Trust... Invisible Loyalties, Entitlements, and Revolving Slates: Nurture This Through Adventure
Revolving Slates, Entitlements, Invisible Loyalties and the Great Outdoors
When you can take a step back to understand relationships and dysfunction from the perspective of a balance of ledgers, it seems much easier to forgive and move forward with trust and responsibility.
Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy used the term “Revolving Slate” to explain how the behavior one exhibits to others is a result of how they feel they have been wronged in the past, with a motivation of, “You shamed me, so I am going to shame you”. This idea that attitudes, expectations, and patterns of behavior are a type of account that can be transferred to the next generation provides perspective into beginning to understand family and societal dysfunction.
Contexts such as revolving slates, entitlements, invisible loyalties, relational ethics, and trustworthiness can help understand dysfunction and find internal resolution even when the probability of another person changing is extremely unlikely. Change begins with the autonomous individual.
Growing up with narcissistic parents can finally be understood. All of those years of shame and guilt and double binds can be put into perspective, because ultimately, you are simply born into an equation that is balancing a ledger of debts around fairness, entitlements, and loyalties.
Self survival has been a preoccupation in human’s and societies since the beginning of time. A primary attitude of self servitude, is one sided and highly unlikely, even Buddha was a part of a power system. In the scheme of things, loyalty groups and power systems are much more favorable than being at the losing end of an exploited crowd. In power systems, trustworthiness is the driving force.
The beauty in understanding these contextual patterns can help you, the autonomous individual, find function from a place of trust resources for the future with human integrity. Relational responsibility will not transpire from trying to settle a debt from the past, it comes from trustworthy transformation, differentiation, and maturation. This requires trust; in well-flowing communication, feedback patterns, and interactional transactions. People become self-motivated when resolutions are focused on autonomy and trust. When people are focused on settling debts of untrustworthiness in a tit for tat entitlement cycle, problems will persist.
Nature Experience for nourishing Trust Patterns
There really is no better way to nourish trust patterns than to spend time in nature with a group. This is a major concept to understand why treatment methods such as Adventure Therapy and Wilderness Therapy are believed to be the most competent form of treatment for addiction and chronic mental health problems such as depression.
Individuals who have suffered from complications with addictive patterns, mental health debts, and behavioral health entitlements are showing up with a ledger of destructive entitlements. Their life has been compromised in a way that questions the trust they have within themselves which influences how they trust others. Spending time in the outdoors for a period of time with a group requires the give and take of interactive trust, there is just no way around it, the intensity of the experience requires TRUST. Individuals learn a type of interdependence that is based around resources of trust, first.
Adventure Therapy and Wilderness Therapy are intense forms of treatment that teach survival skills and rebuilds a person’s ability to trust themselves in what they have to offer the group so that they can learn to trust others. This is how to reverse destructive entitlements, with opportunities to build trust within the self, first.
Healthy interdependence, autonomy, and trust are spontaneously nurtured as the ledger of generational debts are wiped clean with a fresh slate to move forward responsibly.
