What is trust?????

bow pose
watercolor on watercolor paper
8/2013

What is Trust?????

Trust is both an emotional and logical act. Emotionally, it is where you expose your vulnerabilities to people, but believing they will not take advantage of your openness. Logically, it is where you have assessed the probabilities of gain and loss, calculating expected utility based on hard performance data, and concluded that the person in question will behave in a predictable manner. In practice, trust is a bit of both. I trust you because I have experienced your trustworthiness and because I have faith in human nature.

We feel trust. Emotions associated with trust include companionship, friendship, love, agreement, relaxation, comfort.

                                            From changingminds.org

Who can you trust? Why do we have issues with trust?

What comfort can we give each other?

Trust means knowing someone has your back.  That unconditionally another person is going to take care of you (emotional, spiritual, physically, financially supportive (if necessary), your needs for building confidence and self-esteem.

It means you know someone is not going to hurt you, intentionally in any way possible.

All too often people who we are closest to hurt us the most, because we don’t expect it or see it coming. 

I think we all start out trusting.  First with our parents who take care of our needs for food, shelter and nurturing.  We are dependent on that care for our sustenance.  Lucky are those whose parents never violate that trust physically or emotionally or otherwise. They are on the road to developing trusting relationships with all others that cross their path.

For some of us adults, we have to learn who to trust and who not to trust.

We have to be aware. 

Trusting someone means believing someone will keep their word, follow through with what they say they will do.

It means knowing that one can share one’s most painful experiences, be witnessed and not judged for lack of making a bad decision.

We all at some point in our lives make a decision we realize we shouldn’t have made.  Sometimes things turn out better than expected, sometimes there is a lot of pain and hurt.

People don’t always do the right thing, tempted by what is in front of them.

Trust is something that we must develop inside ourselves, trust our intuition, trust our gut feelings about people, situations and what is happening around us.

We must trust ourselves to know what is good for us, when to walk away, when to stand up, when to love, when something is or isn’t right for us.

Trust is one of the hardest concepts to deal with.

I am in an always state of learning with regards to this concept.  Who do I give my trust to? I have experienced a lot of mis-trust with men in my life.  Truth is something that builds over time. This may a life long lesson for me.

What I know for certain is I can trust myself to think through things before I make a final decision.  I trust myself to know what is good for me and what isn’t.