A Question of Trust
We are able to do what we do because of a particularly fundamental trait that we look for in the people that we target; trust. We look for those who place particular reliance on trust and then we abuse that trust. Most people operate on a basis of trust. If they did not, the world would grind to a halt. Trust lubricates so many transactions between people whether those transactions are social, financial or emotional. When somebody tells you,
“I like your shirt it suits you.”
You trust them to be telling you the truth. If you did not do so, you would stop and cross examine them as to why they like it in order to evaluate whether you believe their comment to be a true one or not. You trust the company from which you make a purchase to deliver when they say they will and that the product will be fit for purpose. You trust your colleagues to do their jobs effectively so you can also fulfil your obligations. You trust the police to maintain law and order, if you did not, there would be anarchy and rife vigilantism. It is axiomatic that there has to be trust otherwise everything would be slowed down or stopped as people evaluated, analysed, questioned and verified. Trust is evident everywhere and there is no greater trust than that which is expected in an intimate relationship.
People trust their partner to have their best interests at heart, to trust them not to do something to hurt them, to trust them to be faithful and loving. We know that in order for you to love in the way that you do, that deep and unconditional love, there must be trust. You approach your relationships with this trust held out in front of you, a symbol of good intent. You presume that everyone else that you will engage with will also adopt a similarly trusting stance. You expect them to reciprocate this trust. You trust that they will trust.
You are not a cynic. You do not operate in the realm of suspicion and mistrust. To do so would be admitting defeat and would tarnish the ideal of love that you are committed to. You accept much at face-value. That is not to label you as naïve, that would be unduly harsh, for as I have mentioned, many people operate on the basis of trust and so they must. You apply this trust to your dealings with those that you fall in love, led to believe by us that this trust will be reciprocated, that it will not breached, betrayed or damaged. You are a truth seeker. You apply honesty in all your dealings and the taint of lies and dishonesty offends you considerably. The stench of our deceit, the rank odour of our mendacity is great but the perfumed veil we cast over such dark and dangerous deceptions is such that the malodorous warning never nears you. You are conned into believing that we tell you the truth when we first encounter you. We behave with such conviction, the air of confidence we exude, seemingly unquestionable and unimpeachable. We look you in the eye, those unseen mirrors reflecting back at you your earnest trust so that you what you require. You look upon supposed honesty, apparent openness and this maintains your sense of trust.
By trusting you believe that you will get the truth. That our love will be true, that our intentions are truthful, that our fidelity is real and we govern our interactions with you under the mantle of truth. You trust that all of this will happen because we make you think you can trust us. We will reference those who have let us down, those who have betrayed us and in so doing we hold up our own reliance upon trust in order to receive your trust. See how we have trusted others and they let us down? We have always trusted beforehand and so you can be assured that we want to gain your trust and you shall have ours. It is all carefully orchestrated to channel one of the fundamental tenets by which you abide. When we gain that trust and we do so easily, you enable us to take this valuable commodity and apply our own veneer to it, reinforcing it and demonstrating to you just how much we value it. As a fellow disciple in trust this enables us to conduct ourselves in a way which ensures we are above suspicion. When we meet with a member of the opposite sex and explain she or he is just a friend and it is a friendly drink you have no reason to think otherwise. You trust us. When we tell you that we are working late. You trust us. When we borrow money from you. You trust us. When we tell you that we are using the contraceptive pill. You trust us. When we tell you that we love you and have never loved anybody like this before – you trust us.
Trust equals the truth. We then abuse your trust by carrying out our treacherous acts. We court other partners and shatter your trust. As you sit at home watching television thinking we are working hard for our future we are philandering and sliding our tendrils around a fresh prospect. When you are making that dinner for us both, looking forward to an evening together, I am showering in a hotel as I seek to wash away the scent of the person I have just coupled with. When you check your bank balance and consider what you will do with the return on the investment that I talked about so you lent me the money, your hard-earned money is being used to impress someone else so that they fall into my clutches. We take this very thing that is of such central importance to you and we abuse it. We disrespect and we trade is just like a commodity.
When you eventually realise your trust has been shattered and this has happened repeatedly. When you finally wake up and join the dots. When you see the flagrant breaches of your trust, when the evidence is irrefutable and painful, we may well have gone. Not only have we abused your trust but we have left without explanation or reason, leaving you to deal with the aftermath alone as we move on to the next target and begin gaining their trust. Like any confidence trickster it is necessary for us to gain trust before we are able to abuse it. Not only do we hurt you repeatedly through these actions we do so to such an extent, with so many people and with so many people aware of it, other than you until the last moment. This wide-ranging and wholesale desecration of trust, this tarnishing and defacing of the truth leaves you broken and unable to face the totality of the truth. You cannot comprehend that you have been conned so extensively and so often. You cannot bear the sensation that arises from having been made to look so foolish. You held your trust up as something to be proud of and now you are left to rue your reliance on this as you hear the repeated comments of “Told you so”, “Didn’t you notice?” and “You are too trusting.” You equate trust with the truth. Our abuse of your trust causes you to not want to accept the truth of what we have done.
39 thoughts on “A Question of Trust”
Vent Your Spleen! (Please see the Rules in Formal Info)
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Dear Mr Tudor,
Trust ….. now there’s an interesting word!
Define that …. and you’ve got it made!
Good one Mr Tudor!
What’s happening here? Is G Crissy? And if so, how would you know?
Indeed. I know. It is never an issue, unless someone wishes to make it one.
Okay but how did you know?
Because when you are what I am, you ensure you know.
Thank you
NarcGF: “You don’t trust me.”
Myself: “Do you know what the National Security Agency’s motto is?”
NarcGF: “I don’t care what it is.”
Myself: “It is ‘Trust, but verify’.”
NarcGF: “But I don’t want you to verify!”
You educate on NPD from the perspective that all of their traits are deliberate, intentional, conscious, and premeditated. My narcs biggest ploy is pity. He says hes broken and scared and wants to kill himself…so, we all reach out to hug him and he yanks us in, smothers us with lovely lies, then devours our souls. I say “our” because during our 4 year relationship (during which we had a child and bought a house) there were dozens of other girls. Yet, Ive always wondered about intent….he often seems a victim of his own impulses and a liar because hes scared and overwhelmingly needy….he didnt treat me cruelly until I figured him out and called him on it and tried to leave. He had gone from obsessed with me to extremely distant and blamed it on realizing he wasnt good enough for me, realizing he was shit and had acted like shit, and my bubbly lovey style was actually angering something inside him when he just loved the way I am weeks before. Are all narcs intentionally this way? Are their behaviors premeditated, or are they victims of the demon driving them?
Hello Heather, no I don’t educate from that perspective. The behaviours depend on the school of narcissists. Most narcissists do not deliberately plan their manipulations, they are instinctive responses driven by the self-defence mechanism that is narcissism. They are intentional in the sense that the narcissism intends those actions to occur, but the narcissist sees them from an alternative perspective because we view the world in a different way to our victims.
A Mid Range narcissist who uses pity a lot actually thinks what he does is right, justified and good – he will not be able to see that some of what he does is “wrong”. He will recognise that some of his behaviours are considered “wrong” by other people and this impacts on how he operates (thus being passive aggressive, insidious, mindful of the facade) but he will not accept accountability for this ~”wrong” behaviour, there is always a reason, an explanation, it is someone else’s fault. His lies are actually his truth.
I can hear your voice in this … My husband has lost power this week he just doesn’t know it yet… He works out of town.. Lives in a hotel 4 days a week… Comes home every week accusing me of everything… I am loyal and faithfully to him and he investigates my phone every week and he makes sure his phone is cleaned out every week… HG why does he do this if he trusts me like he says… If he isn’t hiding anything like he says???
Excellent work as usual HG! If you are even half as proficient in action as you are writing about narcs I’m certain your wealth of fuel will be never ending. You are my new favorite anti-hero. 😁
My narc hasn’t gotten me to the point that I distrust all men or people in general (mostly just narcs 😜).
My narc however has gotten me to the point that I don’t trust him. I questioned everything he ever told me after I put two and two together and figured out his true nature. Now I simply assume that unless it is something I already know to be true then it’s probably BS.
In my way of thinking you can trust someone you have no faith or belief in, but you will also find that the greatest, most believable lies are based in a whole lot of truth. However, you can always trust your enemies to deliver scathing brutal truth.
I don’t know if it is an inborn trait for narcs to be grandmaster BS artists or not, but this is exactly what my narc does. It’s not so much outright lies as twisting and warping the truth just enough. A convenient distortion with enough truth that you can even verify the veracity of it, and why do this when something cut out of whole cloth could work better? So that when or if the mark catches him lying he can simply act like it was a slight misunderstanding and be able to face (and use) that same mark day in and day out.
I’ve seen him in action with others, and dissected a good quantity of cons he’s used on me.
The scary part is that I’m not sure I care anymore. I don’t trust him, I have no faith left in him or our marriage, I certainly don’t believe in him or the BS that falls out when he moves his lips. I’ve just recently begun to find a place of peaceful apathy for him. I don’t love him anymore (although it could be said that I never did. The man I fell for, I longed for, and grieved for was just a figment of my imagination that resembled the narc), I never let myself really reach a point of real hate for him. Mostly I felt angry until I realized that it’s not entirely his fault he is the way he is. Sick, weak and empty. I pitied him until I realized that he may deserve pity, but he’s still a narc and still capable of evil things….
This is completely off topic but I keep posting comments yet none of them are showing and nothing about new posts etc. Are showing in my email. I’m hoping I haven’t been locked out or if its my device.
Your comments may well be in moderation Wounded.
I like to go back and read what you write. Every time I start to want to understand or forgive people like you.
when I read what you write , I begin to remember how people like you are. I feel revulsion and I start to feel sick. I regret I lost so much time with people like you. On the other hand I am happy I am free.Thanks god I am free now! And doesnt really matter what your type think about us when we are free.
But what about the fact I think you have red hair, Crissy?
Fuck u 😉
You wish!
Haha. Ginger for sure.
You opened Pandora’s Box there Mister!
I am relaxed Clarece, I came from that box.
Clarece
I thought her name was Chrissy.
this is strange. I feel like it doesn’t matter if she has red hair and this bothers me so much because it reminds me of stuff my ex would say. always circling back to things don’t matter. it makes me feel that feeling when I could never get him to focus on my question. he was always avoiding and circling back to what he wanted, as a distraction. I feel so sick by this. I am so hurt. your hurting me by reminding me of him.
but I cannot stop reading, this makes me feel like im the sick one.
why is that?
tears, so many tears.
It is so interesting that you have this post today because a few hours ago, I was thinking about this. I am feeling very angry with myself for being so stupid to have let a small lie slip. I should have realized it was the tip of the iceberg. And left immediately instead of staying, in hopes of “having fun”.
Internet dating is the worst! I just got back into dating four years ago and met four guys in person and they were all liars! Three of them lied about their ages and their pictures were old. I should have left that date right away! I would never advise anyone to get on a dating website, which is what my therapist strongly encouraged, then berated me for not knowing that many married men are on there. She set me up to fail then yelled at me for listening to her bad advice. Please be careful with those sites!!!
Kate
Your therapist’s contradictory and hypocritical behavior is very odd. You are correct, there are many liars online and your internet dating experience was not your fault at all. Shame on your therapist for chastising you. You are there to get help, not yelled at.
Agreed! She sucks!ll
Kate
Ha ha ha…yes, she does!
It really irritates me when mine tries to gaslight me over something small and stupid. Like the other week, he obv was too busy with his gf to have time with me. But he wanted to make me think he was thinking of me, so he said he texted me to go for a walk. Well DUH I didn’t get a text. I wasn’t even bothered that he was too busy or simply wasn’t in the mood to see me. He could’ve just said so, I rarely complain. But the fact that he tried to pull that over was annoying. I didn’t challenge him on it; I’m not going to argue over something so stupid and risk putting him off. I get why he’d try to lie about a big thing but COME ON.
I wonder even if he’s trying to get me to argue because he needs a reason to shelf me.
Doesn’t seem so. Maybe he was trying to stir up some fuel ?
I don’t trust ppl anymore unless their words and actions line up and my intuition is cool with them.
I no longer trust. But still seek the truth.
HG
Thank you for your uncompromising way of telling the truth.
I love it.
I love the truth when you tell it.
Thanks to you, I knew his truth long before he finally left, trying to shock me by admitting it.
The loser.
You are welcome.
Where are you from?
Straight to the point Crissy. Do you mean where do I live or where do I originate from?
With that directness, you must have red hair.
Is that about the red hair a saying HG or just a joke? Sometimes I find myself getting lost in cultural references because English isn’t my native language.
Anyway I have red hair and there’s nothing direct about me. Ha ha.
Just a joke.
Hell. The answer is Hell.
Ha ha ha…I was scrolling down and saw your comment, Narc Angel, and started LOL. Thank you !
I’ve identified this as a major issue for me in my healing process; I trust people, I always have; often at face value. I encountered a form of evil during my childhood years, but somehow I managed to look past it and trust people around me. The breach of that trust runs deep with me. In my case it was a question of getting more and more confused when I noticed this gap in his personality; he was one person in words and a completely other person through his actions. He was a pathological liar; and he lied about any small unimportant thing. I’ve learned now afterwards that he had a hidden agenda behind everything he did and behind all communication between us. The goal was to gain power and control; and I never could keep up because I thought our dealings with each other had a base built on honesty and trust. He managed to control my feelings, my behaviour and my innermost being to a horrifying degree through brainwashing techniques like this; it makes me so sad. I had a constant feeling something about his communication was off, but I just couldn’t grasp the horrible truth of it. It feels good to be able to do it now and to face the fact that he had an ulter motive for everything that happened; I’m not the crazy one. I was loving and my trust was abused horribly.
So well written Catherine. A very hard lesson to be sure. Hopefully we have lived and learned.
Thank you H, I’m sure we have lived and learned. Anything else would be a waste of lessons taught.