Building Trust and having AS

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I have found that I have significant trust issues. Previously I inherently trusted people, because I did not think about possible dishonesty. But many times I have had that trust abused. And once someone has abused my trust once, it is almost impossible to get it back. I suspect this is because I have no way to judge sincerity other than by what people do. I believe someone more NT than me can tell that someone that has done them wrong is truly repentent and can trust them again. I cannot. The have an onerous task of being trustworthy while I distrust them for a long time. Generally, I feel that I can only trust someone to do what they believe is in their own self-interest.

Does anyone else feel this way?

P.S. I thought of this reading the long pros and cons of Alex and JER working with Autism Speaks. I believe they are doing the right thing by working within and giving the organization the chance to redeem itself, but I can see the cause for extreme skepticism and blatant distrust considering their previous approaches and statements. And it is much harder for an organization to build trust than an individual.

I have pretty significant trust issues as well. I have probably cut off people from my life who would have been otherwise relatively trustworthy, but I know I have cut out people from my life who aren't trustworthy at all too.

I also have trust issues as well. You might not believe this, but it took me a year and three months to get my first 1000 posts on WP, because I was questioning whether I could trust everybody or not.

have you guys ever heard of the concept of compliance tests?

aside from my limited intuition, thats how i figure out whether i can trust someone

As a child, I was explicitly taught by my emotionally-unstable mother to basically trust no one.
So I didn't.
Then I went through a weird phase in my teens when I naively thought that I could trust the dropouts I hung out with.
I was wrong.
So then I fully retreated into myself and radiate distrust towards almost everyone I encounter.
I'm basically still that way. No trust.

On the flipside, I find it somewhat odd that throughout my life, nearly everyone seems to trust ME.
And it's totally unjustified... through my social bungling and paranoid tendencies, I've broken the trust of many people who were actually trying to get close to me.
I guess I look trustworthy on the outside

Wow. I definitely have this problem. Actually Tony Atwood has written some stuff about people with AS being too trusting and being taken advantage of (i.e. victimized) because of that tendency... but in adulthood, I've found that I trust less and less as a result of being lied to and victimized in the past and what's worse is that I feel like I can't even trust myself to know who's trustworthy and who's not... I have a very FEW women in my life who I trust and ask them to make value judgments for me on men in my life. This has worked out well for me so far.

I just had a reminder of how well it's worked the other day too. A man I met at a coffee shop asked me out about two years ago, just around the time that I had decided to ask these other friends to help me determine who to trust and who not to... I asked a friend about him and she told me to stay away from him and to run in the other direction. He didn't seem like a bad guy to me, but after a series of really awful relationships with guys lying and stealing and cheating, I reminded myself that I had promised myself to listen to her, so I did. I stopped going to that coffee shop and cancelled the date. So, last week I saw on the news that the guy is now on the run from the police for killing his girlfriend!! Holy crap! NO WONDER there are trust issues in Aspies! My friend totally knew right off the bat that this guy was a creep, and I WOULD HAVE GONE OUT WITH HIM! Blech.

My trust and intimacy issues are pretty severe, and were what actually caused me to seek out the therapist that eventually helped to diagnose my AS. I find it impossible to trust anyone for any reason - even someone I love, like my Mother, who is a wonderful person who loves her children and always tries to do right by them. I put people into categories - these are my family members that I can trust to do A B and C, these are my close friends with whom I can talk about topics X Y and Z, and these are my old housemates who love it when I go on rants about Pokemon and domestic politics. I therefore find it impossible to form close relationships with anyone, as the only way I have of understanding them is to reduce them to a sort of behavioural puzzle. At the same time I have a very romanticized ideal of what a 'close relationship' might be like, and since I find it impossible to read people I give anyone who is interested in me a chance - or, rather, I put them through a trial run of my 'quirky personality' - but in the process find that I am irritated by the little social dances they try to initiate with me while we're dating, so I end up being the one to break things off.

My complete lack of empathy and difficulty recognizing my own emotional states certainly aren't doing me any favors either. So, don't worry OP, you are certainly not alone in the difficulties you are facing.

Hmm. I guess it only matters if you are in a position where trust is necessary. If it isn't necessary to your function, maybe you don't have to consider it - which is probably why I don't. I actually have no idea if I trust or not - it's never really been an issue as there have been other factors regulating behaviour and therefore trust isn't really the linchpin - such as protocol, structured concequences, laws, etc. Exactly where do you encounter the need for trust???

@Acacia

I too seem to be automatically trusted. I seem to transmit trustworthy; at least when I don't do something socially awkward to identify me as creepy. Fortunately I have learned to avoid many behaviours that others find creepy.

@just-lou

I am enough in the gray area between socially incompetent NT and high-functioning Aspie (due to having stereotypical Aspie problems I identify with the latter) that I run into the situations frequently enough. In my current life as a grad student I have to trust my advisor on his word when I will be allowed to defend and graduate, that he is actually going to edit the paper we are submitting, and so forth. (He hasn't done too well historically and so I don't actually trust him.) When I was looking for an advisor, I had enough of "I don't have anything right now, check back in a few months" that gave me no clue as to whether they were being honest or politely declining. So much that I ended up changing grad schools for lack of an advisor. I dread asking around for post-docs. Those examples are the ones that immediately come to mind, but I also have been fooled many times in the past. Having a built-in sincerity meter would be nice. On the other-hand, I think I do better against those that have false-sincerity down pat than if I actually trusted that gut-feeling.