Blind Trust and the Abdication of Responsibility
A trust that offers us choices but also challenges us to take responsibility for them.
Trust comes up a lot in my sessions; trust the process, trust your inner self, trust Life, God or the Goddess. In my own process I was invited to grow from blind trust in a benevolent God to an active, co-creating trust in a divine force. In that journey I see a parallel with the journey we make as children, where gradually our blind trust in our initial caregivers should make way for a more dynamic trust. A trust that offers us choices but also challenges us to take responsibility for them.
As a child, I was taught to believe in the God of the Dutch reformed church. A dour and strict patriarch dreamed up by Luther and Calvin to counter the seeming lackadaisical, all forgiving mercantile God of the Catholics.
As a teenager, I discovered a more joyful God in the Anglican church, to whom thanks and praise were due and gladly given. Trust God, give thanks, and all will be well. And all was well until I lost my first pregnancy and then my next.
At first, I bravely trotted out the spiritual lines that I had been taught; God knows best and it’s not for me to question why.
Blind trust in the divine wisdom that would help counter the sadness and subdue the anger. And it worked, for a while. But the angry part of me became gradually more vocal. I did ask why, and not only that, I asked why me? What happened to the deal that good things happen to good people? Or was I being punished for some unconscious evil deed? I was deeply disappointed at this fucked up, non-delivering patriarch. Like a spiritual teenager, I raged at the parent who failed me.
Thankfully there was a wise pastor at my local church who helped me set my furious spiritual rebel free. As I shared with him my belief that God sucks, he gently mused that perhaps this personified God of mine didn’t exist. Perhaps the divine is ‘no more’ than a great force of creation that makes no distinction between good and bad.
The proper little Calvinist in me was shocked, but the rebel was delighted. Because it was a way out of the dilemma I had been facing since my first and subsequent miscarriages: we give thanks and praise for all that is good, but when the shit hits the fan, we don’t know where to go with our anger. Because if it is all meant to be, foreordained, then why be upset?
The metaphor of the parent.
It is no coincidence that many religious texts speak of the divine as a parent, be it the divine Mother goddess or the divine Father god!
For the first eighteen months of our lives, we are helpless and totally at the mercy of our primary caregivers. They are like mysterious gods who come to our rescue, or not, when hunger, fear or loneliness floods our little systems. We have to trust them blindly because doubting them means doubting the very foundation of our survival. When they seem angry or upset with us or make us wait and suffer, we unconsciously look to ourselves for the blame. Our parental gods need to remain perfect in order to maintain the myth that they will protect us.
And it is this process that moulds our personality. We give more of that which makes our caregivers smile and hold back on what seems to arouse displeasure. Gradually it determines our attachment style and the development of our shadow-self.
I believe our initial, immature and blindly trusting relationship with the divine is very similar. Or at least, mine was!
Whatever goes wrong, it has to be our fault, not theirs, because our survival is in the hands of these people, these gods. We are being punished because we did something bad. Whether you call it karma or original sin, we take the blame, because we have no idea that in the case of our parents, they have emotional and psychological lives of their own that might actually explain the frown on their faces. Or, at the level of the divine, the thunderstorm, the earthquake, the floods.
This resulting binary code, praise from our caregiver/our god equals good, anger and frustration, or natural disasters equals bad that we take into the world.
However, when it concerns our parental caregivers, we have an opportunity to take them off the pedestals. We start testing our parental gods around the age of two, culminating in puberty, when we are internally programmed to begin to question their wisdom, begin to take back our blind trust and start to think for ourselves. And the good caregiver encourages this rebellion!
Spiritual adulthood
Caregivers who demand blind trust from their adult children are like the dictator Gods of old, scared of losing their power, to be questioned and found wanting. How lucky then that on my own spiritual quest, the pastor of my local church behaved like the good parental representative of the divine and welcomed my spiritual rebel.
It saved me from throwing the spiritual baby out with the religious bathwater.
When my curiosity about the great Mystery began to evolve, I was drawn to the transpersonal psychology of Psychosynthesis. There I discovered that I could dance with the Divine in an epic waltz of co-creation. I learned to be responsible for my own life choices and saw that shit happens to everybody.
I saw that it wasn’t God or me, but a divine creative force within me.
Both the personal and the transpersonal are aspects of my human being. My ego-self is free to choose to dance on the music of the higher or deeper self, or not. And that is much harder than just blindly following a dogma or a belief, be it religious, psychological or political.
Choosing to listen to inner music and taking responsibility for your own life is a challenge. And our worries about getting it wrong often drown out the mysterious musical score of the deeper, wiser Self.
The process of letting go of blind trust in an authority figure, be it human or divine, is frightening. But no one can live your life except you. Shit will happen and no one is to blame. You are free to choose how to deal with that shit. And in the process, you may choose to lean back into the comfort of Love.
I no longer have blind trust. Not in God, nor my parents, nor, even, in myself. I try to maintain a dynamic trust where I keep checking back in with my ego-self as well as my Higher, Deeper Self.
I alone am responsible for my choices, held in the loving embrace of a non-helicoptering Divine parent. That leaves me free to dance in a loving and sometimes questioning embrace, experiencing moments of dazzling pirouettes and lifts as well as falling flat on my face and laughing about it.
Lysanne Sizoo
