Hope vs. Trust?

[MakersDozn]

Hi, tweeter,

tweeter Wrote:I would say I was a generally an open and trusting person. To put it another way, I wasn't looking to distrust, unless I was given reason. There are degrees of trust. I didn't start out with high degree of trust, unless I had to. (As a young child, I had lost trust in my parents. I wavered between expecting them to be trustworthy and not trusting them because they were so volatile.)

Our trust issues go back to infancy. Even then, we had the sense that our needs were not being met by those who we trusted to take care of us and nurture us. We/I have many emotional/kinesthetic memories of feeling deprived of the most basic sense of security that time, attention, and nurturing are supposed to provide. Our father did interact with us warmly, but our mother basically just let us lie there.

tweeter Wrote:[...]Trustworthiness should be re-evaluated from time to time, even in the best of relationships. It's not a matter of testing so much as not overlooking the obvious.

It's always been hard for us to see the nuances of certain things, especially where human nature is concerned. We never had anyone teach us about Life, about People, about How To Get Along In The World. We see our brother and our sister-in-law have these meaningful conversations, these teachable moments, with our nieces. We never had these teachable moments. So we never learned.

tweeter Wrote:In certain relationships, trust has to be earned up front via honesty and competence (as in specialized knowledge). I no longer walk into a doc's office in a state trust, or even expectation of trust. In fact, my BP goes up.

I have been so betrayed in recent times by three people I had trusted for years, that my ability to trust was blown out of the water. Even earned trust is questioned, for good reason. My attitude is at a baseline of mistrust. That's the way it has to be due to circumstances: medical; political; family.....

Can this hope/expectation re trust cause harm to self? Yes.

We have had our trust (or perhaps more accurately, my misplaced hope), badly damaged. Others inside have had a great deal of difficulty forgiving me for my choices, and I have had difficulty forgiving myself. Our T keeps telling us that I/we did what we had to do to survive. I still think I could have chosen differently.

tweeter Wrote:[...]I can have a problem, as I want to trust because of my feelings and because there are times of trust, there can be expectation.[...]

Yes. I hope, and I expect that my hope will be met with a response that builds my trust. It doesn't happen nearly as often as I would like it to happen.

tweeter Wrote:[...]Even when I had determined some predictability of that person's behavior, I had an Expectation of being treated nicely the next minute, or hour or day. I also realized this couldn't be maintained by that person. I would choose to overlook the unpleasant treatment, put up with it, because of the special quality of the relationship on the positive side. The hope was that my honesty, trustworthiness and sweetness would make it so the person[...]had no reason to treat me poorly. But the reason might have nothing to do with what I do.

[...]It didn't do the other person good because my acquiescence empowers[.]

There have been those who have used my neediness against me/us, as I described above. I have to remember not to allow this again. Our others are watchful, and we have safeguards in place now. We can only hope that our walls are not so high and so strong that they keep out people who can enrich our life.

Thanks and take care,

Charity