Trust. What is trust? How does the word get used and what does it mean?
Trust gets held up as a virtue in our culture. Being trusting is portrayed as pure and beautiful, something to aspire to. It is seen as the opposite of unattractive qualities, like being guarded, suspicious and defensive.
Trusting that something will happen is somehow thought to cause it. Trust has even become a requisite ingredient for success in some schools of thought.
But how can a state of trust cause anything to happen? Trust has no action in it. And therefore, a side effect of idealizing trust is an underlying sense of anxiety and a tendency to be passive. It is hard to convince yourself that trust is the cause of anything, because it has no personal power in it.
Trust is a belief in something that there is no evidence for. Trust implies that the world will bend to your wishes, without you doing anything about it.
When it comes to dealing with other people, trust is a set up for feeling betrayed. This is because trust becomes expectations that don’t match how somebody has been showing up. It is believing that somebody will behave more desirably in the future. It is believing that somebody will behave differently than you have any reason to think they would.
Instead of aiming for trust, intend for your mind to become more and more accurate in how it forms expectations. You can expect others will continue to show up as they have been. When they don’t, your expectations adjust.
Over time, your expectations will become more accurate. If they don’t, you’re not updating based on the reality of the situation. The solution isn’t to add more wishful thinking in the form of trust. The solution is to look more clearly at what has been going on. This requires an openness to uncertainty, yet is based on the accumulated knowledge of what came before.
Instead of trust, look to reduce suspiciousness and fearfulness. Just like trust doesn’t cause desirable results, suspicion and fear tend not to prevent undesirable results. Clarity does. Go for clarity, not trust.
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