“If we are blessed with loving caretakers who meet our needs, we develop our ‘trust muscle.’”

A thought by Henry Cloud, from his book, Changes That Heal (p. 84). Zondervan. Kindle Edition. (Click on the book title to go to Amazon.com to buy the book.)

If we have been it can make a major difference.

Henry says, “We begin to perceive the world as a trustworthy place. In developmental terms, this is called ‘basic trust.’

“But if our needs are not met if we are neglected, abandoned, beaten, abused, criticized, hated, or resented for existing, then our very ability to trust and be vulnerable is injured. And our ability to bond is based on our ability to be vulnerable and needy. We are in trouble if this ability is damaged. It is our key to life.”

He goes on, “If, on the one hand, we find the world trustworthy, we learn that being vulnerable is a wonderful thing because it gets us lots of goodies, like love. When this happens, we get more and more because we trust and depend more and more. The rich get richer; loving people find more love.

“If, on the other hand, we find the world untrustworthy, we learn that it would be dumb to trust and be vulnerable. We accurately believe that our survival depends on our not being vulnerable. We rightly get into the ‘I don’t need anybody’ stance, a smart thing to do in an untrustworthy environment.”

He then says, “God wired us with a memory so that we could learn what satisfies and remember it in order to get it again. This is where hope comes from—remembering that good things have come our way in the past and therefore they are likely to come again. This memory works the same way when things are bad. We draw a mental map of the world, and then we order our journey around it. This is not something we really sit down and think about. It is much more natural and automatic than that. If we touch a hot stove, our pain centers warn us not to do that again. If a puppy is hit, its brain warns it to shrink from a raised human hand.”

Henry says, “We learn how the world is and adapt to it. We construct a map of relationship, and how it works. The problem is that we may construct our map in a hurtful setting, and then when we are older and out of that setting, we forget to update it. Our twenty-year-old map then becomes a barrier to living fully, to relating to others.”

Somehow we need to update it by bonding with people who really care about us and then be vulnerable with them.  We really do need each other, don’t we? 

Yes, yes!