The Pillars of Trust & Trustworthiness
In today's episode, we're talking all about trust & trustworthiness. Trust is something that many people struggle with, oftentimes as a direct result of past experiences where trust has been breached. And as we'll discuss in today's conversation, trust is about so much more than honesty. My hope is that you'll walk away from today's episode with greater clarity about why you might struggle with trust, and the steps you can take to remediate this in your relationships.
We’ll cover:
The interplay between trust and trustworthiness
The five pillars of trust
How self-trust and relational trust are connected
Building trust through small acts over time
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:04]:
Welcome back to another episode of On Attachment. In today's episode, I'm going to be talking all about the pillars of trust and trustworthiness. So this is something that I started reflecting on and formulating in preparation for my master class on building Trust, which I ran a couple of weeks ago. And it's really stuck with me. And I think it's such an important conversation to be had because if you're like most people, you probably think of trust as comprising honesty and openness.
[00:01:03]:
And while honesty is definitely a component of trust and a really important ingredient in being able to trust someone, it's not the be all and end all. It's not the whole picture. And I think that understanding that trust is more layered than that, that there's more depth to it and more breadth to what it takes to really trust someone and what it takes for someone to demonstrate their trustworthiness. That really allows us to have a fuller picture of where and why we might struggle to trust and by extension, what we might do to start building more trust in our relationship. So I'm going to be sharing with you five pillars of trustworthiness, which is not an exhaustive list and it's not some sort of doctrine that you're going to find in a textbook. This is just something that I came up with when I was preparing for this master class that I ran. But I am hoping that it is helpful for you in reframing and broadening the way that you think about trust. The other thing I want to say in framing the discussion is that self trust and relational trust are much more parallel than we think.
[00:02:07]:
I think that a lot of people treat self trust as something mysterious and we throw our hands up and go, oh, I just have such bad self trust. I'm so indecisive. I don't really trust in myself to make a good decision. I always ask other people for their opinions and I to and fro on it incessantly. I always doubt myself. And while I understand that that can be a really overwhelming experience, I think we underestimate how many of the principles that apply in the realm of relational trust are very much influential and formative in whether and to what extent we trust ourselves. So I'll touch a little bit on that today. But I do want to say if this is a topic that you're interested in and you enjoy today's discussion, please do go and cheque out the Building Trust Masterclass.
[00:02:57]:
It's two and a half hours or thereabouts of a really deep dive on this topic on self trust and relational trust and rebuilding trust after there's been a breach of trust. So it's really in depth and has an accompanying workbook as well. So I will do my best to give you a taster of these pillars of trustworthiness in today's episode. But if you are keen to go deeper, definitely a good idea to cheque out the Masterclass, which will be linked in the show notes. Okay, so let's dive into this conversation around trust and trustworthiness. So I want to start by saying, you might have noticed I keep saying trust and trustworthiness because, again, I think oftentimes we can blame ourselves if we have so called trust issues. And we go, oh, I just need to get better at trusting. I just need to be more trusting.
[00:03:47]:
And I think it's important to recognise that often our trust issues, if we're going to call them that, are there for a reason. And it might not be a reason that originates in your current relationships, where it might be a legacy wound from a previous relationship, but it's rare that it just comes out of nowhere. So I think we really have to approach ourselves with a level of self compassion and recognise that most of the time our fears make sense and they come from somewhere. So in the past, you might have been lied to or betrayed or disappointed or let down blindsided by something. There might have been secrets kept that you were unaware of. And so you've developed certain fears around trusting in response to something that's happened to you or something that you've seen, but there's something within you that's going it is not safe to fully trust this person, to rely on them, to count on them, to take their word at face value. And so I've got to add these additional layers of protection in order to keep myself safe. And that might look like either withholding parts of yourself not being fully vulnerable, not opening yourself to someone, or it might look like probing someone or not trusting what they say.
[00:04:59]:
It might look like reading their messages or crossing boundaries around privacy because you struggle to just trust that things could be as they seem. So there's lots of tentacles to this whole trust piece. But I did just want to say that oftentimes our trust wounds make sense, and so we do want to approach ourselves with a level of compassion. The other piece is this distinction between trust and trustworthiness. It really is a dialogue, right? It's like call and response. So I trust to the extent that you demonstrate yourself to be trustworthy, and that's likely to happen in increments, or at least ideally it would. So I might trust you with this piece of myself and then you show up in a way that feels really safe and trustworthy, and then I give you a little more, and then you stay steady and you are showing me that you are worthy of trust. I e trustworthy and so as we proceed in a moment to talk about these pillars of trust and trustworthiness, I want you to think about it being a two way street.
[00:06:00]:
It's not just your responsibility to blindly trust. It is a dialogue. It is back and forth between people in a relationship, not just a romantic relationship, to be clear, but this interplay, this dialogue between trust and trustworthiness, and that we really need both of those to dance together in a way that feels really safe in order for that to build over time. So let's talk about these pillars of trustworthiness. The first one is perhaps the most obvious, as I alluded to at the beginning of this episode, that honesty, right? Honesty is a really important part of trust. So honesty to me is, can I trust your word? Is your word true? Is it reliable? Are you sharing the whole truth? Are you withholding are you concealing? Are you not being transparent with me around not only the facts of a situation, but maybe how you're feeling and anything like that? So can I trust that what you say is the truth? And I don't really need to probe or interrogate or push beyond that because you have shown me that your word is valuable and honest and reliable. So honesty, as I said, is what we mostly think about when we think of trust. And so if someone has lied to us, we might not trust them.
[00:07:19]:
And that is perfectly understandable, but it is just the tip of the iceberg, I think, when it comes to trust. And we do want to dig a little deeper to look at some of these less obvious expressions of trust and trustworthiness. So the next one is reliability. So in this context, I'm thinking of reliability as, can I count on you? Will you be there when I need you? Do I really feel like you have my back? It doesn't mean that you're perfect. It doesn't mean that you are waiting at my beck and call all the time. But can I trust that if I were ever in a moment of need, that you would show up for me in a way that really contributed to my feeling of safety? Again, this could be in a friendship. Hopefully you've got at least a couple of friends that you know you could always call and count on to be there for you. And I think that level of reliability, no matter what else is going on, is so conducive to deep trust in any relationship.
[00:08:15]:
Obviously the converse of that is unreliability flakiness maybe not prioritising the relationship enough such that you don't feel important to this person in a way that they really are there for you and care about you. Reliably okay, the third pillar of trustworthiness is integrity. So are your values and your actions in alignment? Is there this sense of wholeness? And can I really feel that you know who you are? You know what you stand for and you are committed to broadly acting in accordance with your values. So I think when there are people who you can feel into the fact that they don't really know who they are and they're really insecure and they flip flop all over the place and they go with the flow and they try and fit in. And there's no real internal angst. There's no sense of them knowing who they are and what they value in anything other than a really shallow sense. It is very hard to trust that person because you just don't know what it is you are connecting with. You don't know who the person is behind the mask.
[00:09:19]:
And so I think that having this really embodied sense of integrity and again, I think of that as alignment and knowing what your values are and acting from a place of integrity, doing what you think is right rather than what is easy or comfortable, that really helps to build trust. And again, I think this is one where it's particularly important to highlight the parallels between relational trust and self trust. Because as I've spoken to before on the show and I teach in all of my courses, a lack of self awareness and self knowledge around our values is a surefire way to erode self respect and self trust. Because when we don't know who we are, we don't know what we value, we don't know what we stand for, we don't know what our boundaries are, we don't know what our limits are. We don't know what we're okay with. And we just float around doing whatever other people want us to in an effort to seek approval or be accepted or be chosen. Very, very hard to trust ourselves from that place because there's no direction, right? There's nothing really anchored or grounded about that. And that flaky kind of energy is not very trustworthy.
[00:10:30]:
So again, both in yourself and other people, integrity and alignment is a really, really important pillar of trustworthiness. The next one is responsibility. And in this context I'm meaning responsibility like do you own your mistakes? Do you recognise your contribution to a situation? Do you own your blind spots? And do you seek to repair and make amends, proactively and find ways to make sure that certain things don't happen again or don't continue because you are committed to nurturing the relationship? So I think the absence of responsibility basically looks like avoiding hard conversations, not really owning your part, being very defensive. And I think all of those behaviours really obliterate trust because they say to someone I don't really care about your experience, or I don't have the capacity to care about your experience because I'm too concerned with my own. And while we can all do that at certain times, it's really, really destructive to trust. So I think that having the courage to be self responsible and to be proactive and to own our part to own where we've slipped up. I think this one is really important to call out. We're not talking about perfection, right, in any of this.
[00:11:45]:
We're not saying you need to have a squeaky clean track record where you've never made a mistake and you never do anything wrong and you never fall out of integrity or alignment. It's about repairing and not trying to avoid those conversations, not trying to shirk responsibility, but really owning up and owning something and saying, look, I messed up and I see where I went wrong and here's why it isn't going to happen again, because here's my plan, right? That level of self responsibility and accountability really, really helps to build trust and it also really helps to rebuild trust if there has been some sort of rupture or breach. And the final pillar of trustworthiness that I want to share with you is consistency. So are you doing all of those things consistently over time? So rather than it just being a little spurt of motivation, which I think can often happen if we've had a rupture and then we have this big conversation around it and you might come up with a plan and then things are better for a couple of weeks or even a couple of months. But then they start to slip back into old patterns. And again, we can give ourselves some grace because I think we're all guilty of this, of getting a bit complacent and lazy with the commitments that we make. But it's really important to trust that there is consistency and inconsistency makes it very hard to trust because there's no predictability, there's no safety in inconsistency. So having consistent behaviour over time and a really solid track record is going to be really helpful for building trust and rebuilding trust.
[00:13:21]:
So really making sure that whatever we're doing to build trust in a relationship is comprised of lots of little things compounding over time, because that's really how trust is built. I think we can imagine that trust would be built in big moments, but I don't think that's actually true. I think it's lots of little moments, lots of bids for connection and moments of reaching out where we feel really seen and safe and held by another person, validated by them. And over time we go, wow, I can really count on this person. Like I said at the start, it's that dialogue between trust and trustworthiness that is constantly happening, this interplay of reaching out and having someone reach back and going, ah, yes, I can trust you because I've got all of this evidence in support of that. So making sure that whatever you're doing in any relationship to demonstrate your trustworthiness is something that you are doing consistently over time, because that is really important to our sense of safety and trust. So I hope that has been helpful, as I said, in sort of widening the lens for you in terms of what you think of trust as comprising and the ingredients that go into building trust? Because I think that if we are only thinking about trust in terms of honesty, then we're missing all these other ways that we might be inadvertently unintentionally harming the trust in our relationships, or that someone we're in relationship in is proving themselves to be untrustworthy and we don't know why we can't trust them. So maybe hearing this is validating to you, that it's understandable that you struggle to trust someone if they've been really unreliable and inconsistent, but they insist they've been honest.
[00:15:05]:
We really need more than just one piece of the puzzle in order to build this overall picture of trust. The tapestry of trust is much more intricate than just honesty. So perhaps this has been validating, and you can then take that away and go, oh, okay, I now have a little bit more context for why I'm struggling to trust this person and what feedback I could give them in terms of my needs so that I could cultivate a bit more safety. We could cultivate more trust and repair or plug some of the holes in the ship to the extent that it feels like you're not quite there yet on really trusting someone. So I hope that this has been helpful. As I said, if you want to go deeper on this conversation, definitely check out the building trust masterclass, which is very much a deep dive, but otherwise, I hope that this has been helpful, and I look forward to seeing you again next time. Thanks, guys. Thanks for joining me for this episode of On Attachment.
[00:16:04]:
If you want to go deeper on all things attachment, love and relationships, you can find me on Instagram @stephanie__rigg or at stephanierigg.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, I'd be so grateful if you could leave a review and a five star rating. It really does help so much. Thanks again for being here, and I hope to see you again sooner.