Trust

Do you trust easily or do you find it hard to trust people? Either way, trust is important in your life; it's important in everyone's life!It's like a superpower when you've got it, it's like kryptonite when it is missing. 
If you just don't want to trust, you are setting yourself up for hard times. But of course trust has to be handled carefully. 

Transcript

How’s your trust? Do you trust easily or is trusting hard for you? Have you even thought about trust in that way? Whether you have considered it or not, you have a relationship with trust. Everybody trusts sometimes, and not so much other times. Humans learn trust early, whether to trust or not, who to trust if you trust at all, what situations are safe to trust and what is not. Babies seem to have a built-in fear of falling, so they don’t trust going beyond a ledge. Literal or figurative, everybody has ledges they won’t go beyond. 

Trust is putting your well-being in another’s hands, believing they are on your side, working for your benefit. To trust someone, you may take a risk of being hurt or overlooked. There are different degrees of trust expected and given depending on the situation. So, the risk is great sometimes. But other times we must trust someone with a small thing or two, the risk then is much less; there is less to lose if things go wrong.

In relationship to your spouse or friend, hopefully you are also trustworthy. When trust is mutual and the people involved have built a track record of trust between them, it is a beautiful thing with lots of benefits. 

Trust is so important that people notice when it is not present. Sometimes we take it for granted when trust is there, but it becomes painfully obvious when it is not. You notice when you don’t feel you can trust someone; you feel ill at ease. The risk of telling them something vulnerable is too great, cooperating with them on tasks to be done has some danger. Trust is so powerful that it makes everything go more smoothly and its absence gums up the works in marriages, friendships, and businesses. 

There is an interesting book about this idea, called “The Speed of Trust,” by Stephen M. R. Covey. It says everything goes better and faster when trust is present. The opposite is true as well, everything goes more poorly and slower when trust is not present. When trust isn’t present, people can’t be totally honest with each other because they don’t know what the other will do with the information. The time it takes to figure out what is safe to say or do, and what is not safe, slows everything down. 

You can probably quickly think of people you have complete trust in. And you can probably think of those folks, who as the saying goes, you “don’t trust them as far as you could throw them.” You just don’t trust them at all. 

Applying trust and getting trust from others is an imperfect process. Do you know anyone who is 100% trustworthy? I don’t meet that standard myself because sometimes I fail to follow through. I choose a self-serving decision sometimes instead of doing what the other needs. Humans being what we are, none of us are completely worthy of another’s trust. That’s why we often need to say, “I’m sorry.” 

It’s a great challenge when we feel betrayed. Betrayal is, by definition a break in trust. I have counseled many couples where there has been infidelity. One party in a relationship takes actions that injure the other. Repair from this is possible but difficult. Options include throwing away the relationship because it may cause hurt again. That is the extreme option, just refusing to trust. Choosing to work to restore the relationship may set one up to be hurt again. It seems there is no way to avoid risk in trust. 

To build trust we need to ask for what we want in relationships, then hope the person will give it. We must also be people of our word with kindness; being trustworthy. It is a dance; giving and receiving trust when the imperfections of us all make trusting risky. In the moving sidewalk that is life, may your relationships now and in the future be trustworthy. And may you be a trustworthy person. 

To dig a bit deeper, take a few minutes and relax. Get centered with a few slow breaths and closed eyes if it is safe to do so. How does trust feel in your life? If you deeply trust someone or something, how does that feel? Is it a warmth in your chest, a tingling in your body? What words come to mind about trust for you? Do you think of people or ideas? Just allow first thoughts and feelings to come while you notice. Now recall a time when trust was broken, maybe by another, maybe by you. Remember the feeling? It was probably an uncomfortable feeling, maybe deeply painful. What do you wish the other had done differently? What could you have done differently? Just feel that feeling. “I’ll never trust again,” is not a good option, and neither is giving up when you did wrong and saying, “I can never regain their trust.” Imagine the other side of loss of trust; what does giving trust again feel like? What steps can you take safely to trust again after hurt or betrayal? What does being trustworthy again look like?