar safe routine. Gradually I started to heal and come out of my deep pain. I felt I had worked through the issues of our separation and I started focussing on my higher level needs of self-esteem and self-fulfillment.

But there was something holding me back and stopping my progress, something missing, something niggling at me. It was as if one of my basic needs was not being met or there was something I had still not worked through. Then it came to me.

It was trust. I had lost trust.

When you have trust none of the other things in life matter. It comes first and foremost before food, before shelter, before good health and well-being. If you have trust it wraps around you like a warm blanket and protects you at night. It goes with you inside you throughout your day and makes you glow with love and gratitude. Trust makes you see sunshine when the rain comes and the cold winds blow. Trust makes you feel strong so you can conquer your fears. It allows you to speak and stand up for yourself. Trust gives you the confidence to do the right thing and to be true to yourself. Trust is your security, your inner core of happiness and your stability that you take with you wherever you go.

In our marriage we had trust. It was one value we both shared with pride. It was unspoken trust. When you own deep trust, there is no need to speak the words, there is no need to make the affirmation, because it is just there.

In that very first instant of my husband telling me he was leaving me it was the shattered trust that pierced my heart and caused me my greatest pain. A pain so deep that pushing it into my deep sub-conscious was the only way I could survive. That is where I had pushed it on the very first hour of the very first day on my own and there it had remained.

I can find companionship. I can regroup our broken family unit. I can take on board my depleted asset base and begin building my finances. All this is possible in time. What can I do without trust? How can I survive without trust? I need trust. I need to be able to trust.

This is where I have come to the conclusion that focussing on our ‘needs’ first is upside down. Underpinning our needs are our values. It is our values that are at the core of our being. Our values are who we are deep down inside us. Our values give us the blue print for how to live our lives. Our values underpin what we give.

Yes, trust is a ‘need’, something we take. Trust is also a ‘value’, something we give.

Deep down inside me I know that at the core of my being there is still trust, my own inbuilt trust imbedded as a value as the essence of my soul. This trust has not been broken or lost, the value of trust that I live by.

This is where my real healing begins, returning to my own core beliefs and values, and living by them every day. My # 1 value is trust.  I believe that if I live by trust, if I give trust, if I continue to live my own life in a trustworthy fashion; if I trust myself; then I know that in time trust as a ‘need’ will be returned to me. I resolve today that I will hold onto trust as one of my core values.

“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe