Trust is a bypass of Fear

What fear are you avoiding by choosing to trust someone or something?

I’ve been researching about Love.

While experimenting, asking questions, reading books, doing interviews, relating to my partner and friends, I notice that for me, it is especially challenging to accept and love who the person is not.

A part of me has an amplifier for every part in the other person and in me that could be different, I have a magnifying glass for all litte piece that is missing, for how things could be better. This place in me is a perfect bacterial collony for expectations.

I discovered that I create expectations to control and feel safe. I make up stories about myself, others, and the world, then turn then into truth, to make life reliable, predictable, and consistent.

This is all my reptilian brain needs.

I do this in an attempt to not feel my fear.

Jim Sarvos in a interview with Clinton Calahhan says:

“I think love is a state of acceptance. So when I accept who you are and who you are not, a space of love shows up. Most people can accept who you are, or they can accept who you are not, but they can not accept who you are and who you are not”.

One of my ways of not accepting who you are not and who they are not is to create expectations. One of the covered ways that expectations show up is through the concept of Trust.

Are you trustworthy? Is your friend trustworthy? Your partner? Your parents? Your boss? Your colleague? Even your next move or the thing you want most? Is anyone or any situation truly trustworthy?

What is trust anyway?

Can you have trust without the expectation that they will always be there for you, be loyal to you, and treat you the way you want to be treated?

Some people have asked me: How can you be in a relationship with someone if there is no trust?

I ask back, how can I relate to someone if I trust them?

What if trust is an elegant, naive, and foggy doorway of expectations and resentments through which you enter into the territory of killing intimacy with those you love? -If you don’t know how expectations kill intimacy, I highly recommend you watch this video.

Expectations happen when you assume that your story about something or someone is true.

If you want to be right instead of being in relationship, then you will create a life of expectation and trust.

For example, when you say ‘I trust that you will not lie to me’, there is a story in the corner that you believe to be true: ‘I have the story that you will always tell me the truth’. You expect them to never lie to you. What happens if this person lies?

You feel betrayed and resentful. I trusted you and now I cannot trust you, YOU have betrayed me. No intimacy is possible.

There is a big wall between you and the one you love. Have you ever experienced that? I did, and my friend, I tell you, is a shitty place to be. The person you love the most, now you can’t look her in the eye for days, sometimes weeks.

What is it that you secretly trust? Why is trust important to you?

Right now you might be secretly trusting that the ceiling above your head will not fall under your head, or that the electricity won’t turn off, or that the organic vegetables you bought don’t have chemicals in them that will slowly cause cancer in your body, or that people have completely washed the soap off the dishes you’re eating, or you trust your friends to remember your birthday, you might decide to trust that the water you’re drinking isn’t poisoned, and so on…

What do you need trust for? You need trust in order to…

I need trust to eat this food and drink this water;
I need trust so they won’t leave if I don’t meet their expectations;
I need trust to feel loved and to be loved;
I need trust so that I can create a project together with you;
I need trust that my partner will not change his mind about the future so that I can make plans with him in the future and not get frustrated when things change;
I need trust because I’m afraid you have something more important than being with me to do and you might say No to my offer;
I need trust to be able to relax and be myself; if I did not have trust in someone, I would be neurotic, always worried and anxious what they are thinking about me;
I need trust to share what I’m feeling and thinking with the other person;

Can you see how behind every sentence there is a cover for fear?

Trust is a bypass for you to not feel your fear.

Trust is the fertilizer of expectations: You have to behave the way I want you to behave, or the way I think you should behave, so that I can feel safe — that is, so that I don’t feel fear.

Practice:

• Think of a time when you consciously or unconsciously chose to trust someone or something. Now write down exactly what you trusted.
• I trust you not to… ‘tell my friends what I told you yesterday’, ‘I trust you not to lie for me about your ex-partner’.
• From there, begin to write, I’m afraid because… Let your fear speak.
• Then ask your fear, ‘Hello fear, what do you have for me? Write down everything your fear tells you.
• Then decide what you want to do with the information your fear has given you.

I need to trust X person, so this person will not leave if I do not meet her-his expectations. I trust that you will not leave if I break your expectations.

I’m afraid because when I say what I want, you seem to get offended because you take your smartphone and don’t want to communicate. I’m scared to act from my center, to not give a shit about what you expect of me, and then you’ll disconnect and leave. I’m afraid you expect me to say yes to your offer to cook for you tonight. I’m afraid I’ll say no and you’ll reject me.

Hello Fear, what do you have for me?

Fear says: Intentionally do something that would break this person’s expectation and check if your story is true. Share your fears with this person and ask: Is any of my stories real in your universe? —

This is a Possibility to move from trust intousing your Consiouss Fear to navigate Intimacy and Love.

What is the way out of this trap?

You dear fear, my friend.

Fear is a magical resource to navigate love and intimacy. Your fear is the source to inform you of the next question, agreement, negotiation, offer to be done. Your fear tells you the pace, is it close, is it distant, is there something hidden, what is the purpose of this question, this comment, what is missing, what is not clear.

Instead of ‘trusting’ someone not to lie to you and being naive and waiting for the moment when this person will betray you so that you can resent and take revenge on him or her, you have the opportunity to be awake and to use your fear. You have the opportunity to use your fear to be present, to ask dangerous questions, to use your sense of purpose, to look the person in the eye, and so on.

If you do not numb your fear, your fear will tell you at the right moment what is about to happen. Your fear has more intelligence than your mind and your assumptions, opinions, beliefs and stories about yourself, others and the world. It is more intelligent because your conscious fear comes from the now, from the present. Your stories and beliefs come from the past.

Your fear communicates with you faster than electricity. When you decide to use your fear instead of trusting that things will happen a certain way, you get closer to reality. You become a magician. You begin to be in the right place at the right time with the right person.
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What if you decide to do a radical experiment and from the time you read this article until next week you stop trusting anyone and anything?

That can sound pretty scary, right? To live without expecting anything from anyone? Is it possible?

If you live in the flat land where fear is bad, frozen, dead, dangerous, then you might not want to go there. You become afraid of your fear. You get worried, controlling, panicky, anxious.

It is scary for me not to trust at all, not to know what to expect, and to be navigating completely unknown spaces all the time.

So much fear, I can’t handle what’s going to happen, with all this unknowing, I need to know. How am I going to navigate this? How can I control this so that I feel safe?

If I feel my fear all the time, it will be overwhelming and I won’t be able to function and work and live my life.

In reality you feel all the time. Every second you feel something.

What are you feeling right now?

You are feeling all 4 feelings, angry, sad, scared and glad, all the time, in different percentages.

That means you feel fear all the time. And from second to second it flattens out from 1% and goes up to 100%. It cannot be bigger than that.

This can be a doorway for you to shift into a totally different landscape of fear. Where fear is fear.

What if you can shift from trusting someone else to radically relying on your inner resources and the universe to navigate whatever happens?

That means you can navigate any feeling, any emotion, any heartbreak, any celebration, any aliveness, any unexpected turn of events. If you have placed your trust in life or love outside of yourself, your Conscious Fear is a doorway to you.

EXPERIENCE:

• Discover your own construct of trust. What does trust mean in your world? Why is it important for you to trust? Why is it important for you to be a trustworthy person?

Start by writing in your notebook, Trust is…

Then, to go deeper and tell yourself more about what trust is in your universe, spend 10 to 15 minutes writing: I need trust in order to/ because/ so that… Try not to filter.

• Discover what the mechanics are behind the decision to trust someone. This process may be more useful with someone else asking the questions and holding space for you. Healing happens when another person can witness you.

1. Pick one of the sentences you distilled, for example, “I need to trust you in order to make plans with you for the future.”
2. You’ve been using trust to bypass and numb your fear. It’s time to make room for your fear. Take a few breaths and walk down the elevator. The spaceholder asks: What is it about this person that makes you so afraid that you need to cover it up with trust? You feel scared because…
3. By trusting this person or this circumstance, I am assuming that… and then I turn into expectation by believing that this is true…
4. My benefit in keeping it that expectation is…

Would you like to explore the field of Consciouss Fear and Authentic Relating and Communication? Contact me to join the next Fear Club for Intimacy, which I’ll be holsing space for in May, 2024.

With Love, Gabriela Fagundes