Trust.
I was thinking about trust, and naturally the first thing to pop into my mind was “Habanera” from Bizet’s Carmen.
In particular, I was suddenly thinking of the lines translated as, “Love is a rebellious bird and it is quite in vain that one calls it, if it suits it to refuse; Nothing to be done, threat or plea,” which it occurred to me could also be about trust.
Trust is elusive, like love, but once gone, it may be even harder to reignite. One of the most common things that people come to the Ombuds Office about, after poor or absent communication, is the collapse of trust. We all know that trust usually takes a long time to build, and only one wrong sentence–sometimes just a look–to ruin.
When people talk about how they can restore broken trust, there are no easy answers. The honest truth is that there are no shortcuts to rebuilding trust, but only a long, painstaking process of showing up every day and keeping small promises until, at last, there is the chance to keep a big one. Quite easy to do on paper, but much harder when it’s your feelings and future on the line.
And yet the fact that trust is so tough to build and so easy to shatter isn’t the tragic thing about it–at least not the way that I think about it. The worst thing about trust is that it is so easy to do, which can open up some doors for us but also get us into deep, deep trouble.
Scammers prey on the susceptible, those who find it easy to trust. Someone emails you and says that you are the beneficiary of a massive inheritance, that they need someone of your good name to kindly sign some papers for a multimillion dollar import-export deal (those advance fees are chump change compared with the windfall that is just around the corner–after you pay another advance fee),to give you their late husband’s Yamaha baby grand piano. Someone approaches you to say that they can tell that you are someone who works hard and are just waiting for your big break, and they can teach you the ins and outs of how to make a crypto fortune–if you give them a few thousand to “invest.” Seeing it on the screen like that should make all of these scenarios sound ludicrous, but in the moment, people fall for them. Sure, maybe sometimes its because they’ve gotten greedy (who wouldn’t want a few million dropped in their lap?), but fundamentally, people get scammed because they trust when they shouldn’t.
The obvious scams, where someone loses money or has their identity compromised, are the most blatant examples of trusting when, in retrospect, we might have known better. There are more subtle examples, however, of when too much trust has led to sorrow. Working as I do at a university, I hear almost daily about people disappointed that they trusted their supervisor, their peer, their employee. Someone could write a dissertation–or maybe a Broadway musical–about how dramatically misplaced trust evaporates for undergraduates working on a group project (I have seen too many cases over the tail end of this semester). The losses aren’t as quantifiable as an empty bank account or ruined credit report, but they are just as real, usually coming down to the collapse of hope.
The easy answer then, is to simply not trust anyone, to assume that everyone you see is trying to defraud, abuse, or malign you. That might guard against misplaced trust, but it seems like no way to live a happy life.
Now is the time when I use a Brazilian jiu jitsu analogy to make a point that might be made by an analogy more readily accessible to a broad audience, but hey, it’s my writing so I get to deploy the analogies that click for me. And I will be frustratingly vague at first, but trust me (see what I did there?), I have a point.
In both BJJ and interpersonal communications, there are (almost) no absolutes.* In interpersonal communication, for example, you can’t say, to flawlessly build rapport every time, ask a question, listen thoughtfully, then reflect it back to your partner. Yes, it is a good technique, and yes, it works, but like everything else it is situational. Probably 99 percent of the time, asking questions and listening actively is appropriate for an ombuds, who is there to listen to people and help them sort through options; generally speaking, if you are talking, your visitors aren’t discussing their options. But there are many times when, to build rapport, you will have to say something just to create some shared ground with the person you’re speaking with. Listening is great, but never talking is no way to build a friendship–at least one that matters.
The BJJ analogy is that when someone is attempting to hold mount, the advice isn’t to grip as hard as they can; this is easier to demonstrate on the mat, but the tighter one grips the person they are mounting, the easier they are to sweep, since they move with the person on the bottom. But being completely loose doesn’t work either, because the person on the bottom will be able to worm their way out. So the best way to maintain mount is to be flexible–loose when the person on the bottom is trying to throw you, and tight when they are trying to slip away.
Very zen, I can imagine, but also true.
Trust is similar in that there is no algorithm to follow: if someone says X, extend them Y quantity of trust, but if they say A, subtract B quantity of trust. There is only a feeling, a hunch. With practice, just like trying to hold mount on someone determined to escape it, you will learn by feeling when you are being too trusting, and when you are being too untrusting. You can then adjust accordingly
One key is rethinking what we mean by trust. Most people, I suspect, use the word to mean “I trust that this person will act in my best interest.” That is a pretty high bar to set, since many people I know don’t even act in their own self-interest. But what if trust means to trust that people will behave in predictable ways? We are good at seeing patterns, so that might not be as hard, or as potentially heartbreaking.
So what if we stop using trust to invoke a friendly world, and start using it to imagine a predictable world? You may find that there are many things that you can trust to happen, or not to happen. When this kind of trust is broken, you have less a betrayal than a chance to refine your predictive abilities.
Sort of like Bizet says in Carmen, the rebellious bird doesn’t come to those who calls it, but only those who don’t. And if the bird does take an interest–watch out. Maybe the key is to be open to trust but be very wary when trust feels so easy, so right, so too-good-to-be true.
So until next time, expect the unexpected, stay informed, and I’ll stay informal.
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* I stuck “almost” in there because saying there are no absolutes…would be an absolute.