Overly Careful to Wisely Careless: A Journey Back to Trust
Yana Jenay Conner
10 min read ⭑
If we want to enjoy deep, lasting relationships that enrich our lives and draw us closer to God, we can’t live with walls around our hearts. But to break down these walls, we must first understand why we built them. If we do the work and dig deeper, we’ll often find they stem from our past experiences.
When someone breaks our trust, we tend to project their failures onto others. What’s unique becomes universal. Truths that should only be localized to a particular person or event become a general assumption about all people, everywhere.
For example, my dad’s abandonment left me with the chronic feeling of being unwanted. Due to his absence, I have carried a fear of rejection into almost every relationship. With time, good counseling, a loving community and the transformative power of God’s Word, the fear has waned, yet it still whispers.
I’m thankful God has helped me to grow out of this fear. But for most of my life, it was like a hum of white noise that went with me everywhere. Always in the background of conversations, causing me to be guarded and turning up its volume if people got too close. “Yana, they will leave you. Don’t trust them. Don’t fall too deeply in love only for them to leave.” Like white noise, I couldn’t decipher the static to discern where these feelings were coming from. I didn’t understand why every time a friendship got good, I would pull back or why when people took an interest in me, I immediately became suspicious. Surely, they couldn’t love me or want to be my friend, mentor or boyfriend? They must want something else, and maybe I should give it to them to make sure they stay.
Metin Ozer; Unsplash
In her book, Why Am I Like This?, trauma therapist Kobe Campbell writes:
Our childhood experiences are the very foundation of our understanding of the world we live in. They shape how we perceive ourselves and others, including God. They set the tone for who we believe we are and what we believe we are worthy of. Our childhood trauma affects us more than just psychologically and emotionally; it affects us biologically as well, shifting the way our bodies operate … wiring how our brains interact, which is the foundation of the patterns of our everyday lives.
I wish I had encountered Kobe’s wisdom earlier in life. Then, maybe I would’ve been able to decipher the static to understand how my dad’s abandonment was shaping my perception of myself, God and others. From childhood, his absence developed these three core beliefs: 1) I am unwanted and unlovable; 2) people leave; and 3) you must please them if you want them to stay. If I had known this then, maybe I would’ve been able to quiet my fears enough to bravely be loved.
Research indicates that it takes at least five positive comments to counteract one negative, and it can often be much more if the negative hits deep. If this is what it takes to balance one negative comment, imagine what it takes to balance out the abandonment of a parent, a spouse’s repeated infidelity, a betrayal that alters your dreams and hopes, abuse that alters your body chemistry and sense of self-worth or church hurt that’s left your faith hanging on by a thread. How much love, presence, gentleness, care and understanding does it take to restore someone’s sense of safety, security and shalom in the aftermath of offense? How many positive experiences do we need to help grow out of being overly careful with others to become wisely careless?
The answers to the questions “how much” and “how many” vary from person to person. For me, it took Lorna Johnson, my first boss in vocational ministry, telling me almost daily over the course of two years that I was loved for me to believe it. It took Moe and Sandy Hafeez opening up their home, letting me eat as often (and as much) as I wanted at their dinner table, for me to learn that sometimes people do stay. It took years of reading, studying, meditating on and praying through Scripture for me to no longer see God through the lens of my earthly father and to believe he would never leave or forsake me. It took the patient and loving friendship of Bree Carnes, LaToya King and Elizabeth Woodson to heal the wounds of friendship betrayal and loss. It took the good people of Vertical Church to believe that, as a Black woman called to preach and teach, I no longer needed to cower myself or my gifts in a corner to appease others. Under their care and constant encouragement, I have learned to be brave and obedient to Christ in all things for his glory and the good of his people. In so many ways, this book wouldn’t exist apart from these people and the many others who have done the hard work of convincing me that: 1) I am valued and loved; 2) sometimes people stay; and 3) those who require me to please them to stay are unsafe.
Friend, I don’t know what it will take for you to grow out of being overly careful with others to becoming wisely careless after the wounds you have incurred at the hands of others. But what I do know is this: you need people to heal. Your experiences of rejection can only be healed by experiences of acceptance. Your church hurt cannot be healed apart from the loving arms of the church. Only friendships marked by sacrificial love, celebration and confession can tend to the wounds of those marked by betrayal, competition and jealousy. You can only know if anyone can be trusted by taking the risk to trust. You need people to heal.
Apparently, the clinical term for this phenomenon is corrective emotional experience. Let’s thank Kobe again for exposing us to language that helps us make sense of our human experience. In her book, which I think you should get, she explains that one of the primary ways we heal is by having positive experiences that “mirror the ways [we] were wounded.” You need people who will enter your story and apply love to your wounds in a way that alters the plotline of your narrative. You need people to listen to heal the wounds of not being heard. You need people to be gentle to heal the scars left by those who emotionally and physically abused you. You need people to stay to counter the years of abandonment that taught you that people leave.
Here are five principles that have led me to positive experiences that mirror the ways I’ve been wounded. Working in tandem with one another, they have taught me that though people are broken and fallen, they are also wildly beautiful, and some of them are undeniably trustworthy.
Make Yourself Available to the Healing Process
In addition to telling me I was loved almost every day, Lorna also repeatedly deposited these borrowed words from Peter Scazzero into my heart: “Yana, ‘it is not possible to be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature.’” Initially, I heard Lorna’s words as a decree of judgment. But for every time she stated these words to me, she affirmed her love for me a hundred times over with her patience, correction and open invitation to nap on her couch whenever needed. Eventually, I listened to her and tried counseling again with the resolution to understand why I was so guarded yet so needy and how that all connected to my father’s abandonment. I also wanted to figure out what I needed to do to be sure my fears of abandonment didn’t continue to spill over into my relationships with others.
Nowadays, there are a plethora of resources available to help you along your healing journey. For you to move forward in life — beyond offense — you must make yourself available to the healing process. If financial strain isn’t the roadblock, you need to stop putting off counseling and go. Then you need to go to counseling and tell the truth. If finances are your greatest barrier, find a podcast hosted by a clinical professional, Christian counselor or ministry leader who can help you understand your story and the pain associated with it. While you need to be wise about the voices you consume, there are voices you can trust.
Learn to Decode Your White Noise
As you avail yourself to the healing process, you will learn to decode the white noise that hums in the background of your interactions with others and has come to shape your beliefs about God, yourself and others. This is reflective work, and although it doesn’t come naturally to all, it is a skill that can be learned.
“To help untangle your past from your present, you need to adopt a biblical worldview of people.”
Friend, your healing needs your time and your attention. Don’t you want to be free of the hum of anxiously seeking the approval of others, the need to be successful to prove the naysayers wrong, or the pain your abuser or offender caused? Don’t you want to not only be free from the need to retaliate against them, but also free from being controlled by the pain they’ve caused? If so, you’ve got to look at what you’d rather avoid and decode the white noise of your story. Much of this starts with asking questions like:
1. When (insert the name of the new person you’re building trust with) asked _________________, it made me feel ______________. Why did it make me _______________? Have I felt this feeling before? If so, when and with whom?
2. Why do I tend to pull back relationally when people do _________________? What am I afraid of? What am I trying to protect?
3. I like ____________, but I don’t know if I can trust them. Is this concern valid? Is there something about their character that should give me pause, or is it that their personality reminds me of someone who hurt me?
In order to decode your white noise, you will need to slow down to ask yourself these questions and others like them. Your soul is worth the cost of investing this kind of time and work to heal. The good people in your life and those who will come are also worth it.
Learn to Separate Your Past from Your Present
I cannot tell you how many times I’ve had to say to myself: “Yana, this person is not your dad.” I was learning to let down my guard and more freely receive and give love, but anytime someone canceled our plans or took more than five minutes to respond to my text messages, my internal alarm system would go off. Was this person safe? Would they leave me, too? Should I break up with them before they break up with me?
When our internal alarm system goes off, we need to become skilled at discerning whether there is indeed a thief in our midst. Before we call the authorities (that is, our initial feelings) to remove the person from our lives, we need to ask ourselves: “Is this a false alarm?” The alarm has gone off because someone has brushed up against a part of your story that’s still tender, but are they a thief or merely a friend trying to get in? Sure, maybe they should’ve knocked on the door instead of barging in with such an invasive question. And yes, it’s alarming when their personality or style is similar to the person who hurt you. But personality and style are not the same as motives and character. Their relational pace may be faster than yours, making you suspicious and uncomfortable, but are they trying to get in to hurt you or heal you? Is their motive to sincerely know you, not use you?
In the wake of offense, you must learn how to separate your past offender from the people who are presently before you. If you don’t, even though you have forgiven your offender, you will make the new person in front of you pay their debt. You may even use the anger stored up in your memory to cause you to retaliate against this new person in the ways you wish you had done with your offender. This is why you need to heal. This is why you need to decode and understand your white noise. Apart from this work, you will be unable to separate the past from the present, and you may end up becoming the offender in someone else’s plotline.
Adopt a Biblical Worldview of People
To help untangle your past from your present, you need to adopt a biblical worldview of people. You need a story that exists outside of your story to help you see humanity more comprehensively. Though people are broken and fallen, that’s not all that they are or can be. They are people created in the image of God who Christ died for and can be redeemed from the worst of their shortcomings. Though there are some whose lives are marked by self-conscious, self-centered self-preservation, there are an overwhelming number of others who are committed to living out self-giving, other-centered sacrificial love. They are not perfect, but they try. They fall short, but they confess, repent and are willing to do what it takes to be reconciled. Humanity is not all bad. They’re a mix.
If you and I are going to live beyond offense to find and enjoy relationships marked by self-giving, other-centered sacrificial love, we must abandon our pessimistic or idealistic view of others. We must not allow a low view of humanity to cause us to put the bar so low that we only expect the worst. And we shouldn’t put the bar so high that no one but Jesus can reach it. We must accept the truth that we live in a broken world with fallen people, and we must believe that not all broken and fallen people are untrustworthy.
Take Wise Relational Risks
As we make ourselves available to the healing process, learn to decode our white noise, begin the work of separating the past from the present, and come to adopt a biblical worldview of humanity, we are better equipped to take wise relational risks.
These risks don’t have to be grand. You don’t need to cannonball into any new relationships. We should never blindly trust. You can start by sitting on the edge of the pool, swapping interests and seeing how they respond when your opinions don’t match. Do they ask more questions to understand your point of view, or do they discredit yours in a way that makes you feel inferior? If they seek to understand, then you can put your feet in the water by sharing something more personal. It doesn’t have to be deep, but something that gives them a window in. See how they respond. Do they listen? Do they exhibit an ability to empathize with you in the sad or joyful moments? Do they shut down or open up in response?
If it seems like the water is fine, get in. Start to do life with one another and get a better sense of their character and values. When your internal alarm system goes off, because it will, check to see if it’s a false alarm, if you need to humbly confront, or make your way back to the edge of the pool. You’re not leaving; you’re just reassessing how careless you can be with them moving forward. But if, in time, you can trust that their motives are for you and they have a proven track record to back it up, cannonball in, friend.
Enjoy the gift of trust and the healing it can bring.
Yana Jenay Conner has served in full-time ministry for the past 15 years. Through teaching, writing and disciplemaking, Yana desires to curate content that will help others think well and exchange a secular worldview for a biblical one. She has done this through a blog series called The Miseducation of Music, providing theological training and consultation on race and unity to churches and organizations, and walking alongside women through anxiety, depression and harmful patterns of sin.
Taken from “Living Beyond Offense” by Yana Jenay Conner. Copyright © 2025. Used by permission of Harvest House Publishers.
