Hi FuzzyBear -- I think you've brought up a very important topic.

The biggest trust issue concerns the online environment itself. This is a public environment and here in the US we have no protections from what we write online being legally used against us. Our computers can be seized in legal investigations. Pseudonyms are easily broken by government snoops.

I find that so inhibiting that individual issues of trust have little to do with my behavior. I had to leave the forums for a while, as you know, because I believed that someone here "had it in for me." I do not know if that perception was true or false, but it was my perception, and I had to absent myself for a while to deal with those feelings. It's definitely an issue of trust if one believes that one cannot come to an online community that exists for support and find that here.

In terms of trusting an individual, I would have to develop, at the very least, a personal email correspondence with someone before trust would become much of a factor for me. This leads me to my second main point about trust -- my trust has to be developed and even earned over time.

My experience in life, perhaps because I was a reporter for a long time, is that it is best that we make explicit to friends and acquaintances when we are sharing something that we don't want repeated elsewhere. They cannot mind-read.

In all honesty, however, I find the best person in whom to confide, if I want to trust, is a therapist who has a legal obligation not to yammer. I don't whether that is cynical or realistic, but it is my experience in life.

A boss who said, "Teaching and research are excellent" six weeks later wrote a letter that cost me my job and years of joblessness.

A Beloved who said, "I'll never leave you" drove off one day and never returned, without letting me know that was the game plan.

I make so many mistakes that I can't even trust myself. Trust is in short supply for me, I fear.