How to Trust Again After Being Betrayed (Anxiety Series, Pt. 9)
If all the people who've betrayed you over and over are a source of your anxiety and negative thoughts, this post will show you how to reverse that trend, and become what you actually want in relationships.
A Story About Choosing Trust
Early in the process of creating The Hart Habits, I was going through a real situation. A person from leadership in my life, someone I trusted a lot, was accused of cheating on his wife with a coworker. It happened inside a church setting, and if you've ever been in that kind of setting, you know the gossip flies and the judgments come fast. Everyone had an opinion about what they'd seen, what they thought, whether he was telling the truth.
At the time I was going through my own catharsis, and I kept thinking, I don't want this anymore. One of the principles from the original text I was working from was "love always trusts." I sat with that. In this situation, it meant I chose to trust the individual when he told me it wasn't true. I decided to believe him and move forward as if that was the case, even with a fair amount of evidence stacking up against him.
One consequence: I got pushed out of the gossip circle, which honestly, I was glad about. I thought, okay, good, one excellent side effect of choosing trust.
Then a few months later, the truth came out. He had cheated. The whole thing was true, a sordid affair, all the juicy details. I had to face what my choice actually meant. I'd chosen to trust him, and he'd lied to me.
At the time, it was a low-stakes experiment for me, I wasn't deeply invested either way. I'd decided how I was going to approach it, and I wanted to see what the result would be. And the result was my peace of mind. Through all six months of the gossip, the meetings, the little pieces of "evidence" people kept bringing me, I wasn't concerned with any of it. I told people what I believed, left it there, and walked away from the situation without walking away from the people in it. I stayed connected to everyone involved without getting embroiled in the slander behind the scenes. Good thing too, because here we are years later, and he's still married to his wife. They worked it out.
Choose Trust as Your Default
The solution to having been betrayed over and over, and the way to reverse that pattern and stop letting it feed your anxiety, is to choose trust as your default. Scary, right?
This is the third Hart Habit. The word is Trust. The statement: "I choose to trust as a default because I listen to my inner voice and I know how to see and carry truth."
If you've been following along, you'll notice that declarative statement leans on Habit 1 and Habit 2, Self and Truth. In the last post, I talked about how everyone gets to hold their own truth, even when it conflicts with yours, and how we can still celebrate it. That's the foundation for everything I'm about to say about defaulting to trust.
To be clear, I'm not recommending you run around blindly trusting everyone, throwing caution to the wind, and letting anyone take whatever they want from you. That's not what defaulting to trust means.
Trust and Verify
The first tool: trust and verify. You've probably heard this phrase before. It's okay to trust someone by default, but if their actions, or your belief in them, are going to affect your life, it's also okay to verify what they're telling you. Trusting someone and verifying what they say aren't opposites.
In business, we call this a contract. You might trust a good friend completely on a deal you're doing together, but that doesn't mean you skip the paperwork. You still get it in writing, and you both sign and date it.
I think about the men I dated before my husband. Early in our relationship, I had to be honest with him: every single man I'd dated before that point had cheated on me. Snuck around, lied about it, spent their time and energy on other women while we were together. Hurt and untrusting would be an understatement.
Trust and verify, for me back then, meant checking his phone. Looking through call logs. Trying to find out what was really going on. What I learned was that I found whatever I was looking for. If I was convinced he'd been calling some woman the night before, I'd find a phone number that seemed to confirm it. So I chose trust, and then I verified that he wasn't trustworthy. Of course I did. That's what happens when verification is really just confirmation bias with extra steps.
Choosing to trust also means being prepared to deal with whatever the truth turns out to be. Love celebrates truth, so I had to actually look at what was true. Was he showing me, with his time and effort, that he wanted to be in this relationship? He called every day. Asked what I was doing. Invited me to his place. Was genuinely interested in my life. That was true. He'd also been honest from the start that he wasn't ready to be monogamous yet, and that we should just be friends for a while. As his friend, I had a lot less say over what he did with his time. So the actual truth was: all I had to do was ask him directly if he was seeing someone else. And every time, he told me the truth.
I'm not suggesting that always happens. What I am saying is that when you bring truth, self-respect, and real trust together, trusting people stops being able to hurt you. It can only help you. Trust and verify doesn't mean digging for "the truth" you already expect to find. It means learning more, gathering real information, understanding your own belief system's role in the situation, building better boundaries, and honoring Spirit, Shadow, and your strengths as you go. Ask what's true for you? What could be true for someone else? How you can celebrate both?
If you're dating someone and you're not sure whether they're monogamous with you, have that conversation. If they're not, you don't have to be either. Good, bad, or neutral, that's not for me to say. That's where your own boundaries and values come into the conversation. Verify. Take every reasonable step to make sure your trust is placed somewhere worthy of it. Then give it freely.
Close the Loop With Systems
The second piece: trust, then build systems that close the loop naturally. Verification stops feeling like suspicion when it's just a built-in part of how you operate.
In business, this is quality assurance, checks and balances. In the group home business I ran, part of our process was a shift-completion form, checked every time, so we always knew things had actually been done, with independent verification built in. Timesheets, clear policies, structured corrective actions, duty checklists, performance reviews, all the same idea.
In personal life, this looks like an accountability partner, or a prenuptial agreement, or simply strong personal boundaries.
The Triangle of Trust
There's a framework I like here, sometimes called the triangle of trust, from Frances Frei's TED Talk on building and rebuilding trust. It has three corners: Empathy, Logic, and Authenticity.
Empathy means really hearing what someone's saying, seeing the situation from their side, celebrating their truth. Logic means applying objective truth: what's actually data-based or evidence-based here, not just what it feels like subjectively. Being cheated on 100% of the time in the past didn't objectively mean my husband would cheat too. It might have felt that way, but it wasn't objectively true.
Authenticity sits at the top, and it's the most important corner. Empathy and logic mean nothing if you're not trustworthy yourself. Put all three together, and it looks like contracts, accountability partners, prenups, assessing a situation honestly, and accepting that objective and subjective truths can conflict, and that's okay.
Wrap Up
The way to stop being betrayed repeatedly, is to choose to trust people, and build systems to verify that trust is well placed. Know yourself. Hold good boundaries. Honor your strengths, your Shadow, your Spirit. Accept that different truths can coexist, even in conflict, and find ways to celebrate them anyway. That's the recipe for choosing trust.
As you trust people and give that to them, they start giving it back. This might be the most pivotal piece of The Hart Habits for actually changing your life, because we're not taught to trust in this society. We're taught to be cautious, critical, always looking for how someone's trying to take from us. In a capitalist society, that fear is well-founded, it was designed that way. So how do we celebrate that truth? By admitting it, and then asking: how do I live my own truth, honoring myself and my boundaries, inside a society built like this?
The answer is disruptive: choose trust as your default anyway. As you do, while still verifying and closing the loop with real systems, other people start believing they can trust you too. The loop grows. We get stronger together. Synergy, look that word up. That's what happens when we trust each other more deeply, even knowing we're all a little bit of a mess sometimes. We do messed-up stuff. That's the truth. But when we choose to trust each other anyway, with verification and systems in place, things can change fast.
Choose trust. Trust and verify. Close the loop with systems. But choose trust. It will help you stop letting anxiety and negative thoughts ruin your life. You'll go from feeling guarded and victimized to feeling trustworthy, and trusted in return.
Recommended resources:
The Thin Book of Trust by Charles Feltman
How to Build (and Rebuild) Trust, Frances Frei
Braving the Wilderness by Brené Brown
Mastering the Skill of Trust by Angus Reid
Question of the day: How have you learned to trust others?