HIve Open Mic #129 : Trust

Hive Open Mic 129: Trust

Trust is a big word

I've had the same question repeated from many people who've been deeply hurt by those who professed to love them ...

“How do I learn to trust again?”

I can totally relate to this question on a very personal level.

I too have been lied to during one of my relationships. I was the only person in our social circle who didn’t know my partner was, in the words of a person who aired the truth many years later... “f*cking around”.

For a couple of years, while we were together, my intuition screamed consistently that he was cheating on me. But his friends covered for him when I asked where he'd disappeared to on the odd occasion and our mutual friends didn’t feel it necessary to let me know what was common knowledge either.

Perhaps it’s more socially acceptable for men to cheat.

“Boys will be boys” after all.

Right?

I now have a son to raise as a man and I’ve educated him on how to treat people equally from the get go.

His education has included sexism (and all the isms) and gender-bias as well. I do this to protect him as much as I do it to protect his potential partners. To encourage a sense of fairness, justice and accountability in him. To encourage his own personal growth and… ultimately… to hopefully build, in him, an innate sense of self esteem and self respect as well.

So that he'll be able to love, and be loved, fully in a vulnerable and honest way. Real connection. Isn't that what we all want in this disconnected world we inhabit?

And how can anyone love us if we're unable to be ourselves or even to know who we truly are ourselves...

because we are too often programmed to be a stereotype from the day we enter the world.

I don’t believe anyone can achieve any authentic kind of self love, or acceptance either, if they're hammered into a stereotype of what a man or woman is "supposed" to be from birth.

Most people lose a good part their authentic selves because of this rubbish. If not all of the best parts of themselves. And I guess it becomes hard for anyone to trust anything under such circumstances.

But this is not a rant about comically outdated perspectives and socialization. I was talking more about being let down and hurt by those that profess to love us at the start of this post.

I guess most of us by my age, and probably at any age, have had our trust broken at least once.

And our hearts as well.

When people ask me this question, "How will I ever trust again", I'm able to draw on some years of personal experience and, in addition, there is far more to being able to trust than meets the eye.

An inability to trust is a symptom of trauma.

As is handing over trust blindly because of the same. Which seems as though it's contradictory, but it is most definitely not.

And, as it turns out, trust needs to be earned anyway.

But there's even more than this to consider when I think about the word "Trust"...

What I finally understood after repeated experiences with dishonesty, broken trust and disappointment over the years... is that even when trust has been earned you can’t really trust anybody but yourself at the end of the day.

I know this sounds as though I’m somehow damaged or bitter because of my experience.

But I'm really not.

I'm very much at peace with things these days.

But it took three long years of total isolation and hard work after a final massive breach of trust to "get" and accept what I’m sharing with you here.

It also took a great deal of thought. A f*ck ton of meditation. And even some research. And it took asking others who had similar journeys and listening to their stories and ways of progressing as well to find my own peace.

I worked hard to return to some semblance of the person I once was. I was almost desperate to feel okay again, you see. The thing is… blindly trusting people the way that I used to was never okay in the first place. It was somewhat childish and extremely naive.

And it got me hurt repeatedly.

I lived in an ideal world created inside my own mind, mostly. Refusing to see any kind of real truth because reality wasn’t so pretty. Love and light, you know? Peace and love, you know? And yes. These things are all very good and well.

It’s just… human beings. And human nature, you know?

And people sometimes react in strange ways and do strange things when they feel their survival is threatened. Even psychologically threatened - as in their place in a work, community or social hierarchy.

So no. People do good things sometimes. And we do not so good things sometimes. And you can’t trust anyone one hundred percent all of the times because people make mistakes on to of all of this.

The thing is... when I truly learned to be okay with myself, I found I didn't need to trust anybody else anyway.

I was simply able to fully accept them as who they are.

That none of us are totally trustworthy all of the time is a fact.

Yes it is disappointing and it adds to the existential angst of the experience of "being human".

Hello. That's why we feel this in the first place. It's the nature of being human. This sense of inherent isolation despite our ongoing attempts at some kind of mutual perception and reality.

But while it can feel lonely initially, it is actually surprisingly liberating when you fully accept it.

I think most of us "get it" intellectually but still secretly wish it weren’t so. That we could change it somehow. And it's in the taking of this realization from a concept to an awakening/understanding to a proper, full acceptance that the "liberation" occurs.

Understanding that people are generally unconsciously acting out their own stories and that their behaviour really has little or nothing to do with you is very liberating indeed.

You get to a point where you don’t even feel you need to respond much. It’s simpler to just step back and wait things out. Wait for things to pass.

Even if it seems like you have something to do with an exchange. Most of human communication is generally projection and miscommunication, surprisingly. This becomes very clear if you really take the time to put your own perspective aside, completely, and ask with enough curiosity to get a proper glimpse of another human being’s experience of the world.

Sometimes it's quite incredible how profoundly different two people who are having the same conversation's understanding is, of what has even been said.

Eye-opening, in fact!

Try it sometime.

The next time you're having a difficult discussion with someone, take the time to reflect back to them what it is that you understand that they have said.

First!

"What I'm understanding you saying is..."

start there. And do please let me know how it goes :)

Once you’re able to take things less personally and observe things with less attachment, or non-attachment in full… well… there really isn't much need to trust anybody but yourself!

Nobody can control the behaviour of anybody else. And a person can be driven quite mad by even trying to do such a thing.

Because control is an illusion anyway, you see.

We all know this.

There’s a quote that goes something like "If you love someone set them free. If they come back they're yours forever and if they don't they never really were."

Are we able to "own" people as "ours".

Really?

How about just setting them free and not expecting them to come back or be anything other than they truly are instead?

Happy HPUD to all! 🔥

I powered up today. Better late than never and not as much as I'd have liked because I've been on the go and am almost bleeding from the eyes to get this in, in the remaining three minutes.

But I'm here, on it and in for the duration.