First of all, trust is confidence in a person and in his actions. There are always two sides to trust and a person can always get something other than what he originally wanted. In psychology, the term trust is interpreted as a state of a person in which he consciously becomes dependent on another person whom he trusts.
Absolutely any relationship between people is built on trust in each other. Be it relationships with strangers on the street, when asking for help, or communication with loved ones. Trust always carries with it certain risks for a person; he can be understood or, conversely, rejected. Every person who enters a state of trust in people must take into account several simple factors:
Trust is a change in distance
By revealing his experiences to someone, a person automatically changes his distance, he becomes closer. It is not surprising that people do not trust their problems and thoughts to people in whom they are unsure. Simply, they keep their distance from them.
Every person who wants to improve relationships with people must remember the rule - if you want to change relationships with people, learn to trust. Naturally, you can not try to get closer to other people, not open up and not trust, but, for example, wait for the moment when people themselves begin to reach out and will be the first to open up about their experiences. But it is worth remembering that trust is often mutual. “If I trust, they trust me.”
A person who decides to trust should understand that there is a certain degree of risk when he may be misunderstood or even rejected in his revealed experiences.
Becoming a Faith
So, answering the question posed in the title of the article, we can generally indicate that faith goes through four stages of formation:
- Emotional faith.
- Intellectual faith.
- Willful faith.
- Heart faith.
It's easy to guess that it all starts with emotional faith. Enough has been said about this. Let us only indicate that in addition to hope, which is greater than desire, peace, which is stronger than tranquility, can also be included here. Intellectual faith is built on conviction. Beliefs are more stable and unchangeable than emotions. When a person experiences the first stages of inspiration from contact with the Divine and does not turn away, his feelings gradually subside, and awareness of what happened comes. Faith becomes more conscious. Volitional faith is the determination to voluntarily submit to the will of God. There may be an element of slavery (fear) and an element of mercenary (search for reward) mixed in, but in any case, the person himself decides to follow the acquired faith. The belief here becomes much deeper than just an opinion. It will be impossible without love, which ceases to be just a feeling. Heartfelt faith comes from our inner self. Love comes to the fore here. Heartfelt faith cannot be explained by material, earthly categories. In the New Testament, for example, the heart is never used to mean the organ that pumps blood. In general, Holy Scripture attributes to the heart functions that secular science is accustomed to attributing to consciousness. This includes will, thinking, sensations, conscience, etc. It turns out that in heartfelt faith the whole being of a person is directed towards the object of faith - God. Faith here ceases to be just a belief, it becomes confidence. In this case, the reality of the Lord becomes more obvious than the reality of the surrounding world, it becomes an internal axiom of the soul. This, if you like, is not only an answer to the problem of the origin of faith, but also to the question of why to know God. If He is the Creator of the world, then He is more real than the world. Heartfelt faith becomes the return path to the perfection of the Reality lost by man.
Risk levels
By trusting people with their experiences, the person himself becomes vulnerable to some extent.
Having experienced failure once, he risks closing himself off and becoming a loner, distrustful of others. By trusting those closest to you, a person can get negative experiences, experience pain and disappointment because he expected a different reaction. Thus, we can say that trust is a kind of lottery that a person can win or lose. Read more: A guide to problems in family relationships If a person is dependent on outside opinions and has little self-esteem, then the degree of trust in people may be higher. For example, a person who does not know how to act in a given situation often looks for someone to ask for advice, someone to trust. The degree of risk in trust can be in two directions:
- determined by the state from the inside;
- determined by a person’s readiness for undesirable reactions.
Be that as it may, if you learn to assess the degree of risk, you can avoid many unpleasant situations both for yourself and for others. After all, to trust or not is the responsibility of the person himself. No one can predict what another person's reaction to trust will be.
The need to trust people
Trust is an exclusively psychological category found in people - in the animal world such a feeling and relationships built on it are absent. It always implies endowing a person with unique, special powers. This can be expressed in complete emotional openness, with an unspoken demand for secrecy, or given the keys to one’s own apartment - everyone has their own unspoken set of such concepts, where they will not be betrayed.
Naturally, since everyone has different understandings, people behave in different ways, and the purity and depth of feelings do not always coincide. So it turns out that the trust shown disappears as a result of certain actions. The more a person gets burned, the more difficult it is to give away important pieces of the lives of others, but at the same time the moment of being able to trust remains significant - it gives a feeling of security and the ability to mentally relax. Everyone needs a place where there is no need to constantly scan the situation and defend themselves.
Trust concerns all spheres of life or just one, for example, a person can trust someone with a secret, but not money, and he can entrust someone else with babysitting, but will not tell an ounce of personal experiences. Absolute and total trust, affecting all areas of life, is extremely rare, since most often people cannot meet such high expectations of others.
Usually, by the middle of life, so many unpleasant experiences appear that a person searches for strength in himself, how to trust people if you have been deceived more than once and whether it is worth doing it. The opportunity to do this immediately and naturally disappears, but the need for a person standing behind you never disappears. Trusting at least one person helps to maintain emotional balance, strengthen the nervous system and not feel lonely. It is this kind of communication that makes life full, and not the number of formal acquaintances and imaginary friends, who cannot be trusted with even the slightest information.
There is also a special mental mechanism that increases the coefficient of trust in people depending on the duration of acquaintance. That is, unfortunately, even the most reliable person present in our lives for a couple of hours will not inspire as much trust as acquaintances from school. This is understandable from the position that people have already proven themselves over a long period of time and you can understand what to expect from whom, but this in no way characterizes personal characteristics. This is why the betrayal of friends and family is so painfully perceived - the level of trust in these people was overestimated from the very beginning. I remember marriage scams or deliberate infiltration of trust solely for the purpose of profit, which means it is necessary to develop the skills of not only subconsciously setting boundaries, but also conscious control and evaluation of a person, no matter how much time has passed.
It is inappropriate to trust everyone or to do this from the first minutes of acquaintance, but the opposite attitude is also destructive, when a person is closed from everyone and cannot trust even those who are considered his family. The adequacy of intimacy and the level of trust provided directly characterizes a person’s psychological maturity, his ability to listen to his own feelings and evaluate the people around him. This all comes with a certain, not so much life, but spiritual experience (events of personal life and those around you, books read and real stories - all this helps to form close relationships and establish their type).
Unfortunately, many lose the ability to trust because they incorrectly use the experience gained and, instead of applying the skills of assessing a person in the first stages, they simply drag out the pain of betrayal, closing themselves off in advance, without even giving the other a chance to demonstrate their qualities.
Trusting a person means being prepared for any reaction.
You can learn to control your emotions and feelings, but you cannot control another person. Most often, by trusting, a person expects that his experiences will be perceived positively, they will respond to them and will always help. But the fact is that to trust means to be prepared for any reaction, even not the most expected one.
So, for example, a girl telling her friend that she is pregnant expects a positive reaction from her, congratulations and discussion of plans for the future. But in fact, a friend’s reaction cannot be predicted; she can be either happy or upset, and these will be her experiences.
In order for the reaction to trust not to cause frustration and despondency, it is necessary to be prepared for negative reactions and accept that a person cannot always react the way he would like.
What is mistrust?
Mistrust is the easiest path to loneliness. It is impossible to build any normal relationship if there is no trust in each other. Distrust is a defensive reaction of a person who is unsure of people and their reactions to their actions. If you look and look for the roots of mistrust, then most likely the reaction comes from a person’s own lack of confidence in himself, the fear of being rejected, deceived, or not accepted. By refusing to trust, a person closes himself off, thereby trying to protect himself from negative experiences. There are several reasons for mistrust:
- lie;
- betrayal;
- failure to keep promises;
- envy.
Read more: The three-minute rule when communicating with your child
Mistrust can come from a person's family. When a small child opens up to his parents, he shows them his fragile soul. If parents overestimated, punished or humiliated the child in his desire to be open, then in adult life such a person will avoid trust, realizing that those closest to him can cause pain, what to say about strangers.
Loneliness
Faith in God often gives people some kind of moral support from above. Lonely people have a slightly higher need for this than people who have loved ones. This is the reason that can influence the acquisition of faith, although before that a person could be an atheist.
Any religion has such a property that its adherents feel involved in something global, great, sacred. It can also give confidence in the future. It is worth noting that confident people are less dependent on the need to believe than insecure people.
Why do you need to trust people?
As has already been said, mistrust leads to loneliness. Therefore, it is important to make new acquaintances and friends; for this it is important to be able to win people over. Man is a social being who requires relationships to function normally. Without society there would be no man himself. Lack of communication and trust in people leads to loneliness and recluse. Although trust can easily turn into mistrust, it is worth talking about the positive aspects.
Trust allows you to build strong and harmonious relationships between people. People who want to build comfortable friendships definitely need to trust each other, because this is the only way to get closer and get to know a person better. By revealing his experiences to another, a person unconsciously includes him in his life.
Whose side is the government on? To trust or not to trust?
At first glance, it may seem that people who choose distrust are less vulnerable to society.
Nobody knows anything about them, they do not open up about their experiences and, in principle, do not tell anything about themselves. But there is a downside, such people do not have the power to approach people on their own initiative. It turns out that someone who trusts others can freely change the distance in a relationship - moving closer and further away. These people tend to have more power in relationships because they have more choices.
