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Don’t Speak to Me – Because Your Words Have Become Meaningless

An Article About Trust

By A. Alexis KreiserPublished 4 years ago 6 min read
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What is trust?

Trust means many different things. As a noun, it is the firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something. As a verb, it is to believe in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of. Synonyms of trust include faith, confidence, and belief. If you trust someone, that means that you believe them to be a reliable figure to keep you out of harm’s way, both physically and emotionally. As an emotion, trust means revealing your vulnerabilities to someone else, while at the same time putting your confidence in them to not take advantage of you being open with them.

Who do we decide who to trust and distrust?

For you to be able to trust someone, they should display various behaviors around you, including compassion, consistency, and humility. They should also respect your boundaries and show some gratitude. This person should also be willing to compromise and not to expect something for nothing. The person should also try not to cancel at the last minute – seems kinda obvious. They would confide in you by giving up all the facts no matter how much it hurts them to do so. They don’t do water cooler talk and they don’t do materialism, and even though they should be right a lot of the time, but also be willing to learn. You should also get to know their connections, and vice versa, so that all of you can be there for each other. However, the most important thing out of all of this is to remain relaxed, because it shows that you have nothing to hide and that you are ready to open up and be vulnerable.

Why do trust issues develop?

Here’s where this article gets very personal from my perspective. One way that trust issues can develop is if you were raised in a mistrustful home. My parents would always change plans on me at the last minute when I would least expect them. As a result, I become flustered and panicked because now my whole agenda changes. In a hypothetical example, I want to sit in my room and write, but my parents spring on me that they are having people over and that I should talk to them, when in reality I simply do not want to. Another example of mistrust is sometimes I would invite someone over to my house or they would invite me over to theirs, and then, according to them, “something’s come up” and they have to cancel, leaving me sad and bored. Being raised in a mistrustful environment can lead to trust issues later in life, which is exactly what happened to me. (Thanks, Mom and Dad, and shout out to my two best friends from grade school…and my current roomies now that I think about it. I’m not going to name names, but let’s just say that they know who they are, and they know exactly what they did.)

Another way that trust issues can form is from traumatic events. In my case, the most traumatic event that lead to an issue relating to trust would have to be one of the many awful things that happened in the year that I don’t like to talk about…you know, the year between 2015 and 2017. It happened that summer. I had been aching to go to Screwattack Gaming Convention for years and years and years, so that summer, at the age of 18, I told my parents that I wanted to go, only for them to tell me at the very last second that if I went, then my parents might get a divorce because they are so disagreeable – so disagreeable in fact that I have come to the conclusion that my brother and I are the only reasons why they are still together at all, let alone married, but that’s besides the point. That whole thing left me sad and in all kinds of pain – not just emotional pain, but physically and financially as well. I have no idea if I will ever recover from that. However, I did get to go to RTX in 2017, which at the time was basically an equivalent of SGC. The only thing that was different was the name. It was still in the same place, with all of the same people, including some of my friends that I was finally able to meet in person at that time.

There are a few signs that someone has trust issues. The first is that they don’t believe what other people tell them. This is a big one because my parents would always make fun of me growing up, whether that was my driving, my body, my sleep cycle, my health, or whatever else. They said that they “only do it because they love me,” but I have asked them to stop – repeatedly – and nothing has changed after over two decades of existence. Another sign is that they expect the worse, which I also do. This one isn’t necessarily because of trust. It’s because I’ve been dealt some pretty nasty hands in life. For example, I hit a telephone pole back in November, and the bumper was falling off, so I thought that I should take it to the shop because I could still drive it, it just wasn’t aesthetically pleasing. Well, it turns out that my car was totaled by my insurance because the frame was also damaged, but by that time, I had learned to expect the worst so that I wouldn’t be disappointed or surprised. Other examples include asking for certain things for Christmas or my birthday and not getting jack sh*t, thereby leaving me very disappointed, as well as when I was in second grade and the person in the lunch room always took away recess for my whole class despite the fact that I was a very good student…ugh that still hurts all these years later. All of this has made me feel suspicious of other people and taken advantage of. A third sign is that somebody keeps others at a distance, which I do, and hard. I long for deep and meaningful relationships in life, but I struggle with this, partly because I have issues being vulnerable and I feel like an outcast wherever I go or whoever I am with.

How do we conquer trust issues?

There are many small ways that we can conquer our trust issues. One way is to stay present among other people, which means that we should stop living in the past. I have trouble with this because I can’t be around people in general without feeling fear and potential betrayal, so I have trouble being around people that I know and trust. Another small way is to learn to forgive. This helps us to let go of resentment and open up to trusting others. It can seem hard to forgive because of how often we should do it, but to be exactly, we should forgive others exactly 490 times (Thanks, VeggieTales). Conquering trust issues also involves not repeating the same mistakes, knowing exactly what you want, and letting go of fear, which can be exceptionally difficult because of the betrayal we have felt, so it is very difficult for is to be vulnerable around others, but we will certainly try.

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About the Creator

A. Alexis Kreiser

Freelance author. I write about what I want which is mostly stuff about science and politics - or my own life.

Email: [email protected]

Twitter/Instagram/Snapchat: @Lexie_FM

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