Once,
a smart man with an open heart told me - you can easily recognize if someone is authentic and trustworthy by checking on three ''pillars of trust''. The author of those specific pillars is unknown to me, but the pillars have followed me since then: it's the empathy, consistency and logic. To know if you can put trust in someone, you ask yourself three simple questions: Has this person shown true empathy in any situation? Is this person consistent in its words and actions and do they match? Especially through longer period in time. And third, is this person logical? Do their thoughts/words follow simple logic or their ideas seem irrational and out of touch with what's really going on.
1. Empathy
We all love to talk about empathy and most think they naturally have it. You can't know if you lack it, can you? Not if you've never experienced the presence of it. But the person who possesses the empathy (most humans do to, at last to certain amount) can recognize the lack of it in other. Empathy doesn't mean being able to cry at every movie scene there is, loving your dog's loyal company or being a good listener when it comes to problems of others. There are tears that come to please or own heart. There is adoration of creatures (be it animal or humans) who we selfishly consider and treat as part of our own self, as our own living extension. There is curiosity factor and self approval and self consolation when being the one who listens all details about injustice and hardship in other people's lives. This doesn't mean every good listener has such background and lacks empathy, that tears don't show emotion, or that every mother is narcissistic in her nature. These examples only serve us to understand the nature of true empathy, which doesn't have any self interest, selfish aim or agenda, her only purpose is to detach from our own egos and be as one with other, as we are, in most selfless way there is.
You will never feel truly seen, accepted or understood in the presence of those who lack empathy. They may act as they hear you, but they listen for other reasons. They observe attentively people around them by measuring the potential benefit they may have through hypothetical interaction with them. They underestimate you secretly, and others openly. Even if they seem to understand you and others perfectly, they don't comprehend one important thing they lack: the source of existence, love - love for its own sake. Everything that's meaningful, comes from it. Everything else is merely an improvisation, a play, an illusion of living.
Can a person become more empathetic? Maybe through certain therapy and self work, maybe through living spiritual revelation. You may also notice that the spirituality that interests them is the spirituality of pure self gain, self affirmation and self ascension. It's the illusion of enlightenment that covers their self-oriented life pursuit.
Another thing - you may or may have not noticed that the common thing with addicts is the lack of empathy. It's because those people have lost every connection with the source and others while focusing on the object of their addiction, which has become the artificial master of their complete existence, until there is none left. It is obvious that empathy isn't something to brag about, it's a healthy human trait. When person lacks it, it will naturally focus exclusively on self interest, self pleasing behavior, cynic approach, often diminishing others (secretly or openly). The case with the addicts is only that their range of interests and personal needs become as narrow as it can be. Such behavior can function for a person and feel powerful as long as things go their way. As soon as their plan fails, the person becomes disoriented, angry, malicious, weak,
The important thing is that when we recognize the lack of true empathy in a person, we can learn when to say no to being a vessel for manipulative operations. And don't forget, those people don't need your compassion or word salad, they need real healing.
2. Consistency
We may be completely amazed by a person's character, approach, attitude, words and even actions. How to know if what we are seeing is true? How can't it be? If it they are changing it often, if those elements contradict each other, these are learnt behavior that serves a person in that specific moment, or a period in time. Yes, we all change through time. We must, it's how we grow. But there is this different kind of change in a person, a sudden change of its thoughts and behavior that make us question our own perception of shared reality. Sometimes a person can intentionally gaslight other person to confuse, to fulfill certain needs or to escape certain consequences. Sometimes it's simply their modus operandi. People say one thing, and do another, simultaneously or in retrograde. We all tend to fail. But this is not like a broken promise, this is more of a broken character. Yesterday, Michael couldn't stand a cat near him, and today we see him sharing an album of random cats online, inserting love emoticons. Lisa used to preach everyone about the importance of good quality music. Today you wont ever see or hear her mentioning, sharing, or enjoying such music - her recent boyfriend isn't into such things. Months ago, Samantha mocked everyone for wearing a pink lipstick. Today she shares tutorials on how to do trendy Barbie make up and makes good money of it. Tim occasionally gambled in certain desirable social circles, but today he has friends of different social profile and swears by his children he has never seen a Casino.
Those people don't operate from their inner source. They collect these random ideas from others and put them into mental boxes ''prestige/popular'' or ''not prestige/unpopular'', like a clever (or maybe not so clever) computer program. If the idea matches someone they have in mind as prestigious, popular, cool (usually rich), it's the idea they'll follow.
When our heart truly changes, we become aware and open about it. That's a real, healthy change. We learn different, better ways. To be more clear, we are inspired everyday by other people's words and actions and most of us wants to create a life that's successful and somewhat approved. But at what cost and for what cause? Whose ideas inspire us to move? If gaining power is the ultimate meaning to our life experience and to who we are, then love is just another instrument to gain desired control, or a poor substitute for power. Then there's nothing else to be or to do except for those things that make us seem special and important on the outside. And as the world trends change, masks change too, until it becomes impossible to remember who some people were and to understand who they are behind them.
The pillar of consistency is similar to the pillar of empathy in terms of recognizing the attitude of being self profit oriented, which is heavily encouraged by the culture we live in. It is not the same to be ambitious and to be ambition obsessed. Also, there are people who are ambitious obsessed but haven't failed the test of consistency or empathy. They might have failed some other tests if you ask their close ones, as we all have after all. If the pillar of empathy is important to understand so that we protect ourselves from being easily taken advantage of, it's important to understand the pillar of consistency to save us from trusting and investing into every interesting story that we meet. Maybe we won't loose much, maybe we wont get heavily hurt, but we will probably get heavily disappointed in our own judgement after certain amount of time.
3. Logic
So the person seems and feels authentic - is aware and sensitive to others, is consistent in words and actions, has shown integrity. Yet you still feel you can't fully trust this person? There is something, but you cannot point your finger to what that is. People might have best intentions, but can lack the ability to form an accurate structure of the reality presented. This can be do to health conditions or other reasons. We all have our personal truths of what we perceive and our life experience shapes our perception. But we still agree on the important parts of one and the same reality that we live in, and when we don't, we usually get into some kinds of conflicts. It's all regular part of our human experience. Some people impose their own perception of reality as one and the only, even when facing all the facts that prove the opposite. They believe the logic is what they want it to be and that truth must suit them. This could be a long passage about mental health, but I'm not psychologist or psychiatrist and this is not a scientific article. The moral of the story is, you cannot trust the kindest and the most honest person if that person is irrational and lacks basic logical observation of the world and people in it. You might taste the bitterness of this truth if you fully put trust in such relationship. You might get sucked into it, get confused, fooled, played, even attacked. We are not talking about dreamers and geniuses who see the world in their own unique way. We are talking about people who both consciously and unconsciously ignore all the facts for the sake of their own personal plot development, their own affirmations and every day functioning. There's always something missing to their story - it's paragraphs of the story themselves - and you'll never get to the conclusion.
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So those would be the pillars of truth that might help us to differ authenticity from lies, honesty from manipulation and maybe even save us from certain toxic relationships. Once you get burned, you really appreciate all kinds of insights and observations to save yourself from unnecessary pain. The story of inauthentic person doesn't have your own well being in it, invites you in only if you're willing to pay big amount, never gives you credit for it or lets you read the story properly, keeping you in constant question what is it all about. Your story on the other hand is being observed, read, fragmented and eventually denied.
We are all flawed, sometimes toxic and far from perfect empathetic and logical superhuman beings, but being aware of ourselves and others should help us grow in love. Awareness helps us to forgive ourselves and others. But no matter how tolerant we think we should be, we should remind ourselves often that not everyone does the necessary inner work or thinks that inner work is necessary for them. People love to justify each sin and evil while climbing their stairs, so when they meet you on the way, hold on to these pillars, God takes care of open hearts.
