If you missed them, here are: Part 1 and Part 2.
Ok, I'm pretty sure I have committed some kind of huge blogging faux pas by having: requested that Aphra Behn interview me, started to answer her questions, run off to a wedding, and in the exhaustion following, never finished answering her questions. So, now that I have recovered from my trip and have had given myself enough intervening days of mindless posts to allow my brain to clear, I am back at it. With great apologies to Aphra Behn for all the flakiness, here is my answer to the third of her interview questions:
3) What does trust mean to you?
Ok, I admit, another of the reasons that it has taken me so long to answer this question is because I just can't come up with an answer I like. In my early blogging days (a few whole months ago), I wrote a post about trust that really resonates with many of the folks who drop by and visit me here. The Junky's Wife read that post in a Nar-Anon meeting and it made someone cry. Recovery Discovery carries a copy around. The San Diego Reader has even paid me to publish it. After all that, wow, I really feel like I should have something huge and healing and deep and life-altering to say about trust, something else that will touch people and make them cry and carry my words around in their wallets and pay me money. And yet...
What do I know about trust? I'm still learning what trust is. Anyone who knows me knows that I joke about my "trust issues" all the time. I like to joke that I should see a therapist for my trust issues, but first I have to overcome my trust issues enough to see a therapist. (I actually really do not have, and never have had, a therapist. Maybe I'll blog about that sometime.) When I was at that wedding recently, I spent some time dancing with some of the guys in the wedding party. One of my partners tried to dip me, and I would not go over. I told him it was just my trust issues acting up, a common refrain of mine in any situation where someone else is supposed to physically support me.
If anything, I tend, as is the case with my lack of a therapist or the ability to dance, to be suspicious of people, not to open up, not to tell the truth, not to give them all of myself. I did believe in my husband and give into his care my heart, my life, all of me. And one of the great challenges in my recovery has been not to learn from his betrayals that I was right, that I should protect myself from people by closing up again. But that breach, that injury, did teach me that trust is not blind belief; trust needs to be founded on something, even if that something is simply the will to change.
So, maybe trust is walking that line between closing a hard exterior shell against possible hurts and revealing my vulnerable interior without basis. Maybe trust is a perfect middle ground of remaining balanced in openness and love without fear of harm. But I don't know. I'm still trying to figure it out.
I actually wish that I could be less trusting. I have this weird need to open up to people all the time and tell them about myself, and I do it far too quickly before I know if I can trust them or not. I don't know where that comes from. Maybe it's because my home environment was so repressed and secretive that I'm reacting against that? Who knows. Or maybe because it's lonely and I need someone to share my emotions and thoughts with.
It helps that I've stopped drinking, as being sober makes me more able (obviously) to stop and think before I open my mouth.
I think my trusting nature also comes from the fact that I am naturally a fairly nice person. I'm not saying that I always am, and that I haven't hurt people, but, if I did, it was unintentional and not planned. It took me a long to realize that other people might not have the same good intentions as I do.
As far as friends go, I've had a very good track record so far (touch wood!). I can normally tell pretty much straight away whom I can touched and I have very rarely been proved wrong or lived to regret opening up quickly. It's with men that trusting too quickly becomes an issue because, when my judgement is clouded with dreams, expectationns, romantic fantasy, then I am in no position to make a good decision.
Let's just hope I take a step back next time I meet a man.
A wonderful, thought provoking post.
And trust is a tricky one. A lot of times it seems people equate trust with trusting they won't be hurt. I'm beginning to learn/wonder/consider that trust is trusting I'll be okay even when it does hurt.
I love your honesty.
I think your last sentence holds the key. If you stop trying to figure, then what else is there but trust? It's not an answer, it's a state of being, once you're free from fearing outcome.
Beautiful post.
It's hard, isn't it? Especially when the people you most want to trust (need to trust) are the people who have violated that trust again and again, and, at least at my house, with a refrain of, "BUT WHY CAN'T YOU JUST TRUST ME?!?!"
Your first trust post, though, helped me and the rest of us because you describe that balance well--it made me think of how redefining what I want can help me deal with expectations that just aren't reasonable in the relationship I'm in.
Oh, I don't know. I hate that weird feeling, though...when there's something that you so had a grip on for a moment, intellectually and spiritually, and it's just kind of faded away...
No worries about the delay in answering; it was a humdinger of a question, and the answer was more than worth waiting for.
One thing I've learned is that trust is often confused with predictability; I'm comfortable around people whom I don't trust but whom I can predict simply because I can predict them.
It's complicated, isn't it? Thank you for a thoughtful and thought-provoking post on the subject.
And glad to know you're not drinking, Serizy. That's good to hear.
Aphra.