65: Dropping the Armor: Trusting Strangers & Maybe My Ex

This week’s episode is a love letter to one of the riskiest, most liberating beliefs I’ve ever adopted:
 It is safe to rely on the generosity and honesty of strangers.

I’m sharing the story of how buying a quirky little car on eBay completely rewired how I move through life as a divorced woman, single parent, and human navigating the daily grind.

We’ll talk about:

• How divorce and betrayal shrink your “trust radius”
• Why suspicion feels safe but is actually a prison
• What Diana Chapman’s world as an ally philosophy has to do with your ex-husband
• The nervous system’s role in rebuilding trust (and why your body has to go first)
• “Trust push-ups”: small, safe ways to start letting people in
• The surprising science behind why letting others help you is a gift to them
• How to hold both trust and strong boundaries without apology

You’ll also hear how I’ve reframed my ex as one of my greatest teachers, why I keep choosing to extend the benefit of the doubt, and how this belief has made me lighter, freer, and more powerful in my own life.

Your challenge this week: spot three moments a day when someone offers you help, kindness, or honesty—and see how it feels to let the world prove you right.

Because trusting strangers isn’t about being naïve. It’s about deciding you’re strong enough to handle whatever comes… and opening your life to a whole lot more good in the process.

PostDivorceGlowUp.com

Email: quinn@postdivorceglowup.com

Transcript

0:49

Hello Lover. It's finally cooling down to the nineties here in Arizona, which feels like a blessing. Straight from the weather. Gods whew. One of my daughters just returned from her summer internship in Syracuse. Another will be back this Sunday from the outer banks. And my son, who is a senior in high school, he starts his first day of school today and the added structure of school for all of my kids, oh, it is helping our home life run a whole lot smoother. When I got divorced, I did not walk away with many assets. There was no cash for us to split What I did get is about a dozen bookshelves full of books, some kitchen odds and ends, and perhaps the most useful thing was two cars. My husband was always the one who handled car purchases as well as maintenance and anything to do with cars. And when I look back at the cars we drove and the prices we paid, oh my God. I just laugh because I genuinely believed I, it was not a conscious belief, but I had this idea that he was better at car stuff than I was. That is what internalized misogyny sounds like. It's me assuming he had some special car buying magic because he was a man. So when the time came for me to buy a car all on my own. I was terrified when I bought my first car when I was probably 19 years old. I felt like I was taken advantage of and I was so terrified. I was convinced. I still had this belief that I would be taken advantage of again, that I would overpay that men selling cars could not be trusted. And let me tell you, that mindset was exhausting. When you walk into buy something that you need, assuming already, that you're going to be taken advantage of and that you are a victim. I visited car lots. I went on test rides. I contacted sellers. I made offers on cars that ultimately didn't work out. It was weeks of this. I felt like I was constantly on guard until finally I surrendered. I needed a car. Where I live in Tucson is right on the edge, right before the desert, so we don't have public transportation out here, biking outside of our neighborhood. Is not safe. We're not in a place that that can happen. So in a moment of desperation, I looked on eBay. I've heard of people buying cars there, and I found a car in Phoenix that runs on natural gas. And there are two natural gas stations in all of Tucson. There are hundreds of gas stations, but there were two natural gas stations, so I thought maybe that might work. I checked the value, it was priced well. Everything checked out. I bought it and it was a fantastic little car, but that was a turning point because What really changed is that I decided to believe a new thought on purpose, a thought that felt very, very risky. And I think some of you may think this is a very risky thought as well, but I wanna offer it to you and let's, let's just play with it to see if you can just hold some space for this idea. Because this thought has made my life as a single parent so much better, and this is the thought. It is safe to rely on the generosity and honesty of strangers. What do you think, what's the initial reaction you have to that idea? It is safe to rely on the generosity and honesty of strangers now before you dismiss it out of hand or roll your eyes and mutter. Yeah, right Quinn, until they screw you over. Hear me out. This isn't about being naive. It's about reclaiming the energy of your life and moving through your life in a way that opens more doors than it closes. I think I can say pretty definitively that we do not have unlimited energy, and so the energy that we have, if we're pushing it towards guarding ourselves and assuming that we are the victim waiting for someone to victimize us, it takes a lot of energy. But let's be honest about this. Divorce, betrayal, or years living in a marriage in survival mode, it shrinks our trust radius. We start living like perhaps everyone is out to get us. And while that's suspicion, can give us a sense of safety, like I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop. It is a prison. It reminds me of when I lived in Mexico and we would live in these homes with gates, like gates that not only covered the front of the home, but depending on the home would sometimes rise up and connect to the roof like you were in a cage. And at first I thought it was. To keep other people out until I struggled one day to get it open and I realized it's also keeping me in. So anytime you find a place in your life and you think this feels really safe, just take a look at is it keeping others out? Is it keeping you in? And what really is the role of whatever thought or circumstance that you're putting into place to try and keep you safe? There's a great book called The 15 Commandments of Conscious Leadership, by Diana Chapman. And it talks about seeing the world as your ally. And she talks about this specifically in the sense of, in the business world, seeing other people there to help you and everyone is your ally and living in that way. And it's a practice of interpreting events and people as happening for you, not to you. And yes, this includes strangers, it includes people you work with. You've probably met those people that always have kind of a chip on their shoulder just expecting that they're going to be treated badly, or the person that has the constant stories of people taking advantage of them. but I want you to just notice if you are at all open to this idea. That it is safe to rely on the generosity and honesty of strangers. I want you to take a minute and just think. Have you ever been in a position where you have needed to rely on the generosity and honesty of strangers? One of the reasons that. I specifically said, strangers, is that I know that there are people in my life that I feel like I can't trust, but so much of my life is reliant on people that I don't know, my children's teachers. They're friends. They're friends', parents. I try to be as safe as I can and do my due diligence, all of that. This isn't about that, but there is a point at which my energy will just run out. I don't have the energy to protect myself and my children from every possible thing that could go wrong, and when I live with an assumption that. It is not safe to rely upon the generosity and honesty of strangers. I find that I go through my life in kind of this full metal jacket, you know, bracing myself for the impact of someone trying to take advantage of me or hurt me or someone in my family. And so simply looking at the results of what this thought creates for me by believing it is safe to rely on the generosity and honesty of strangers. It helps my nervous system relax, and when I have a relaxed nervous system, I can show up with so much more clarity and joy and power, just personal power in my life. I can also show up as the stranger that offers the generosity and that can be honest with other people. If you've ever been hurt, as in perhaps through a divorce or physically assaulted, but also the emotional assault that can happen during a divorce or during a painful marriage. Your body's default is hyper vigilance, so you can't actually, I mean, I, I make it sound simple, right? Just, just choose to believe this other thing. You can't just think your way into trust. Your body has to feel safe first. I had been doing the work for years of. building safety within my body. There are times where I would play affirmations all through the night about I am safe. I am safe. I am safe, because I didn't feel safe for so many years in my marriage in many different ways. So I have built up the capacity for my body to feel safe. when I stretched that capacity to say that it is safe to trust the generosity and honesty of strangers, there was a place for that to land. see if, as you think, the thought that it is safe. To trust in the generosity and honesty of strangers. See if you can just pause and take a breath, a slow, deep breath, and just feel your feet on the floor, or feel your body on the bed, whatever you're doing, or if you're walking and just scan your body for signs of safety. And especially if you're out in the world somewhere, if you're driving or if you are on a walk, see if you can notice that if something happened to you right now, there would be strangers that could help you. Maybe someone's kind eyes, maybe a relaxed posture. Maybe you can hear someone's gentle tone of voice or their laughter, and as you start looking for signs of safety. It's, it's a way of training yourself to look for that in the world. So it starts to know, that's what I'm looking for. Our brains are very good at scanning for places and ways in which we are not safe. What I'm asking of you is to start. Getting curious about what safety looks like. What are the ways, what are the signals that we can give to our nervous system that we are safe? Because here's the truth, your mind can't talk your body into safety, but your body coming from a relaxed nervous system, it can teach your mind how to trust again. let's start small with this idea. If we're going to start building our trust with strangers. We need to start practicing. So before you go and you buy a car sight unseen, maybe you start even smaller than that. Maybe you ask for directions instead of Googling directions. Maybe you let a stranger hold the door for you and you actually make eye contact when you say thank you. All of these. Uh, trust pushups, low stakes, high payoff. Every rep rewires your brain to expect more good than bad. Making small requests at the grocery store for someone to reach something on a high shelf or. I love when I'm walking through the Costco parking lot and I see these older folks, we have a lot of them here in Tucson as they struggle to push their cart or to put things into the trunk of their car that I can go and offer to help. Yeah, there is some science behind this.'cause you notice when you help someone, you get a little bit of a dopamine hit, right? Because helping others is such a yummy boost for our brain. We get dopamine and we get oxytocin. If we are the person that gives, which means when you let a stranger help you. It is also an act of generosity. You are giving them the gift of feeling useful, feeling good at their job, I think about this every time a friend asks me for support, They think that they are taking my time, that it's a big ask, but what they're really doing is giving me a gift because I love showing up for the people I care about. And I'm guessing that you do too. But let's be clear. Trusting strangers does not mean ignoring red flags. You still get to do your due diligence. This is more of a foundational belief. So we do the due diligence. We look for the red flags. If everything seems safe. We go ahead. You can believe that the world is full of allies, that the world is here to help you. That all the people, all the circumstances are here to help you are here for you. You can believe all of that, and you can still trust yourself to know when it's time to walk away or to not do a deal. The art is knowing who gets your open heart and who gets the polite. No thank you. Or I think I'm gonna pass. So that car, that little car that I bought in Phoenix, it eventually got totaled just a few months ago. No one was hurt, thank goodness. And this time, instead of dread. Over car shopping. I simply dove into it and I went into it. I really noticed a difference because my initial memory was of. The incredible time suck and the painful process of trying to find that car. But this time I just went into it with this belief that there would be an honest and generous stranger who's going to help me find my car. And I found the car. I reached out, I met the owners. It's a sweet couple from Korea who had bought it for their child. They were the only owners of the car. They bought it new. 20 years ago, it's been well maintained. I handed over the cash, I drove at home smiling, and I thought the world is proving me right. I can rely on the generosity and honesty of strangers. When I decided to extend this grace and trust to strangers and this idea that everyone in my world is my ally, everyone is here to help me grow and to learn something, I had to include my husband in that. And I had to look at some hard truths about how he has been one of my best teachers Without him knowing it, of course, he has not agreed to be my teacher. It's simply the way I frame him, because he has taught me so much because of him. I have learned a great deal about family law that I now use to support people in my life. He taught me how to speak up in unsafe situations. We had a situation where he cornered me in a public place and I was really frightened at the time, but then I just started talking really loud and everybody turned and looked at us, which got me out of that situation. He has given me the opportunity to let go of worrying what people say about me. Like I never have to wonder if someone is saying something awful about me. I already know he is. And I get to grapple with that. And so when my kids come home and they say, oh, dad said this about you, I get to go. Yep. He gets to say those things. And now after years of that, it really doesn't bother me. It's fine. He gets to say that it affects me 0%. he has given me the opportunity to hold boundaries. He has taught me that I am resilient. I can parent full-time 24 7 with him moving to another state. He's taught me that I can adapt when he changes plans and drops the kids off when he's supposed to have them for the weekend. Heck, he's even trained me to recover from jump, scared dreams when he pops up when I'm asleep. This man has given me so much. If you do not want to include your husband, your former partner, in your gift of grace to the world, and believing That you can rely on the trust and generosity of strangers, that's okay. And yes, sometimes trust doesn't work out even. And maybe especially with husbands. Just a few weeks ago, my husband lied to me. He lied to my kids and he encouraged them to lie to a friend, and my first reaction was to be angry at myself. For believing him. But here's the thing. I want to be a person who trusts As a co-parent. I can't choose whether my husband and I have a relationship. We have a relationship, but I can choose how I show up for it. So I'm going to keep offering the benefit of the doubt because that's the person I want to be. Even the hard moments that we have. Can be allies in our lives if you let them. So here's your challenge, babe, for one week. Just see if you can spot three moments a day when someone offers you help or kindness or honesty, and start keeping track. Write them down, make a voice note. Collect the evidence for this way of being in the world, that when you lean into trusting in the generosity and honesty of strangers, that strangers are there for you. Prove me right or prove me wrong. But for one week, act like the world is on your side. And see what happens. Just see, just get curious and see if you feel a little bit lighter if you're able to drop some of that armor that you carry around with you. And if you can let the strangers in the world just help lift the burden that is sometimes life a little bit with you, it is safe to rely on the generosity and honesty of strangers. Not because everyone will always show up perfectly, but because you are strong enough to navigate whatever happens. I wanted to mention one last thing. today was my last day doing one-on-one coaching. in five years since I became a certified coach, I have always had one-on-one clients, and this is the first time that I have chosen to step away and really focus on schooling. So as you know, as a listener to this podcast, I will be starting nursing school next week, It has been such a pleasure meeting so many of you who have emailed, who have met with me online, who have allowed me to coach you. It has been such a pleasure. I am not going to be taking more one-on-one clients until I see how I do with all the things with nursing school and taking care of my kiddos. But until next week, I am cheering for you, babe. I am cheering for you.