How Can I Ever Trust Again?

Sitting in the McDonald’s parking lot, I tearfully told my pastor that sex felt dirty and awful, and begged him to stop doing it. He, with a tender expression, took my hand in his, and told me that God had told him that he was to teach me about sex, one of God’s greatest gifts to those he loves, and that my discomfort with sex was simply an indicator of more that I needed to learn and overcome, and that he was willing to be my helper. He told me that it would be slow work, and that I just needed to trust him.

Those experiences of “trust” understandably caused great disillusionment and confusion, and cast a dark shadow on the concept of trust altogether. My instinct to survive the abuse, and to protect my little girl heart, caused me to tuck the tender parts of myself away and offer only a thin surface layer of who I was to the one who called himself my "helper." In the years following my abuse it caused me to do the same to others, including my husband, family, friends, God, and even my children. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but rather an automatic one, and one that enabled me to cope and function in my life. Eventually, after the busyness of college and marriage and the years of parenting babies and toddlers, I slowed enough to notice that I really felt numb, lonely, and disconnected from, not only myself, but the people I most loved in life. I began wanting more out of life than my patterns of survival and self protection allowed, as nothing I experienced or felt ever went more than skin deep.

Beginning my search for more, I knew that my abuse experience played a huge roll in my inability to trust others and entrust myself to others, but I also sensed that I was going to have to make a choice and take a risk to trust another in order to get the poison of my past out of myself and into the light. I think the first step in trusting another with our story is unavoidably scary, in that it is a choice of pure will, but what I experienced after getting my secret out of myself surprised me. I have previously mentioned the question of “When you think of God, what song comes to mind?” When asked that question, the song that came to my mind told me that I believed God himself to be untrustworthy – distant, disapproving, and waiting for an opportunity to punish me for my long list of wrongs committed and allowed. It is not surprising that, as one abused by an authority figure in my life, I would have a distorted image of God – the Father, and the ultimate authority figure! And so I began with a simple honest prayer telling God what I believed about him, and that I had come by my views honestly, and that, if he is not who I believe him to be, he could show me the truth of who he is. I made a choice to fill my mind and soul with scripture, allowing the fact of God’s character as recorded in scripture, straight from the source, free of human interpretation, (Psalm 103, Psalm 139, the Gospel accounts of Jesus), to replace the fiction of who I believed him to be. As the truth seeped in, I began to notice my anchoring shift from the sand of my own isolation and vigilance, to the rock of God as loving, gracious, and prone to weep just as readily as I at the thought of my abuse.

As the lies planted by my abuse fell away, and my trust in the true God grew and deepened, I realized that I didn’t need to worry about trusting others at all, which was a tremendous relief. I used to joke with friends about my rather confining comfort zone and my reluctance to trust others, and yet I found myself increasingly comfortable with new situations and people I didn’t know. What I realized was that it was my definition of trust and safety that had changed. Whereas trust and safety used to have to be evaluated on a case by case, person by person basis, I began to define safety to be wherever my God placed me, trusting that he holds and protects me, and so I need only keep my eyes fixed on him. The truth is that no human being is perfectly trustworthy, and that because of our sinful nature, we will all eventually disappoint and be disappointed. I remember well a picture God gave me before I went into an intense therapeutic setting in which I was afraid to entrust myself to others. The picture was that of me hooked up to a pulley system controlled by God’s hand, by which God could lower me down and pull me up as he saw fit. And so, rather than having to give myself into the hands of another authority figure just because he was, by virtue of his title and position, supposed to be trustworthy, I had only to surrender to God and trust him to be in charge of my safety. I am grateful for the simplicity of needing only to trust in God, and his goodness and faithfulness to keep me safe as he defines it. And so now I can go into what are, in earthly terms, very scary situations, like depositions and press conferences, and, instead of having to appraise the character and motives of everyone with whom I interact, feel only a deep peace, and an anchoring to God and his pulley system of trust and safety.