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Wednesday, May 12, 2004

About Trust 

Someone diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic once told me she thought her problem was not that she trusts other people too little, but that she trusts them too much. I agree. She seems to expect to be able to trust everyone she meets like an infant trusts it’s Mama. Which, of course, is the root of her unfailing disappointment in other people and why it looks, from the other person’s perspective, like she has a problem with trust. Her problem is not with trust, she unfailingly trusts over and over again. To her, the problem is betrayal. Experience has taught her to expect it.

I wouldn’t trust an infant to behave sensibly around a hot stove, would you? Should you trust a National Enquirer reporter with sensitive personal information? Trust becomes a problem only for those folks who have failed to learn who can be trusted for what.

Seems to me everyone can be trusted for many things but not for everything. Isn't wisdom knowing who you can trust for what and learning how to keep the ambience light as you wend your way through the tangled webs we weave, or have been woven?



Comments:
I like this concept. It appears very true as far as it goes. But the two people I've known who exhibited paranoid behavior did not do it all their lives, or even a major part of their lives. They developed it without there being any learning or not learning involved. In fact, all their lives they had learned which people to trust and which not to trust. But physical problems in the brain (we, lay people, MDs, psychiatrists, & psychologists, all presume) caused them to suddenly become distrustful of their previously most trusted friends and relatives. If only one person was suddenly deemed untrustworthy, I'd have thought that person might have just as suddenly, and unbeknownst to me, shown his/her true colors, that I was lacking in information that might make me agree with the paranoid person. But the distrust seemed to apply across the board to everyone. So that wasn’t the case. My point, I guess, is that there are many causes for paranoia, both psychological and physical, and that not all of them can be explained so simply.

And while your theory may be very applicable in dealing with the paranoid person, no matter the cause, perhaps it’s not so useful in dealing with their friends and relatives, or even in explaining their problems to their friends and relatives. The friends and relatives of such people as I described suddenly find themselves in a very strange world with everything they have know as normal, now slipping and sliding all around them. Their own behavior, previously acknowledged by the paranoid person as loving and caring, is suddenly interpreted by the paranoid as hostile and threatening. That is a very hard place to dwell.

Sorry, but this has become a comment on paranoia and not on your own blog. I liked your blog. It is a different and probably useful way of looking at the paranoid person, for a professional. I’m not too sure it offers much help for the friends and relatives of the paranoid, who need equally illuminating and novel ideas on what behaviors to use to convey to the paranoid person the same love and care they always have, and have it accepted by the paranoid as just that, love and care, not hostile and threatening.
 
Paranoid Schizophrenia typically appears in the 20s when the young adult has to set out on their own without familial support. There is a theory that maintains that these folks suffered early trauma that arrested their emotional and social development at an infantile level and that the stress of separation forces them to break through to their emotional "fault line". These therapists practice what they call "reparenting". They take the client into their own home and treat them like an infant, then as they mature, a toddler and so on. If there is a "good fit" between the therapist/parent and client/child these patients can progress to the point where they function well in the real world but still need their sessions with the therapist/parent - there is no termination date for this therapy. I am curious to know what eventually happens when the therapist gets old, feeble and finally dies. As far as I know, that hasn't happened yet. At any rate, my experience with the individual mentioned in the first paragraph seemed to corroborate this theory.

The paranoid dementia that manifests in an apparently normal individual in old age is not the same phenomenon. I cannot comment except to note that conventional therapy treats both kinds of patients with major tranquelizers or, when they think the diagnosis could include manic depression, lithium. Major tranquelizers interefere with intuitive and intellectual function and must make it more difficult to follow paranoid ideation.

Among the "worried well" who comprise the vast majority of clients in therapy are many who are there to work on "issues of trust". The very diagnois implies that these folks can't trust their own intuition or past experience and need to learn to trust in a kind of one-size-fits-all way. Perhaps these people might find my musings "About Trust" helpful. I hope so.
 
Paranoid Schizophrenia typically appears in the 20s when the young adult has to set out on their own without familial support. There is a theory that maintains that these folks suffered early trauma that arrested their emotional and social development at an infantile level and that the stress of separation forces them to break through to their emotional "fault line". These therapists practice what they call "reparenting". They take the client into their own home and treat them like an infant, then as they mature, a toddler and so on. If there is a "good fit" between the therapist/parent and client/child these patients can progress to the point where they function well in the real world but still need their sessions with the therapist/parent - there is no termination date for this therapy. I am curious to know what eventually happens when the therapist gets old, feeble and finally dies. As far as I know, that hasn't happened yet. At any rate, my experience with the individual mentioned in the first paragraph seemed to corroborate this theory.

The paranoid dementia that manifests in an apparently normal individual in old age is not the same phenomenon. I cannot comment except to note that conventional therapy treats both kinds of patients with major tranquelizers or, when they think the diagnosis could include manic depression, lithium. Major tranquelizers interefere with intuitive and intellectual function and must make it more difficult to follow paranoid ideation.

Among the "worried well" who comprise the vast majority of clients in therapy are many who are there to work on "issues of trust". The very diagnois implies that these folks can't trust their own intuition or past experience and need to learn to trust in a kind of one-size-fits-all way. Perhaps these people might find my musings "About Trust" helpful. I hope so.
 

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