Use This Brené Brown Trust Exercise to Improve Your Self Worth
Do you trust yourself? Does it surprise you for me to ask that question in a video about self-worth? During the most painful periods of my life, I can honestly say that my answer to the question, "Do I trust myself?" was always no. Self-worth and self-trust are intricately linked. I would argue that you can't have one without the other. So, in this video, I'm going to teach you my favorite tool for building self-trust, and therefore self-worth.
Watch the video below, or read on for the full transcript.
If you are neurodivergent or a spoonie and are tired of doing things the neurotypical, able-bodied, and toxic way, this is the place for you to be. Subscribe to my channel and hit the bell to be notified when I post a new video every other Tuesday.
Don't let the productivity tips fool you. I'm here to help you love and trust yourself. Helping my clients develop unconditional self-trust and innate self-worth is and always has been my main goal. Now it's your turn, so let's get started.
Today's tool is called The Trust Jar, and it's inspired by the trust jar analogy Brené Brown uses in her work. Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston and has spent the past two decades studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy. Most people know her from her TED Talk on the power of vulnerability, and her six New York Times bestselling books.
Brene's original analogy uses a jar of marbles as a representation of the trust in a relationship between one person and another person. The more marbles in the jar, the more trust. The less marbles in the jar, the less trust. It takes time and effort to add marbles to the jar. However, it can only take one very negative experience to suddenly dump all of the marbles out of the jar. And why it can be hard to heal relationships that have gone through something like that, we don't realize that it's gonna take just as much time to fill up the jar again as it did the first time, if not longer, because of the betrayal of trust. I love this analogy for relationships and I have found that using it to think of your relationship with yourself and how you trust yourself is just as, if not more, powerful and profound.
If you're new to this analogy for trust, let me know what you think about it in the comments below, especially if it helped you have an a-ha moment.
So, for the modified trust jar analogy, when you're trying to build self-trust, that jar of marbles simply represents self-trust and a marble goes into the jar every time you decide and follow-through on a safe expectation. If you're not familiar with what that is, definitely go back and check out my last post, 'cause I talked about it a lot. What I have found, however, when using this analogy in relationship to how you view and trust yourself, as opposed to how you trust or don't trust another person, is that it is counterproductive to also include the 'empty the jar when there has been a betrayal of trust.'
To lose marbles in relationship to yourself, especially if you have a history of trauma in any way shape or form, that can be deeply painful and triggering and it's not helpful. And furthermore, I have found working with my clients that because of their histories of trauma, the smallest "failure" (and I'm using air quotes for a reason, because I don't consider them failures), will prompt them to remove a marble or whatever they're using to collect in a jar. It will prompt them to remove something from the jar, one or more. And that's so painful. That's not what the self-trust jar of marbles is designed to do. Instead, use the jar as proof that you have successfully followed through on things in the past.
Often, when we're faced with fear, anxiety, and insecurity, we forget everything we've ever done right for ourselves, everything we've ever done that is kind for ourselves. And the self-trust jar helps to combat that. So, instead of allowing your trained habit of shaming yourself to affect your self-trust jar, we never remove things from the jar, we only add. So, if you did not meet a safe expectation, all you do is you don't add a marble to the proverbial jar at that point in time. You don't remove any, because when you are striving to build trust with yourself, it is really painful, and it tends to be not just a one step forward, two steps back, it tends to be a one step forward, 10 steps back if you take marbles from the jar when you think you've failed. Because then marbles in the jar represent trust, yes, but marbles removed from the jar simply reinforce your patterns of shaming and judging yourself harshly. They only serve to reinforce how you were taught to view failure. And so, by taking things out of your jar when you did something quote-unquote wrong, it only serves to reinforce the trauma you have already experienced if you're someone who has experienced trauma.
What I want my clients to do with this exercise is to put more emphasis on the positive. And the reason why I feel that isn't toxic positivity is because if you are drawn to me and my work, and especially if you're already one of my clients, your brain does a good enough job of reinforcing the things that you struggle with, and the things that hurt, and the things that drive you to feel ashamed. Your brain is really efficient at that stuff and that's why you're drawn to me, so we can get rid of that. Your ability to think critically and to understand negative consequences of things, you're not gonna lose that by focusing on the positive with a self-trust jar. Trust me. (laughs)
The other thing I wanna say is, while in my program and in my coaching I tend to very explicitly link safe expectations with putting a marble in the jar, that doesn't mean that's the only time you can put a marble in the jar. So, just like in the land of productivity where you can have a to-do list and a done list, or what some of my clients call a ta-da list (I love that name), you can treat your self-trust jar the same. So, if at the end of the day when you're reflecting on your day, you realized, "Oh, wow, my stomach was hurting, so I lay down and gave myself 15 minutes to rest so I could feel a little bit better." That doesn't necessarily fall under the strict safe expectations follow-through thing that I talk about in my program. But that still is evidence that you did something in alignment with self-trust that day.
I want the trust jar to be either a metaphorical or literal, if you want to actually get a jar and fill it with marbles or something else, something for you to look at and realize how far you've come. Because when we have a history of being infinitely unreasonably hard on ourselves, it becomes practically impossible to see where we have treated ourselves well, where we have followed through on things that are important and meaningful to us. And so, by creating a self-trust jar, it is irrefutable evidence that we have done good things for ourselves, that we have done well by ourselves. And that can be such a profound experience to see the jar filling up over time.
And again, if you "fail" one day, and I don't consider it failure, we all have times or days and sometimes strings of days where we're really struggling to do right by ourselves, as it were. But that, that is not reason enough to empty the jar when it's a self-trust concept. I feel like that emptying can be helpful when it's another person because another person is, by definition, outside of your control, that that can be a more accurate representation of what's going on between you and the other person. But when it's your relationship with yourself, I think it's also honoring that a lot of the things that we experience and we do as individuals, as human beings, are also outside of our control.
That's a lot of what I talk about with my clients, particularly those who are, like myself, are neurodivergent and/or chronically ill, because neurodivergence is outside of our control. We're born that way. Or if it's a result of a trauma, for example, it happened to us, we still, there's nothing we can do about it. We can't rewire our brain. And similarly, with chronic illness, depending on what illness you have, there may be certain things under your control to help yourself feel better more often than not, but still, the actual mechanism of the illness in your body is not something that you have conscious cognitive control over. I can't just think to my heart to stop being tachycardic. (Man, I wish I could do that, that sounds great.) And I think what happens when you remove marbles from your self-trust jar, if you're someone who has a history of being really hard on yourself, there's an element of forgetting that there was so much outside of your control in that moment.
To, in this model, the way I see it, accurately have reason to remove a marble from the jar would mean that you had 100% control over every aspect of that circumstance, and that's literally impossible.
So, I know I'm beating this metaphor into the ground. But I've seen my clients struggle with it and have used it as yet another tool to do harm to themselves with. And that's what I want to speak to, because I don't want this self-trust jar analogy to be that for you. I want this to be a tool to help you feel better about yourself more and more over time. It is not designed to be a tool to, equal and opposite, make you feel worse and worse about yourself over time.
Hopefully, I have spoken to that at length enough that that makes sense. But if any of you have any questions about it, don't hesitate to ask them in the comments below, and I will get back to you as soon as I can.
There you have it, my take on Brene Brown's trust jar analogy to help you develop self-trust and increase your self worth.
If you're curious about what I do as a coach, I help neurodivergent spoonies who are done feeling like a failure and a burden go from doing things the neurotypical, able bodied, and toxic way, to mastering a toolset for genuine self-care and a bias toward action, so they can finally believe in and trust themselves enough to spend their precious time and energy the way they want to. The main way I work with clients is through my signature course, The Action Navigator. And if you wanna learn more about that, check out this link.
Check out this post next for more information on setting safe expectations.
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