Building Trust

Everyone at one time or another has been uncertain about trust, whom to trust, how much to trust or when not to trust. Trust can be defined as the reliance on the integrity, strength, and ability to confide in a person or thing. But what happens when trust is broken? Often, we set up roadblocks that prevent us from maintaining old relationships and building new ones, we create a mental handicap that limits our growth and progression. My biggest mental handicap has been trusting the people closest to me due to my past experiences of betrayal and abandonment.   Mistrust was seeded early in my childhood, followed me through early adulthood, and pruned today to allow me to move forward with my life.
As a child I would drift deep into my thoughts and wonder why so many other kids had a father and I did not have one of my own. He left when I was three years old and would appear sporadically in our lives, leaving us with more questions and even fewer answers about where he had been or how long he would stay. I remember vaguely one easter at the age of five where he brought a basket and a big stuffed bunny. My mother stopped him in his tracks, she had grown tired of his reappearing act. It was as if she had seen what goes on behind the curtains of a magic show and was no longer impressed with the smoke and mirrors presented at the front of the stage. She pulled him aside and said a few words to him and he was never to be seen again. His lack of presence left me feeling abandoned.   There was no good cop to my mom’s bad cop, no male guidance about how a man should treat a woman, nothing. I can’t even call him a father, in my home we refer to him as the Sperm Donor.   I just remember the bunny ears hanging out of the trash bin and he didn’t even say goodbye. This was the start of my broken trust. How could the one man who helped create me, leave me? His void was replaced with self doubt and insecurity. That self doubt and insecurity left me searching for that male figure in...