Greenstorm's Journal

This is such a big theme in my life right now. My poly group is going to do an episode on trust and they asked some questions:

What does trust mean to me?
How do my partners and I create trust in relationships?
How do we maintain the trust through the course of those relationships?
If you've had a breach of trust with someone, how do you go about reestablishing trust?

Then I'm over here, handling Josh with his recent attempt to date three people at once, Tucker with his buying a condo far away and telling me after, and A&E and going in on a major thing of importance for me but together. Plus some conversation about safe space and boundaries and trust in a workshop/community setting to work on those. And then-- my history managing contractors, coming out in my workplace, it's all trust stuff.

Trust is having a reasonable idea of what someone will do, and thus being able to align your actions to theirs. This can be on the smaller scale (they won't date other people, if you're mono) or on the larger scale (no matter what their specific actions, they'll make time for me and keep our lives aligned)

Trust is established through a combination of words and actions. If someone does something often enough, you can trust them to do it again in the future. In an ideal world someone can put what they will do into words, thus saving you from having to go through enough actions to get a sense of trust and then align your own actions accordingly. On a meta level, then, if someone says they can do things and their actions then align with their words, you can trust their words. In both these situations they're earning trust; because it's not common in society to have explicit conversations about what elements of trust a relationship can contain, and because many of those elements are hard for people to self-evaluate accurately, most trust seems to be earned through actions. It's definitely possible to trust someone's words or actions in one realm (say, friendship or handling money or with my body) and not in another realm (say relationships or handling money or with my body). With most people I establish trust by learning to ignore their words about their actions, and instead looking directly at the actions themselves, since people are so often aspirational rather than realistic in their words.

For me, trust is maintained by adjusting my expectations of someone's behaviour to align with their actual behaviour. I also try very hard to align my behaviour with the ways I say I will act, that is, to be trustworthy to others. For me this mostly involves speaking in generalities, in likelihoods, and evaluating my own past actions frequently. This is the same as if there's been a breach of trust: realign, reevaluate. If someone wants the side-effects of my trusting them in a certain way they can re-align their behaviours with their words.

Josh did repaired or maintained my trust, for example, when he first moved to the city: he didn't make much time for me, he started dating S and saying some things about how that was going to go and they didn't go that way. We had a talk or several, and now he's careful to keep his predictions and behaviours in alignment or else update me on his available time, so I trust his words. He also made more time for me after those discussions because he wanted me to trust he'd be there for me, and consistently when he gets busy and I say I don't feel like I have enough time with him he'll come up with various solutions; so now I trust him to make time for me, too, not just to accurately describe his relationship. It's pretty great.

I can trust Tucker to keep doing personal growth. I can also trust him not to become monogamous with a metamour.

I also trust Josh not to change the trajectory of his life generally for me, and Tucker not to involve me in important life decisions. I guess we normally use the word trust only to describe predicted behaviours that feel positive to us but it's possible to trust people to do terrible things too. I enjoy trusting folks that way because it makes my decisions very clean and easy. I know how to gauge my level of closeness to them. And that, to me, is the benefit of trust: it lets me sort and set boundaries without having to come up against them with every interction. Someone whose behaviour is ambiguous, who I don't trust either way, I either take a huge distance from or they'll be bumping up against boundaries and I'll be adjusting appropriate distance in each instance and it's tiring. I'm establishing trust in this way with my future housemates, bumping and bumping against behaviours and boundaries and using the smaller behaviours and word/action alignments or misalignments as a scrying glass to see whether I can ultimately trust them to live with comfortably in some way.

I don't think trust is a standalone verb. You're always trusting someone to do some specific thing, or not to do some specific thing or class of things. It seems to be used generally to mean "trust someone not to hurt me".

There are some kinds of trust I really want in relationships: trust in someone's kindness, trust that they'll assume good intentions, trust in consistent behaviour, trust that actions align with words, trust to honour and know their own boundaries, trust they'll read me a little bit so I don't need to verbally spell out everything.

There's a lot more to say on the subject, especially about trust where I can't easily choose my level of involvement (as in sharing a house and property) and in complex situations where folks have real capacity to harm me (which I guess is the same thing).

Two ways of drawing:

Sketch a very light, general outline across the whole canvas. Go back and add clearer lines, not always in exactly the same spot, working from large to small. Refine the lines more. Add shading. Refine the shading. First the thrust of the pictures emerge and then the details.

This will often capture proportion and composition exquisitely; detail may not be exact.

Put your pencil on the paper and your eye on the object. Move the pencil along with your eye, capturing a single line in continuous, careful, complete detail. The whole picture can be done in one continuous line, moving from detail to the next closest detail until the whole panorama has emerged.

This will often capture detail and nuance exquisitely; proportion may not be accurate.

Some of us are more suited to one technique than the other. Some finished products prefer one or the other process. Both are important in the world.

The former is often how I approach ideas in conversation: a broad sweep with the intent of going back with the other person and refining, adding here and erasing there. When thinking I work in either mode, depending, though I spend more time in the former.

Just realized, perhaps it should have been obvious, that I am very very cautious about being happy around folks who are not either deeply trusted or strangers. Happiness is when I'm vulnerable, when anyone can step in with a cutting remark and actually cut me, and when there is actually something valuable to be taken away.

I avoid being happy around a lot of folks for this reason.