I’ve been thinking through trust a lot lately. Stephen Covey says it is essential to productive life in every way; having it speeds up everything, and not having it slows everything down. I think this is essentially true. But then we talk about how to build trust, and things can get very personal. Can we make someone trust us? Is there even anything we can do to help make it happen?

Covey says building trust is essentially a two step process:

1. Give your word
2. Keep it

This actually makes a lot of sense, and it is a path that I try and recommend. But in two different relationships, I have hit a bit of snag. If there are trust (or other) issues that result in serious misunderstanding, giving and keeping your word isn’t enough.

That is, I have found myself saying explicitly “I’m going to do this”, then doing it, then being criticized for not keeping my word. The problem comes, I think, when “I’m going to do this” doesn’t get interpreted the same for each person involved. Then, when I do it, it looks like keeping my word to me, but not to the other person —they were expecting me to do something else (on the basis of how they understood my word), so my actual action looks like doing something other than what I said I would do.

As a result, I give my word, then keep it, but trust is eroded rather than built. What is the solution? I can think of two, one easy and bad, the other better but much harder, if at all possible.

The easier path would be to short circuit the communication issue. Don’t bother with giving your word, and just do whatever the other person wants. Then, when they see you have done it, they will feel they can trust you. Even though it isn’t because you kept your word, but because you capitulated to their desire. This is problematic for me because it should work (theoretically), but for the wrong reasons. I don’t want to be known as a man of my word because I’m a pushover. I don’t want people to trust me because I’m weak, and won’t stand up to them.

The harder path is to address the communication issue, so you each see keeping your word in the same way. Make step 1 not just ‘give your word’, but something like “give your word, and affirm you have consensus around its meaning and implications”. If that sounds laborious, I agree. If the communication issues are not trust related, this is probably possible, and I would recommend it. But if the communication issue has at its root the trust issue itself, then you will need to affirm the consensus reached, since it is itself subject to the doubts and misgivings that come with distrust. So you’ll give your word, confirm that you understood it the same together, then affirm that you understood your understanding the same together, etc. This process seems more necessary to me, than productive.

So something that occurred to me through all these ramblings (which I guess may have been obvious to everyone else) is that trust is an act. Yes, we have trust between us, or not, and this is what Covey talks about mostly. But trust exists between us because I trust you, and you trust me. This is important, I think, because in the above two solutions, there is a disjunct between trustworthiness and actual trust. I see you as untrustworthy not because you are, but because that’s the way I see you, for whatever reason. But because I see you that way, I don’t trust you, and therefore trust isn’t there between us, and everything goes slowly —or worse.

Alternatively, I can trust you because I see you as trustworthy, even when you aren’t. When the shortcut above is used, one is actually trusting in the others’ weakness, not their character. But it is nonetheless possible to trust, and for things to go better/faster (at least until the misunderstanding is revealed).

I can also choose to trust you, even though you are untrustworthy. This is perhaps most easily seen in the case of an abuse victim returning to his abuser. It may fly in the face of all reason, but it is nonetheless possible to put yourself in the hands of someone who you have every reason to expect will hurt you.

So it seems that someone being trustworthy is independent of our capacity to trust them.

I imagine many people would object to the above statement, perhaps on the grounds of trusting the untrustworthy in the case of abuse. I’m not saying that an abuse victim should put himself in the hands of his abuser, not at all. But there may be times where is it good, right , or necessary to trust someone despite their apparent trustworthiness.

The above statement, then may provide a third way, to get around the communication problem where one is unsatisfied with each of the easy/bad and good/hard paths. That is, one may say

I choose to trust you, even though you seem untrustworthy to me.

and the communication problem is set aside. Again, doing this in the face of obvious abuse is unwise. If you think someone is abusing you, I encourage you to decide the truth (with whatever help you need), and resolve that abuse appropriately. But in cases where there is doubt, I don’t have to resolve the are you trustworthy? question before deciding to trust you. Because of this, we don’t have to wait for certainty before getting the relationship and productivity benefits of trust.

This answer is particularly interesting to me because this statement makes trust an act of faith, in two different ways.

First, in that faith is the relational stuff that binds people together (“assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” Heb 11:1 ESV). That is, choosing to trust is choosing to be a faithful friend, even when the friend is not particularly faithful himself. So we can choose to build relationship, rather than wait for it to happen.

Secondly, for many of us the above statement is hard (or even impossible) without some kind of backstop. What happens if the person turns out to be my abuser after all? But as Christians, we have the ultimate backstop to all pain and suffering in God. So we can look at each other and decide to trust, not because we are either trustworthy (let’s not kid ourselves), but because I will be OK if we trust someone, and get hurt as a result. So the statement above might look something more like

I choose to trust you, not because you are trustworthy, but because God will help me when you hurt me.

And as a result, this act of trust not only gives relational benefits between the untrustworthy people involved, but it also helps us orient our trust ultimately toward the only one who is truly trustworthy.