Trust issues

My father used to tell a story about a psychiatrist who put his own son on top of a mantelpiece and encouraged him to jump into his waiting arms. When the kid duly jumped, the father let him go crashing to the ground. The psychiatrist then explained to horrified onlookers, "That will teach him never to trust anyone."

Whatever the merits of the humour in the story, trust issues almost always go back to our childhood.

The way things should work is this: your parents love you and support you. They teach you morality by (mostly) example that is then reinforced by precept. Starting in your mid teens, they let you develop more and more independence and then let go.

It never works out that way. I once had heated argument with a  Catholic woman who was interfering in her daughter's life. She insisted to me that she had to do so because it was her duty as a mother to make sure her children didn't go to hell. Her daughter was in her late thirties at the time.

Sometimes it isn't anybody's fault. I knew a young woman 40 years ago now whose mother died when she was 16. It was a horrible death and the poor girl was left with a mother-sized hole in her life. I know a guy whose father died a similarly horrible death from cancer years before I was born. Both struggled all their lives to form close human relationships. They see-sawed between being too trusting and too suspicious. The thing is, they both had some understanding that the problems began with them. They could see that their behaviours were destroying their chances to bond with other people but they wouldn't stop.

I say "wouldn't" instead of "couldn't" because there was something willful about it. They felt others should accommodate their special needs. They had trust issues because foundational people in their lives had been taken away from them, this brutal disruption had left them unable to build trusting relationships with others, it wasn't their fault this had happened and. therefore, other people needed to take their trust issues more seriously. Not everyone, you understand, only people who wanted to get close to them.

This is, easy to say, the exact opposite of what should be done. Trust issues are damaging to us not because other people fail to take them seriously but because we take them too seriously. When other people ask, usually with actions and not in with words, to get over ourselves, we quietly scream inside, "Can't you see, this happened to me and now I'm owed!" To which the obvious rejoinder is, "By whom exactly?"

I've done that. Like most people, I've had my heart broken, my trust betrayed and then I felt entitled to special treatment. Yes, I'm probably capable of picking up and carrying on but I deserve some special love. As I say above, I think I learned this pattern of behaviour in childhood from parents who probably learned it in their childhoods.

I've been fixing the problem bit by bit but there is more to do.