Читать книгу 1 ON THE PATH TOWARDS BASIC TRUST - Linda Vera Roethlisberger - Страница 7

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Basic trust — the key to a fulfilled life

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Basic trust – the key to a fulfilled life

The irrational fullness of life has taught me never to discard anything, even when it goes against all our theories or otherwise admits of no immediate explanation. It is of course disquieting, and one is not certain whether the compass is pointing true or not; but security, certitude, and peace do not lead to discoveries.

C. G.Jung

Trust is a complex entity. We instinctively know what it feels like to engage trustingly in our own lives and with our fellow human beings. The same applies to freedom – such as options for action, decision-making freedom, empathy and abundance. And we also know what it feels like when trust is destroyed – when the construct of our thoughts and feelings, the construct of our lives, collapses in the fraction of a second. It can take years to rebuild it.

Trust is future-oriented and at the same time a result of our past, a state between knowledge and non-knowledge, from fragile to unshakable, interwoven with primal feelings and our earliest experiences. Sometimes it is destructive, makes us vulnerable, and makes us realize that we cannot control and often misjudge our outside world. And yet we are highly dependent on trust if we want to lead a successful life and want to act from a place of abundance rather than a place of fear.

On the palette of basic trust, which we will discuss below, trust is one of the primary colors. Other nuances are being able to trust and rely on others, assuredness, hope, confidence, faith, being able to build on something and, finer even, self-confidence. Accordingly, philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, educators, clergy, political scientists and many more have dealt intensively with the topic of trust. At a more rational level, trust is the expectation of not being disadvantaged by the actions of others, with “others” meaning both humans and systems. In that sense, trust goes hand in hand with the responsibility we expect of others: I trust the government, which has to fulfill its responsibilities. I put faith in a teacher, my partner, a co-worker, my child, the auto repair shop, the vegetable grower, et cetera … While this trust can be a simpler, straight-forward type of trust, it can also mix with expectations, which complicates the issue – as is always the case when we expect something and thereby put hope in the outside world to fulfill our (often not even formulated) wishes. Unfulfilled expectations as well as broken trust engender suspicion. Yet when we look back, we see that trust and its antagonist mistrust are two poles between which we oscillate in these lives of ours that are characterized by uncertainty and risk, and that we are time and again challenged to grow.

As aptly put by Seneca:

Lack of trust is nothing but

the result of difficulties.

Difficulties have their origin

in a lack of trust.

What to do? “Just trust” to circumvent difficulties? That sounds like a risk, especially in a time when morality and ethics are losing value and the outright lie is experiencing a renaissance.

An “ethics of trust” had also preoccupied philosophers such as Aristotle, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Locke and many others; after all, philosophy seeks to come to grips with our most existential experiences. And trust is existential: if we put our trust in the wrong thing, it can deprive us of our livelihood, cost us our health or uproot us. Without any trust, however, we would be paralyzed, even in the literal sense of the word. Even learning to walk calls for trust, and so it is with philosophy and life itself: we take physical or mental steps that get us ahead, towards the unknown, so that we may encounter something that gives us support and that has meaning for us.

As we delve deeper into the notion of trust, we sense how intertwined it is with all our actions. Trust permeates all areas of life. Many of our decisions require trust: What do we choose to do when we have an alternative? Where do we go next? Who will accompany us? Which way will we go alone or together? We want to avoid pain and be happy in life – that is what underlies our actions and unites us all. But is it our trust that drives our because it is somewhere between fear and trust that our personality grows. Both form us, like the lump of clay that takes shape; they create the individual person, with all its beauty and scars, from a tension between trust and mistrust.

Lack of trust restricts; freedom, by contrast, whether personal or that of our society, requires trust, and vice versa. Our personal freedom ends where it harms others. At the same time, we must be able to trust that others do not want to harm us. We live by rules – and those who override these are attacking not only us but also our freedom. Especially in this regard, we are presently experiencing many assaults that are deeply unsettling. In traffic, we exercise caution, knowing that it can easily lead to casualties; but we are not prepared for a terrorist to purposely drive a car into a crowd. Such acts are an attack on life and freedom at the same time.

Such attacks are nothing new in their essence. Let us remember the trust that many Native Americans held in the New World conquerors: Dismissed as naive, they were exploited and massacred while they had no idea how shamefully their trust was being abused.

Trust and disappointed or even abused trust go hand in hand with strong emotions. That is why we want to look at the concept of trust from a more emotional perspective.

An extreme abuse of trust engenders fear; yet fear does not serve as a good guide. Where there is fear there is no trust, and where there is no trust, nothing can flourish, nothing can move.

By contrast, those who trust let go of, in part at least, control – something which the more security-oriented part of ourselves despises. And yet, time and time again, we choose to trust, because we know instinctively or from experience that trust can get us ahead. By trusting, we get more options that promise more abundance. The principle of trial and error, or success and failure, opens the wide field of trying things out so that we might arrive at new solutions. Indeed, this is can be seen by observing the evolution of mankind.

In the emotional realm, trust opens up the wondrous world of relationships with other people: daring something, letting go, security, love … Imagine, for a moment, a society in which we can unconditionally trust – ourselves, our choices, the people who are close to us, strangers, institutions – a paradise based on empathy, compassion, mutual responsibility …

And as is often the case, this paradise is within us.

Trust is such a beautiful

thing that even the worst scammer cannot

resist a certain respect from the one

who gives it to him.

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

But our Earth is a learning planet, and often we evolve most when challenged. All of a sudden, we experience the downsides of human nature – deception, malice, doubt, envy … – and must realize that our trust has been abused. We feel deceived, hurt and shaken in our self-esteem, ethical principles and worldview. This applies to broken trust of any kind: in our life partners, in business partners, in ourselves, our health, our talents. The abuse of our trust will leave scars, and the resilience of our personality will determine whether we recover from this blow or whether the fear of pain and disappointment will henceforth reign in our lives. Often, in situations like these, we lose confidence in ourselves because we realize that we subscribe to notions that aren’t realistic, and that we’ve ignored, overheard or misjudged signs and harbingers. However, when we can no longer trust ourselves and our perceptions, we no longer see our path and do not know where to take our next steps. We then want to retreat into our cocoon, and sometimes we have to as a means to recognize our own share of failure, heal wounds and rethink our options. The degree of our basic trust determines whether to spin this cocoon more tightly with the threads of fear or to burst it open and return to life a different person. But perhaps we are alchemists, who can transform broken dreams, disappointments and resignation and who hence experience true metamorphoses.

The concept of basic trust was coined by psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson, a student of Freud who emigrated to the United States in 1933 and taught at Harvard and Berkeley. In that sense it is a fairly new term, although its spiritual dimension, as we shall see in Chapter 2, has been significant for millennia.

According to Erikson, the roots of basic trust go back to earliest childhood. A healthy personality needs basic trust to develop and to experience emotional security, having its needs met, reliability and encouragement.

As newborns, we are helpless and totally dependent on others. Evolution has nonetheless seen for the care of infants and toddlers in numerous ways, such as biologically programmed signals that are transmitted by the child and answered by the adult. In the child’s repertoire ranging from screaming to smiling, the baby has a whole gamut of features to induce the desired behavior in adults. Yet even so the baby is not always heard as intended.

There is an interface between the infant or young child’s needs and the outside world. In other words, the way the outside world responds to the child’s needs forms thechild’s basic mindset and affects and pervades it for the rest of its life. When the child’s needs are met by the outside world, the child experiences security and growing trust. Food, warmth, shelter, physical closeness, a loving ambience, security – all this fuels basic trust and makes it thrive. On the other hand, when a child experiences neglect, unreliability, threats and failures, and has no stable attachment, the development of trust is hampered, and mistrust, fear, insecurity and behavioral and developmental disorders emerge. Both have consequences. C.G. Jung pointed out that life is the “history of the self-realization of the unconscious”: “Everything that lies in the unconscious wants to become an event.” Whether trust or fear – our later life is an expression of what was created early on. Each child will be confronted with disappointed expectations over and over again as it grows up. What is important, however, is that trust outweighs these disappointments: Then the child learns how to handle frustration, become independent, draw healthy boundaries and develop a sense of self.

Basic trust is like a seed that is brought to germinate through human warmth and care, and makes the personality blossom.

But is the development of basic trust really reserved only to those who were lucky enough to experience it as a young child? The metaphor of a seed germinating implies the notion that “something” already existed and is thus invested in all of us: a deeper vibration, a “primal” confidence as part of our human dispositions. At this level, we are moving in the realm of the spiritual, the spiritual recognition of being.

The trilogical approach combines the rational (IQ), emotional (EQ) and spiritual (SQ) levels. In the next chapter, we shall discuss the spiritual aspect of trust.

Faith is an oasis in the heart which will never be reached by the caravan of thinking.

Khalil Gibran