Trust: How Do I Know if it’s Real?

Wanting trust says something about you; real trust says something about the relationship.

There are few things more disorienting in a relationship than wanting to trust someone and discovering that you cannot simply decide to.

We often talk about trust as though it is a quality of the person doing the trusting. I need to trust more. I need to stop thinking about what happened. I said I forgave them. Why can't I let this go?

Sometimes the other person joins us there: You either trust me or you don't.

But this way of thinking about trust asks the wrong question. Trust isn't something we successfully produce inside ourselves. It is something that develops between people, under particular conditions. And understanding that distinction can change the way we think about both ourselves and our relationships.

Relational concepts have properties

Think about a car. Most of us don't need to understand exactly how an engine works in order to drive one. I certainly don't. But I do need to understand enough about a car to participate responsibly in owning one.

There is usually a significant investment on the front end. I think carefully about which car I want to bring into my life. I may research it, drive it, compare it with other options, and look at its history. Once I own it, I have responsibilities. I put gas in it. I change the oil. I replace tires. I pay attention when a warning light comes on.

Over time, the car may even reflect some of the care I have given it. And still, things break. Sometimes the repair is small. Sometimes it's expensive. Sometimes there is an accident and we need someone with more expertise to help us determine whether the damage can be repaired safely. And sometimes a car is totaled. None of this is determined by how badly I want the car to work.

I can love my car. I can remember every road trip we've taken. I can be incredibly inconvenienced by losing it. I can desperately want it back. Those things matter. They just don't tell me whether the car is safe to drive. Trust works something like this as well.

Wanting to trust someone tells us something important about you

When someone says, I just want to trust them again, we don't rush past that sentence. There is something important inside it. Maybe you value closeness. Maybe you deeply value the relationship. Maybe you want security, connection, belonging, or the ability to relax with someone you love. Maybe you want your old life back. Maybe you want to believe that this relationship can hold you safely again.

Those desires deserve care. They tell us something meaningful about your relationship with yourself and what matters to you. But they answer a different question than whether the other person is currently trustworthy. This is one of the most important distinctions we can make:

The desire to trust belongs to you. The conditions required for trust belong to the relationship.

You have influence over the first. You do not have complete control over the second.

Trust requires maintenance

Healthy relationships aren't relationships in which nothing ever breaks. We misunderstand each other. We disappoint each other. We become distracted or respond defensively. We miss opportunities to listen well, and occasionally say exactly the wrong thing.

Trust does not require perfection, but it does require maintenance. That maintenance may look like honesty, reliability, responsiveness, reciprocity, accountability, curiosity, and repair.

In a healthy relationship, both people participate. When something breaks, we don't necessarily throw the relationship away. We investigate:

What happened?

What was damaged?

What does repair require?

Is the person who caused the injury willing to understand it?

Are they participating in repairing it?

Has anything actually changed?

Identifying where the repair needs to happen, and what accountability is required by each partner, is where trust becomes less about a promise and more about a pattern.

Sometimes there has been a collision

There are relationship injuries that are bigger than ordinary maintenance.

o   An affair

o   A significant lie

o   Addiction

o   Financial betrayal

o   Repeated broken promises

o   Abandonment during a vulnerable time

o   An explosive conflict

o   A secret that changes what you understood about your relationship.

After a significant injury, people often feel pressure to answer an enormous question very quickly: Can I trust them again? It may be more useful to make the question smaller: “What evidence of repair exists today?”

If my car has been in a serious accident, wanting it back isn't enough information to determine whether I should drive it. First, we need to perform an assessment. Determine:

o   What was damaged

o   What caused the accident

o   What was repaired

o   Did the repair address the underlying problem or simply made the car look better

o   How it drives

Relationships deserve at least as much curiosity.

Your relationship has a CARFAX

When we buy a used car, we consider its history because history gives us information about what may happen next. Relationships have histories, too. This doesn't mean that people can't grow, change, or be flexible. They absolutely can. But change becomes meaningful when it moves from intention into behavior. For example, an apology is information, a promise is information, insight is information. Over time, these behaviors build a pattern.

If someone repeatedly promises to change and repeatedly returns to the same behavior, remembering that pattern isn't bitterness or unforgiveness, or even evidence that you are incapable of trusting.

Patterns are data.

Sometimes people believe that loving someone requires them to continually reset the relationship's history to zero. It doesn't. Forgiveness does not require amnesia and compassion does not require us to stop noticing. Understanding why someone behaves as they do does not make the impact of their behavior disappear. In fact, someone's painful history may help us understand them and still not make every behavior safe for us.

“But I want it to be different.”

This may be the hardest part. Sometimes we understand perfectly well how something works and still desperately wish it worked differently:

I would love for my car to run on water. It would be cheaper and more convenient. I could simply stand in my driveway with a garden hose and solve an enormous number of problems.

That isn't how my car works, but it doesn’t make my desire ridiculous. It just doesn't change the requirements of the machine. Relationships can contain this same grief:

o   I wish loving each other were enough to create trust.

o   I wish forgiveness automatically restored safety.

o   I wish understanding someone's trauma meant their behavior couldn't hurt me.

o   I wish explaining myself one more time could make them understand.

o   I wish wanting someone to change helped them change.

Sometimes growth means becoming able to hold two things at once:

I deeply wish this were different.

and

This is what is true right now.

We don't have to shame ourselves out of the wish in order to respect reality.

Trust is not a virtue you owe someone

This is important to notice after a relationship injury.

Trust is sometimes treated as evidence of goodness: the loving spouse trusts; the forgiving person trusts; the emotionally healthy person stops checking; the compassionate person gives another chance. But trust is not a moral reward we give another person for apologizing. And withholding trust after it has been damaged is not automatically punishment.

Trust is better understood as a reasonable response to accumulated evidence of safety and reliability. This means rebuilding trust usually requires more than reassurance from the injured person. It requires new experiences. The person who caused the injury may need to tolerate a period in which their partner loves them but does not yet trust them.

Reliable behavior is necessary in order to believe and predict behavior. These actions can help:

o   Answer uncomfortable questions

o   Participate in repair

o   Accept appropriate boundaries

o   Understand that their internal certainty—I would never do that again—is not yet shared evidence

This can be uncomfortable, but discomfort is not the same thing as unfairness.

You don't have to decide everything today

Understanding how trust works does not tell you what you have to do with your relationship. You may stay, you may leave, you may forgive, or you may need more information. You may discover that the relationship is repairable but that trust will return much more slowly than you expected. You may also discover that you love someone whom you can no longer safely trust with a particular role in your life.

These are deeply personal decisions. You may consider therapy in order to help assess, guide repair, build communication, and build a roadmap toward healing. Therapy should be used as scaffolding for your unique relationship, not as a judge and jury for your future. Instead, good therapy can help separate questions that pain tends to collapse together:

o   What do I want?

o   What am I afraid of?

o   What has actually happened?

o   What repair has occurred?

o   What pattern am I seeing?

o   What would I need in order to feel safe?

o   Does the relationship that exists (not simply the relationship I hope for) have the capacity to provide it?

There is tenderness in learning to ask these questions without immediately forcing yourself toward an answer. Because sometimes the most compassionate thing we can do is allow ourselves to want something very badly while becoming increasingly willing to see it clearly.

You retain authority over your decisions. You do not have to reorganize reality in order to justify them.

And perhaps that is one of the foundations of trust itself:

Before deciding whether another person can be trusted with an important part of your life, you begin learning that you can be trusted to notice what is true and care thoughtfully for the person experiencing it: you.