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Trust is the key to living fully. Without trust in yourself or others, you will be living a partial existence filled with fear, anxiety and paralysis. Trust is a complicated human endeavor that begins at birth. You learned your most fundamental experiences of trust when you were an infant. When you were a baby you cried to let your caregivers know that you were in need of something. If they came to you within a reasonable amount of time you quickly learned that you could trust your own voice to get your needs met, and that when you reach for someone they respond. If you cried as an infant and were left to wail for extended periods of time, or were not responded to, you might have learned a very different lesson about trusting yourself and others. These early trust-related experiences are of course pre-verbal and out of your awareness as an adult. However, it is important to recognize that you were not born with the ability to trust or not trust. Your level of trust in yourself and others is very much affected by your relational experiences as well as more general responses you receive from your environment on a daily basis.
“Learning to trust is one of life’s most difficult tasks.” – Isaac Watts
Trusting yourself
Trusting yourself is easier said than done. Self-trust, like all other forms of trust, gets stronger with experience over time. The more you put yourself out there and have interactions and experiences that positively reinforce your self-trust, the more you will believe in your ability to make good decisions about yourself and others. Self-trust is fragile however, and mistakes, disappointments, and negative outcomes can quickly erode your sense of self-trust. The goal is not to always be right or to make the perfect choices. It’s about trying, extending your own limits of comfort, and overcoming any fear. To build self-trust you will need to move your focus from doing things right to simply doing things.
“Depend upon yourself. Make your judgement trustworthy by trusting it. You can develop good judgement as you do the muscles of your body – by judicious, daily exercise. To be known as a man of sound judgement will be much in your favor.” – Grantland Rice
Trusting others
Your trust in others will depend on your past and present relational experiences. Trusting is vulnerable, because it involves depending on the other to show up and respond in a way that allows for safety and ongoing closeness. In order to trust we have to be vulnerable so this definitely presents a chicken/egg dilemma. Opening your heart, and letting others in takes courage. Fear is one of the greatest impedements to trust, and it is fear that often creates the most conflict in a relationship. When you are afraid of being hurt and disappointed, it becomes very difficult to trust. Every moment presents an opportunity to build or erode trust.
“Peace comes from trust. Wars come from fear.” – Satish Kumar
Broken Trust
Trust is most often associated with fidelity and commitment when it comes to love relationships. The truth is that trust is much more than that. Trust comes from feeling accepted with all your faults, being listened to and heard, feeling emotionally validated, and by being treated with loving-kindness. Just as trust gets built over time, it can easily be eroded over time. Trust can be broken with harsh words, angry outbursts, neglecting or minimizing thoughts or feelings, and of course breaking commitments. Like many animals, humans can learn the defense of shutting down or closing up to protect against being harmed. The main problem with this is that when you shut out the potentially harmful stuff, you also shut out the opportunity for good. One of the saddest outcomes from being hurt is losing the ability to trust. Learning healthy ways to protect yourself from those who have or could hurt you will allow you to continue living fully, and trusting others and the world.
“For well you know, that it’s a fool who plays it cool by making his world a little colder.” – The Beatles
(Re)Building Trust
Trust accrues over time like money in the bank. The longer you know someone, and the more they have shown how they will show up for you, the greater your sense of trust. The gut wrenching twist on this however, is when that kind of longstanding trust gets broken. It’s like your account goes bankrupt, and it is very hard to recover. You will question having ever invested with someone who has hurt you so deeply. In these scenarios your job becomes re-building the trust, which can be a long and arduous process. Re-building trust after it has been lost is similar to building trust in general. Over time, through small actions and behaviors, you will begin to “believe” in that person once again. Broken trust is a betrayal however, so healing that feeling will be essential for allowing yourself to trust again.
“If we really want to be full and generous in spirit, we have no choice but to trust at some level.” – Rita Dove
Overall, if it feels like the world is cheating you, you find it hard to get close to others, it’s challenging for you to ask for help, you find it hard to make decisions or you withhold information or lie, you are most likely dealing with trust issues in your life.
