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Are you afraid to trust others? You could suffer from pistanthrophobia
Psychology
Does it give you confidence when someone says to you “let yourself fall on your back, I will hold you”? I suppose the answer lies in depending on which person is waiting for you with open arms to avoid a fall. Trust works like this: they transmit us security while to others we would never confess something intimate about ourselves, among other things.
However, there are those who do not differentiate because they do not trust anyone. Yes, people with an irrational and exaggerated fear that is given by a bad experience in the past in which something of theirs, personal information told to third parties, was released to the four winds and, with it, their privacy was violated. “This fear is related to having had experiences in which we have learned directly or indirectly that trusting has been dangerous,” summarizes Ana de la Mata, a psychologist at the Cepsim psychological center. So relationships are no longer a source of support and enjoyment, even though the person in question may have a strong desire to connect and be able to trust others.
Apparently, according to the psychologist Ana de la Mata, we all experience this fear to some degree or form throughout our lives: «And it is useful to us because it warns us of possible dangers to our physical and emotional integrity and therefore puts responses are underway that allow us to flee or fight against these dangers ”.
The fear
Defensive pessimism has a lot to do with pistantrophobia: those whose negativity is always ahead never consider that someone can help them. That is why they anticipate that others will not be able to understand them, that others will not be able to respond to their needs or that they will harm them. «They expect others to be neither receptive nor sensitive to their own needs or emotional states; that they will not believe them, they will laugh at them, they will not take their side, they will ask them dishonest questions or they will feel sorry for them “, explains the psychologist.
On the other hand, and since the fear of trusting has to do with experiences in which trusting did not go well, we have doubts or we conclude that what has happened to us has to do with what we have no criteria to choose trustworthy people, that we are bad or that they do not love us: “You have to understand that fear is not only about what the other can do to us, but about being able to trust our own criteria and feeling of worth,” says the expert.
Characteristic behaviors
The fear of trust can be faced from two positions: trying to avoid being disappointed by others or avoiding intimate situations.
Ana de la Mata explains that when we try to prevent others from letting us down We amplify the expression of our emotions in order to make sure that the other will pick up on them: “We try to like ourselves by forgetting about our own needs and we experience difficulties in saying no.” Apparently, from this position we can feel that in relationships we do not receive as much as we give or that we cannot predict when the other will be available to us.
On the other hand, when we try avoid intimacy we really or emotionally distance ourselves from others: “Since relating and establishing secure bonds with other people is a necessity, in order to distance ourselves it is also necessary to distance ourselves from our own emotions or needs by avoiding or minimizing them,” says the psychologist. From this position we can experience that we feel less than others and that others are the ones who feel too much. Moreover, says Ana de la Mata that we can feel that others demand too much affection from us and that relationships They are very tired: «This does not mean that they are lonely people, we all have a nice family member with whom we coincide in the celebrations, with whom we laugh, who always tells us that everything is going well, but in reality we do not know much more about him ».
In our relationships there are always going to be moments of lack of tune, moments in which the other or we will not be able to capture and perfectly cover all the needs and emotional states, but these breaks in tune can be repaired.
Quoting Cyrulnik“If I tell you what happened to me, you will not believe me, you will laugh, you will side with the aggressor, you will ask me obscene questions or, worse still, you will have pity on me. So I will keep quiet to protect myself, I will discover only the part of my story that you are able to bear. The other part, the dark one will continue to live in silence in the cellars of my personality».