Liberate Your Story Podcast

Thou Shalt Not Trust Thyself.

Sometimes I wondered if this was the 11th commandment in the Bible. The one specifically made for women.

On the 6th day God made Adam, according to the Hebrew poem in Genesis.

After Adam had a chance to frolic through nature and meet all the animals he named, God decided he needed a more suitable companion.
Adam was alone in the midst of all of nature. So… God made Eve…FOR Adam.

So we are only a bit over a week into creating a cosmos, a planet, all of nature, animals and a man…and God decides MAN needed something… and WOMAN was to answer to that need.

I was taught in my churches that it’s because woman has the attributes that man didn’t have. We completed him.

And that my purpose was to complete man as his helpmate.

Now hang in there with me…I’m not trying to trigger every sensory response in your body at once. I’m trying to lay out a core belief we have about who we are and why.

I was taught that woman domesticated the wildness of man and fulfilled the ability to procreate and populate the earth. Woman was a very important part of Adam’s existence.

I was also taught that woman was the weaker of the creations.

You see... it was Eve that fell into temptation and caused Adam to sin.

She offered him the fruit of the forbidden tree.

Because of this act, humanity had now experienced sin. Man (in the general sense of mankind) wanted to be like God and that was not acceptable to God.

They were removed from the utopia of the Garden of Eden and Adam was cursed to hard work while Eve was cursed labor pains and service to man.

Whew…that’s a lot of belief system instilled into us with 3 relatively short chapters of a very long book.

Different factions of the Christian faith will apply this teaching of the poem in different ways. Some will heap heavier burdens on women than others.

But most WILL still lead us back to one core belief. “Woman can not be trusted.”
My fundametalist background would also say “she will fall to temptation and needs Man to lead her so as not to lead them both into sin.”

I honestly can’t think of a more destructive belief on our planet than this one.

It has seeped into every culture, every religion, every government throughout history. It has created the idea that women are useful, not complete and weaker.

My previous religion would also taught that I could not teach other men, speak among men in biblical discussion, be an elder or leader in my church (unless it was children or women)
and that having children with my husband was my ultimate calling.

The depth of this belief system was that I should not and could not trust myself. I would need a man to help with making decisions and having intuition.
Me alone was not enough and could be dangerous to my own well being.

Think I’m being extreme?
Take just a quick moment to consider “pay equality” in the workplace.
Consider the types of jobs society deems women more suitable for.
Consider segregated sports.
Consider what has just happened in the Supreme Court by removing the right for a woman to make her own decisions about her body.

I don’t think I’m being extreme.
I think we live within a systemic belief system about women.

But if I have the belief that I am not trustworthy all on my own…then I will live in such a way that makes room for others to not find me trustworthy too.
It has a ripple effect.
It creates an imbalance and unjust society of values and worth based on a few chapters of a book…a book written by men.

So…am I just man bashing today? No. And may we never just swing the pendulum the opposite way. That’s not how justice works.

What I am saying is that there is a very treacherous road we journey BACK to trusting ourselves.

I found this Webster definition profound.
“To believe that someone is good and honest and will not harm you, or that something is safe and reliable.”

Do you believe you are good?
If this is where we start in the definition of trust, it is quite telling WHY we find trust in ourselves so difficult…we don’t actually believe we are good.

I didn’t believe I was good or even safe for most of my life. This belief had nothing to do with my moral choices or principles.

It had everything to do with that core doctrine of my faith system… that mankind was inherently evil or not good.
AND the second core doctrine that woman deceived man resulting in needing to be led/guided/instructed by man so as not to be further deceived.

When this is your world and self view, then the ability to trust yourself becomes not only difficult but simply irrelevant.

It’s irrelevant because the goal isn’t to gain trust in yourself.
The goal is to trust God.
More of Him. less of me, right?

When the focus of our being is set on God, then we will take our eyes off of ourselves…until it starts leaking out and boiling over.
We start questioning our equality.
We start feeling angry towards our roles and even our relationships.
We resent the opposite sex and quite possibly even sex itself.
We may even resent ourselves for seemingly “falling short” all the time.
We don’t believe we are enough all on our own.

So how do we learn to trust ourselves?

We will have to change our beliefs. We will have to stop filtering ourselves through the systems of belief that someone else created for us.

Unraveling…releasing from the threads so tightly woven into our internal navigation system…
can be the hardest work we do.
Learning to lay a new foundation for the relationships we have with ourselves, opens us up to both healing and opportunity.

Believing that you are good means that you can commune with yourself for THE MOST honest life experience possible.
It means you have within you a guidance system that can operate from the abundance of goodness that makes you who you are.

Can you imagine… just for a moment… what it would feel like in your body to know that you have everything within you to make all the decisions that need to be made?
Can you feel it?
The visual I get is from a scene in Grey’s Anatomy where Dr. Shepard takes her Wonder Woman stance in the OR right before she starts a brain surgery.
It’s like “summoning the Inner Super hero”…and that super hero… is you.
You’re not being rescued from yourself anymore.
You are already everything you need to be.

Deep within us we know that we can…We CAN trust ourselves. We just haven't had permission to.
So…I give you permission, if you need it.
You have permission to trust yourself.
To be your very own SuperHero.

I actually think women are these incredibly intuitive beings that humanity should look to during difficult and challenging times.

Woman has the amazing ability to see what isn’t so readily available to our sight and tap into depths of her subconscious being in a way that isn’t taught…it’s just done.
She has KNOWING that is quite profound.
And maybe this is why men of old (and maybe of today) are so afraid of them.

But… that’s just my personal opinion leaking through.

May you trust in the goodness that IS you.

You are good and worthy of your own trust.

The world should trust you.

Liberate your goodness and you liberate your story.