Manage Anxiety: Use Hope to Build Trust and Confront Disappointment | Victoria McGeer /Big think
[Music] I think of trust and hope as being really quite closely related. Oftentimes we trust without really having to worry too much about whether the person we're trusting is able to do what we're trusting them with. Maybe they're a very reliable type, and you know we've trusted them in the past with this sort of thing. We're not too worried about their capacity for living up to that trust.
But very often, we're having to trust under conditions where it's a little more uncertain, or where we think there's some sort of, as it were, almost moral obligation. Certainly, it can be a sort of parental obligation to trust, for example, our children when we think maybe they're not fully reliable yet and they may well disappoint us. But it's certainly an important part of raising those children to understand that they are going to be asked to do things.
They are going to be relied on in various ways. It's a way of allowing them to develop those capacities to be responsive to trust, which is a very important feature of human social life. There, I think we do need to energize our trust with our own capacity to hope. Where that means something very particular for me is to say that when we hope for things, we are always facing the fact that we could be disappointed.
We're facing that disappointment in a clear-eyed way. That is, if we're hoping well, we're saying: “You know, I understand what the stakes are here, but I think this is an important thing to do.” It's important to regulate my own anxiety about this, so I use my hope to put certain worries offline, as a way to just not focus on them.
Instead, I focus on what could be under the right sort of conditions and give whatever support is necessary to make that come about. But, of course, I have to, as a hopeful person, realize that I could be disappointed, and therefore, that I have the kind of capacity to recover from disappointment. That's a very important part of hoping well. [Music...]