I want to leave a question I have been reflecting on lately. It’s about trust. I feel like being trustworthy, and how to build and cultivate trust, is a topic that almost always occur when we’re discussing relationships, but the conversation often lacks an important nuance.
I will leave the question at the top of the post, but I suggest you keep reading to understand what I want to share.
The question I want to ask is: What can people trust you with?
If you want to tell me what you think people can trust you with, leave a comment so I can come back and read.
What IS trust? If you think about your closest relationships… What makes you trust your friend or your lover? If you want to share, I’m interested in real life examples. I’m talking day-to-day situations where you experience either trust or distrust.
To me, trust can mean a lot of things. It can mean: keeping your word, not talking badly about someone behind their back, keeping someone’s secret, having their back etc. The aspect of trust I’m talking about in this post is a different kind of trust. I’m talking about:
Can people trust you to say: “No, I don’t want to do that”?
Can they trust you to tell them: “What you just said made me feel upset”?
Can people trust you to say: “I don’t feel ok, can we talk?”.
Or if you hurt them and they tell you to not hurt them again, can they trust you to receive them?
Keeping your word, not talking badly about someone behind their back, keeping secrets etc., are “outwardly” acts. To build trust, a certain action is required. The trust I’m talking about comes with an internal requirement. You have to acknowledge what you want; you have to accept what you want, and last (but not least) you have to tell your friend or lover what you want. Keeping your word is guaranteed a positive response. Giving people a boundary feels uncomfortable. You risk making the other person upset.
Where am I going with this? First of all, I don’t want you to feel like you should be able to comfortably and without fear just communicate what you want. Or your boundaries for that matter. I want you to know that, if you are not a trustworthy person, you are missing certain experiences. In other words: if you get those experiences, it will become easy telling people what you want, as well as stating your boundaries.
What are the experiences (I think) you need in order to effortlessly tell people what you want with?
(1) Knowing what it feels like to be fully and wholeheartedly accepted and wanted for who you are; knowing that there are people who do not just want you exactly as you are, they want you BECAUSE you are who you are. You can (and need to) give that experience to yourself, but you also need to experience it in relationship to others.
(2) Knowing that sharing your true feelings means working together as allies to resolve the conflict, and that doing so leads to an increased sense of safety and closeness. Knowing that your partner will remain connected to you during a conflict, they will NOT pull away, turn against you, or make you feel like you are alone and it’s them against you.
You are meant to have a strong and solid sense of knowing that you deserve to be treated with respect. You are meant to engage with people who listen, want to understand, and cooperates to find a solution. You are meant to be welcomed when you tell people how you feel. You are meant to feel like the relationship is safe, and that the connection is not threatened when you go through disagreement and conflict.
If you never experienced what I just described, you need someone to model it. You need someone to stay connected through conflict, to listen to you, understand you, and to hold your hand through the experience to help you learn what it should feel like. When you have had it modelled, you can start giving yourself the experience. That being said, you need others to give you the experience too.
Gunhild Archer, counselor 