Do You Trust Too Quickly? Repairing Mother Wound Trust Patterns

If trusting feels like a risk you’re tired of paying for, I want you to know: it makes sense. Mother wound trust patterns happens when love and safety didn’t reliably live in the same place. Mother wound trust patterns can make you mistake intensity for intimacy, silence for peace, and familiar pain for proof you’re home—even when you’re capable, self-aware, and “know better.” This piece is the start of a reset: learning to recognise your cues of safety, ask what you’re trusting and why, and rebuild a steadier relationship with trust.

We were on a wooden sailboat between islands in the Philippines when the guide stopped and told us we’d have a swim break at a spot filled with beautiful underwater life.

(Yeah, in the last blog, you travelled with me on another memory through SE Asia—probably persistence grey skies here, so give a girl a moment :))

I’m a very good swimmer and feel completely at ease in water, but I’m a terrible diver.

I know how to jump like a rock dropping straight down, but not that elegant arrow-like dive.

I climbed up to the second deck of the boat, wearing my large snorkelling goggles, and somehow decided to attempt exactly what I didn’t know how to do, and jumped overboard head-first.

It was rather a high jump, and because I hardly ever dive head-first, I didn’t know I needed to remove my goggles.

I climbed back up the rickety steps of the boat looking like I’d walked out of a horror film — blood streaming from my forehead, cut by the goggles’ lenses that had completely shattered upon impact with the water.

It could have been worse.

I could have damaged my eyes, and who knows how — or when — I could have received proper medical care, stranded in the middle of the sea off Palawan Island.

This is how I often think about the way undermothered women give away their trust—you possess certain skills, you have experience, yet still you dive head-first into relationships—sometimes landing with manageable emotional bruises, sometimes crashing into something far more painful.

“But Shelly,” you might think now, “I don’t think at all that I can trust. I just hesitate, or don’t make any move at all, or somehow get hijacked by dissociation and do things I don’t even know why.”

When women tell me “I’ve got trust issues”, my response is:

It’s not that you don’t know how to trust. It’s that you rarely stop to ask:

“What exactly am I trusting — and why?”

That single question interrupts mother wound trust patterns at the exact point they usually take over—before you even realise you’ve made a choice.

This is a massive shift in perspective: learning to notice what drives your trust.

Helping you flesh that out is how you heal the mother wound and recover your relationship with trust at its roots:

🍒 You might trust the familiar inner voice that tells you to stay quiet at the gym when someone shares an opinion you disagree with, rather than sharing your well-informed views

🍒 You might trust the person who fell head-over-heels in love with you, wanting you to be the centre of their world, while ignoring the red flags that remind them of your mother

🍒 You might trust your mother again each time she takes a temporary break from calling you ten times a day, or from asking you to jump in and rescue her yet again, while disregarding the voice inside that tells you, “this is not real”

You see, we always trust something—be it an internal or external voice, intuition or fear, what we want to see in others or don’t want to see in ourselves, our hopes or bad memories.

Your trust hasn’t gone. Your trust system was ruptured within a ruptured relationship with your mum.

And that’s why mother wound trust patterns can feel so confusing: you’re trusting from a place that once had to prioritise connection over clarity.

The mother wound ruptures our relationship with ourselves and distorts how we experience trust and apply it within ourselves, with others, and life itself.

🍒 If you grew up in an enmeshed relationship with your mother, you learned to override your instincts and place your trust in her emotional reality instead of your own internal signals.

🍒 If your mother was chaotic, dysfunctional, or abusive, you learned to associate closeness with unpredictability, making trust feel dangerous or unstable.

🍒 If your mother was physically, emotionally, or energetically absent, you learned to construct trust without a reliable foundation, often attaching it to fantasy, hope, or external validation.

So now —when you want to trust your ability to choose the right partner, pursue your creative work, set boundaries, or honour your desires — trusting is no longer straightforward.

Undermothered women adapt to this trust rupture in very different ways.

I have jumped in head-first a lot in my life — not just off a fishing boat in the Philippines.

My style of trusting was either surrendering it without discernment or avoiding it altogether.

Between withdrawing trust and surrendering trust, the spectrum is wide and varied, and I want you to know where you’re at, at any given moment, because it truly makes life easier.

I’ve created Reset with exactly that in mind—offering you the tools and space that will help you restore flexibility and reliability to trust.

Reset sets the course of the past towards the future you desire.

A 4-week experience-based group for women who are done second-guessing and want to trust themselves and have trusted relationships.

In the first week of Reset, we’re going to focus on recognising the cues of safety, which tell you what you need to know to rebuild your relationship with trust.

One tiny shift, experienced as real-time insight, gives you significant information about what you do trust, whether that serves you and your vision of the future, and how to recalibrate your trust in the most supportive way.

Reset starts March 24th, where you’ll get:

🍒 Practical somatic practices that generate meaningful real-time shifts that you can immediately apply in daily life

🍒 A carefully held group space where you observe your relational patterns as they happen, rather than analysing them afterwards

🍒 Feedback from me to directly translate bodily awareness into concrete decisions, boundaries, and actions

Then in the long run, you:

🍒 Take space confidently in the next family gathering, trusting your presence has value

🍒 Withdraw work commitments that leave you breathless, trusting the signs in your body

🍒 Embark with joy on your creative project and business idea, trusting there’s no offer like yours

Registration to Reset opens on Tuesday, March 10th. 

Join within the first 48 hours to receive a 1:1 bonus session with me.

You can already save your spot for when the doors open and be the first to claim your bonus

KEEP YOUR SPOT HERE

P.S. You don’t need to “trust harder” or trust less—you just need to trust more consciously, with clarity on what you’re trusting and why

 👉 Reset shows you how

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Learn how coming back to love  becomes possible with healing the mother wound in my private podcast BirthRite. Add your details below and you'll get immediate access to your free episodes 👇

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Shelly is a trauma-informed, certified Hakomi therapist helping women who've had a complex relationship with their mother discover the hidden impacts of the mother wound 👉 so they can thrive in their lives & careers