The Confidence Coach - trust in relationships

0:02 A listener production. This podcast aims to provide general information only and is not intended to be a substitute for psychological therapy. If any of the topics discussed raise issues for you, please seek advice from a trained psychologist, and if you're struggling, you can always call Lifeline on one three one one one four. Hi, and welcome to the Confidence Coach, the podcast for people who struggle with self confidence, question their self worth, or have a persistent nagging voice in their head that tells them they're not good enough. I'm your Hostcast done. I'm a clinical and coaching psychologist, and in each episode, we'll start with a real person sharing their confidence struggle with me in their own words via a voice memo. I'll share with you ideas and tools that you can apply to help boost your self esteem and live a more confident life. Today we're going to hear from Sam. Hi Cass.

1:12 My name is Sam. I'm just sharing with you my confidence struggle. So I grew up in the eighties in a household where children were to be seen and not heard. I also grew up with a father that was a serial cheat, So I have relationship issues in where I refuse to trust a lot of people. So even my husband, I trust him now, but there's still that doubt there, and I don't let people get too close because I'm worried that they will leave. I think that's all good luck.

1:52 What Sam is talking about here is very much an attachment issue. So as very young children, our primary relationship is often with our care rightes with our parents, and the dynamic in that relationship forms the template or the blueprint for our later adult relationships. An attachment theory says that based on how effectively your parents were able to meet your needs and how reliable they were and trustworthy they were, you will develop either a secure attachment or an insecure attachment. And everybody would love to have a secure attachment. And that means that you basically learn that people can be trusted, that you are a worthy, lovable person, the world's a safe place, that you will have support to regulate your emotions, that somebody will be there to validate how you feel and support you through your feelings.

2:51 The reality is that only slightly over half of the population has a secure attachment and the other forty percent has some variation of an insecure attachment. Sam has witnessed this very important relationship as being unstable, as being not secure and not faithful. And there has been some research that seventy five percent of children feel betrayed by a cheating parent. Essentially, this person that you relied upon to be there for you is not the person that they said they were. This person couldn't be trusted, and if a parent can't be trusted, then who can be Really eighty percent of children who had a parent who was unfaithful said that it affected their attitude towards love and relationships, and seventy percent said that they believed it impacted their ability to trust others. So what Sam's describing is really not that uncommon, I guess. The other thing that's worth noting is that as little children, emotional experiences that are negative have a much stronger and more lasting impact on our developing brains and our future behaviors. And this is the negativity bias at work. Basically, things that are painful imprint really strongly so that you learn not to do that again. You learn effectively what is safe and what

4:25 is not safe. In Sam's case, a significant adult in her life has proven themselves to be untrustworthy and so therefore she is left to wonder who is able to be trusted. Then if the person that you love and respect and who keeps you safe teaches you one thing and then acts in a different way, then you're left to wonder what you can actually rely on in the world. So that's just a shaky foundation upon which to build any relationship going forward. The pathway towards creating more confidence and feeling more secure in relationships is about recognizing when something from your past is showing up in your present and it actually has nothing to do with the relationship that you're in now or the person that is in front of you right now, and it is everything to do with old conditioning from your childhood. And one really helpful technique that you might be able to use in this situation is called name it to tame it. So essentially this is exactly as it sounds. In the moment when you feel that you are being gripped by an intense, overwhelming emotion, which is often a fear a panic, might be a lot of stories in your head about whether

5:56 he still loves you, or whether he's cheating on you, whether he can be trusted or she can be trusted, and to stop in that moment and to identify what it is that you're experiencing, what you're feeling, what you are thinking, and to recognize that this is something from the past, this is not to do with the present. Just naming the emotion that you feel has a way of reducing the intensity of that emotion. So it can also be really helpful to tell people, particularly the people who are closest to you, to share with them some of what is happening for you so that they can better empathize with what you're going through, so that they can hopefully take things less personally. If you're able to bring them in to be vulnerable enough to let them know what you're feeling and what you're thinking and where you think that's coming from, then they're more likely to be able to be available to you and to support you through that experience. Healthy adult relationships can also very much help to heal an insecure attachment. So, no matter what your early experiences were, having an adult relationship with somebody who is consistently available, who is emotionally open to you, who is trustworthy and who trusts you and who treats you with respect can help you to create what is

7:29 called earned security. So earned security comes about when you have enough corrective emotional experiences that you essentially reprogram those early core beliefs and you lose some of that earlier conditioning that had you believing that people couldn't be trusted. So obviously, what you want to be able to do is stay in that relationship for long enough and to have consistent positive interactions with that person so that you can build up that earned security, and it's going to help you to have a longer lasting relationship the more that you can actually be honest about what's going on for you. So if you take one thing of value away from this episode, I hope that you remember that strategy, name it to tame it. In the moment when you are being gripped by an intense, overwhelming emotion, whatever it might be, if you can pause in that moment and name what it is that you're feeling and recognize in that moment that that emotion is being triggered by something that happened in your past and that it doesn't have anything to do with what's happening in the present, then that will go a long way to helping you diffuse that emotion. And to come back to the present and deal with this moment. And if you're able to continue to do that every time you feel anxiety in your relationship,

9:03 over time, you will build a much stronger sense of confidence in yourself and in your relationship. Thank you so much for listening to the Confidence Coach podcast. If you have a confidence challenge that you'd like my help with, send me a voice memo. You can do that on my Instagram account at cast done underscore XO, or you can just use the voice recorder on your phone and email it to the Confidence Coach at casdone dot com and I look forward to helping you with another confidence challenge on our next episode. Listener