Couples who reach out about their relationships are almost always calling for one or more of three things:
• 😔 we love each other but our communication sucks,
• 🫤 we’re more like roommates than lovers,
• we want to see if this is worth saving, but can’t seem to get past broken trust.
That one.
Trust.
Most of us were led to believe you either trust someone or you don’t. But we humans are complicated creatures.
What I tell my clients– trust is the ONE word in the English language that I feel most strongly should be 36 different words, as I’d heard the Inuit have for snow. (The truth, according to Wikipedia: “..Central Siberian Yupik has 40 terms. In Nunavimmiutitut, the Inuktitut dialect spoken in Canada's Nunavik region has at least 53, including matsaaruti, for wet snow that can be used to ice a sleigh's runners, and pukak, for crystalline powder snow that looks like salt. Within these dialects, the vocabulary associated with sea ice is even richer. In the Iñupiaq language of Wales, Alaska, Krupnik documented 70 terms for ice including: utuqaq, ice that lasts year after year; siguliaksraq, a patchwork layer of crystals that form as the sea begins to freeze; and auniq, ice that is filled with holes. Similarly, the Sámi peoples, who live in the northern tips of Scandinavia and Russia, use at least 180 words related to snow and ice, according to Ole Henrik Magga, a linguist in Norway.”)
• 🥛 Maybe you can trust your partner to have your back if you were to get insulted at a party, or to cheerlead you for a promotion, but can rarely trust him to bring home the right milk.
• 🎂 Maybe you can trust her to remember your birthday, but not to tell you how she really feels about your parents.
• 🤧 Maybe you can trust them to take care of you when you’re sick, and to always remind you about the gathering you would have forgotten, but you don’t trust them not to cheat on you.
So can you ever FULLY trust anyone? It depends on your definition(s) of trust. And perception. And semantics.
According to Internal Family Systems and Parts Theory, we are all comprised of different parts, parts that may sometimes even seem in contradiction to each other. We are not all good or all bad. So if someone says, “I can’t stand you!”, the more accurate explanation is more likely, “I can’t stand the behavior of the part of you that did that thing right now…” We often cause ourselves a lot of unnecessary grief trying to label someone as either a “Jerk” or a “Love”, when they are most likely capable of representing both in diffeent ways at different times- as, most likely, are you.
“At the center of IFS — sometimes called “parts work” — is the idea that each of us has multiple parts, kind of like sub-personalities. Getting to know them and treating them with compassion may help us manage our lives and our stress better, Schwartz writes in his book No Bad Parts.” — from NPR Morning Edition
But what if the partner you felt you could trust in all 53 variations of the word does break that trust? Or you, in one way or another, have broken theirs?