The firm belief in the reliability, truth or behaviour of someone or something
I recently finished reading Uniquely Human by Dr Prizant (a book I would highly recommend for its empathic and compassionate approach to viewing and working with people with autism). In the book Dr Prizant writes about autism as a disability of trust. This has left me very thoughtful.
For me trust is such a loaded word. There have been so many devastating breaches of interpersonal trust throughout my life, that my trust in people is hard won and easily lost.
Dr Prizant expanded my thinking about trust, to also include being able to trust our bodies and the world around us. To trust our bodies means that we can rely on them to behave in the same way each day and that they will respond in a consistent manner to external stimuli. To trust the world is to experience it as generally unobtrusive, a place where rules are followed and patterns of life, like the changing of the seasons, continue. As an autistic person living with complex PTSD and DID I do not experience my body or the world in these ways.
Difficulty trusting our bodies.
My dissociation and poor interoceptive skills mean that I cannot trust that my body will tell me, or that I will pick up on, it’s cues of when I am cold, hungry, full, need the toilet or am unwell.
My difficulties with having a sense of linear time combined with it’s abstract nature means that I am prone to thinking and feeling that illness and pain will last forever.
I cannot trust my body not to be injured, both because of my poor proprioception and at times due to parts of self taking control of my body and self harming.
I cannot trust my body and mind to not be triggered and send me hurtling back into hideous flashbacks or forward into exhausting meltdowns. My body does not feel like a safe place to be, it is not something that I trust.
Difficulty trusting the world.
The world, set up for the neurotypical majority, can have a sensory trigger at every turn. Similarly, trauma triggers seemingly come out of nowhere. Whilst knowledge of triggers can enable you to take action sooner, desensitise yourself or avoid certain situations, it is never the less difficult to trust the world.
Taking into account that the only constant is change, it is easy to loose trust in familiar spaces. Due to perceiving the gestalt, when I enter a place I know, in which something has been moved it can feel like I am going to fall over, everything feels wonky and unsettled inside and outside my body. It may only be a tissue box but to me I feel like I have entered another plane of existence. These changes also act as trauma triggers for me, instigating feelings of paranoia that ‘bad people’ have been in the room ‘looking’ or ‘planting bugs’, to me it can mean that ‘they know’.
The more I have explored these different notions of trust the clearer it is to me that trust is not just a ‘people’ issue but a global one. I have always known that I am constantly on high alert, that nothing and nowhere feels safe. Seeing this as an issue of trust, or rather a lack there of, is a helpful reframing.
As I anxiously muddle my way through daily life I will keep this new perspective in mind and pursue trust. Because;
‘the opposite of anxiety isn’t calm, it’s trust.’
Dr Prizant quoting Michael John Carley (2015)
Dr B.M. Prizant (2015) Uniquely human. A different way of seeing autism. Simon & Schuster, inc: New York