Trust Is Needed

Trust Is Needed

John Paul Derryberry

I remember a rather lengthy lecture from my father about how relationships are damaged when trust is no longer present. I also remember the look on his face when I broke this trust a couple of times with some youthful indiscretions.  It’s often a scar on a relationship, yes, the wound could heal, but something is forever different. A scar is a wound before it heals; a wound comes with many variables. They need care, treatment, and time to change, or it will grow into an infection. A scar is a sign that we have naively aggravated a wound correctly.  I have a very faded scar on my wrist from a bike accident when I was 11. Totally wiped out going down a hill at a campground I was staying at with a childhood friend. 30 years later, still there. A faint remainder can lead to a bad result.

I think this is part of life we are struggling with deeply within our culture. So much of what we do now is public knowledge through social media. Declaring our love for another person, a boss, a friend, a candidate, or a movement is now such a public process that we no longer look for evidence of whether we should trust this person. We go even one step further, we look for all sorts of excuses, evidence, and reasons not experience the wound. The public nature of everything has us protecting our ego instead of searching for who we could be or what could be. To act as if our first decision to trust was the correct one. Even though we all know that trust is built over time through many different acts in a relationship. No wounds, no reason for growth and change. No need to examine life; we can cultivate scenarios where we are always the trusted source.

It’s draining so much of what relationships are great, so much of what makes culture interesting. Immersing yourself in conversations with others, people who agree with and disagree with, and come out with knowledge. Trusting the process, examining new evidence, changing course, and allowing wounds to occur. Tending to those wounds in a way that they heal to become a reminder of the twists and turns life can take. My dad often talked eloquently about the nature of trust between people: how, in one instant, it can feel so strong, but in another, so fragile and easily broken. What I didn’t understand as a young teen, but do now, is that this is the way it is supposed to be. As life unfolds, it will give you evidence to continue trusting the process, the person, or the situation, or it will show you it’s time to tend to a wound.

We are taking away the most important part of life because we can’t stand the public nature of the wound. Too many people will say you have changed, that you didn’t care to begin with, that you never believed. It’s what happens when loyalty is placed above trust as an important trait. Loyalty asks you to follow no matter what. Trust asks you to follow if the path ahead is clear. It’s an important distinction. It’s simultaneously saying, maybe I should trust the way your partner wants to do things, but also saying I need evidence that I should trust. It’s hard; it can open wounds we didn’t know we had, push us to places we didn’t know, and, yes, leave you feeling stupid, frail, distraught because you trusted the wrong person.

We can’t avoid that in life; it's often the only way to find the right people and heal the wound of mistrust by changing course, people, and places. We just have to start trusting ourselves a little more. We can handle the public pushback; it will heal and leave a scar, but it will fade over time to just a reminder of the time we could have done things better. And no human on this planet, or anyone who has ever lived, has not had a couple of moments throughout their life they wish they had done better.