What is trust?

Yesterday I listened to the @thisjungianlifepodcast episode on Trust (Episode 203). You can check out more on their website here.

There were some pretty powerful gems I wrote down:

“Trust [is] something that is very primal.”

“We don’t make a decision to trust, it really is happening down at the cellular level, which brings us to the early developmental topic... we feel in our bodies whether the environment or relationship [is] safe. And if we don’t have that experience of trust in our bodies, or our body’s feelings aren’t trusted; that makes these further relationships more difficult.” - Lisa Marchiano

“Unless the body knows that it is loved, that its responses are acceptable, the psyche does not have the ground of certainty in the instincts that it requires. Sooner or later, in the analysis, the person will become stuck because the ego is afraid to trust. At the point of surrender, the ego becomes paralyzed. Unless the body knows that their inner loving arms have the strength to contain it, however fierce or broken it may be, it will hang onto its own rigidity in an effort to survive.” - Marion Woodman

“When a child is in a dangerous environment, it can also lead to [the shadow side of] trust, that leaves them vulnerable to danger...”

“When we are raised in an environment where our own instincts are dismissed, they’re not real, they’re attacked or the only thing that one is able to express is what the caregivers deems important or valid: some children will shut down that instinctive side of themselves.” - Joseph R. Lee

“[Children] will walk up to strangers and bestow a level of trust upon them because their own instinct for self preservation has been violated... this extraordinary lack of fear that the child experiences... seems to rise up out of this substantial trauma history…

“The instincts that would normally chime in are put to sleep, there’s no way for the ego to develop a sense of the values that should be present between me and the other. The solution is to name, cultivate an understanding, of the values that will keep us safe, and to believe in them.

“So we have to re-parent ourselves.”

- Joseph R. Lee