Balance and Trust

Life is like an ongoing effort to balance the teeter totter but sometimes the trust needed for this can have many lifelong lingering struggles. As a child I remember walking over to the teeter tooter at the playground, standing there, looking down at the seat that sits fully supported on the ground and realizing I need to trust someone else to enjoy this playground toy that was supposed to be fun.  

Trust, as a child I am not sure I fully understood this and not knowing what this was still helped me feel like I needed to hope someone else will not hurt me. Putting trust into this other child who runs over to say they want to sit on the other side and have fun with me was either a fun experience or one that taught me my first lesson that maybe others might intentionally or unintentionally hurt me.

So, as the teeter totter ride begins, we go up, and we go down, and fearing the ride up will not hurt or more importantly make me lose my balance and fall to the ground, trusting the other child to balance me and not hurt me was the first experience of learning that I need to trust who I let play with me on not just this playground but in my entire playground of my childhood life.

This trust was a lesson learned quickly as the other child lets their end hit the ground hard causing much more fear and pain and now I am hanging in the air fearful that the child I trusted won’t just get off and let me fall to the ground while in my seat.  How many times do we continue to trust another child to not cause us fear of trusting and causing us to avoid this fun playground toy?

As I grew up and struggled with trust not only of a child but also now of adults, I struggled with relying on others to keep me balanced and not hurt me. Now at my age I have lots of apprehension, fear that others are not balancing me to keep me safe and more importantly, I am recognizing my trigger of not trusting others and how I feel when I don’t feel I can trust them and they might hurt me.

Understanding this trigger, and more importantly my sensitivity, has allowed me to protect myself when I feel this hidden feeling and understand how I react. My reactions are sometimes more profound that I was triggered when I don’t always recognize it when it happens. So now, I trust myself, my intuitiveness and I balance who and what I get involved with either in my personal or professional life. Either way, I avoid the chance of being hurt and now I trust ‘me’ even more to protect me in this huge adult playground of life.