April 16, 2008
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Featured Question #251: Trust?
What does it take for someone to earn your trust?
It's really not too hard to get me to trust you. I tend to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. Keeping my trust? That's another thing altogether. Everyone's on probation really. It always seems like I'm only giving people enough rope to hang themselves by giving them my trust, by expecting them to live up to my expectations, by hoping that they are as honorable as I like to think I am.
Generally, the more I know someone, the more I trust them. But saying I trust them is only saying I can gauge what they will do in any situation. I can say I trust people who have wronged me, but really, what I am saying is that I already have a good idea of what they will do and so I trust them, if you want to call it trust, to act in accord with what I have observed of their character.
Does that make sense?
People disappoint me all the time. So to say that I trust people is really stretching things. I've yet to meet anyone who's actions and motivations are beyond reproach, including family. As I've mentioned before in other posts, people are intrinsically selfish. So I expect people to act within the scope of their own self-interest. It's when people don't act the way I expect that they impress me. People who impress me with their actions earn my respect as well as my trust. With every selfless action, my trust in them grows. In effect, I put them on a pedestal and one little thing can bring it all down like a house of cards.
Yeah... I'm screwed up. I blame my parents. All of my trust issues stem from infancy... when my mom took off on her soul-searching tour and my dad dumped me and my little sister in foster care. When you can't even trust your parents to be there when you need them, you tend to stop trusting other people PDQ. I was only three when my mom came back, but she says to this day that I was a different little girl than I was before she left. Yeah... being abandoned, neglected, and abused can do that to a person.
What does it take for someone to earn my trust? Honesty...integrity... loyalty... a desire to be better than the lowest common denominator... a willingness to do what is right even if other people duck their heads and look away....
Basically, if you've earned my respect, you have my trust. Abuse my trust and you have neither my respect nor my trust. I'll still treat you the same, but I won't care if you stay or go.
I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too!
April 16th
This is the fifth day of the Cerealia.
The god Apollo was worshiped by his faithful cult in ancient Greece during an annual festival called the Hiketeria.
On this date in the year 1946, Pagan author Margot Adler was born in Little Rock Arkansas. Her Wiccan handfasting on June 19, 1988, was the first Neo-Pagan Wedding to appear in the New York Times' society pages.
It was customary to begin weeding the crops today.
The 2nd day of Payni is a Holiday of Ra and His Shemsu (followers).
Comments (1)
Of course we're all alone. As for broken, I guess in our society most people are, to an extent that you won't ever realize in your life.
I've never been broken like this before. I've been breaking for a little while now, but I've never been -broken-. I've laughed at myself until I cried, and it isn't helping, because of what I know, and maybe also what little I know.
Anyway, trust implies 100% belief in someone. The human condition predisposes us to never believe or doubt concretely, and the fact that your belief is about a human being in the same condition makes it, rationally, even less concrete. I used to hold the same kind of benevolent viewpoint that you do, but nowadays the ONLY person I trust, per se, is my partner. Everyone else, who I've never met or interacted with, gets a starting out 99% or so.
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