Friday, June 12, 2009

The Importance of Trust

By Kevin Murphy M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland

I was listening to someone recently talking about their experience of infidelity. They were describing their peer group and how there was an unspoken consensus in it that infidelity was not such a big deal. By which I mean it was not considered so big a deal that it prevented various members of the group, both men and women, from having affairs with other people.
There is something alluring about freedom of this kind, isn’t there? It offers the prospect of having one’s sexual curiousity satisfied, not to mention one’s sexual desires, in whatever random situation that happens to develop.
It was equally interesting listening to this person describe their peer group – all youngish who were not married and who had no dependants – from a position of anxiety. The question they repeatedly asked was how was it possible to have a relationship in which one felt secure, respected and loved? It was as if the prospect of all that personal freedom was too much to contemplate.
When this person went into the detail of various infidelities it was rarely a clear cut situation. Usually the cheated-on party was greatly hurt and a trust was broken. Or else the cheating party was keeping a secret that was leading to a strong sense of guilt, or was living with the prospect of being found out at some point.
Whichever way you looked at it, the picture this person was painting was one of personal freedom being exercised in a way that willingly risked sacrificing trust within an existing relationship in exchange for pleasure, however brief, outside of it.
Some people feel that this is a worthwhile exchange to make. Others get incredibly damaged by it. And I’m not just talking about those who do the cheating.
Another person I spoke to recently was having huge difficulty coming to terms with the devastating effects on their relationship of having a one night stand. The one night stand is part of popular western culture. It is an acceptable thing, in most instances. But this person was having huge difficulty not just in coping with their partner’s reaction to it, but their own reaction to it. It seemed as if they were more likely to achieve forgiveness from the partner before they would forgive themselves.
And I suppose I’m also thinking of a person I listened to recently who was on the other side of a similar situation. The partner this time had been having an affair and had admitted to it in order to appease their sense of guilt. Once again the issue of trust raised its head but this time in a curious context. This person began asking if it was naïve to expect trust to be part of a loving relationship?
And that I suppose is at the root of the questions that all of these people, and more besides, have been asking in one form or another. In an age of unprecedented sexual freedom one could legitimately ask whether there is a corresponding increase in happiness. Freedom brings with it great things but it is also capable of being abused.
So rather than taking it from the perspective of whether freedom should be restrained or curtailed, from a psychotherapeutic point of view we should ask what happens to trust in one’s primary love relationship if one’s pursuit of sexual freedom leads to infidelity?
The answer is that trust gets badly damaged, in some cases terminally so. And when trust gets damaged often the person whose trust has been broken gets damaged too.
And it is not just the innocent party who gets damaged in these situations. Those who stray are just as susceptible.
The occasional transgressor might be filled with remorse but the bulk are publicly unrepentant, they just betray their guilt in different ways. Look at the effort that goes into their defence mechanisms to protect themselves from accepting the possible enormity of what they have done? They use the classic psychoanalytic defences of denial, or projection onto others, or compartmentalisation of the issue in their own minds or they split themselves off from it completely.
This enormity that I am speaking of is not just meant in the narrow sense of what they have done to their existing partner or to their own sense of who they are or to the relationship they currently have. These are important issues, no doubt, but there is a further point that is rarely considered.
When opportunistic sexual gratification is on offer faithfulness can seemingly be jettisoned. So I suppose you could say we are down to a question of ethics now because the decision to remain faithful is at base an ethical one. But, like all ethical decisions, it is a difficult one to make.
It doesn’t come without some form of sacrifice. It doesn’t come without some form of refusal to indulge in extra pleasure. And neither does it come without a degree of personal strength being applied.
In this light, the enormity that I am speaking of also includes this sense of having failed in the face of a hard task, mainly because it was hard. Now some will say, how hard can it be to remain faithful to someone you love? And that too is a good question and one that needs to be considered.
The driving force behind infidelity is desire, in particular sexual desire. And, according to the psychoanalyst Dr Jacques Lacan, somewhere at the heart of this mysterious thing called desire is a misrecognition of completeness, of fullness, of the potential to find the thing that will fill up all our gaps, our lacks. But really there is no fullness at the heart of desire.
Instead it operates from behind a veil that hides our own narcissistic desires; we are satisfying something in and for ourselves. This lack at the heart of desire ensures we continue to desire.
This might sound like a fatalistic approach. But it is far from it. Once we recognise the essential deception in seeing the fulfilment of desire in every new sexual object, male or female, then we can begin to come to an understanding of how to love another person fully.
In that context, trust becomes an intrinsic element that is rarely even considered rather than a dominant issue that must be debated and negotiated on a continual basis.

End

No comments: