Be more trusting

I need to get over some old problems I know. I try to rush it, but again, again, I think I need time. It’s not really fair to my boyfriend, I know, but maybe it’s less about trust and more about being irrationally scared. I have no reason to not trust my current boyfriend. I still have nightmares about my ex sometimes. Or maybe I’m just confused about the whole thing. I don’t want to mess up what I have because it’s so good. I really do Love him.

My fiance claims that I need to learn to trust people more. Not like be gullible and believe everything a stranger says, but in a personal sense. Ever since screwing up my friendships I had with my friends from high school I have found it very hard to open up and become close with people in the area I now live in. I have several people I consider friends and yet I just can’t bring myself to trust them with my innermost secrets.

Also, the most secret of secrets, things I should be able to share with my fiance…I can’t. I just can’t bring myself to tell him.

Whether the secrets be minute or the deepest and darkest, I have trouble opening up to people now. I used to be very talkative and I used to love sharing my life with everyone around me. However, now…I seem to always talk but never actually say anything (yes, that is a quote from Doctor Who, but in this situation, it fits).

I’m posting this just so I can clarify my thoughts regarding some issues I’ve had regarding aspects of certain types of relationships, and I’m trying to figure out how to change my thinking where I need to.

I had lunch with a friend a few weeks ago, and in the conversation we had I was telling him that I have difficulty trusting people and in putting the right level of expectation on them, and I asked him for his thoughts. The essence of what he told me was that you go through your daily life and you encounter all sorts of people, most of whom you don’t know at all and the only thing you can really expect from them is that they will respect your space, and the idea of trust never really enters the equation. If you look at them and smile all you can trust you will get back from them is that they will maybe smile back if they feel like it. As far as expectation goes in relationships deeper than the miscellaneous stranger you might encounter on the street, I had a harder time understanding what he said.

It seems to me that the idea of trust is very closely related to expectation, or at least in the way that I think of these things. If I put a certain level of expectation on someone and then they don’t fulfill it, I feel like I they have violated my trust. I realize that this feeling I get is through no fault of whoever I think wronged me as I likely never communicated to them that I had put this level of expectation on them and also what I expected from them may not have even been realistic or rational.

There’s a certain balance I don’t seem to have found yet. As far as my relationships with people go, either they’re in or they’re out. I try to keep as distant as possible until I allow myself to pass a certain threshold and then I want to be as close as possible. I don’t really have a good sense of how to do “in between”, and that’s a problem. If I’m friends with someone, in the first place I don’t really see why we can’t use each other for whatever purpose although I’m told that people use different friends for different things.

For instance, you might go to the movies with friend X, but you may never be able to talk about things with friend X the way you do with friend Y and yet friend Y may never go to the movies with you. In my thinking, I wouldn’t even consider friend X a friend in the true sense of the word and would probably do little to maintain such a relationship because it seems to lack some deeper element of trust. This seems to be a mistake number one as in this case I am trying to put more expectation onto the relationship than I should. As for friend Y, I would be confused as to why they don’t sometimes want to do things with me like go to the movies. I might question how deep the relationship really is if it’s not multi-dimensional.

What I come away with from all these thoughts is that I need to learn to accept that certain relationships will only reach a certain level of depth and that this doesn’t mean such relationships aren’t necessary, and I also need to learn to accept that a deep relationship doesn’t necessarily mean that the people in the relationship are involved in all aspects of each other’s lives. Here’s the problem: I can say these things and intellectually contemplate that they are true, but I don’t feel it at all. How do you force a new way of thinking onto yourself so that you actually believe it in your heart and not just intellectually? I ask that rhetorically; I’m not actually expecting an answer…

naive

It’s so abstract.

Part of me feels as though I have been wronged too many times for it to even be a possibility anymore. That’s the part that thinks “what’s the point in trying”.

Then another part of me feels as though it’s something I have to force myself to do so that I can learn that not everyone is going to screw me over.

What I’m not sure about is how to bring those two parts of me together.

Spoke with my genious boss
He’s got such an immense and absolute trust in people
So impressive
And of course does bring genious results
Wish I were able to get this level of trust
Wonder how to do it…

Have some ideas
But these are not clear yet

There are many different levels and types of trust. In one sense I really have learned to be more trusting in my professional relationships. I don’t know if it’s a matter of trust or of being willing to cede control; they’re both kind of related I think. I’m willing to delegate more. I’m willing to discuss problems and seek input more than I used to be. I trust that people are professionals who are doing their best job and that they respect me for my professional judgment as well. I’m not so scared that my opinions or approaches to different issues will be thought of as foolish. I guess this comes with having more experience and also with being forced into a role where I have to make quicker decisions. I feel like I really have been making progress

Another form of trust is on a personal level, that someone can be there for you when you need them. I’ve been told many times how normal it is for people to come into your life for a while and then disappear. My problem with developing this more personal level of trust is that I can’t deal with the expectation that people aren’t going to stick around for good – that there’s no guarantee that anyone will stay, even people I like and I think like me back. I can’t deal with there not being some level of constancy and assurance of it, and I also don’t want to deal with it at this time. By having learning to trust as a goal, I’ve thought a lot about things I’ve been doing to sabotage relationships and about how I can change my behavior so that people want to trust me. However, I’ve also found I can do what I want and that it could still be totally irrelevant to anyone else. Therefore, I’m not going to waste time consciously thinking about this anymore… although I’m still going to take what I learned and not try to act in a way that purposely sabotages relationships…

I am terrified of the damage another person can do to me. But I also know that I have only ever been happy in those little moments when I am putting my faith in someone to care. And I so desire to be a lot more in touch with myself.

People who trust even a little are radiant.

I appear pretty trusting and vulnerable to people on the surface – or at least to the wrong people mostly. I had an uncomfortable upbringing, and I’ve had unbelievable betrayals by a few people, to the point I definitely run away from people when they come close. I try to hide my terrified insecurity behind a really friendly and fun demeanor, but as soon as anyone begins to see behind that I just feel paranoid and act out strangely. The last time I decided actively to let down my guard it was one of the worst mistakes of my life. I’ve survived, but at a huge cost. I have been programmed to have a difficult time knowing who to trust, and which “inner voice” to listen to. I can be quite highly functioning professionally and socially, etc., but feel so unbelievably alone. This has gotten only worse over the years. It is hard to know what to do though when you have a situation that you hope friends can support you with, and they wind up – at best – being unable to even understand what you’re going through. Or worse, when they turn it against you. I cannot even imagine trying to use someone’s pain against them.

I am happier to be the “wounded” person who has a conscience than to exploit someone else’s trust, but my goodness, how can I get to an in-between-point? How can I get some relief and learn how to become more “safely” vulnerable? And to let people in where they can either hurt me or help me? Because I know what the ironic truth is: if you don’t let yourself be vulnerable, you are 100% guaranteed to be hurt, because you have already been determined to miss an opportunity that you will always wonder about by pre-ordaining the situation to be a failure.

To be honest, with my last extremely-failed situation of deciding to trust someone just to give them a chance – I wound up handling things well. And this loser will never be anything more than a loser. And the people who fell for his side of things at my serious expense, well, I do not think they are brave souls.

This goal is a hard one to accomplish, especially when a good friend of many years backstabs you. Apparently she bitched about me to another good friend to the point where the other friend told her to shut up. I don’t think this has ever happened to me before. (not counting when we were little when everyone said anything about everyone else just for attention).

It’s been a bad day. :-(

of the people who deserve my trust. The ones who SHOULD have it do & the ones I’m not sure of are the ones who really could come & go & I probably wouldn’t even notice. Im marking this complete, mainly for the simple fact…I know who this pretty much revolved around & things in those situations are basically almost perfect! Still some minor issues here and there but nothing that can’t be worked out & handled properly.