When patients come to me with anxiety disorders, the way they *feel* is that everything is dangerous, they're never safe, and nobody can be trusted.

As we progress through our work of rigorously discovering how humans work, we discover that there usually is some danger, there are almost always ways things can go wrong, and everybody has a limit to their trustworthiness.

From the outside, this can look like validation of the anxiety. "See?! I told you everything was dangerous!"

And... it sort of is. They weren't wrong to be anxious. They lacked the education to understand *how* and *why* things are dangerous, and the tools to keep themselves safe.

The world *is* dangerous, and nobody can be completely trusted. That's true. But that's not where safety comes from. Safety comes from understanding the danger and knowing how to navigate it. We're all going to lose the battle with danger. That's a fact on the ground. Between here and there, the more we can understand how things are dangerous, the better we can stay relatively safe.

An easy example of this is when we learn to spot signs of trauma and anxiety in other people. We learn that even though they may not want to, people with trauma inadvertently hurt the people closest to them. And then we start noticing that almost everybody around us is showing signs of trauma and anxiety.

The difference is, now we know how to set boundaries around the specific triggers we see. We can spot when they're becoming emotionally aroused, and rather than join them in their trauma cycle, we can use our own skills to leave the situation or say/do the thing that might help them de-escalate.

All of a sudden, instead of being unpredictable and dangerous, they are a known quantity, and if we stay in our healthy lane, they pose a minimal danger to us.

With trust, it's largely the same. We don't trust other people.

Read that again. It's not a typo.

Trust is not about trusting other people. Trust is about trusting myself. When I trust myself, I take risks with other people that I know I can manage even if they let me down or have ulterior motives. Trust isn't knowing someone else won't hurt me. Trust is knowing I have the skills to manage disappointments, misunderstandings, and betrayals.

The trick to recovering from anxiety isn't discovering that the world isn't as dangerous as I thought. It's realizing I was mostly correct, and learning the skills to understand and navigate confidently through a dangerous world.