My parents have no trust in me
15, male. I have done some things that I regret and my parents found out about it and now they have no trust in me. Its been two years like this, I have no friends and can never go out or hang out with people. They don’t let me talk to any girls or have any social media, they also say I will have to stay at home during college. They aren’t very supportive of me and I’m am constantly getting yelled at about grades. I can’t do good in school because I just want to have trust with them again and that’s all I think about, two years and nothings changed.
Assalamu ‘alaykum,
I hear the regret and frustration in your post. I’m glad that you have reflected on your actions and have thought about where your choices got off track and the regret you feel is a healthy way your self tells you that you haven’t been the person that you would like to be. Repentance is layered. It requires that you first recognize where you went wrong. Next, we have to figure out how to forgive ourselves for honest mistakes, and even situations in which we made very scary and hurtful choices. Those two internal steps are very hard, but what is equally hard is to go to those you have hurt, and ask them to help you understand how they were hurt, to hear their pain, and to ask how you can make amends. This step can take time, and requires intense courage. However, making amends is part of asking for forgiveness from Allah (swt) as well.
Now I don’t know your parents, nor the thing you did to break their trust. So you will have to decide if this is a conversation you feel comfortable having on your own, or if you’d like to ask a trusted family member, community member, or Imam facilitate the conversation with your parents — or even if it is safe for you to have this conversation at all. That being said, on the whole I have experienced parents respond positively to their child if the child can approach his/her parents with sincere reflection on their actions, and a sincere interest in knowing how those choices impacted their parents. The conversations I have witnessed generally start with, “I have been reflecting on my actions and am disappointed in myself for some of the choices I have made. I can see that I hurt you and I want to hear how what I did hurt you.”
The benefit of having a good facilitator is that they can keep you and they away from statements like “you are bad” and push you towards talking about your feelings “I worked so hard to raise you and taught you what was expected behavior, and when you did that I felt like I failed.” Once you both feel like you have been able to express yourselves in nonjudgmental ways, you can work together to figure out what needs to happen so that they can trust you again. Hopefully that will give you a concrete path on how you can earn back their trust and a benchmark for them on when they need to loosen the rules again.
The reality is they may not be able to have a self reflective or insightful conversation. If they aren’t, you can out of rahmah forgive them for their shortcomings, and still ask the question, “What do I need to do to earn back your trust?” Trust is such an abstract term that sometimes it’s helpful to break it down into behaviors so they can talk about where they need you to step up (see this video for more on that: “The Anatomy of Trust” on the website https://brenebrown.com/videos/).
Your parents may or may not be able to have the trust conversation with you, but at least in that moment you know you have tried in a mature, responsible way to bridge the gap created between you and your parents.
May Allah (swt) bless you for putting in the effort and Allah (swt) alone is in control of the outcome.
We ask that the outcome be blessed by Allah’s (swt) response to your effort
wa ‘alaykum salam,
Your sister in Islam,
Fatima Z
