One, two, one, two, three, four
Some loves are just lies of the heart
The cold remains of what began with a passionate start
And they may not want it to end
But it will it's just a question of when
We've lived long enough to have learned
The closer we get to the fire the more we get burned
But that won't happen to us
Cause it's always been a matter of trust
I know we're emotional sorts
It takes a lot for us to not lose our faith in this world
I can't offer you proof
But we're going to face a moment of truth
It's hard when we're always afraid
We just recover when another belief is betrayed
So break my heart if you must
It's a matter of trust
We can't go the distance
With too much resistance
I know we have doubts
But for god's sake don't shut me out
This time we've got nothing to lose
We can take it, we can leave it, whatever we choose
I won't hold back anything
And I'll walk away a fool or a king
Some love is just a lie of the mind
It's make believe until its only a matter of time
And some might have learned to adjust
But then it never was a matter of trust
I'm sure we're aware now
We've all had our share of believing too long
When the whole situation was wrong
Some love is just a lie of the soul
A constant battle for the ultimate state of control
After we've heard lie upon lie
There can hardly be a question of why
Some love is just a lie of the heart
The cold remains of what began with a passionate start
But that can't happen to us
Cause it's always been a matter of trust
It's a matter of trust
It's always been a matter of trust
It's a matter of trust
Cause it's always been a matter of trust
We look at a lot of the issues, not only with Pathfinder Society, not just Pathfinder, but even the world itself and far too often what we can boil it down to a lack of trust, whether in our fellow players, our fellow GMs, the awesome people at Paizo, or even... ourselves.
This is my 10000th post on the Paizo forums, and 5000th on my main posting alias. As folks may be aware from the Pathfinder Society area, I tend to make my 'milestone' posts questions, or thoughts, or ideas I've stumbled across in my quest for wisdom and growth.
With humble respect please keep it clean, keep it polite in keeping with the community guidelines.
How have people either approached trust issues in the past, or have had their trust betrayed? What did we learn from these experiences? What was our initial reaction, and was it justified in retrospect?
May we all grow a little bit from the discussion and perhaps share insights.
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I won't go into the number of times my trust has been betrayed. That is far too private.
People are not worthy of trust. The occasional individual is. The occasional goal is. But people never will be.
You may be right that lack of trust is a problem. I do not see any better path.
That is what I have learned from my experiences.
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The worst is having a family member be the reason you stop believing in trust.
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Trust does not have to be an on/off switch in your head.
You can lose trust in one person but still trust others. You can even learn to trust a family member with addiction/drug/alcohol issues in the areas where they can be trusted, but learn not to trust them in other aspects of your relationship*
If you don't currently have the tools to do that, try to get access to them. Therapy, family support groups and other sources can teach you the skills you need to learn to differentiate the risks and the opportunities.
*True story
One teen-aged drug user I knew could be absolutely relied upon and trusted to do family errands on the way home from school. If someone needed to pick up milk, or dry cleaning, he would do it cheerfully and reliably.
You just couldn't trust him to attend classes, not use drugs, not steal, and a myriad of other things he needed to do to move forward in his own life. But it wasn't all or nothing. He could still be trusted, just in very limited capacities
I can still trust others. I can even trust him in those limited areas of life. Trust is not a unitary event that only has one outcome
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I think my greatest weakness is that I'm TOO trusting. I tend to forgive and forget quickly and easily (a long road from how I was in my younger years) and it often comes back to bite me in the butt.
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It's much easier to evaluate whether or not to trust someone's words if you already have a clear understanding of your own boundaries.
There's a lot of heartache involved in not having clear boundaries but expecting other people to behave as if you did.
In that case, it's not so much whether you can trust *them* as it is a matter of being able to trust yourself to take care of you own needs. If you can't articulate what you need to do to take care of yourself, then it's very hard for someone else to know where your lines are drawn.
If you say one thing ("Here's the line") but behave as if something else is true ("nah, that's not really the line; you can keep doing that"), then your own words don't match your behavior.
So you get a relationship where neither person can be trusted to say what they really mean.
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As someone whose been on both sides of this, I've learned that trust is something that is built over the course of a lifetime that can be destroyed in an instant.
I'm going to share two examples, see if maybe I can understand now what I couldn't understand before, and to show that I'm not hiding behind my original and somewhat vague post.
I trusted my military recruiters when I was in the process of graduating high school. I tried to do everything within my power to get my body into condition as well as the proper 'shape' (the branch I was going into was being VERY particular about weight, and I'm an atypical build, like a brick s*&#haus).
The night before I was supposed to go in for final screening they 'helped' me by providing an exceptionally harsh medical item. The next eighteen hours were excruciating pain, and I ended up horribly dehydrated AND failing the entrance examination due to not meeting the weight/body mass standard.
At the end of the discussion with one of the people at the processing station, in my delirious state I revealed what had happened and suddenly there was keen interest in my situation, for obvious reasons.
Being young, stupid, and naive, I figured that was the end of it.
...flash forward a month later, when the excrement hit the whirling fan blades.
They wanted to wash their hands of me, and for the most part they did.
The only two recruiters that would have anything to do with me were the two who had tried to counsel me AGAINST taking the item I had been provided by the other recruiters, and were willing to at least help me chart and build a personal regimen to get to 'qualifying mass/shape'.
It was probably the best lesson I could have learned about trust... if I had only retained it.
I managed to get into the military, was in for about two years and then they started the great Defense Drawdown, and when they made the requirements physically impossible for someone of my particular build to reach, I found my way out.
I was a long-time GM and sometime campaign leadership and volunteer for a long-running 'living' campaign. The rules were a lot more relaxed in comparison to organizations like PFS.
A player came to me with a cool idea (and as GMs and writers in the campaign we were allowed to work with 'cool player ideas' provided we kept notes and at least another GM 'in the loop' so there'd be no failed 'hand-off' in the event of RL issues, etc).
Over the course of six months we would work on the 'cool idea' -- it was a scifi space opera game, the character had found an ancient relic that relied on a *True Balance* of the forces of Darkness and Light to activate. He even undertook to 'balance' himself and get notably *dark* to be 'in balance'.
And then at an Interactive (picture sort of like a free-form Special, where players have liberty to do a lot of their own things in addition to a story arc) the player decided their character was going to activate the relic... in quite possibly the worst place anyone could consider doing that.
I gave the player one warning. "This is an exceptionally BAD idea to do at this time. It will work, but it will have negative consequences."
Player was insistent on pushing ahead. "This is now the GM informing you that the action you are about to undertake will result in the death of your character, with no recourse."
Player performs action. Suddenly the story events of three Interactive tables screeched to a halt as a brief GM conference was held, and the mission was scrapped in exchange for 'stopping whatever Stupid had been unleashed from the relic activation'.
Player then turns to me and says "Okay, I want to turn it off."
"You do realize that it required perfect balance and perfect timing to activate it, correct? It will require a living sacrifice to turn it off. And it won't be a heroic one."
Player... "I understand, I do what is necessary."
"Your character is now dead as they become one with the universe for a brief instant to mend the tear in space/time that they created. You may no longer play this character."
Player... "Oh, okay, I was thinking of making a new character anyways."
...it was the first time I'd ever taken out a character in any game. I felt sick for almost a week over it, going over my notes, trying to figure out if there was any way that I'd given bogus advice. I consulted with my 'backup' GM, gave them all my notes, and they agreed with me.
Three weeks later, I am at work in the middle of a busy rush at the register and I get a phone call from the 'leadership council' of the campaign.
Council Rep: "Yeah, we're calling to find out some information about a character death you handled, we were told that you never told the player of any of the risks or that they wouldn't be allowed to play the character any more."
...
...
"Can I call you back when I'm *not at work with my manager and a half-dozen customers staring at me*, please?"
Council Rep: "Oh, we're probably just going to re-instate the character, this was more a courtesy call than anything else. Have a nice night."
...words cannot express.
That was the start of a downward slide towards GMing in general, because I couldn't trust anyone for a good two years to not be 'heading behind my back' to 'get the best outcome'. I'm constantly second-guessing myself as a result, because I don't want to be misunderstood.
Even to this day, it's hard to trust that I won't have someone do this, or that there will be some 'flaw' in my GMing that will be exploited by a player.
It's taken some good friends to mitigate some of the edge, but it's still there, lurking in the shadows.
Thank you for your time and patience thus far in the thread...
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I have a good friend who battled the weight issue. He didn't have an ounce of fat on him but according to Marine Standards he was overweight. He did everything he could think of to lose more weight, but he couldn't lose the muscle mass, and eventually they ousted him. He went through a pretty tough period of depression but then joined the Army National Guard here in our home state and is doing very well. He's the logistics officer for the entire Guard and actually serves under my old roommate from college, who is now a colonel.
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Recruiters can be some of the shadiest damn people (not just in the military, but in general).
I've never been betrayed by a headhunter, but it helps that I've never trusted anyone with an obvious motive for getting em to sign up for something.
I honestly can't recall the last time my trust was violated, but a big part of that is that I don't give it lightly.
I have a good friend who battled the weight issue. He didn't have an ounce of fat on him but according to Marine Standards he was overweight. He did everything he could think of to lose more weight, but he couldn't lose the muscle mass, and eventually they ousted him. He went through a pretty tough period of depression but then joined the Army National Guard here in our home state and is doing very well. He's the logistics officer for the entire Guard and actually serves under my old roommate from college, who is now a colonel.
I was in a similar boat.
In my Basic Training graduation photos I looked like a cadaver with a hint of muscle.
Regaining enough muscle mass and strength was a killer.
EDIT:
Instead of any sort of contact, they instead rented our usual 'haunt' out from under us, and attempted to prevent us from meeting that night... or so they thought.
We were a proactive group, and we determined we would relocate for the night AND come up with 'our own way'. It started small locally, but eventually became an international concern.
Until internal politics and personality conflicts intruded, we had one very simple rule -- we *weren't* going to be 'those guys'.