Episode 42: Being Brave Enough To Trust Again

Ever said, "I will never trust ANY man ever again..."? Yup - me, too. I've said that.

But let's think about this. What's the fallout of making a decision like that? You tie the whole world of LOVE to one relationship - or a few relationships that didn't work out.

You end up alone. Shut down. And in a pretty dreary place. Look how much magic you could be leaving on the table!

In this podcast we talk about how one woman who found herself suspicious, not only of men, but of everyone, came back to find the love of her life. She dug down deep and discovered her "grit". But she also gave herself a lot of grace to heal, to grow and to open again.

Guess what! You have this inside you, too. And activating your grit and your grace will bring out a true beauty you may not even realize is there. That's attractive. And that's BRAVE!

PSST!  Do you still want the magic but are afraid to trust someone again? Does love seem like it's for everyone else but you? So what if you're pushing beyond 50...Something is standing between you and all your dreams. My passion is to help you discover what that is and open your heart to everything you want. Send me an Private Message on IG and ask me anything.  @braveenoughforlove

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Transcript

Episode 42: Being Brave Enough to Trust Again

0 (3s):
What do you do when you're a woman pushing beyond 50 and you wish you could just fast forward, past the dating part, how do you find the love? And the guy you know is out there. You step up to be Brave Enough. You refuse to give up on the magic. You create a man plan and you go for it one day at a time, one date at a time. I'm Bernice, McDonald, your Love Coach. And that's what I had to do. And that's what we're talking about in this podcast. Brave Enough For Love.

0 (44s):
So come on in...

1 (49s):
Woo-hoo! Welcome back. We are going to be talking about something today that is so essential for you to get through anything that you go through on your Path including the devastation of a broken heart. Including your divorce. Including not being able to trust again. And that's the main thing that I want to focus on today is the fact that many times we tell ourselves the Story that says, "I can't trust again". And when that Story is present in your mind and in your heart, it's going to cloud everything that you do.

1 (1m 35s):
So how do we flip it? How do we change that story? Flip to a new page and rewrite that because face it, that's a story that could be, have tendrils that go all the way back to your past, right? There are many reasons, not just whatever your recent breakup was, that can cause you to lose your trust in life. You know, I'm always poking around the internet, trying to find stories about women who have gone through really difficult times and have made it through and come out the other side and done just that - recreated the story of their life.

1 (2m 18s):
Recently, I came across a woman named Shannon de Garmo on a site, which by the way, is called a Grit and Grace Life which really attracted me to it. I encourage you to go check it out. She has a podcast and everything there too. But one thing that Shannon said in her story was that as that caught my eye was that it took years for her to rebuild her trust. She said, "My life had been broken into two parts. Pre divorce Shannon who was trusting and naive"(which I'm sure all of us can relate to) ..."and post-divorce Shannon who looked at everyone with distrusting eyes".

1 (3m 2s):
Now that's what happens to us. Remember, we are walking on a Path, you on your own Path, you're a heart that's born into this world. That's the beginning of your Path. When you die, that Path will end. And in between are all the decisions you have to make about all the stuff that happens to you, right? Divorce is like a BOMB going off. It says, if you have something that happens blowing up right beside you, that troll totally overturns your world. Pre divorce Shannon said she was trusting and naive.

1 (3m 47s):
We all believe we all have those times before those things happen to us where we're just walking along, minding our own business, enjoying our life, doing the best we can. And then POOF-whammo! This bomb goes off and everything turns upside down. The fallout is that, of course, we lose our footing for a while. We lose our grounding. Now being Brave is facing that very thing. Being Brave is being willing to not numb ourselves. And that's what Shannon said.

1 (4m 28s):
She decided not to do. She wasn't going to numb her pain by chasing men or by being so busy she couldn't stop to think. And I remember going through those times of like, no, I can't go home because it's too quiet. I can't go home. I don't want to be by myself. I need to be with somebody. I need to do something. I need to stay busy. That's a way - if you're doing that, you're trying to avoid the pain in your life. The best thing you can do is to dig down deep for what it takes, the courage that you need, the grit, which is by the way, the perseverance, the passion, the persistence to do what it takes to reach a long-term goal.

1 (5m 20s):
You need to find the quiet. You need to face your heart. Being Brave is doing just that, facing your heart and realizing that you have feelings. That those feelings are feelings of fear, feelings of not being enough, feelings of being devastated and not knowing which way to go or what way to turn or how to think, how to feel in the future. What you don't want to do and this needs to be your WHY, my dear ladies, you need to not be bitter. This was my why.

1 (5m 60s):
And I hope that you're going to latch onto that. When it comes to not trusting again, that's what happens, is that we become like Sleeping Beauty in the castle. Remember, we prick our finger on the pain and we'd go to sleep. We let our hearts go to sleep because the pain puts us into a state where we don't want to feel pain anymore. And so what the danger here is that we fall into a place where we never feel pain again. Your WHY needs to be NOT to become that person, not to numb and not to put yourself to sleep so that you don't put yourself at risk.

1 (6m 40s):
That's not the solution. The solution is NOT to build that wall around our castle. That's so thick nobody can ever penetrate it again. It's not to let the Fiery FEAR Dragon blow his fire over us so that we stay in our Fear Story. So first you need to not, you need to know your "why" you don't want to do this. Do not become bitter and do become stronger. Instead of better become stronger in order to do that. You need to listen to your Fear Story.

1 (7m 21s):
What are you telling yourself? If you're Fear Story, is in this case, is, "I will never trust again. I am so suspicious of everybody who comes into my life". And I still find myself wrestling with this because of all the people in the past that have let me down, because of the things that have happened where I thought it was going in a certain direction and it didn't. Somebody changed my world. Somebody rocked me. A bomb went off. And my world changed. And so I'm wary. I don't trust. However, I'm going to do, I'm going to tell you what Shannon tells us to help us to flip our Story from our Fear Story.

1 (8m 10s):
"I can't trust again" to, "Yes, I can trust again. I am going to become stronger and I'm going to do love differently this time." In order to get to that place, you have to do these things. First of all, she said that she had to face her situation. She had to NOT NUMB. As I've said, she decided she was not going to let busy-ness force her into a place where she didn't feel she was going to face her feelings and, ladies, that takes being Brave.

1 (8m 53s):
That takes grit to dig down deep and find that determination in you that rises up and phases a situation and says, yes, this is the way it is. And I'm going to accept that this is what happened. So first of all, you're going to face your situation. And second of all, you're going to not go to things that numb you. Those can be all kinds of, of things. Eating can be a change for you so that you don't have to face the real feeling. Drinking.

1 (9m 38s):
Drugs. Partying. Working too long. Being so absorbed in the life of others that you do not face your own life. Those are all ways that we numb ourselves. Don't do this because, when you do this, those feelings won't be dealt with and you are going to end up in a bitter place. You want to face your feelings and you want to avoid the things that are making numb. You need to face your feelings like this. And I loved how she tells us in her Story what she had to do. She had lost her trust. She was seeing that she didn't trust other people.

1 (10m 19s):
And she recognized the fact that, really, at the bottom was this - that she didn't trust herself. When red flags would come up in the past with other people - And even this can happen when you're dating - red flags come up but you push through it when you're not really acknowledging your feelings and you don't trust yourself. You ignore the red flag and you say, "It'll be all right. It's just me. It's how I'm seeing it". Or "He'll change". Or, "I will work to fix this situation. I know that I can control this and it'll be better down the road".

1 (10m 60s):
What Shannon said she had to do was to face the fact that the red flags were signals to her. That there was something in her that was intuitively sensing that something was off. And, you know, as, as women, we have incredible intuition. And that that's exactly what happens is that we get red flags in all kinds of situations. We sense that something is off. You need to trust that gut instinct. Let me tell you one story and I don't want to scare you off dating. Do not let this scare you off dating.

1 (11m 42s):
I was exactly at this point in my healing. I had taken a couple of months and I was backing off because a friend had told me. You need to look at your own heart. You need to take some time and let your heart heal. Really feel where you're at really feel what is going on in you and start to let some things go to, to let the healing happen. And so I was doing that. And when I was ready at a point where I was ready to date again - to test out the waters - I met a guy online and I went on a date with him and we ended up talking for like two or three hours sitting there.

1 (12m 28s):
And there was just something I was sensing about him that was off. Now, one of the things I had committed myself to was that I was going to give a guy more than one date. If he wanted to go out with me again, I would give him another chance unless there was something I was totally not there, right? So I agreed to see this guy again but still this feeling inside me was growing. There's something that is off. And it turns out I was right. Because I can't remember if it was the second or the third time we were out. Very soon, anyways, he ended up telling me that he was a convicted pedophile.

1 (13m 12s):
And he started to tell me the stories of what he had done and how he had done it. And I was so freaked out. I got out of there as quickly as possible. I, I just made a reason, an excuse to leave and I got out. That's not to scare you from dating, like I said. I was fine after that. What it did for me was tell me that I needed to trust my spidey senses. They were working. And then that's how you learn to trust yourself is to believe in your gut. Believe in your gut feelings. When something is off, you need to explore that. Sometimes it takes talking something through.

1 (13m 56s):
Sometimes observing for a while, just waiting it out. But you need to trust yourself. Let me tell you, when you get to that place where you can trust yourself, like Shannon tells us in her Story, you will have an unbelievable confidence in the fact that you can take care of yourself. You will know when something is off and you will follow that through until you get to a place of peace where you feel okay about it. In Shannon's case, she flipped her Courage Story, her Fear Story, to a Courage Story. She got to the place where she said like, you can too.

1 (14m 38s):
"I am Brave. And I will grow who I am through this. I am not going to let this Bomb going off on my Path, make me bitter and keep me from the rest of my life. Her courage story... "I am Brave and I will face this head on, not hide from it. I am Brave. And I will now allow my spidey senses to lead me and trust myself first. I will trust myself." Shannon says it took her about three years to get to that place.

1 (15m 18s):
And during those three years, she had a good friend who was trying to get her to meet this guy who was a gym teacher in their kid's school. She had some hesitations, of course, and she actually hadn't been dating very much. But after saying no, no, no for those three years, she finally agreed to go. Yes, she went to meet him, but she said, "I'm not meeting him alone. I want to be with people". And so they arranged to meet at a restaurant with a small group of people. Well, she and her friend drove together. And as they pulled up, this guy walked up the sidewalk and her friend pointed him out.

1 (15m 60s):
Shannon said, "We both screamed at the top of our lungs. Why? Who knows why girls scream when they see boys, even divorced girls". And I would add, "Even divorced girls in their fifties, sixties, seventies". We all respond to same When we see a guy that we think we are maybe going to like. Well, in this case, Shannon said that it was so easy. She said, "We laughed and told stories. It was the best night. It was the beginning". And they ended up getting married just over a year later.

1 (16m 44s):
My lady, you are already Brave. You've been through so much in your life. You have that grit inside. You have what it takes to have a Shannon story like this. You need to find that grit. And I love that word "grit" because it's like something to hang onto. Something that is strong. Something that is going to get you through anything. It's perseverance. It's determination. It's passion to reach your goal. And if your goal, in this case, is to learn to trust again, you can do it by flipping that Fear Story of "I will never trust again"

1 (17m 31s):
to, "Yes, I can trust. I'm going to do things differently. I am going to trust my gut feeling and I'm going to be able to take care of myself." So we are going to talk more about grit and how it can help us to Brave Enough For Love in the next few episodes so make sure that you tune in. I would love to hear from you so you want to send me a private message on Instagram. Please come and follow me because I'm always building on these things on my posts on Instagram, on videos and everything I do there in support of what we're talking about.

1 (18m 17s):
About becoming Brave Enough For Love. So

0 (18m 20s):
Until the next podcast, which I hope you will tune in for, I want to ask you one thing. I want to ask you to Never stop believing in the magic because it's out there. You can be Brave Enough. You are Brave Enough to go for love. You have everything you need inside you including that grit. Okay. I will talk to you in the next podcast.

PSST!  Do you still want the magic but are afraid to trust someone again? Does love seem like it's for everyone else but you? So what if you're pushing beyond 50...Something  else is standing between you and all your dreams. My passion is to help you discover what that is and open your heart to everything you want. Send me an Private Message on IG and ask me anything.  @braveenoughforlove