Trust: It's a really big concept
PS: Emily is in Austin, TX tomorrow
Hey, Austin! Before we get to Robyn’s post, Emily will be in town tomorrow for UNHUSHED’s 7th anniversary bash! Emily and Karen Rayne will be on stage answering your sex questions live and in person. Tickets benefit UNHUSHED and local bookseller Reverie Books. (You can even bring your books to be signed.)
It’s gonna be really fun. There will be burlesque. They’re not messing around.
And on to the topic of trust, here’s Robyn:
I was writing about trust for another project and it got me thinking about how broad the concept of trust is. When searching the literature you have to be specific about what kind of trust framework you’re looking for because there are theories and models and frameworks for building and maintaining trust in almost every type of relationship we have.
You can read about building trust between supervisor and supervisees, friends, romantic partners, institutions, patients. And something that’s important to note about these different relationships is that we have different expectations for what trust means in each of these different dynamics. You’re trust expectations for your therapist around confidentiality and oaths of care likely isn’t replicated in your friendships, at least not in the same way or to the same extent.
Something that’s important to note about these different relationships is that we have different expectations for what trust means in each of these different dynamics.
When I was a victim advocate, one of the types of trust I often worked with people on was around institutional trust and feelings of institutional betrayal. Institutional betrayal is the failure of an institution to live up to its implicit or explicit agreement with a member of their campus to provide safety and the services to ensure that safety, while they’re on campus and in their learning environment. When the institution fails to meet their side of the agreement, or actively works against the person’s best interests, it can feel like a betrayal. Being an advocate means that I’m working with people who have experienced harm (often including breaches of trust) and are trying to navigate their lives moving forward. The types of experiences that the folks I was working with were rooted in a breach of trust that they often had no desire to repair.
Their experiences are definitely on one end of the spectrum when it comes to trust and is often part of the narratives we hear most often about breaches of trust. The other end of that spectrum is what Emily talks about in chapter 6 of Come Together. In the section on trust, she provides three ways that trust is built between romantic partners and by extension how it can be impacted, intentionally or otherwise. She uses Sue Johnson’s model of being emotionally available, responsive, and engaged and does a fantastic job of illustrating how that can look when it works and when it doesn’t. I’m not going to reiterate what she wrote because that would be redundant (the book is so good, I recommend reading it!) but it’s also not totally what I want to talk about when it comes to trust.
Instead, I want to talk about two things; narratives and the expectation of perfection.
In the section on trust, Emily uses the example of Susan and Jeff (two people in a hetero-type relationship) who have stopped responding to each other’s emotional bids. Susan asks Jeff to clean the kitchen in the way that she has learned gets Jeff’s attention best; getting loud and big. Later, Jeff requests sex and gets ignored until Susan eventually gives in to get him to stop asking. Emily lays out how this break in emotional responsiveness harmed their trust and how they fixed it (spoiler: therapy!), but what I want to focus on is what is going on behind those bids, namely storytelling.
Something we often forget about trust is that it is primarily interpersonal, something that is built and maintained between people or the people that make up institutions or entities. A single person can’t determine what makes them trustworthy to another person for a few reasons. For example, trust is context-based, malleable, and sometimes hierarchical and there’s no way to keep track of all of that for yourself and another person with equal accuracy; only other people can determine if you’re trustworthy to them regardless of your efforts or intentions (or skills or expertise); trust is as much about how you act when you build it as when you need to repair it and that is an interpersonal dynamic to navigate.
There’s more, but those are some examples of why you can’t sit around alone and determine how to be a trustworthy friend or partner. It is an exhausting, effortful process to build and maintain trust with people and it inherently (and ironically) requires trust to navigate. It’s up to everyone involved to determine whether the relationship is worth the cost of repairing, rebuilding, and maintaining that trust.
What makes navigating trust building and repair complicated is what narratives are going through everyone’s heads. Going back to Susan asking Jeff to clean the kitchen– As Emily rightfully points out, Susan and Jeff’s feelings about the request aren’t about the kitchen. Instead, what narratives are in Susan’s head prior to, during, and after the request that might be impacting the way she asks and responds? Maybe she’s already anticipating that Jeff is going to ignore her or refuse to do it because he’s done that before. Maybe she’s hoping he’ll do it this time because having a clean kitchen is step one in a multi-step plan to get things done throughout her day. Maybe she’s worried she’s asking too much of him and then arguing with herself that she’s allowed to ask her husband to share the workload.
All of that could be going through Susan’s head behind the, “Hey Jeff, can you clean the kitchen for me please?” that actually gets communicated. When Jeff says no, she still has all those narratives, but now she has the narratives about his refusal as well. Maybe it’s “he doesn’t care about my day” or “I knew he wouldn’t, why do I bother asking?” And all these narratives contribute to Susan’s continued feelings of her trust being broken by Jeff, whether or not those narratives are accurate.
Meanwhile, Jeff has his own narratives about Susan’s request. Maybe he’s thinking “but everything in the kitchen is her mess, I haven’t been in there all day” or “she didn’t notice that I cleaned the bathroom and now she wants me to do more cleaning?” or “she didn’t even say hi to me today. She’s always asking me to do things instead of talking to me like a person.” But neither of them are talking about these narratives out loud. Instead, they’re focusing on the request and the interaction around the request. That’s what Emily means when she says it’s not about the kitchen. Part of Susan and Jeff’s work repairing and rebuilding trust in their relationship would be unpacking these narratives and recognizing where they come from and how they impact their behavior towards each other.
These narratives are insidious because they can often be the set up for miscommunications, especially during conflict or ongoing harms in trust. They’re also insidious because they can feel true regardless of whether or not they are true. No matter how well you know a person, how long you’ve known them, or how deeply you care for them, you will never know every single thought and reason behind their behaviors or actions unless you ask them to tell you. Otherwise, you’re only responding to the story you told yourself about the situation.
You see this a lot when people try to go over the same event with each other and they seem like they’re talking about two entirely different situations. Relitigating a conflict isn’t always helpful because the conflict isn’t usually about the inciting incident, it’s often about all the little (or big) breaches of trust and all the stories we’ve told ourselves about the other person(s) involved. If the details of the conflict matter, it can be helpful to get the narrative discrepancies out of the way first so you’re at least able to talk about the same thing without all the other interpretations you have about the situation getting in the way. If the details don’t actually matter in the long run, then the work is around unpacking where those narratives came from and healing those parts either in yourself or in your relationship.
So the next time you catch yourself coming up with stories about why the other person is acting the way they are, try interrupting that train of thought with something like, “we’re supposed to be on the same team. What am I missing?” It really helps to both remind you that you’re in relationship with another person and that you don’t know everything about the situation.
A side note: In these examples, I’ve been talking about relationships that aren’t functioning in a healthy way, but are not abusive. Relationship breakdowns that happen between people who have equal power in the relationship (meaning someone isn’t exerting power over another person for the purpose of controlling them) are generally acting in good faith even if they’re not acting their best in the relationship. That is why there is space to repair and rebuild trust. These internal narratives we all have about situations that result in miscommunication are different from the emotional and mental abuse tactic of gaslighting. Gaslighting is the deliberate and malicious attempt to undermine a person’s belief in their own experiences, instincts, and memories of a situation with the goal of gaining or maintaining power and control over them. The difference is that when we are caught up in our own narrative interpretations of a situation, it’s about our own feelings, hurts, and resentments about the other person, we aren’t trying to control them with our narrative. We’re trying to interpret their behavior through the lens of our own storytelling. We all do this to varying degrees about everything because we are interpreting and meaning making creatures.
The last thing I want to talk about when it comes to trust is the expectation of perfection. Trusting someone and being trustworthy is vulnerable and carries a lot of responsibility with it. Those of us who have had our trust broken know the impact it can have on our well being and ability to trust in the future. It’s because we know the potential stakes a breach of trust can have on a person that we place so much weight on the concept. But the fact of the matter is that we will all fuck up and break someone’s trust. It might be in big ways or small ways, it might be unintentional or intentional because we think it’s justified, but it will definitely happen at some point. I know it will happen because we are imperfect creatures with very imperfect communication methods and trust is built and maintained through communication. If we fuck up our communication we will likely fuck up the trust we worked hard to build.
I say this not as an excuse or to give permission to act in inconsiderate ways, but because I want to take some of the pressure off of you to act perfectly all the time. Most of us like to think we’re good people who don’t cause harm in the world, but that’s just not the case. All of us, myself included, have caused harm, broken someone’s trust, failed to repair the trust or harm, or just didn’t notice it happened in the first place. Maybe the harm was compounded by defensiveness caused by fear (or FEAR or PANIC/GRIEF, in the parlance of Emily’s Emotional Floorplans).
I say this because I want to encourage you to think back on those moments and recognize your own imperfection with compassion and care. It sucks to know we hurt someone and we may or may not have been able to make amends. It’s okay to feel whatever you do about those situations, but please allow some compassion to ease its way in as well. Maybe you’ll do better in the future or maybe you already have. Maybe you’ve learned and grown from that experience to prevent future harm. Maybe you’re still working on it. Just give yourself (and maybe others) a little space to be imperfect.
Trust is a very big concept and it can sometimes feel overwhelming to keep track of all the things you need to do to maintain someone’s trust. That’s valid, especially if you’re working through your own hurt feelings at the same time. But it’s okay to not have all the answers about what you need or about what others need. You really only need to remember that it’s an act of trust to ask, instead of assuming or anticipating, and it’s an act of being trustworthy to listen.
-Robyn
Questions or comments? Please email my very tiny team at unrulywellness@gmail.com
Feel free to say hello on 📷 Instagram and 🤖 Facebook – I don't always reply but I read everything.
Signed copies of Come As You Are and Come Together can be obtained from my amazing local bookseller, Book Moon Books.
Stay safe and see you next time.
