Who Can You Trust? Overcoming Betrayal and Fear

Chapter 1 Looking over Your Shoulder The only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him; and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him and show your mistrust. Henry Lewis Stimson Have you ever walked down a dark street at night in an unfamiliar city? You feel apprehensive and uneasy; each footfall behind you seems menacing; you quicken your steps. You tend to look over your shoulder, hyperalert for any danger lurking in the shadows. Trust can take on a similar feelingfollowing an unfamiliar path, encountering new people, working your way along in untested relationships, having to depend on the reliability of othersnot knowing what may lie in wait in the dim, unknown future. We've been making decisions about trust from the beginnings of our consciousness. Few of us can remember, but at one time we were all trusting of just about everyone. As we aged, we experienced both trust and its opposites, abuse and betrayal. Our human databank of knowledge increased tremendously. Some experiences were good, others bad. As these experiences multiplied, we began to shape our view of trust and mistrust. Child-development educators teach today that our behavior depends to a great extent on howor whetherwe resolved the trust-mistrust conflict early in our lives. Their viewpoint largely comes from the work of the late Harvard professor Erik Erikson. He held that the conflict between trust and mistrust arises in the very first stage of a child's development. Successful resolution of this conflict depends largely on the infant's relationship with the primary caregiver. If we encounter trust during our infancy, the stage is set for a lifelong perception of the world as a good and pleasant place. But if our caregiver wasn't dependable, then the crib and nursery turned shaky, and it's likely we grew up to be mistrustful and insecure. Both history and personal observation show us early or late that the capacity to trust, or the lack of it, bears out Erikson's view. Somewhere along the way, all of us in one way or another have seen our trust mishandled, either on purpose or by mistake. Slowly we became a little jaded in our view of the world. Perhaps at some point in our lives we blindly trusted someone without question. But as our experience grew, a little voice began to warn us to be cautious with every decision concerning trust. We quickly discovered that no one is immune from the pain of mistrust. Like walking down that dark street at night, we learned to trustbut also to glance anxiously to and fro for possible trouble. Trust and mistrust carry immense power in shaping our lives. They influence our view of our parents, our friends, our mate, our children, our bosses, our government, our peers...and even our view of God. To make the issue of trust and mistrust more complicated, in recent years our trust in trust itself has been shaken. The events of September 11, 2001, fractured bodies, buildings, friendships, and families and set the whole nation on edge. Thousands had faithfully left home for work in the World Trade Center or the Pentagon that morning, trusting to return by evening. They never came back. Their routine of trust and their very lives had been smashedby the treacherous violence of terrorists. The terrorists themselves had betrayed their trusting welcome at America's historically hospitable borders. Shortly after 9/11, our trust quotient took another terrible blow, this time home-grown in corporate America. Enron, WorldCom, and other business scandals shook the trust of millions of people, horribly damaging employees, investors, and retirement-account holders. The economic bubble of the 1990s first started shrinking and then collapsed amid charges of irresponsibility, deceit, and accounting trickery. Betrayal wearButt, Howard E. is the author of 'Who Can You Trust? Overcoming Betrayal and Fear', published 2004 under ISBN 9781578568017 and ISBN 1578568013.