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I was thinking about trust this morning and the faith we have in the dark early hours that the sun will rise again. As a child I sometimes imagined myself spinning through space on planet Earth. It was dizzying. How futile to try to control anything under these circumstances.
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I was full of existential angst as a child. I probably read too much Isaac Asimov. Itās just as well I didnāt find out about Schrƶdinger's Cat until later. I got quite tangled up in thinking sometimes. The outside world seemed rather unreliable. Who and what could I trust?
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I was lucky to have dependable parents. Although my dad enjoyed teasing me with practical jokes I could mostly rely on him. I didnāt always trust my body to do what I wanted it to though. Pain, vertigo and collapsing joints were lying in wait to catch me out and trip me up.
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The unpredictability of other people became more obvious in my teens. I left behind familiar games Iād played at childrenās parties and discovered the much more complicated games that young people and adults are expected to play. I soon realised I wasnāt all that good at this.
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People I thought I could trust, like my parentsā neighbour, who took me out for the evening with his teenage children, turned out to be completely unreliable. He drunk-drove us home swerving onto the wrong side of the road. That was the first time I thought I was about to die.
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That was the first occasion I can remember social politeness conflicting with personal safety. As the evening progressed I tried to work out how to avoid being driven home by this person, but I failed to come up with a viable plan. My parents had no idea how dangerous it was.
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I became somewhat wary about other people as a result of experiences like this. Iād be hopeless at the trust game (a popular 1980ās team building activity) which involved falling backwards into someoneās arms. Iād rather high dive off the top board than rely on being caught!
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Iām not sure to what extent my #trust issues relate to being #autistic. Itās certainly the case that some people found it easy to dupe me; perhaps because I always wanted to believe the best of people. I hated the idea of the world being full of cynical, exploitative types.
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As time went by - 60 years to be exact - I found a small number of people I trusted implicitly. This was partly instinctive and partly based on a rational appraisal of the facts. Heart and head. Itās important to me to have people I can rely on, confide in, and feel safe with.
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The Covid pandemic has been very challenging in terms of trust. Our personal safety depends in part on politiciansā and strangersā actions. Pleas to the public to exercise common sense seem rather futile when we know how irrational behaviour tends to be at the best of times.
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The question I am left with is this: āIf I have been tricked, fooled and betrayed by other people, how can I ever learn to trust myself?ā. This is what I am working on in therapy. Itās taken me most of my life to get to the point where I can really see what was going on.
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Therapy is working in two ways. Iām developing my understanding of the vulnerabilities that led me into dangerous, damaging and compromising situations in the first place. But Iām also celebrating the strengths, resourcefulness and conviction that allowed me to get out again.
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Part of the work Iām doing in therapy is to learn to trust my intuition again. I sometimes set this to one side if I canāt find any rational justification for it. And yet, with hindsight, I come to realise that my natural, instinctive, āgut reactionā was perfectly justified.
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I think this is because Iām picking up all kinds of subliminal signals that I canāt fully decode on the spot. What I sense is perfectly real, itās just on a different plane. When I eventually manage to process everything I realise what was going on. This can take some time.
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So many aspects of my life have required me to trust people: education, health, employment, finances, friendship, love... it isnāt easy to recover after trust has been breached. Defensiveness is a rational and sensible reaction. But being hypervigilant soon gets exhausting.
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In the middle of a global pandemic itās even more important to feel confident about staying safe. There are Covid related risks to manage before considering anything else. Keeping my anxiety under control depends on getting reliable information from trustworthy sources.
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