Originally Posted by
DoubleDragons 
... How did you come to fully trust your "shrinks" and others who helped you...
I never said "fully"
As an ACoA, one of my "character traits" is that I used to do everything in "black and white". I either adored my job, or hated it with a passion. A person was either the ultimate example of virtue, or the personification of evil.
That is the way a 2 year old thinks. Raised by drunks I was never given the opportunity to learn this whole business of "shades of gray". My "judgement skills" were stuck at the 2 year old mark.
Trusting fully is not fair to the other person. They are human, just like the other 7 billion peeps on the planet. Today I trust "in balance". Some people I trust with some things, other people I trust with less.
I learned that children trust their parent implicitly. It's part of their genetic makeup. Really, they have no other choice. A baby creature that does _not_ trust their parent will wander out of the nest and die. I was a baby creature that was wired to trust the sperm and egg donors that were the biological antecedents of my existence. In my case, genetics fouled up, I should have run away from home the day I learned how to walk.
Adults _earn_ trust. That is where I was mixed up. I was an adult using a childs rule for establishing trust.
I test people. I listen to them for awhile. If they sound good then I tell them one small thing, very unimportant to me, almost irrelevant, and see what they do with it. If they are kind and compassionate they earn 1 point. If they try to give me advice they loose 10 points. If I hear back from some third party gossip merchant what I shared they are written off. They get to 50 points then maybe I will trust them with something important.
I did some "doctor shopping" and found a shrink that was kind and compassionate. I trusted her with some of my issues, just some. Nothing else. Not with my checkbook, not with my apartment, not with my car. She gave me some ideas, some "exercises", and they worked. So I trusted her with a couple more.
That has worked very well for me. I am able to get rid of bad peeps _before_ I have shared too much, or gotten too comfortable. I have also been able to build some deep and long friendships. I have heard it called "baby steps" in some meetings. I did not get injured overnight, I am not going to heal overnight. Likewise, I have learned how to allow people to _earn_ my trust over a period of time, instead of handing it out overnight.
Mike
