May 27, 2008

• Trust – Part 2

  . . . in which I find out if I can say what I was trying to say yesterday.

  I thought about that post a lot through the afternoon and evening yesterday, while Doug was using the computer.  I couldn’t remember exactly what I had said, but I was almost sure I hadn’t made the point I meant to make.  When I read it again this morning, I was sure.

  Trust is another of those words, like “love,” that is overused and poorly understood.  I have often heard people say they would trust someone to do something, when by the context and their voice and body language it was apparent that they meant just the opposite.  Parents pull that on their kids a lot. 

  Suppose a young woman has fairly consistently broken her parents’ curfew, and taken the family car farther than permitted or to places the parents have forbidden her to go.  She asks for the keys again, and instead of a flat refusal backed up by reminders of past infractions of the rules, she is given a lecture about doing as she is told, and handed the car keys with a reluctant, “I’ll trust you this time.”

  Oh, yeah, she is being entrusted with responsibility for the car, most likely because the parent doesn’t want to play chauffeur and the kid has demonstrated her driving ability.  The parent believes she is unlikely to wreck the car, but the kid is not trusted.  The parent expects her to go where she pleases and come home when she is ready, because that is the expectation the kid has created by her prior performance.  If she shows up before curfew, it will come as a surprise.

  Suppose a woman leaves her abusive alcoholic husband and then allows him to talk her into coming back to him, not because she believes his promises to “never do it again,” but because she is codependent and believes that her marriage is more important than the people in it.  He begs her to trust him, she holds out for a little while, but not so long that he will give up and quit asking her to come back, and then she tells him she will trust him “one more time,” and comes back.

  In this case, that “one more time,” is a dead giveaway.  She is saying that she knows he is going to do it again.  No trust is involved there, except that she is trusting that he will perform true to form and she will get to give him even more “one more” chances, and will have more and more guilt points to hold against him.  At AA meetings, you can hear many guys guiltily confessing to having betrayed their saintly wives’ trust.  At Al-Anon, their wives confess to being addicted to the men, and admit that they expect them to “go out” again and get drunk.  Where’s the trust?

  Or take infidelity . . . .  In a novel I read recently, the author, Randy Wayne White, has his characters repeatedly bringing up the idea that for most things a woman doesn’t need to ask forgiveness, and for two things, infidelity and aging, she can’t be forgiven.  There is probably a lot of truth in that.  When a man leaves his wife, it is often for one of those reasons:  either she has aged into something no longer attractive to him, or one or the other of them has found another sexual partner. 

  Learning that a spouse was unfaithful is often a deal breaker for a man, more often than it is for a woman.  Women are more likely to forgive, or at least to say they forgive infidelity.  A wife might say she trusts him not to do it again, but even if he is faithful for the rest of their lives, she might keep checking the laundry for signs or scents of other women.  That isn’t trust, nor is it really forgiveness.  Think about the level of anxiety involved there, the fear of betrayal . . . but how can one be betrayed when one is not investing any trust?  The bond in such a relationship is more one of insecurity than of love.

  These are examples of head games, of emotional blackmail, of one person setting another one up for a round of, “AHA!  I got you again!”  Genuine trust, the expectation of honesty, benevolence and fidelity, is relatively rare.  It is most often the possession of young people whose loving parents earned their trust, and it is often extinguished in them during early adulthood when the trust they place in friends and strangers is betrayed.  Trust that can survive repeated betrayal is an act of Will, and one that few people will risk.  We might give people the benefit of the doubt, or cut them some slack and treat them as if we trusted them, but few adults are truly trusting.

  I’m still not sure I have said what I intended to say on this subject.  I may be back around with part 3.  Who knows?  I am easily distracted, lately.  My mind has been sidetracked by a news story that Greyfox relayed to me by phone a few minutes ago.

  ---

  Headline:
  Papa Pilgrim dies in jail, unrepentant and alone

  He came to Alaska at the head of a sprawling, picturesque clan — the last true wilderness family, as he put it when he battled the local park rangers. Robert Hale presented himself as a pious, Scripture-thumbing patriarch who just wanted to raise his 15 children far from the sin and temptations of the modern world. He settled in the mountains near McCarthy and called himself Papa Pilgrim.

  Hale was revealed in the end as a manipulative tyrant who kept his family illiterate and twisted his Bible teaching to justify torture and the violent sexual abuse of his oldest daughter.

  He used to pray with his family that they all would die together. It was his “number one prayer,” the children testified in court. Acquaintances once worried the prayer foretold a horrible cultlike suicide pact.

  But on Saturday night, Hale died alone in an Anchorage jail. He was just months into a 14-year sentence for rape, coercion and incest.

  He has gone to his grave insisting that God told him to lock his daughter up in a shed, beat her, and rape her repeatedly.  I have to agree with Greyfox that the world has become a more pleasant place now that he is dead.  The full story is on the front page of today’s Anchorage Daily News, and at adn.com.

  • 4:20 pm
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