Daring to Trust: Opening Ourselves to Real Love and Intimacy

by David Richo

Overview

The best-selling author of How to Be an Adult in Relationships explains how to build trust—the essential ingredient in successful relationships—in spite of fear or past betrayals
 
Most relationship problems are essentially trust issues, explains psychotherapist David Richo. Whether it’s fear of commitment, insecurity, jealousy, or a tendency to be controlling, the real obstacle is a fundamental lack of trust—both in ourselves and in our partner.

Daring to Trust explores the importance of trust throughout our emotional lives: how it develops in childhood and how it becomes an essential ingredient in healthy adult relationships. It offers key insights and practical exercises for exploring and addressing our trust issues in relationships. Topics include:

• How we learn early in life to trust others (or not to trust them)
• Why we fear trusting
• Developing greater trust in ourselves as the basis for trusting others
• How to know if someone is trustworthy
• Naïve trust vs. healthy, adult trust
• What to do when trust is broken

Ultimately, Richo explains, we must develop trust in four directions: toward ourselves, toward others, toward life as it is, and toward a higher power or spiritual path. These four types of trust are not only the basis of healthy relationships, they are also the foundation of emotional well-being and freedom from fear.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780834822078
Publisher:	Shambhala
Publication date:	12/14/2010
Series:	Shambhala Publications
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	449,707
File size:	449 KB

About the Author

David Richo, PhD, is a psychotherapist, teacher, writer, and workshop leader whose work emphasizes the benefits of mindfulness and loving-kindness in personal growth and emotional well-being. He is the author of numerous books, including How to Be an Adult in Relationships and The Five Things We Cannot Change. He lives in Santa Barbara and San Francisco, California.

Read an Excerpt

Our first life task was to trust. We may have been gratified to notice it was wisely placed. Or we may have been let down as we found out it was not. When trust happens with our parents or with any person, we are launched into an assurance that the world and others have what it takes to fulfill us. Trusting later in life will come easy.

The opposite of trust is not mistrust. It is despair because we have given up on believing that safety and fulfillment are possible. We have lost our hope in fellow humans. Trusting was our first need. Perhaps it became our worst fear. In the venture of growing as adults in relationship, it is our finest risk.

One of the first things we notice when we enter an intimate relationship is that trust is required if it is to work. If we never learned to trust others to begin with, we will be bewildered and notice that we are in over our heads. We will feel powerless because we did not make the preparations required to take a course this complex.

A healthy adult learns to trust himself first. We trust ourselves to receive trustworthiness with appreciation and to handle untrustworthiness with strength but without retaliation. We shall be seeing clearly in this book that trust can grow with practice, especially that of choosing to be trustworthy, whether or not others may be.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

How This Book Came to Be 2

Our Need, Our Fear, Our Risk 6

Practice: Exploring Our History of Trust 8

1 What Is Trust? 11

Intelligent Distrust 15

Our Capacity for Trusting 18

Needs and How They Play Out 21

Reading Ourselves 26

Practice: Following Our Needs 28

There Are Healthy Connections 30

Bonds of Attaching and Relating 33

Practices

Breathe, Pause, Start Over 37

Exploring Our Childlike and Adult Trust 38

2 Our Early Sense of Trust 42

Our First Steps 46

Gone but Here 52

Practices

Receiving Comfort and Facing Challenge 53

Trusting and Loving 54

3 How Trust Happens in Relationships 58

Reciprocal Trust 60

Surrender in a Committed Relationship 65

To Whom Shall We Go? 69

Exploring Our Style of Trusting 71

When the Five A's Meet the Ego 72

Practices for Auditing Our Relationship

How to Know If Someone Can Be Trusted 75

How Communication Becomes Trustworthy 79

4 How We Miss Trust 83

Trusting Can Wake Old Ghosts 85

Practice: Freeing Ourselves from the Fear of Trusting Our Own Power 91

When Our Story Gets in the Way 94

Practice: Erasing the Storyboard 96

5 Trust Lost, Trust Regained 101

The Silent Treatment 103

Lies We Tell, Hear, or Won't Hear 107

A Double Life 113

Practice: Letting Go of Obsession 116

When We Cheat 118

When We Are Betrayed 122

Why We Put Up with Pain 125

Practices for Rebuilding Broken Trust

Noticing How Our Past Is Present 130

The Work of the Partner Who Broke Trust 133

The Personal Work of the Partner Who Was Betrayed 135

When Both Partners Want to Work on the Relationship 137

6 Trusting Ourselves 144

Trusting Our Feelings 148

Practice: Working with Our Emotions 152

Trusting Our Bodies 154

Trusting Our Sexuality 156

Can I Trust Myself in a Crisis ? 158

Practices

Befriending the Three Witches 161

No Longer Victims 163

A Positive Approach to Ourselves 165

7 Our Core Trust in Reality 166

The Supreme Attunement 172

Practice: Fidelity to Ourselves 176

Four Reliable Directions 178

Practice: Using Our Compass of Trust 182

8 Trust in Powers beyond Us 187

Our Longing for Meaning 192

Buddhist Paths to Adult Trust 195

Trust in the Higher Self 200

Practice: Awakening at Many Levels 205

Epilogue: Trust in Grace-full Coincidence 208

About the Author 212

Editorial Reviews

"Trust is not a feeling. It begins as a belief about the other," explains Richo (When the Past Is Present), a longtime therapist and author who transforms his kindly advice into an easy-to-understand "bible" of trust. The author introduces the concept of the "Five A's" he deems pivotal to trust in any adult relationship: Attention, Acceptance, Appreciation, Affection, and Allowing. Especially helpful is a point-by-point checklist to aid readers in determining if someone can be trusted. While some guiding principals may seem self-evident ("Does not lie or have a secret life") others are more nuanced, such as "May operate on the basis of self-interest but never at my expense or at the expense of others." Filled with informative quizzes and fact-based assessments, the slim book offers a great deal of real-world advice governing adult relations, especially regarding modern romance in a shifting world. Richo's greatest ambition focuses on readers' ability to self-nurture, and he devotes the book's most enjoyable chapters to this subject. The take-away? The most important person to trust is yourself. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

"Combining profound insights and practical techniques, this important new book walks us step-by-step through our trust issues and, in so doing, opens the gate held shut by our deepest fears so that we can finally, fearlessly, love and be loved."—Susan Piver, author of The Wisdom of a Broken Heart

"Beautifully wise, straightforward, and helpful."—Jack Kornfield, author of The Wise Heart

From the Publisher