I have been asked to write about trust…
My first thought was, ”What the f… do I know about trust?”
But being human and no longer in the first flush of youth, yeah, I’m good at understatement, I figure I have some experience of trust and of betrayal.
If death is the lever arm of life, then betrayal is the lever arm of trust.
What I mean by that, is that, knowing about death can galvanise you to live your life as fully as you can.
Mr Gibran asks, ”You would know the secret of death.
But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?”

We exist in a world defined by duality, light and dark, up and down, hot and cold, male and female, no and yes. I now know that day follows night, the sun and warmth will return after a long cold winter. In more primitive times my people may have sacrificed a goat or a virgin to the sun gods to beg its return. Ignorance of the dance of the solar system made them fearful, mistrustful. Today it is spring, showery, grey and I have every trust that it will get warmer, that winter and summer are two sides of the same coin.

But maybe the request for me to write about trust was of a more personal nature and the request was really a probe into the mechanics of human relationships. In attempting to understand trust I read quite a few papers about financial trusts and on our personal reliance on another person.

A psychologist I spoke to believed that humans have a natural disposition to trust, are born trusting. The chemistry of trust is based on oxytocin, and like all chemistry within us varies from individual to individual. The psychologist has a small baby and is in the throes of oxytocin cascades and that may be causing her thoughts, for now, to fall under the sway of oxytocin chemical cascades as she bonds with her child. Oxytocin is the bonding hormone. So to trust another person you must generally have an experience of that person as reliable, you have mutual oxytocin events. So trust is learnt from experience. Hence the expression trust is earned.

Then there is the trust or otherwise between sexual partners. Betrayals, infidelities, jealousy, misplaced trust, disappointments, reconciliations and happy or unhappy outcomes drive the wheels of human behaviour, of literature, theatrical endeavours and music. I must admit I get sick of songs about co-dependant love.

So to trust. Are you any closer to understanding trust? The pundits, writing about reality, now tell us that we create our own reality and that what we have is what we resonate with and to change what we have or experience, we have to change our resonance. To resonate with trust we have to embrace betrayal, to fear a betrayal is to resonate with betrayal and thus attract it.

I don’t think I produce much oxytocin as trust of others does not come easily to me, but I do not fear betrayal, I have both betrayed and been betrayed and survived and prospered. The betrayals taught me compassion for my flaws and the all too human flaws of others. The betrayals taught me to trust myself and my intuition and to not betray myself to please another’s ideals or to meet their expectations. I learnt to listen to myself and trust my feelings. At times no doubt I will find that trust misplaced after some event or other, but I now know with a certainty that come from experience that I can trust myself to move towards a deeper love of life.