Unifying Trust
Recently a story rippled through some of the dating-coach world.
A man was taking a woman out, and she refused to go inside a chain restaurant with him.
As the story unfolds, we learn that she made him wait an hour in the car when he picked her up and they missed their reservation at the fancy restaurant.
She asked that he wait in the car, she said didn't feel comfortable inviting him into her home, because this was their first date, she didn't know him, doesn't trust him yet.
That's the part I wanna zoom in on, because this is a nuance that is keeping LOTS of people out of healthy partnership, spiraling in the same dating patterns. This is a nuance that allows unsafe partnerships to form and continue.
It isn't the behavior itself, it's the energy driving the behavior, and the reason that energy is there. It's an underlying lack of trust in the SELF. But maybe not how you think.
The behavior is withholding love, connection, and relationship until some level of "trustworthiness" is "proven" by the other person.
It seems to make all the sense in the world, when we think of trust as thoughts about whether some future event will play out in a predictable manner.
But trust is not a thought. Feelings of trust and safety come and go with thoughts. Trust itself is a practice.
Most people would say that they don't trust the other drivers on the road. These are their thoughts and feelings of trust. Yet, even in saying that, they're revealing a practice of trust. They are ON the road, practicing trust, behaving trust, demonstrating trust in other drivers. If they didn't trust the other drivers, truly, they would not be on the road.
Anxiety arises in any situation where our embodied practice of trust is not aligned with our thoughts and feelings of trust.
We are entrusted to a situation that does not seem to be safe to our consciousness, and anxiety is that dissonance.
This is obviously an adaptive survival strategy. This is the feeling that says "get the fuck out of there" and has reserved many of our ancestors the opportunity to give us life.
But if this is happening in dating and partnership, we are doomed from the get.
Dating is one place where we absolutely must unify our practices and senses of trust. And we absolutely must listen if that is even a little bit difficult.
Back to the first date: He's arrived at her home. He knows the location of her home. She's going to get in the car with him and he's going to drive them to a location unknown to her. She is demonstrating massive trust in him.
But she says she cannot trust him to allow him inside her home for the HOUR LONG WAIT he didn't sign up for.
Again, no criticism of this behavior, everyone has their boundaries—this is not about whether she lets him in the house. I wouldn't say anything about this if the statement was "I do not want you in my home."
I want to speak to this nuance of reasoning, this practice of withholding connection in the name of safety.
She is in a practice of massive trust with a man she does not have thoughts and feelings of trust about.
This is where her willingness to bear dissonance puts her at a high level of risk, and where unification seems like it would be problematic, but is actually the ultimate cure.
In dating, we MUST trust him all the ways we ARE trusting him--this is what I mean when I say unification.
When we get in the practice of feeling and thinking the level of trust we are behaving and demonstrating, we actually LEAVE the situations that do not feel safe. Our feelings and thoughts of unsafety and mistrust alter our behavior, because we feel the trust we behave and behave the trust we feel.
If we are constantly internally negotiating with the feeling of whether we can trust what we are already behaviorally trusting, that is hot water that can boil our froggy ass in no time.
It's like ignoring the check-engine light, like not turning it off after the car has been serviced. How will you know when a new problem actually needs attention? You are letting the alarm sound so often it's become background noise, and it's cover for all manner of nefarious activity coming into your field.
This unification is one nuanced element I serve my clients in individual containers. This is a gradual refinement, a slow polishing over and over of the same already-precious experiences.
Unifying behavioral trust with thoughts and feelings about trust is as risky as it seems.
Suspicion seems important and protective, and it IS, when we don't (and maybe can't) trust our own discernment.
This is the fundament we must install, reinforce, and observe as we integrate and unify—the trust in the self to discern and select valuable, generative, nourishing circumstances, situations, and relationships, so that the surrender we desire to practice and experience is the only thing that makes any sense at all.
It's what will lead me to a man I don't say "no" to, not because I am afraid or obedient or even merely easygoing, "being his peace," but because he NEVER makes a deniable offer.
Suspicion matters before you've purified threat from your field.
Once threats are not in your field, suspicion is a threat.
