Trust

Trust is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something.

Is it something we grant to someone else? Is it innate? Do we learn who and what we can trust – including ourselves?

I’ve been in deep contemplation about trust over the last week. When I deviate from what I trust to be true and start to overthink, doubt creeps in and that can wreak havoc on a sense of self.

Before and after my parents’ divorce, trust was always at the front of my mind. Could I trust what I was seeing and hearing with my own eyes and ears, even when one or the other adult tried to tell me that I was wrong, or I had imagined what I had seen? Their need to have me doubt myself led to many confrontations and a need to prove that I knew the truth, that I could trust my instincts and my ability to read the room.

Not long after they divorced I read an article about an experiment to bolster trust. It’s a common practice. You stand with someone right behind you. You lean back and fall into that person – either their rigid body or their arms. My mother was less than keen. My sister wary but I was insistent that the three of us needed to do this. It was important for the three of us as a unit to show solidarity and that we could rely on one another in times of difficulty or crisis.

My mother’s trust had been badly broken, and I knew this would be a difficult but important exercise for her to undertake. My sister had issues with our mother that I wasn’t fully apprised of at the time but was aware they existed. I knew I needed to be able to trust both. As this had been my suggestion I went first. I knew my sister would catch me. And she did. Sadly, I was a little less certain of my mother, the one that I should have without a second thought believed would catch me. But she did. I caught each of them and neither wavered in letting go to me. As I expected, my sister hesitated in allowing herself to believe our mother would catch her and mother’s instinct being what it is, she caught her. There was no hesitation with me – my sister almost flipped herself backwards at me. We had always been a tight twosome, a team that united in a shared support system of love and protection. That exercise was the birth of me using the expression “I’ve got you.”

I am once again at a crossroads in my life, needing to put my trust in people I do not know intimately, who are not part of my inner circle. They are professionals, others who are experts in their fields and those with knowledge that I do not have. It’s a point where I need to trust myself – my instincts and to be able to put my faith in those individuals. Not blindly, but with hope and with faith.

You can’t see trust. You can feel it, sense it and believe it, that unseen unknown. I’m carrying it with me these days like a talisman. Trusting others and more importantly, trusting myself.