I don’t know how to trust. I’ve never known how to trust. No, That’s a lie. I’ve trusted my mother when she told me my father would get better. He had cancer. Even he didn’t know, she couldn’t tell him, the doctors wouldn’t let her. Maybe if I have known I could’ve made him better? Now we’ll never know. This was 11 years ago. I haven’t really trusted anybody since.
Do you know what’s it like to not trust anybody in the world? It’s very lonely, especially on long business trips to a foreign country.
I get feelings, paranoia, I always feel like people are lying. I catch the most minute inconsistencies and start pulling, and wind up hurt, mostly because I started pulling. But I can’t resist, I can’t resist pulling on that little inconsistent thread. I don’t really know anybody. I can’t really talk to anybody. I have a thread in my hand, it’s pretty thick already, but I’m afraid. I’m afraid to pull it. Maybe for once it will be nothing. But even if it is nothing, if I start unraveling and digging deeper I will hurt everybody, including myself. If I don’t… I’ve never been able to enjoy peaceful ignorance. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, I can’t work. Maybe with time that’ll go away, but for now I have to pull.
People have told me to get help. How can I get help? I can’t trust anybody.
I don’t know what to do.
… I don’t know why I’m posting this.
Well, you just exhibited a sign of trust. You asked for advice.
So you do trust, to an extent.
I don’t know what to say about the thread you are thinking about pulling.
Perhaps it’s not so much about trust as it is about your own self-esteem. I think that those with a strong sense of value of themselves, don’t get as hurt when lied to or betrayed.
I won’t pretend to know what you are going through, I did want to respond to let you know there are people you can trust, and if you feel you need help, you can get it.
I have no problems with trust. But occasionally, I will dwell on something I said or did. It took me some years to realize that it really doesn’t matter, no one made a big deal out of it. I’m a small cog in a big social machine. Sometimes one of my friends or family will say something that will make me scratch my head. I look at the larger picture. Are they good people? Did I misinterpret that?
Certain levels of trust need to be earned. Basic trust, in my opinion doesn’t need to be earned. I guess I believe that most people are inherently good.
My problem is that I love to believe that all people are inherently good.
But what if they’re not? I’ve been bitten by the other side of Pascal’s Wager.
What if everybody is out to get me and is laughing behind my back at my inept naivette? Sure, the possibility seems very remote, but the ramifications are so great, I get sucked into believing in it.
Me posting this is in a way an attempt to call the world openly on it.
Hey, you are not alone. I feel this way too…and once said, “When you are not looking, the whole world is actually laughing at you”. I could have said what you have just typed word for word, and claim it mine too.
I think we have to remember that people are imperfect. Trust will be betrayed to some extent. We ourselves are imperfect too, and try to get an imperfect world to be perfect, well, is impossible.
I think we have to do something about expectations, to remember that people can be both good and bad. And sometimes, I think, the intentions is more important. I rather have someone lying to me to protect me, than to tell me the truth just to dig at me.
The thing about lying that you need to understand is that everyone lies. It really doesn’t have anything to do with you. People lie to simplify things, to protect themselves, to protect others’ feelings, to make themselves look better. It’s part of the human condition. This is not necessarily a bad thing. I would have more trust and respect for someone who told a “white lie” to protect the feelings of someone else than another person who prided themselves on always being honest and didn’t care who suffered from it.
Trust is about giving others the opportunity to hurt you and believing that they won’t. Once you accept the reasonable limitations of human behavior (ie: everybody lies about little stuff), you can then concern yourself with deciding whether another person, with the opportunity to hurt you, would do so. There are people in my life that I would trust with nearly anything - money, the care of small children, intimate information. There are people in my life whom I trust with somethings but not others. And there are people who I refuse to trust any further than I can shotput them.
It is learning by experience, trial and error and intuition.