he did not really care

I recently had a conversation with a British woman who told me about her recent breakup with a man she felt was ‘keeping her a secret.’  He didn’t introduce her to his friends or family, and he never showed affection toward her in public.  He almost acted embarrassed to know her.  She confided that several boyfriends did not show her public respect, and yet going out with these males had become a sort of pattern.

I shared the downfall of my second marriage, how I instantly knew it wasn’t going to work, but denied my intuition and spent four years of my life trying to ‘make a family’ with the wrong man.  My lack of self trust resulted in becoming a single mother five months after my son was born.  I looked for a solution, and found counseling.  I wanted to understand why I kept making similar mistakes with men.

My counselor asked me an important question.  Did I have any trust?  No, I had no trust. I did not trust my own intuition.

The British woman confided that she also felt the same way I had felt.  Something inside her didn’t trust herself, and she didn’t understand why.  She intuitively knew when a man wasn’t right for her, but denied trusting herself, and so she went along with another bad choice, and ended up with the same type of man who harmed her confidence, like an unhappy cycle of loneliness.

I needed my sobriety to discover that trust was not something I could make up by myself.  I needed direction, to believe in something larger than myself.

I chose to trust my dreams.   For decades, my dreams have provided me direction and confidence through images I can connect with, like reliable messages from my subconscious that give me belief.  The dream path led me to understand that I am not the center of the universe.  I can choose to listen and trust myself, or not.

Within a couple of days, the British girl had a profound dream about her first love, an old boyfriend from junior high.  Her relationship with him felt like the root reason for why she made current bad choices.

She decided to take my advice about trusting that her dream had come to her for a healing reason.  She could choose to interpret dream images for herself and make conclusions as how those dream images could improve her lagging self esteem.

She told me that our conversation helped her realize her last relationship was not healthy.  She wanted to change from unhappy patterns that she set up as an adolescent.  I sincerely hope she keeps trusting herself to move forward.

For me, my deepening trust in dreams gave me a foundation that makes me solid.