The Moment You Lose Trust

by AMD, AMDtherapie

Losing trust in your body is a particular kind of pain on levels no-one really talks about. The pain in itself, the dissapointment, the frustration, the grief and fear at losing what or who we think we are. Because no one can feel what it is like to be you. Faced in an unfamiliar and uncertain situation without a clear way ahead. It may begin with pain or varying symptoms that arrived without clear cause, or a system that stopped responding the way you expected it to. Whatever the case may be, the observation can only be made as to the varying ways people express their pain. Mainly through their eyes, even when they try hard to smile. It is both moving and humbling when people have an unwavering determination to keep going, to keep trying to find the answer to how they can get better. To wake up without their physicality or health being a question they don't know how to respond to. To get up and walk without pain. To move without having to think so carefully. Without having to feel that more analyses or effort is needed. Or that worse, they feel they are failing in within themselves.

You are not. Your system is responding to what it feels is protection out of necessity. It is not you, or your effort, your knowledge or who you are. It is a system that overrides your uncertainty, your fears, your doubts with the response that there is a threat that needs protection. So it reponds for you. Before you can think. It's automatic, fast, powerful. It has to be for it to work well and without fail.

It almost becomes a philosophical question, though it is quite the opposite. If your system is keeping you safe but causes painful symptoms, how do we reach it and how do we get round it? We will get to that in a moment.

The body is not the only place trust can be lost. It might be in a person — not necessarily through a single dramatic event, but through the quieter realisation that someone who was supposed to be reliable turned out not to be. It might be in a situation or an environment that felt safe until it didn’t. It might be in yourself — in a decision you made, a response you had, a moment where you felt you fundamentally couldn’t trust your own judgement or your own reactions.

Whatever the source, something very specific happens in the nervous system at that moment.

The system files it. Not as a memory you can access and examine with any degree of neutrality, but as a prediction — a new piece of evidence about what this kind of experience means, and what the appropriate response to anything resembling it should be. From that point forward the nervous system begins scanning for anything similar enough to warrant running that response again. A tone of voice. A particular sensation in the body. A context that carries the emotional signature of the original loss, even when nothing on the surface appears to connect them.

This is how a loss of trust in one person quietly reshapes how you hold yourself in relationships more broadly. How a single experience of the body failing you can expand into a continuous wariness of physical sensation. How one moment of not trusting yourself can become a background layer of self-doubt that surfaces in situations that seem to have nothing to do with where it started. It cascades — not because something is fundamentally failing, but because the nervous system is applying what it learned as widely as possible in order to protect you from experiencing the same thing again.

The original situation is over. But the file keeps running in the background.

And trust — in the body, in other people, in a situation, in yourself — doesn’t return through deciding to trust again. It doesn’t return through understanding why it left, or through reassurance, or through reasoning your way to a different conclusion. Understanding can be part of the process, but it isn’t sufficient on its own, because the file doesn’t live where understanding lives.

Trust returns the same way it was lost — through experience. Through what actually happens next, accumulated slowly enough and safely enough that the nervous system can begin to revise the prediction it formed at the moment things shifted.

What that looks like is different for everyone to a degree. Grief takes its own time and has its own requirements. The body needs to accumulate experiences of safety before the mind can begin to follow. Some need more time than anyone suggests it should take — and that’s not failure, that’s the actual pace of nervous system change. It doesn't simply back down because you have shown it something to the contrary once or twice. Its going to say, "Listen, I've been doing this for a very long time and I have a great deal of evidence that this works- you're alive aren't you? That's me keeping you safe. So if you want me to respond differently to situations, you're going to have to show me that they are. I can't possibly tell that a lion chasing you is not the same as filing your tax return; they look physiologically the same to me. That presentation? You might as well have been jumping out of a plane. Same thing. But if you can genuinely show me that they differ even a little, then ok I can work with that."

The nervous system isn’t the obstacle to trust coming back. It’s where the return has to begin.But to rebuild trust anywhere, takes incremental change. Repeated over time. Until it snowballs in the right direction that tips the scale just enough. To show the system it is safe enough so the alarm bells don't go off. It is not perfection; that is not required. Nor immunity to human design. Instead accepting our imperfections with possibility. Just like learning to do anything again after being wounded or hurt. We rebuild from the inside out. So that the system learns to stop running the file that is no longer required.

If this resonates with your experience of pain or your current situation, please comment with your thoughts. You can also find out more about Shift the Field at amdtherapie.com or listen to our new podcast on Spotify under Shift the Field.