Growing in Trust Mentorship Program |Angel J. Storm, Ph.D

Growing in Trust Mentorship Program |Angel J. Storm, Ph.D.

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Printed in the United States of America

First Printing, 2018

Introduction ...... 4 Lesson One: What is Trust? ...... 5 What is Trust? ...... 6 Trust from a Biblical Perspective ...... 7 Reestablishing Trust in Your Life ...... 8 Trust and Forgiveness ...... 9 Exercises and Reflections ...... 12 Lesson Two: Expectations and Trust ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. Expectations and Trust...... Error! Bookmark not defined. Communicating Expectations ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. Exercises and Reflections ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. Lesson Three: Boundaries ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. The Importance of Making Predetermined Choices ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. Establishing and Enforcing Boundaries ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. Biblical Boundaries ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. Exercises and Reflections ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. Lesson Four: Handling Betrayal ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. Betrayal and Persecution ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. Focus on what you have ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. Push back through prayer ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. Conflict resolution ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. In love, move on ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. Go deeper ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. Exercises and Reflections ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. Lesson Five: ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. A to B: A 12-Month Journey of Deepening Your Roots in God No Matter How Long You’ve Known Him ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. Month 2. Trust/Faith ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. Favorite Quotes, Songs, Sermons, Books, Pictures/Drawings on Trust ..... Error! Bookmark not defined. Month 2 Activations ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. About the Author / Speaker ...... Error! Bookmark not defined.

Introduction Welcome to the Growing in Trust mentorship course! When I was designing my mentorship programs, I knew I wanted each of them to be customizable for each person who enrolled. If you want to go through this PDF more than once, you can do so with new exercise sheets by downloading them on my website for free.

This course is deeply personal to me. It is the fruit of a struggle that I went through to produce it. It wasn’t easy and I didn’t like it. In fact, I hated years of it but I’m finally able to look back and say “it was worth it.” It was so worth it. I got free to help others get out of bondage and shine a spotlight on an area that permeates every sphere of society. Too many of us do not understand the need for boundaries. If we do, we don’t know how to enforce them because we want to be “nice.” We derail our purposes by allowing people to run all over us. No more! I pray this course not only brings healing to your soul and spirit but that it shifts the trajectory of your bloodline’s destinies. You can be the change and you can break the curses.

As you read this PDF and watch the videos that correspond to each lesson, be conscious of the fact that there is an impartation available to you. The goal of this course is two-fold: 1) Help you understand the need for boundaries and what these will look like in your own life, and; 2) Walk you through the process of setting boundaries for yourself and others and how to properly and appropriately enforce them so that you can grow in trust in a healthy way. Boundaries are not just meant to keep people and things out; they are meant to keep in the good! If you haven’t been great at setting boundaries before, do not worry! There is always hope. God is always good and always redemptive.

For me, composing this course was a journey with Jesus and for that I am grateful. I pray it is the same for each of you. May the hope of Heaven, breath of the Spirit and the Love of God encompass you as you read and work through this course. Finding your voice and putting your story into words is so needed and it’s needed now. The last part of this PDF lends a hand to help you do this but most important is your connection to the Creator, the Defender and Deliverer. He crafted you to share a very powerful message of the Kingdom that is unique. May you discover that message at a deeper depth through this journey.

Angel J. Storm, Ph.D.

Founder / Director

Ashes to Beauty Ministries Lesson One: What is Trust?

What is Trust? When we hear the word trust, we typically define it as believing someone to do something. This is how I heard one person define trust: “Trust means being able to predict what other people will do and what situations will occur. If we can surround ourselves with people we trust, then we can create a safe present and an even better future.” If we take that definition, then we should be able to trust our enemies to behave in a certain way, right? And if this is the case then a reliable enemy can be preferable to an unpredictable friend, because at least we know where we are with them. (By the way, if you’re taking this course because of your experience with a narcissist, this is exactly why narcissists are addictive to our brains. Our brains release a flood of chemicals into our systems that get us hooked from a physiological standpoint. It’s similar to gambling because you don’t know what you’re going to win or lose and the thrill of the mystery becomes addictive, as twisted as that sounds.) But of course when we speak about trust in our everyday lives, we think of trust in a positive manner and we only ascribe this feeling and reliability to those we love, whom we have good relations with.

We believe that if we behave in a loving manner, supporting those around us through hard times, defending them when they are defenseless and engaging them with openness, that those things will be reciprocated to us, do we not? The problem that all of us encounter in life that this is not always reciprocated and the hurt and betrayal in these cases can sting and last a lifetime, especially if we don’t take active steps to manage unforgiveness and correct the ways that we went wrong in establishing that relationship.

Let me be clear, we can do everything “right” and we will still be hurt by others. We will still experience let downs and betrayals. That is part of life. By taking this course you won’t exempt yourself from being hurt by other people. We live in a fallen world and we are subject to being let down. This course is about learning to establishing healthy boundaries and behaviors in yourself and then for yourself so that the same mistakes of toxic relationship and hurtful friendships do not keep occurring in your life. When you are aware of the patterns of mistakes you have made, you can implement new behaviors.

As we have gone about life, some of us lose our trust in our own selves. This was absolutely true for me. About two years ago I looked around at my life and I really felt like I could not make any decisions for myself. I lost trust in myself to make good decisions that were healthy and would help my life grow and prosper.

This course is largely based off of my own experiences over the past two plus years with the Lord, with other people and wisdom I’ve gained from books, conferences and webinars I have attended. This course will start by explaining trust from a Biblical perspective, developing or strengthening your trust in God, allowing that trust to fill yourself and grow your identity and then allowing your true identity to flow out of you into others in your life. I also want to remind you that you will get out of this course what you put into it. If you are diligent in applying the activations and doing the exercises that are given to you in each lesson, you’ll get the change you are after. Establishing and practicing trust and being trustworthy are ongoing activities. It’s never a onetime event. Please allow God to speak to you throughout this course and into your life specifically and directly. I am sharing with you my revelation and good practices, but in your situation God may direct you in another direction. I think it’s critical that we stay aware of this and open to Holy Spirit’s leading.

Trust from a Biblical Perspective Trust originates in God. It’s a necessary part of our lives; we are all called to trust. Here are some passages of scripture that show us God’s heart for the issue of trust:

• Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. Proverbs 3:5 • But the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, “Because you did not trust me enough to demonstrate my holiness to the people of Israel, you will not lead them into the land I am giving them! Numbers 20:12 (NLT) • The decrees You issue are righteous and altogether trustworthy. Psalm 11:138 (HCSB) • You keep all Your promises. You are the Creator of heaven’s glory, earth’s grandeur and ocean’s greatness. Psalm 146:6 (TPT) • Depend on God and keep at it because in the Lord God you have a sure thing. Isaiah 26:4 MSG) • To all the rich of the world, I command you not to be wrapped in thoughts of pride over your prosperity or relay on your wealth, for your riches are unreliable and nothing compared to the Loving God. Trust instead in the one who has lavished upon us all good things, fulfilling our every need. 1 Timothy 6:17 (TPT)

Trusting in the Lord is not only a command, it releases blessings to us when we do it and we can lose out on promises if we don’t. God is the only One we can trust totally knowing that He will take care of us to the fullest. We will let ourselves down, we will let others down and other people will let us down, but God will always come through.

When we rely on other people to make us happy, to make us feel purposeful and loved, we are relying on a something that is faulty and will fail. But when we are connected to the source of Life and all that flows through it, we have a sure bet knowing that no matter what happens, God will never let us down and He will always be there to pick us up when we fall.

Throughout this course I will mentor you in ways that you can grow in your relationship with God so that your trust in Him will take root in your heart. Your trust in God will also grow your trust in yourself. More and more you’ll grow to trust that you are who He says you are. You won’t apologize for it and you won’t be afraid if people accept you or not because you’ll be so aware of the position you have in Jesus. The amount of trust you have in God and in your identity will directly correlate to how much you trust people.

I think it’s really important for me to reiterate again that all people – even you – are flawed and you will be hurt in life by people. That is part of the engagement. But there is no hurt that Heaven can’t heal and we are all called to be the light of the world. As we learn more about trust we also grow in grace, discernment and we make choices based on God’s desires, not our unsanctified emotions.

Maybe some of you have no trust or very little trust in God. Maybe you don’t have a history of relationship that you can look back on and recount the ways that He has been faithful to you. This is the place that I started from more than two years ago. I believed there was a Creator because I could see a blade of grass and know that it didn’t get here from a freak accident of a bang in outer space. I grew up in a very religious and abusive household so I didn’t know God through relationship and because that was my only experience with God, I really wasn’t interested in growing my relationship with Him.

At this point I had to rely on other people’s history and exercise blind trust. I said to myself, “If God is unchanging and unfailing and if He sees all and if He is always good, I’ll trust Him with one thing and see what happens.” Well, that one thing turned into my whole life. I kept my heart open to hearing from Him and I was dedicated to my relationship with Him. Sometimes you just need to get to a place where you acknowledge that your own efforts, intellect and strength are not working and you need Something Greater. If you have little or no trust in God personally right now, I encourage you all to start today. Start today by becoming dedicated to God. Start by setting time aside every day throughout the day to speak to Him and be obedient to His words. As you take steps towards Him, God will rush towards you and overwhelm you in an avalanche of His Love. Most of the issues with trust in other people stem because we don’t actually know what trust looks like with God and we have no idea how to hear Him or take what He is saying and put that into action in the natural world around us. This course will help you! In this lesson, you’ll have two assignments (which are listed in detail at the end of this section). The first is to spend time with God throughout the week and get three promises from Him to you. What is in His heart for you to experience in this lifetime? Write those promises down along with the dates you got them. We will expand on these later on in the course.

Reestablishing Trust in Your Life Once we learn what trust in God looks like and how this effects our identities (our understanding of who we are and what we were created for), we can affect all areas of our life with this revelation. Rebuilding the ability to trust people should be the first milestone we set on our way to rebuilding trust with specific people or groups of people (such as men or those of a different culture). All situations in life require us to have a certain amount of trust in people. We trust the person next to us on the road to stay in their lane and use signals to turn and look before switching positions. We trust the people who work in the restaurant to bring us food that’s prepared well and will nourish us and not harm us. We trust the hairstylist to cut our hair how we want and not how they want. My point is that a certain amount of trust is built into society. None of us can truly say “I don’t trust people,” because if that were the case we would never leave home, only eat the food we grow and prepare ourselves, and be completely isolated in every other way. When we say we don’t trust people, we mean that we have issues with allowing people to come into certain boundaries or levels of closeness to us. This is much different than “not trusting people” and by repeating this phrase inward to ourselves or speaking it out loud, it reinforces negative thought patterns and harms our brains. (This is actually a word curse and I will show you how to break this at the end of this lesson.) Pay attention to your words and learn to declare what Heaven is saying and stop mimicking what Hell is saying.

Having set boundaries for people is healthy and even godly. The issue comes when we can’t establish healthy boundaries and we falsely believe that no one is worthy to stay in any level of our lives. That is unhealthy and it’s a counterfeit of the way God asked us to live and Jesus demonstrated for us when He was on earth. If you haven’t already read the book Keep Your Love On by Danny Silk, I recommend it. It’s an easy read and it’s easy to implement the suggestions in the book right away. If you’ve already read that book or you’re looking for a new level of understanding boundaries and trust, check out the book Boundaries by Henry Cloud.

Not everyone should have the same access to you. Understanding this and embracing this concept makes it easy to trust people because you are the one who puts them in positions of your trust being given to them instead of it just happening or people maneuvering themselves into those positions in your life. Imagine yourself as the center circle with four rings going out from it. In the center with you is God. No person will ever be able to make it to that spot because it is only for God. The next circle holds one position as well. The next ring has three positions, the next has twelve and the last has any number you choose. This is the way Jesus set up his relationships with people. In Jesus’ smallest circle after God was John – the Bible calls him the disciple that Jesus loved. If you are married, this position should be taken by your spouse but if you are not married, this should be your best friend, a sibling, parent, cousin, etc. Jesus’ circle of three held Peter, James and John and His circle of 12 were His 12 disciples. Even among His 12 disciples not everyone had equal access to Jesus. He touched thousands and thousands of people’s lives and He healed everyone who came to Him, yet He positioned His life and His will to mirror those of the Father’s. That model is just an example but it is how Jesus lived and I have found it to be a useful model for my own life.

You know, God only has good plans for you. Do you think your relationships are not of utmost importance to Him? Once you grasp the revelation that God can always be trusted, it will enable you to put yourself in positions where you will be confident in trusting people, even if they hurt you. There will always be the risk of getting hurt in any relationship. There’s always a chance that you could hurt others. There’s also the possibility of impacting someone’s life deeply, changing the course of their life. Ultimately, whatever God is calling you to do - whether it’s stepping out and praying for someone or integrating into a small group at your church or saying “yes” to a date - our first reactions should be to be doing the will of the Father. We should be working to get to a place where we trust God so much that we can trust people again.

I am going to talk more about boundaries in the coming weeks but for now I want to give you the second assignment for this week. Think about the 12 people you spend the most time with. Are these the people you trust the most? What does trust look like to you for each of these people? Does it vary from person to person and year to year? There is no right or wrong answer – this is simply an assessment of what is happening in your life in terms of relationships with other people go. (See the full exercise at the end of this lesson.)

Trust and Forgiveness One more thing I want to mention in this lesson is that just as forgiveness is a process that we eventually learn to walk in, so is trust. For example, let’s take one of the 12 positions I mentioned before. There are three other levels of trust between where a person is and my inner circle. Trust is earned through time and trials. Over time if I consistently see you saying one thing but doing another, I’m learning a lot about who you are and what your values and morals are. In times of trial, I learn what your foundation is made of. Imagine I own a company and I hire sometime to be the executive assistant. I need them to take calls, schedule appointments, return emails and manage my calendar. If that person shows up late all of the time, does not return or notify me of important emails and is rude when they answer the phone, I would be a fool to leave them in that position in my company acting on my behalf. So many of us leave this kind of person in positions of importance in our lives! Besides them showing up consistently late, their other actions prove that they are not the right fit for the job! Trust should be earned both ways. You need to learn how to earn the trust of other people and you need to learn how to have other people earn your trust. The only time I should have someone in my group of 12 that is going to betray me, is if God told me to put them there.

Again, we will talk about earning trust and establishing boundaries and reinforcing consequences, but right now I want you to also think about the people that maybe you don’t have a relationship with. Maybe it’s a family member or a person that you used to be close friends with but no longer speak to. What ended that relationship? What qualities did that person display that caused you to lose trust in them? Maybe it was the other way around – what behaviors did you display that caused them to lose trust with you? In order to move forward, it’s really important that you take an honest assessment of your life. If you say you value honesty in a friendship, are you honest? If you value loyalty, do you display it? You can’t demand something from another person that you yourself are not willing to display first. You can’t control another person. You can only control yourself. This is another reason why our connections to God are so important – the more we are around Him and spend time with Him and know who He is, the more like Him we will become.

We will discuss all of this throughout this course, but for now you have your two assignments for this week. As you complete these exercises (and all the ones that follow), remember that there are no grades in this course – this is about how much change you want to see. You will reap what you sow. I hope you all will take time and do the exercises and journal whatever experiences you have during their completion, even if they are painful. God will use all of it to build you up better. Remember, He only takes what you are willing to give Him. He already sees and knows everything. This is about you opening yourself up and giving that which He already knows about. In the next lesson I will be talking about expectations and trust and healthy communication with others in relaying those expectations. As an added bonus for this week, I included a chapter from my book A to B: Deepening Your Roots in God No Matter How Long You’ve Known Him. The chapter is on trust and you can find it at the back of this PDF.

Before I end this lesson, I want to break the word curses that you yourself or other people may have spoken over you. The more specific you can be the better. Customize this declaration for your situation. Say this out loud:

I decree and declare that I am blessed and not cursed. I am the head and not the tail. I am above and not beneath. I am blessed coming in and going out. Everywhere I go, I am blessed. I am chosen by God. I am loved by God. I am mantled by God. I am empowered by God. I break every curse off my life in Jesus’ name! I break family curses such as (name specifics). I break witchcraft curses such as (name any ties to the occult or other religions or ties to manipulation you may have in your life). I break word curses such as (I will never let someone hurt me that way again, or I always fail at everything I try – be as specific as you can). I pull down false utterances and evil proclamations over my life. I command every curse to bow to the blood of Jesus! I break all curses over my life in Jesus’ name and I release the blessings of Heaven over my life. Be broken now! I am free! I am blessed! I am redeemed!

Exercises and Reflections Fill out the circles below with your relationships right now in this season of your life.

GOD

Think about the five people that you spend the most time with every month. What are they like? Are they healthy and progressive forward in life or are they stagnant and bitter?

______

Is God leading you to shift your boundaries and relationships with people? If so, write down what He’s instructing you to do, here.

______

Think about the people that you don’t have a relationship with any longer. Maybe it’s a family member or a person that you used to be close friends with but no longer speak with. What ended that relationship? What qualities did that person display that caused you to lose trust in them? Maybe it was the other way around – what behaviors did you display that caused them to lose trust with you? In order to move forward, it’s really important that you take an honest assessment of your life. If you say you value honesty in a friendship, are you honest? If you value loyalty, do you display it? You can’t demand something from another person that you yourself are not willing to display first. You can’t control another person. You can only control yourself.

______

Our connections to God are so important – the more we are around Him and spend time with Him and know who He is, the more like Him we will become. What is God speaking to you right now regarding how He wants you to spend time with Him? What areas in your life does He want to make more in His image?

______