By Charles Barnard
Of course, love trusts. If you love someone you trust them and they trust you, right? Is it really that easy? Trust is vital to strong, happy, loving relationships. When trust is broken, relationships are broken. When trust is broken, you can have significant scars from that broken trust. One such scar is trusting again. Another scar is loving again.
One of the most important virtues you can instill in your children is the importance of truth and its impact on trust. If people are untruthful, trust is virtually impossible. Emphasizing this over and over and over with your children is crucial. Inevitably though, because they are children, they will test you and they will lie or maybe more likely they won’t be completely honest. They may try to hide a truth from you. Depending on the age of the child and the exact situation showing trust in them in the future should not prove to be that difficult, unless…
Of course, recovering from broken trust is highly dependent on two things: the extent of that trust, and your mindset regarding keeping a record of wrongs. The greater the trust you put in someone the greater the pain when that trust is broken. The greater the pain the more difficult it is to forgive. Even if you do forgive and have let go of the anger, sadness, and hurt from that broken trust, it does not mean you automatically can trust them again.
Trust is more than the emotions attached to it. Trust is a behavior and therefor there is an internal strategy people run to do the behavior. There is the rational thinking about the risk of entrusting something of value – physical, mental (an idea), or emotional – to another person that may be part of the strategy. If a person has broken trust with you, that rational thinking process takes over and how that interplays within your strategy will determine your response.
There are people that do not have a very healthy trust strategy. They may have a very difficult time trusting. These people will often have problems developing intimate relationships or long-term relationships There are also people who trust too easily. These people are susceptible to cons. They are also susceptible, especially children, to becoming victimized by predators. These people can be drawn into relationships that are one-sided and potentially even abusive.
A mindset of love then will be trusting. You need to self-reflect on whether your trust strategy is supportive and healthy or whether you may have a hard time trusting or trust too easily. If you are self-reflecting about a specific relationship that has been damaged by trust you may want to consider some professional help. If you know you have a strategy for trust that does not serve you well you may also want to consider some professional help. What follows are some basic principles and guidelines for dealing with this on your own.
Recognizing that trust is a behavior and a strategy, you can learn to recognize how you go about trusting someone. Part of that would be understanding or determining your convincer strategy. How often do you need to have the person demonstrate trust before you trust them? If it is continuously or daily or something in that order you will have a very difficult time because your behavior will be one of distrust or not willing to fully trust someone. That is difficult on relationships. If it is just once or even just a look they give you, word they say, or something of that sort, that is potentially dangerous because you are likely too easily giving your trust. Trust is a difficult strategy, because you need to find that happy medium.
Once you understand what your strategy is changing it amounts to interrupting the pattern repeatedly and installing or removing steps you run. This is why counseling can be beneficial. Using cognitive behavioral therapy reflective practices can help as you analyze the rational thinking aspect of the strategy to challenge any deletions, distortions, or generalizations you have made in your thinking pattern or strategy. Visualization, rehearsals or role playing and anchoring are other tools that can be used to build trust. These are especially effective during meditative practices. Ultimately, if you have trouble giving trust, you will need to trust to get better at trusting. That often requires you to give trust for little things first and then build to the bigger things so you build a success loop. It is important to know that rehearsing this in your mind repeatedly can have the same impact as doing it in reality, but that still isn’t real and you need to make it real.
There is one other tool that is powerful in this process whether you have troubles trusting or being too trusting. That other tool is time line therapy. With that tool you can find out what beliefs you have and whether you have any stored negative emotions that are contributing to either of those issues. Then using TLT techniques you can remove those obstacles. It is possible that alone will do the trick. Fear is often an emotion that gets in the way of trusting and the lack of fear contributes to being too trusting.
Finally, being trustworthy is also a quality of love. If you are trustworthy, you have integrity. You are a man or woman of your word. You believe sayings such as your word is your bond. You are honorable. It doesn’t mean you do not make mistakes, but someone who is trustworthy and honorable acknowledges those mistakes and takes responsibility for them.
If you look at many polls, a lack of trust is a serious problem in our culture today. There have been numerous polls that show a lack of trust in congress and the media. This goes across party lines so it is not just based on political ideology. It is true that Republicans will tend to trust other Republicans and Democrats will tend to trust other Democrats but even within their own parties, trust appears to be a diminishing virtue. We simply don’t trust each other. One poll by PEW research center found, “About half of Americans (49%) link the decline in interpersonal trust to a belief that people are not as reliable as they used to be.” That is a dangerous statistic and notice the belief behind it. People are not reliable. Being reliable is easy to fix; each individual simply has to become more reliable. Easy right?
I am not advocating any public policy change; I am advocating that all of us learn to love more, which means also learning to trust more. If we have those other qualities of love, trusting just right becomes monumentally easier – which does not mean it is always or will ever be easy, just easier than if we don’t have all those other qualities of love. So, go out and demonstrate your trustworthiness (reliability) on a daily basis and show your love for someone by demonstrating some trust in them.
https://growthmimindsettrainingacademy.com/Success-Institutes-Trust
