Do you trust me?

How do we learn how to trust

Today’s essay is part of a series on trust that includes me,

Joshua Doležal

,

Bowen Dwelle

,

Michael Mohr's Sincere American Writing

,

Dee Rambeau

, and

Lyle McKeany

. You may remember our past series about fatherhood, recovery, and work. Even though this space is in transition, writing with these guys is too much fun not to jump in. Plus, it gave me a chance to experiment with one of the areas of my life that feels really alive right now. This week, all of us wrestle with what trust means to us. Please let us know how our meditations on trust compare to your own.

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Photo by Content Pixie on Unsplash

When our group proposed to write on trust, I immediately imagined writing about battlefield trust. I figured the most interesting thing I could write about was trusting the guy or girl next to me with my own life, flying warplanes off aircraft carriers and living a life most people only imagined. Then I could compare it to the business world, where people I trusted undermined me. I wrote out anecdotes about getting fired for admitting to a friend that I was sad another friend had gotten forced out of the company. I retold stories about screaming “Waveoff” at just the right instant to save an F-18 Hornet from flying into the back of the carrier, saving his life because I trusted myself in the job. While the other guys were talking about the reasons they struggled to trust themselves, I imagined the heroics I would share with all of you. But this, it turns out, was me not trusting myself either.

I don’t know that I’ve ever trusted myself. I hadn’t had the rug pulled out from under my feet by ex-lovers when I was least suspecting it, hadn’t been gaslit by therapists or healers or spiritual leaders¹. No, my lack of trust was more mundane than all that. It came out when I wrote about heroic deeds. It shone when I believed that the only way to be interesting was to tell amazing stories, the kind that have other guys wishing they could have done that as they order another beer only to get to stay at the bar. I didn’t trust that my everyday life was interesting enough for anyone to care, so I embellished some old stories. I planned grand plans so people wouldn’t think I was ordinary. I was ashamed of who I was; how could I trust that person?

When I finally started listening, I was struck by the six of us, all at different stages in life and all from different pasts, all struggling to trust our own lived experiences. Struggling to trust that we knew who we were or how to be in the world. Many of us have reasons to do so, from broken promises and staggering wounds to addiction and rock bottom. Hell, I even have some of those stories myself. 

But I realized my own lack of trust is deeper than those stories. Sometimes I think our general lack of trust —in ourselves and each other — stems from the scientific revolution. I blame Descartes and Newton and Einstein. How can we trust ourselves when every new scientific discovery has gone against our natural intuition. Quantum mechanics anyone? If I were pithier, I’d go into a tirade about what’s been lost, talk about the meaning crisis, even show you how ridiculous it is how many New York Times bestsellers are all written to show you why you shouldn’t trust your mind. Sadly, I’m not half as smart as I’d like to think I am, so I’ll leave that to the real talking heads. All you get is my lived experience.

My lack of trust lay hidden under the surface. I didn’t experience grief, but I was always unsettled. I was constantly biting my tongue, biding my time, betting that I was wrong and trying to be just a little less wrong. It’s not something I talked about — even if I had the words such topics don’t ever make you the life of the party, even the kind of nerd parties where we explored the dusty volumes of the local public library that are the only ones I’m still invited to. No, when everyone is too busy getting ahead, buying the next million dollar fixer upper in the right neighborhood and planning the next generative AI investment, who’s got time to talk about the existential angst that has driven thousands of years of philosophical inquiry? There’s no modern Zeno’s stoa or Epicurus’ garden anymore — those opportunities were bulldozed for another posh high rise condo with a giant billboard screen out front that shows non-stop ads that makes the P&L work. Deep questions don’t sell, and there’s no time when we’ve got to “always be closing.”

Instead, I kept my mouth shut, smiled, and hid in the swirls of yet another fourth wave pour-over coffee and sourdough avocado toast. Maybe I found my way through church and into religious conversations. But I didn’t know how to trust the scriptures that they quoted. It seemed most people I knew had a verse for every question, but not a reasoned thought to back them up. I think their faith came first, and the scriptures backed up what they already believed. Maybe it worked for them. But I didn’t believe; didn’t know; didn’t trust.

Which left me on my own to figure out how to live, how to trust myself to live a full life. I didn’t even trust myself to ask the right questions. I just knew I longed to know something more.

As the old saying goes, “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”

About a year ago, I was introduced to a philosopher. I sat in my bedroom, hiding from my kids so I could talk freely, and I found myself admitting how lonely I was. Over Zoom I told him how I wake up at night and stare at the ceiling wondering if my life has been worth living. How I wasn’t thriving, but I didn’t know that I was hurting either. I had a pretty good life, and I told him that for all I knew I just needed to accept that and move on. That was the problem though. I didn’t know. I didn’t even know if I could know. His answer, said confidently but nonchalantly, infuriated me: “Are you willing to be open to the idea that the only thing you’ll ever know is what you feel and what you sense?” 

What the hell was that? I wanted to find something actually useful, not some stupid aphorism. What I got though, was an opening that has taught me how to trust myself — a spiritual opening.

Admitting what you can know forces us to admit what we can’t know, what we’ll never know. It might sound like giving up, but it’s actually very active. If all we can know is what we directly experience, than everything we thought was more true than our real lives is actually false. It’s all thought. From string theory to general relativity, from causation to metaphysics, and from self-portraits to perfect beauty and even our own pain. Those thoughts, which we believe so strongly, all come and go. And we have the opportunity to see them, to observe them, and to realize we’re not them. Nor are they us. It takes some time and a little training, but eventually the shine of “the world” wears off. We don’t need faith — in scriptures or gurus; we can actually experiment ourselves to arrive at a lived experience. We can know because we’ve discovered. That’s when things start getting really trippy.

It’s not just that observing —being the witness in Vedantic terms — frees us from our anxieties and fears. It does that, but not in the way I expected. The thoughts: whether they be that there’s something wrong with me or that I’m an infinitesimally small part of the history of the world, they still occur. They’re always bouncing around. But I can see that I am not those thoughts, they’re not real. What I am is so much bigger than them, and I can be okay watching the mind go crazy. It’s not just that we suddenly open to ideas which very recently seemed batshit crazy. It does that too. Ideas like “time and space aren’t real” or “I have no head” suddenly seem a lot more plausible than they should. The real magic occurs in the way we exist as ourselves.

Just the other day my six year old daughter was crying. She had gotten in trouble and had shut down, unwilling to tell me what was wrong or even look me in the eye. She simply hid her brown hair under the covers. Normally when she does this, I feel rejected, get angry, and storm out. “Fine, if you don’t want my help, solve it yourself.” Not my proudest reaction, but this series is all about telling it like it really is. Not this time though. This time, I was able to sit on her bed, put my hand on her chest, and listen. I was still dejected, still angry, but those emotions didn’t need to be lived. Instead, I told her I thought it was pretty hard being a kid. I asked if she wanted to talk about it. What came next floored me.

“When I get in trouble, I want to scream. I want to yell ‘You’re so mad. STOP.’ but I can’t say anything. And then my ribs start hurting and I feel all tight and black and poky. Like a spiky knot, and I just feel so stupid.”

That’s some awareness for a six year old — I’m working on that same awareness here at 40. But I could tell her what I’ve learned. I could tell her that if we see that emotion, we can’t be it. Not our true nature, because we can’t be something we’re observing. I could give her the starting point to ask what her true nature is. I could give her hope that she isn’t really stupid (she’s anything but stupid, I promise), and start to unravel those stories in the same way that Socrates, the Buddha, and Jesus can if we let them. I’m not sure she really understood a word of what I was saying, but she squeezed my hand against her chest the entire time while I tried to explain the mysteries of non-duality to the tiniest of cute almond eyes. And then she eventually fell asleep.

I still wouldn’t say I trust myself to be the father I want to be. Even less the husband, much less the man I imagined all my life. But the heart of trust is knowledge. It’s knowing what is real, what I am, and how to live with that knowledge. The path of knowledge has led me to trust, and for the first time in my life I think it’s leading me to God. I don’t have all the answers, but I have more than I used to believe possible. Although I still don’t talk about it at my nerd parties.

What’s your own relationship to trusting yourself? Have you found an opening or are you still searching for one? Or have you given up? Let me know in the comments.

1. I did have one therapist and one executive coach convince me that I wasn’t okay and never would be without their help. But my inability to trust was established long before those two earned their special place in the annals of my life story.