Hope vs. Trust?

[MakersDozn]

We talked about this with our T this evening. I said to our T that I feel that some of our others think that I'm naive because I've always been a trusting person.

Our T disagreed with the idea that I've been trusting. She reminded me that throughout our life, people have proven themselves to be *un*trustworthy. And that I experienced this lack of trust at a very early age.

I said that even after repeated disappointment, I've tried even harder to find validation from people. She said that I've kept trying because I've had hope, not trust. I've kept hoping that I would find trust even though I haven't found it so far.

She said that hope and trust are two very different things. She said that trust has to be earned, but hope does not, and that hope is one of the things that keeps us going. Not just me, but people in general.

How can I continue to hope when I repeatedly experience a lack of trust? Am I indeed naive to keep hoping? Am I hurting myself by hoping? Am I hurting the others with me?

What do you think? What are your experiences with hope and trust (or a lack of either or both)?

Thanks,

Charity

[The People]

(09-11-2013, 09:54 PM)MakersDozn Wrote: We talked about this with our T this evening. I said to our T that I feel that some of our others think that I'm naive because I've always been a trusting person.

Our T disagreed with the idea that I've been trusting. She reminded me that throughout our life, people have proven themselves to be *un*trustworthy. And that I experienced this lack of trust at a very early age.

I said that even after repeated disappointment, I've tried even harder to find validation from people. She said that I've kept trying because I've had hope, not trust. I've kept hoping that I would find trust even though I haven't found it so far.

She said that hope and trust are two very different things. She said that trust has to be earned, but hope does not, and that hope is one of the things that keeps us going. Not just me, but people in general.

How can I continue to hope when I repeatedly experience a lack of trust? Am I indeed naive to keep hoping? Am I hurting myself by hoping? Am I hurting the others with me?

What do you think? What are your experiences with hope and trust (or a lack of either or both)?

Thanks,

Charity

[The People]

We really get what your T says. Once I attended a talk given by a man. I think he was mostly speaking about the B word but he isn't into labels. He talked about folks like us and how trust usually came in percentages. That made sense to me. He said that when you have been hurt as badly as we have the trust was an ever moving marker. Almost like a thermometer. And if they do one small thing, even without meaning to hurt us, the thermometer drops down.

Question. Do you trust yourselves 100% We don't. So if we cannot even trust ourselves to do the right thing 100% how can we put that number on others. My opinion is that many multiples (people may disagree with me here) have nobody in the A circle. I remember learning a concept in a psych class one time and it just jumped out at me. The very good prof talked about how we often have people in various groups. We are the centrepiece and most people have a few people in there with them. A good spouse, a best friend, kids and grandkids... Then in B are people they work with every day and trust on a general level but not as much as those in the A circle. Then there is the C circle; people we see at church or social occasions where we might say "I lie your dress" "are you still with the same law firm?" or "i'd like to spit on so and so's ugly shoes" (referring to a politician or someone not in the room. If we see them at Safeway we say hello and hold the door for them coming out of the mall. They might work in another area of we are in a large office. I cannot remember if there was a D circle.

Multiples allow few if any people into the A circle. A T perhaps although they most likely don't get 100% either. Some of you were fortunate enough to have family members that were not hurtful and you got through things together. Even then there is a need to tiptoe around some things. But the people who get closest to us only get as far as the B circle. Because it is too scary otherwise.

I happen to like it when someone moves from a C to a B circle. More socializing, more people to talk to. I don't think that even I am in my A circle. However, while I find it sad at times I do not give up hope on my good days. IO know there are people out there who care about me. I have a friend from my B circle visiting from out of town. We worked together and we moved to this city at separate times. We share a lot of opinions and humour and she is comfortable to be around. Comfortable enough that I felt safe enough to visit her a few months ago as she now lives in BC. That gives me hope. That is progress. Because I know that there are others out there like this friend. Some are in the past, some are in the present but life has changed things a bit and hopefully there will be more in the future. No, not hopefully. I am sure there will be. Fear makes me want to leave them in the C circle but hope makes me want them in my B circle. Will anyone ever fully make it into A? I don't know. But if I have enough Bs and my kitties I will be OK

A friend's husband came home from H today after heart surgery. I think there must be a b- circle as they are neither B nor C. We are good to each other but I am not the one they turn to when they need help and they have too much on their own plates to nurture me. But they were my first friends here. So I care a lot about them. However, tonight as I was trying to nap this voice inside me was saying "nobody ever calls to see if I am OK." However, part of me knows that this is by design. When things are too dark I cannot speak enough to explain why things are dark. So while I am sad that I don't have an A team... I am babbling but I hope that what I said made sense.

[Tangled Web]

WOW MDs. That is an amazing conversation to have and makes so much sense to me. Thank you for sharing that.
I also have mistaken hope for trust and have been disillusioned too many times to count.

How can I continue to hope when I repeatedly experience a lack of trust?
Hope is that little ray of sunshine you look for when you surrounded by darkness to help show you the way out. It is one of the MOST important things you NEED to have. I agree with your T....hope just is......TRUST needs to be earned now as adults.

Am I indeed naïve to keep hoping? Am I hurting myself by hoping? Am I hurting the others with me?
I believe you would be hurting yourselves if you didn't have hope.
I would like to share one of my experiences with you.......before I got married (now divorced) we used to be a person who always tried to see the good in people. We were a giver.......if we had it to give. We had HOPE in humankind that everyone wasn't bad or evil. Xmas was our favourite time of the year and we would get so excited in trying to find that perfect gift for someone, you know the one gift that when they opened it up, they would light up like a xmas tree. That was what xmas was for us. After I got married my ex-husband changed all of that. He was more worried about the cost and the money wasted on other people and we would fight every single year at xmas. I tried so hard to hold onto that for myself but I lost it. Everything was about the price tag and money. Even at the grocery store one time while we were waiting to check out, this mother with a baby in arms that was screaming was short 3 dollars and she was trying to find something to put back because she didn't have enough money and I pulled out a 5 dollar bill and gave it the lady and my ex flipped out on me. I knew it was the right thing to do but it was situations like that where I lost my hope. It has been a few years now since I have left him, and I am still NOT the person I used to be before him. When you lose that hope it is so hard to get back. So NO I don't think you are hurting the others or yourself and I don't think you are naïve either. I believe you would hurting yourself and the others if you lost that hope.
I know we have been hurt tremendously because we lost that hope.
TW

[tweeter]

(09-11-2013, 09:54 PM)MakersDozn Wrote: We talked about this with our T this evening. I said to our T that I feel that some of our others think that I'm naive because I've always been a trusting person.

Our T disagreed with the idea that I've been trusting. She reminded me that throughout our life, people have proven themselves to be *un*trustworthy. And that I experienced this lack of trust at a very early age.

I said that even after repeated disappointment, I've tried even harder to find validation from people. She said that I've kept trying because I've had hope, not trust. I've kept hoping that I would find trust even though I haven't found it so far.

She said that hope and trust are two very different things. She said that trust has to be earned, but hope does not, and that hope is one of the things that keeps us going. Not just me, but people in general.

How can I continue to hope when I repeatedly experience a lack of trust? Am I indeed naive to keep hoping? Am I hurting myself by hoping? Am I hurting the others with me?

What do you think? What are your experiences with hope and trust (or a lack of either or both)?

Thanks,

Charity

Funny, I was working on this today. Kind of continuing project. Instead of the word "hope," I used "expectation." It can also be wishful thinking

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.)

The conditions of life change and character responds. Fact of life. 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.

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.

I have particular difficulty with people who frequently give double signals. This scenario has been a pattern in my life that has caused havoc. If there's no emotional/sp. attraction or attachment, I'm okay. I refuse to serve the needs of that person; I don't trust, and will say so. However, if there is a bond (personal or professional), 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. My experience has mostly been with people were like a flag in the wind. I didn't know if I was going to be loved or emotionally ab*s*d. 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 (a close platonic friendship or a romance would be the setting) had no reason to treat me poorly. But the reason might have nothing to do with what I do. It's a losing battle. I know what it takes to leave such relationships, and I've done it, eventually losing all desire to return. But harm was done: lost years and waste of energy; loss of potential social contacts; even loss of reputation.
It didn't do the other person good because my acquiescence empowers, though with the people with whom I've had experience, the person had little control over themselves, but could be very charming. Something clicked and I was hooked as a friend, trusted student, love interest, whatever, until I couldn't take it anymore. That could be defined as there being a demand that I do or say something that went against my identity and standards and I could see how this could evolve.

time for a nap,
tweeter

[tweeter]

I knew I was sleepy when I wrote before. Amazing I didn't nod off at the keyboard. Maybe I did a couple of times. Certainly reads that way. Insufficient separation of categories.

The mixup for me might have occurred because I define two categories of trust.

One is based in competence with subject matter, and outstanding integrity/accountability, respect for those served. This could indeed define a professional relationship, like a doctor, teacher.....
The way the health system operates here, it's easy for a doc to withhold test results (or even the full extent of testing done), doc notes, patient options and lack thereof because of how the so-called system is run, etc. Even trusted docs can falter and pretty much throw a patient under the bus, so to speak. Without going into details, this has happened to me, and it's serious.

The Other has to do with my ability to trust someone with my feelings, my secrets. My expectation is not unquestioning approval. Who needs that! But, I need to expect the degree of gentleness that defines that kind of relationship for me, and I return it too.
If a person gets thru to some indefinable degree, I'm capable of waiting for that kindness, thru h*ll and high water. It might not start that way, but when this goes wrong, it's because of a double signal situation. Can begin as interactions read more than one way, and which involve a certain emotional risk for me. This can occur in purely platonic and romantic situations. (One reason why being flirted with makes me uncomfortable. But, that can be the beginning of courtship, or not.....)

A problem.
I have a history of not expecting the same degree of integrity in some above-described personal relationships, most especially of the romantic variety. My view has been that I don't necessarily have to trust someone to love. Makes sense in some situations, but not in others, not where the degree of honesty and responsibility towards each other should be on solid ground (as between reasonable adults).
Sometimes I think I'm too softhearted, naive. Or, I've been taken advantage of by someone who knows what I need and can get thru, the combination of which is very rare.

Okay, I think I've clarified things. Hope so.
tweets

[MakersDozn]

Hi, everyone,

Thank you all for your thoughtful responses. We've saved them all so that I can write replies offline with editing and formatting and such. I'll reply during this weekend.

You've each given me something to think about.

Take care,

Charity

[MakersDozn]

Hi, The People,

The People Wrote:We really get what your T says. Once I attended a talk given by a man. I think he was mostly speaking about the B word but he isn't into labels. He talked about folks like us and how trust usually came in percentages. That made sense to me. He said that when you have been hurt as badly as we have the trust was an ever moving marker. Almost like a thermometer. And if they do one small thing, even without meaning to hurt us, the thermometer drops down.

Yes. Some folks here at MM have referred to this as having a "trust-ometer." It's kind of like a speedometer. For someone like me, who tends to see things in black-and-white, it takes a great deal to understand the concept of shades of gray. I feel in extremes. I hope in extremes, and I expect things in extremes. So it's no wonder (except to me, of course), that I end up disappointed so easily and so often.

The People Wrote:[...]I remember learning a concept in a psych class one time and it just jumped out at me. The very good prof talked about how we often have people in various groups. We are the centrepiece and most people have a few people in there with them. A good spouse, a best friend, kids and grandkids... Then in B are people they work with every day and trust on a general level but not as much as those in the A circle. Then there is the C circle; people we see at church or social occasions where we might say "I lie your dress" "are you still with the same law firm?"[...]If we see them at Safeway we say hello and hold the door for them coming out of the mall. They might work in another area of we are in a large office. I cannot remember if there was a D circle.

We have very few people, if any, in our A circle. Even some of the others inside aren't in some of the others' A circles. But that's the nature of relationships in general, and our inside relationships reflect our outside ones.

The People Wrote:[...]I happen to like it when someone moves from a C to a B circle. More socializing, more people to talk to.[...]I have a friend from my B circle visiting from out of town. We worked together and we moved to this city at separate times. We share a lot of opinions and humour and she is comfortable to be around. [...]That gives me hope. That is progress. Because I know that there are others out there like this friend.[...]Fear makes me want to leave them in the C circle but hope makes me want them in my B circle. Will anyone ever fully make it into A? I don't know. But if I have enough Bs and my kitties I will be OK.

[...]A friend's husband came home from H today after heart surgery. I think there must be a b- circle as they are neither B nor C. We are good to each other but I am not the one they turn to when they need help and they have too much on their own plates to nurture me.

We're glad that you appreciate the opportunity to socialize more with peole who enter your B circle. You've mentioned that you're an extravert. About three-quarters of us, me included, are introverts. So our B circle is fairly small, even with the people we see every day. Of the 250-300 people in our office, maybe about a half-dozen at most make it to the inner area of our B circle. Another dozen or two, mostly those in our department, would be farther out in the B circle, perhaps the "B-minus" people that you mention.

Our C circle would include the remainder of our co-workers, as well as relatives outside our immediate family. On the outer boundary would be people we see frequently but have little or no direct interaction with. As for the D circle, there are those with us who would definitely say one exists....It would include strangers, and particularly anyone we feel the need to put up our defenses against. Which is a lot of people, unfortunately.

The People Wrote:[...]So while I am sad that I don't have an A team... I am babbling but I hope that what I said made sense.

Yes, you make a great deal of sense. And thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts. I appreciate it.

Take care,

Charity

[MakersDozn]

Hi, TW,

Tangled Web Wrote:before I got married (now divorced) we used to be a person who always tried to see the good in people. We were a giver.......if we had it to give. We had HOPE in humankind that everyone wasn't bad or evil. Xmas was our favourite time of the year and we would get so excited in trying to find that perfect gift for someone, you know the one gift that when they opened it up, they would light up like a xmas tree.

Yes. I was like that with our theater friends, the people we spent most of our time with in our twenties. It was customary to exchange small gifts on opening night or closing night. It meant a great deal to me to give these gifts, even a flower, to the people who meant something to me.

Looking back, I believe that on some level I was trying to buy their approval. It's not that I wasn't being sincere in giving to them for giving's sake, but I did expect something in return. Emotional security for me, and the chance to be important in their lives, valued by them.

Tangled Web Wrote:[...]After I got married my ex-husband changed all of that. He was more worried about the cost and the money wasted on other people[...]I tried so hard to hold onto that for myself but I lost it. Everything was about the price tag and money. Even at the grocery store one time while we were waiting to check out, this mother with a baby in arms that was screaming was short 3 dollars [...] I pulled out a 5 dollar bill and gave it the lady and my ex flipped out on me. I knew it was the right thing to do but it was situations like that where I lost my hope.

Our grandmother (our mother's mother) was like that. It really hurt our mother and, after our parents married, it hurt our father as well. Our grandmother tried to run their lives, especially early on. Even though we were very, very young at the time, we absorbed the emotional current, and it's hurt us badly. There are those inside who have tremendous anger because of this. The anger scares me, and it wears all of us out.

Tangled Web Wrote:[...]It has been a few years now since I have left him, and I am still NOT the person I used to be before him. When you lose that hope it is so hard to get back. So NO I don't think you are hurting the others or yourself and I don't think you are naïve either. I believe you would hurting yourself and the others if you lost that hope.

Thank you for saying this. It means a great deal to me. And thank you for taking the time to share about your experience.

Take care,

Charity

[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