I woke up this morning with lots of thoughts in my head about trust. Its not a random thought process of course, recent life events have led me to needing to understand. So after almost a year of not writing anything in my journal it once again becomes a tool for me.
A huge amount of things have happened in the past year, and yet i somehow feel like i am in the same place. Perhaps the child within has just started to scream at me again.......
Anyway, the focus of this post is trust. What is trust exactly? It seems to me that it is a very strange concept and is also one i have had problems with all my life. I have very distinct recollections about not trusting people when i was younger, not trusting anyone in fact. But today i wonder about not only what i meant by not trusting anyone but also if i have somehow become too trusting - am i holding my vulnerable under belly up to the world then wondering why i am getting hurt?
When i think back to my teenage years and my twenties my lack of trust was suspicion. I was suspicious of anyone who tried to get to know me - what were their motives exactly? what did they want from me? and when they got it would they toss me aside like a used and broken toy? I always used to think my trust issues were related to the fact the people i trusted most not to hurt me or leave me did just that. Talking to my young step brother however has revealed that he feels the same way as i did at his age, yet his parents have never left him. They are very much intact as a family, and he has not had any of the chaos i had as a child. So what is it about us both and what does it mean to 'trust'?
It is obviously something to do with relationships - all of us talk about trusting (or not) in other people as well as ourselves. In romantic relationships it is mainly thought of as trusting the other person not to cheat on you with someone else. Trusting a friend is usually about keeping personal information about you to themselves or being there to stand up for you, and trusting yourself is about making the right choices is it not? Its about having an expectation, a limit, a line that is not crossed isn't it?
Taking this idea of a line that is not crossed by either yourself or another person i think is the most useful as it highlights the drawing of a line by one and the need for it not to be crossed. So where is my line drawn? and how has that point changed over the years? or has it moved at all? Do i have very high expectations? Have i had to adjust those expectations in my lifetime? Where did my expectations come from in the first place?
All of these questions are important and help me to answer my queries about what my step brother and i have in common - a shared fear means we have both got extremely high expectations of ourselves and yet seem to understand that other people can't live up to the same level of expectation.
At the minute i seem to have learned even the smallest level of expectation of others is pointless because they just keep crossing the line i draw. So should i always expect the worst of people? I wonder what life would be like if i did.........
A huge amount of things have happened in the past year, and yet i somehow feel like i am in the same place. Perhaps the child within has just started to scream at me again.......
Anyway, the focus of this post is trust. What is trust exactly? It seems to me that it is a very strange concept and is also one i have had problems with all my life. I have very distinct recollections about not trusting people when i was younger, not trusting anyone in fact. But today i wonder about not only what i meant by not trusting anyone but also if i have somehow become too trusting - am i holding my vulnerable under belly up to the world then wondering why i am getting hurt?
When i think back to my teenage years and my twenties my lack of trust was suspicion. I was suspicious of anyone who tried to get to know me - what were their motives exactly? what did they want from me? and when they got it would they toss me aside like a used and broken toy? I always used to think my trust issues were related to the fact the people i trusted most not to hurt me or leave me did just that. Talking to my young step brother however has revealed that he feels the same way as i did at his age, yet his parents have never left him. They are very much intact as a family, and he has not had any of the chaos i had as a child. So what is it about us both and what does it mean to 'trust'?
It is obviously something to do with relationships - all of us talk about trusting (or not) in other people as well as ourselves. In romantic relationships it is mainly thought of as trusting the other person not to cheat on you with someone else. Trusting a friend is usually about keeping personal information about you to themselves or being there to stand up for you, and trusting yourself is about making the right choices is it not? Its about having an expectation, a limit, a line that is not crossed isn't it?
Taking this idea of a line that is not crossed by either yourself or another person i think is the most useful as it highlights the drawing of a line by one and the need for it not to be crossed. So where is my line drawn? and how has that point changed over the years? or has it moved at all? Do i have very high expectations? Have i had to adjust those expectations in my lifetime? Where did my expectations come from in the first place?
All of these questions are important and help me to answer my queries about what my step brother and i have in common - a shared fear means we have both got extremely high expectations of ourselves and yet seem to understand that other people can't live up to the same level of expectation.
At the minute i seem to have learned even the smallest level of expectation of others is pointless because they just keep crossing the line i draw. So should i always expect the worst of people? I wonder what life would be like if i did.........
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