Lucy: ‘I’m getting so I don’t trust anybody.’ Linus: ‘Don’t you even trust me?’ Lucy: ‘I trust you as far as I can throw that blanket.’ Linus tosses the security blanket he always holds tight. Linus [talking to Charlie Brown]: ‘My sister trusts me eight feet.’ – From the comic strip Peanuts
I began to think about Trust, Optimism & Pessimism more than fifty years ago. I continue to think about these three characteristics and strengths (by-the-by, Gentle Reader, a characteristic or a strength does not have to be positive or a virtue). I have decided to gather some of what has emerged for me during my searching and seeking these past many years and share it with you (I am not sure how many ‘Parts’ I will post but as I put finger to key today I expect it to be more than one).
Many years ago there was a television commercial about Smith Barney and it warned us that [we] ‘are not born with an instinct to trust. Trust must be earned.’ Performance may be the key to trusting a stockbroker or a banker or a chemist (and others) but performance is not the key to trusting (think: trusting the stranger, for example).
Consider that our inclinations to place faith in the other(s) is a tap root that is nurtured early in our lives. The psychologist Erik Erikson noted that ‘the amount of trust derived from earliest infantile experience [depends] on the quality of the parental relationship [the relationship the parents have with one another and the relationship each has with their child]. Parents create a sense of trust in their children.
Now Smith Barney and Erikson are talking about different kinds of trust. Confidence in your stockbroker is called strategic trust – trust rooted in experience. Erikson’s faith in others is called generalized trust – this does not easily change (think: if one learns to trust when an infant one ‘generally’ continues to trust and if one develops a mis-trust when an infant one ‘generally’ continues to instinctually mis-trust).
As we grow we develop our ‘instinct’ to trust or mis-trust. These are then the tap roots that feed, nurture and sustain our developing as optimists or pessimists. As we grow, our generalized trust is rooted in an optimistic view of the world; a world view that we initially learn from our parents. Optimists rooted in generalized trust are not likely to change from trust to mistrust for as they grow and develop they begin to realize that trust must be learned, not earned. Generally, people who have integrated generalized trust with optimism remain trusting and optimistic over time. Now there is a double-loop here: optimism is rooted in generalized trust and generalized trust is reinforced by one’s optimistic view of life.
Our trust significantly depends upon how much our parents trusted others and, in general, how nurturing our home environment was. Our parents will talk to us about trust and we children will watch how they model trust or mistrust – their behavior will trump their words if their words and behavior are not congruent.
The powerful tap roots are nurtured in the family and so the tap roots of trust-optimism and mistrust-pessimism are planted, fed, nurtured and sustained early in life. AND, parental-family influence is hardly the entire story. Each of us is the gardener of our own garden and each of us is the author of our own life-story. Our parents-family sowed some seeds and nurtured many early tap roots and they were the editors, if not the authors, of our early life-story. In the end each of us is entrusted with our own garden and each of us is the author of our own life-story.
In closing today I am recalling Antonio Machado’s haunting, challenging question: What have you done with the garden entrusted to you?
I am eager to see what unfolds in PART II.