In the 1998 movie Hope Floats, and Birdie Pruitt has been chosen as a guest on the Toni Post talk show on the premise that she’s getting a free makeover. They blindfold her, put her on the stage, and when she takes the blindfold off, she’s sitting on national television with her husband Bill and Connie, her best friend. Unfortunately, it’s soon revealed that Bill and Connie have an ongoing affair. He requests a divorce, and she’s blindsided. The cameraman pans to her daughter in the audience, who’s visibly heartbroken. This traumatic scene from the movie reveals how vital trust is and how devastating it can be when it’s betrayed.
Trust is a part of everyday life. We need it to build relationships with family, friends, workplaces, and leaders. But, unfortunately, it’s often tricky, difficult to gain, and even more difficult to rebuild if lost.
As a general default, I give people the benefit of the doubt and believe that most people are good and have good intentions. However, I am tuned into my intuition to know when something doesn’t seem right.
In a post last year, I talked about how love without trust is a river without water. In it, I was tempted to write about how you can know if you can trust your partner. But I kept coming back to one universal truth – trust has less to do with your partner and more to do with you. Wait, what did you say, precious?!
While it is important to vet our partner and know if they are a good match for us, at the end of the day, how much we trust others is a reflection of how secure we feel about ourselves. See, people are inevitably going to hurt us and betray us at times. But how we process those experiences and how we feel about ourselves sets the stage for how well we can trust going forward.
When you trust your own abilities to be okay and weather the storms that come your way, the freer you can be to trust other people. Like I wrote in that post, “You trust yourself because you aren’t dependent on how someone else treats you. Your value and worth aren’t tied to what someone else does or doesn’t do.”
You can only ever really trust yourself, which is why the best relationship you will ever have is with yourself. Trust your own ability to be deal and be okay of someone betrays your trust. Know that if someone chooses to betray you, it has nothing to do with you and everything to do with them. No matter what someone has done, or hasn’t done, it doesn’t give people the license to go out and betray people.
All that being said, it is important to be mindful of red flags and things that you see that might indicate deception. I’m strange in that I will let that information come to me. I truly believe that bad behavior will reveal itself…it’s really only a matter of time. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t consider the possibility of something being off or that there might actually be danger on the horizon and take appropriate action.
I tend to go with my gut feeling on most things. Our intuitions can be a great guide. But it is important for us to learn the difference between intuition guiding us and trauma misleading us.
