Trust issues

i don’t trust many people…maybe four people in total.
that is alot for me, human beings are fundamentally flawed…they are missing a few chromosomes :smiley:
take care :alien:

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missing a few brain cells as well in most cases, this society is turning into some sort of jungle for idiots where you have to stay in the tree tops all the time and watch that no-one knocks you off of your branch.

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Really? I would be much less trusting of a religious person. Not trying to start anything. Just how it is for me.

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There was a (very) famous developmental researcher years ago named Erik Erikson (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Erikson). He asserted yet another path of developmental stages (after Freud’s and Piaget’s, and before Kohlberg’s), and that one has become the most widely utilized in modern psychotherapy.

The acquisition of Trust is the first of those stages. Among many other things, Erikson observed (across a research population of hundreds) that small children have to learn to trust their caregivers if the caregivers are trustworthy, meaning reliable, consistent, caring, compassionate, empathic, understanding, patient, etc.

If the caregivers are not “trustworthy,” the very small child will have problems at the next developmental stage, Autonomy, during the so-called “terrible twos.” The trustful child with trustworthy caregivers will usually develop an appropriate and functional sense of separateness and burgeoning independence. The dis-trustful child of caregivers who are not trustworthy tend to become too independent and autonomous here, but fearing being alone and unsupported, often flip back and forth from overly autonomous too overly dependent, needy and clingy.

In the next developmental stage, Initiative, the appropriately trusting child feels sufficiently secure to be able to explore the world and acquire experiential knowledge. But the dis-trustful and flip-flopping child who had problems with Trust and Autonomy often demonstrates too much Initiative here… and too little there. If the caregivers are insufficiently reliable, consistent, caring, compassionate, empathic, understanding, and patient with the child who caroms back and forth from too much to too little of any of these three developmental acquisitions, the next stage may be direly affected.

That stage is Competence (which used to be called Industry), or the behavioral demonstration of capacity and capability to solve problems and overcome challenges. Failures at Competence are considered grave because the next stage up the line is Identity, or sense of self.

If the child has either failed or “split” into over- and under- Trust, Autonomy, Initiative and/or Competence, Identity will be “foreclosed” (see James Marcia’s work online) into a set of dysfunctional, reality-denying and/or -avoidant defense mechanisms that prevent further growth toward realistic Trust, Autonomy, Initiative and Competence in adolescent and adult life… again according to Erikson and legions of developmental psychologists observing children over the past 65 years.

I found this enormously edifying, as my own developmental difficulties seemed to be described at every stage. I had really lost hope. BUT… as I developed and practiced the Hindu / Buddhist / Sufi / Gurdjieff / Krishnamurti -based “mindfulness” mantra of “observe to notice to recognize to acknowledge to accept to own to appreciate to understand to digest to transcend” (see an earlier version at http://pairadocks.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-10-steps-of-emotion-processing.html), I was able to establish trust on that basis, instead of on the basis of either blind belief or trying to overcome anxiety.

As I have continued to take my meds and use this mantra, I have been able to establish functional Autonomy, functional Initiative, and functional Competence. And my sense of self – or Identity – has become a lot more positive. As I have written elsewhere on this forum, I don’t feel “cured,” but I do feel waaaaay better.

I wholly trust my pdoc. my instincts tell me he cares about me.

judy

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