Trust, like safety, runs deep. When we don’t experience trust, as when we don’t experience safety, we shut down, protect, and hide our vulnerability. We also, in both cases, tend to place responsibility for our experience on the outside. It is extraordinarily challenging, when we don’t experience trust, to recognize it as our experience instead of assuming that whoever we are not trusting is simply not trustworthy. It is similarly difficult, when our experience tells us that we are not safe, to step outside of the conviction that “it” is unsafe to be where we are.
Before proceeding much further, I want to make it clear here that I am talking about trust and safety as they relate to the emotional and social aspects of life, and I am not addressing situations in which physical safety is at risk. Only a rare few of us are able to maintain choice and presence in the face of physical danger. As inspiring as such stories are, they are not within reach of most of us, and I am therefore choosing to exclude physical safety from what I am focusing on. That said, I nonetheless want to stress that my readings so far in life have led me to believe that the human possibility exists that even when what’s at stake is our physical safety, accepting our vulnerability and our ultimate inability to control ourselves or the environment, we often have more ability to transform our inner experience and to affect our outer environment.
From Trusting People to Trusting in Life
Some people are slow to develop trust. They check out new people for a while before lowering their guards and trusting them. Whether by grace or naïveté, my own responses have been different. I usually have a great deal of ease trusting people when I first meet them. I extend my heart, expect the best, get excited about possibilities, and open up fully.
All these experiences, from both ends of trust building or loss of trust, have left me with a growing sense that trust can be an attitude toward life, quite beyond a reaction to how someone treats us. Living in trust is no guarantee that nothing painful or even dangerous would happen to us. Such guarantees simply don’t exist. Rather, it is a way of responding to life. For me, living in trust is a willingness to risk the loss, and preferring the possibility of being burnt every once in a while to the alternative of living in fear and continually attempting to check out everyone and everything, protect ourselves from all eventualities, and imagine that we can be safe.
The culture in which we live often operates on the model of mitigating risk. This model logically compels us to protect, and tends to reduce trust and create adversarial relationships. I vastly prefer the attitude of focusing on building trust. Paradoxically, I believe that putting energy and resources into building trust is, ultimately, the most effective strategy for mitigating risk. The person who is trusted, respected, and cared about, is the person least likely to want to harm us.
When Trust Is Lost
When we don’t experience trust with someone, it seems impossible that we may ever experience it again. Losing trust also has an edge of humiliation attached to it for many of us, as if we are found out to have been foolish to trust in the first place. From the other direction, I imagine many of us know the crushing experience of someone losing trust in us and not knowing how to support them in regaining it, especially when we believe their perception of mistrust is erroneous.
Part of the paradox of trust is that, more often than not, if I don’t trust someone, they probably don’t trust me, either. It’s likely that the very behavior they do that leads to my mistrust is itself based on not trusting me. I have often used our ability to trust the truth of what someone is saying as an example. When the issue comes up, I ask those present if they have ever lied. Invariably I receive laughter. Of course we have all done some lying in our lives. Once this is clear, I ask people to remember what led them to lie when they did. They immediately can see that what would lead someone not to tell the truth is all and only the fear of the consequences of telling the truth. That’s when I tell them that if they want people to tell them the truth, it means creating sufficient safety so that people will know there aren’t going to be negative consequences to telling the truth. Any time we penalize someone for telling the truth we increase the changes they won’t do it again. In this way we can increase our trust in another person by making ourselves easier to trust.
Recovering from the Illusion of Perfect Trust
Repairing trust is one of the most complex and challenging endeavors we can engage in. At the same time, unless we embark on this task, we can only become progressively more closed to life. From early on, as early as four months into life, it appears that when we repair trust, the relationship is more robust than if the trust was never broken in the first place. This research finding immediately made sense to me. When we repair lost trust, there is less anxiety about losing it again, because we know when we can recover. This, in effect, creates more trust.And yet we all know the longing for the perfect relationship, for the perfect understanding with another person where there would never be conflict or issue, never a tear shed, never any pain or discomfort. I recognize this longing, still, after decades of living on the planet, after knowing it’s an illusion, after knowing the joys of repairing trust.
Each time, freshly, takes determination, the willingness to let go, again, of the illusion. It’s especially challenging the first time conflict arises with a new person, when I experience a fall from that temporary heaven that repeats the illusion: maybe this person, this time, will be the exception?
Once again I mobilize to meet life with an open heart, despite the pain, the challenge. Once again I accept the invitation. Sometimes it’s as simple as remembering that when trust is lost I want to aim for “yes” in any way I can, because “yes” builds rapport. Instead of asking the person: “Do you trust me?” – a question that requires them to say “no” – I say: “I sense that perhaps you have lost your trust in me. Is that true?” This question invites a “yes”, which makes at least the acknowledgment of the loss of trust that much easier. Acknowledgment, of any kind, reduces the barrier. We can get one small step closer. The journey without a map begins.
Some other times, the task is much larger. Certain forms of mistrust, especially intense anger and hostility, are still more demanding than my own heart’s capacity can contain, and I contract in response. That is, I know, my own loss. It is not about the other person, who they are, what they do or don’t do, what their qualities are. It’s about my own heart’s capacity to love the person who mistrusts me. Whenever I can rise to the occasion, I am that much closer to the experience of heaven that comes from knowing that living in trust is a choice. May I find my strength to do so.
Yes, on the personal level where we long so much to trust and become intimate, it’s hard enough……..yet there seems a way.
But what to do on a political or religious belief level, when, like in Israel, both sides claim they want peace, but none trusts the other side, not only due to past tragedies one caused the other, but with the added burden of religious and political material having been absorbed by each side from the words of their leaders.
This is related to fear of physical harm, plus the doctrines increasingly fed the each side publicly, then repeated socially.
What I experience is people saying that if I even consider trusting the intentions of the other side, I am already not faithful to my side. That feels like a no-winner, and I believe it shuts the majority of people up, who would otherwise be at least willing to listen to the other side and be accorded similar listening in return.
Dear Shira,
Of course the political, social, religious divides are orders of magnitude more challenging.
As I am sitting here, I don’t see a way to approach them without a third party that is attuned to everyone’s heart, able to love everyone through the dispute. Tall order.
And I am not giving up.
Miki
I would like to add another dimension of thought to this excellent presentation. As young children, we learn about helplessness as synonymous with vulnerability. They are felt to be one and the same. I am strongly suggesting that the only way one can grow from being a child (emotionally, not physically) is to embrace the idea that as an adult, one need never feel helpless although circumstances, both emotional and physical in nature, may create the stimulation of a childhood perception of helplessness.
Let me simply define these terms by saying that helplessness offers no options, no choices, no resources, no experience – all of which do characterize what it is like as a child. By vulnerable I mean that there are always choices! Philosophically as an adult one should never again ever feel helpless, although great vulnerability may arise from the circumstances at hand. This makes all the difference in the world. Let me give you a straight forward example.
Even when the choice that exists is that of inevitability, it is a choice that can be made and that defines that person – regardless of size and age – as an adult. I previously used to illustrate this profound difference by using those in the concentration camps knowing they were being taken to their deaths. Among them were those who recognized and accepted their vulnerability and the inevitability of their deaths and in so doing died as adults. Those who felt no choice, were overwhelmed with the feelings of helplessness and succumbed to the end dying in an emotional child-like state.
To head off discussions of the Holocaust that may arise with this illustration of my point, I have changed the example to that of the passengers aboard United Flight 93, Sept. 11, 2001. Once learning through cell messages of their likely fate, some were no doubt overcome with helplessness and became paralyzed in fear and the consistent sense there being nothing they could do but to curl up fetally. There were those who recognized their overwhelming vulnerability and accepted theirs was the choice of inevitability. They knew they would die and made the choice to accept their fate. This mobilized them as adults to take definitive action knowing they would rob the desired terrorists’ goal.
Now couple these states with two other facts distinguishing the chlld from the adult. And that is the difference between a child’s binary (or digital) thinking which is a quite normal phase of early cognitive development that, like a light switch, allows for only one of two positions. On or off! You are either with us or against us. We are right (because God told me so) and therefore you are wrong.
Contrast this with an adult’s “dimmer switch.” Now there are infinite choices between on and off. There are at least 50 shades of grey aren’t there.
Put together the adult capacity in the face of a threatening situation of vulnerability with its knowledge there has got to be a choice, (not just blind retaliation), with the adult’s capacity for analogue thinking and we have the makings of real world problem solving.
Leave child-like helplessness in the face of threat and rigid, fundamentalist (another word for binary) thinking and, lo and behold, we have the front page of every newspaper in every county, over thousands of years. It is all the same story reported of the helpless child, acting without choice who makes his optionless a virtue by digitally idealizing his choice as good and, ergo, all others are by definition bad.
Haven’t been able to get from here (warfare, brutalizing others, etc) to there with these earliest perceptions, unaltered, operating the machinery of living. Once vulnerability with it choice(s) and analogue thinking that says maybe I have some good stuff and maybe your stuff is good too; then we are on our way to the kind of future that we long for having.
Hi Sheldon,
I am really appreciating your thoughts about the distinction between helplessness and vulnerability, and the crucial role of choosing even in the face of impossibility. I also am quite taken by the connection you make between the state of helplessness and the right/wrong thinking superimposed on it, and the potential for harm that then emerges. Even the examples you used are meaningful for me. All this resonates deeply with me. I know I will continue to think about these things.
The one thing that I don’t resonate with and about which I feel quite sad, is the link you make between those states and being a child. Quite a number of years ago I became aware that we habitually associate many negative traits with being a child: selfishness, impulsiveness, and others. I also noted how, for me, children represent life before it’s socialized, tamed, and changed into so much that I find troubling about adults. I stopped attributing negative traits to children, and I completely stopped using two words that I now find painful: “infantile” and “childish,” both of which capture that sense of superiority that adults have toward children.
I have known children whose choices, thoughtfulness, and presence in the face of difficulties I appreciate more than many adults. I also have a diary that my mother wrote about me when I was quite young, mostly between ages five and six, and I also remember the experience. All of this leaves me quite unwilling to embrace that aspect of your thinking.
I also think you can make the same arguments without relying on painting children in the way that you do. So I am hoping you can see this as a friendly comment, inviting you out of any residual binary thinking about adults and children, and into accepting them, fully, into the human family.
Much gratitude for your thoughts!