Trust and After

Trust and After

Small moments build it. Contradictions break it. Forgiveness is not the same as believing someone again.

Helen Higgins

Oct 26, 2026

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Trust is one of those words that everyone understands until they are asked to define it.

How would you define trust?

Most of us recognise the feeling of it. It’s being able to relax around someone. It’s the relief of not having to second-guess their motives, search every text message for a hidden meaning, or rehearse what we’re going to say before we see them. It’s the quiet assumption that the person we love isn’t hiding something that would change how we see them.

The moment we try to explain what trust actually is, though, it becomes surprisingly difficult to pin down.

Trust is never entirely objective. History shapes it as much as behaviour. Someone who has rarely been betrayed may move through the world assuming the best of people, and why shouldn’t they? Nothing in their experience has taught them to do otherwise. Someone who’s been repeatedly disappointed may need far more evidence before extending the same confidence towards anyone, and they may never manage it completely. Most of us exist somewhere between those two extremes, but it does need acknowledging that what feels like reasonable trust to one person might feel like astonishing recklessness to another.

Erik Erikson, the psychologist, argued that the earliest developmental task of human life involves establishing a basic sense of trust in the world. When our needs are met consistently, we begin to understand other people as reliable. When they’re not, uncertainty takes root. Whether or not we realise it, we carry those early lessons into adulthood, which is why trust is never only about the present moment. The person standing in front of us is usually negotiating, unknowingly, with everyone who came before them.

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In friendships, trust tends to accumulate rather than announce itself. Nobody sits down and formally decides to trust a friend, at least not in my experience. I’ve taken a “leap of faith” to trust people, but it’s usually come with some kind of preceding interaction; I’ve never looked at a stranger and thought, “I trust you implicitly.” Trust, instead, usually develops through hundreds of small interactions. It’s the friend who remembers something important months later, or the one who keeps a confidence when passing it on would make for a better story. It’s the one who tells you the truth when a lie would be so much easier and more comfortable, but they do it without enjoying the opportunity to hurt you.

We often find out who people are when being dependable becomes inconvenient. Almost anyone can be reliable when it costs them nothing physically or emotionally. Trust only becomes meaningful when honesty, loyalty or kindness requires something from them.

I think part of the problem is that trust is extraordinarily sensitive to contradiction. A friendship might survive disagreements, distance and periods of neglect - many of mine have. What friendship struggles to survive is the discovery that it wasn’t quite what we believed it to be. Then, the hurt is rarely confined to one incident because our minds begin to revisit everything that came before the moment the shatter happened.

What else did I misunderstand?

Which conversations were genuine?

Which reassurances were sincere?

How many people knew something I didn’t?

The damage travels backwards through time.

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Mick Haupt

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From my own experience, nowhere is this more obvious than within families. Family trust is unusual because it’s the type that

is

assumed rather than consciously chosen. We’re taught to expect loyalty, care and protection from the people closest to us, usually the people that are allegedly predisposed to love us, because these relationships occupy such a central place in our lives. When trust breaks within a family, the result can feel as disorienting as it does painful. The relationship is unsettled, but so is our understanding of where we belong within it. It may never recover. “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time” remains one of Maya Angelou’s most frequently repeated observations because it speaks to something we often recognise too late. I’ve invoked it with two of my siblings more times than I can count.

Reality, however, is rarely as simple as the quotations on Pinterest makes it sound.

Human beings are inconsistent. We’re capable of remarkable kindness and profound selfishness, sometimes within the same day. People can behave badly without being entirely bad. Someone can spectacularly fail us and still love us. They can be sorry and still do lasting damage. Behaviour and intent require reviewing separately.

The difficulty lies in deciding when something is a mistake and when it reveals a pattern, although in the moment, that distinction is rarely as obvious as it’s portrayed to be when we’re the person living through it.

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Romantic relationships make the question even more intense. Trusting a partner means making yourself vulnerable in ways that might feel irrational anywhere else. We give another person access to our fears, insecurities, hopes and private selves, and we allow them to influence our emotional well-being simply because their opinion matters to us more than most; we tend to live with that person, work towards building a life with them, and, culturally, we are raised to believe in “happily ever after” and perfection.

Emotional security doesn’t require perfection. People don’t need partners who never fail them. What they actually need are partners who are willing to repair the damage when they do make mistakes.

That distinction matters because trust isn’t destroyed by human flaws alone. If it were, no relationship would survive. Trust is hand-in-hand with accountability, so trust begins to disappear when accountability does. It happens when explanations become evasions and when concerns are dismissed as overreactions, or when an apology is used to end a conversation rather than change a pattern of behaviour.

This is why trust cannot be rebuilt through argument. A person can explain what happened, provide context, offer reassurance, and even promise that it will never happen again, and those things matter, but trust is built through experience rather than persuasion.

We believe change when we have lived alongside it for long enough to know that it’s real.

Brené Brown wrote that “trust is built in very small moments.” Recovery happens in small moments too. It happens when words and behaviour begin to match again, difficult questions are answered without defensiveness, and patience is offered to the person whose uncertainty was created by someone else’s actions.

Sometimes trust

can

be rebuilt. I’m not suggesting that it’s easy, but some relationships become stronger because both people commit themselves to understanding what happened and changing what made it possible. That work is slow, though. There’s no overnight turnaround. It requires consistency from the person who caused the damage and patience from the person trying to believe them again. It’s hard.

Sometimes trust never returns, though. That doesn’t necessarily mean forgiveness is impossible, nor does it mean people can’t change. It simply means that forgiveness and trust are different things. Humans are capable of understanding why someone hurt us, accepting their apology and wishing them well without ever feeling safe enough to give them the same access to us again. We’re allowed to stake out and hold that boundary.

This is why I think that trust resembles glass. It can shatter, obviously, but it mostly resembles glass because it remembers. Even after repair, the fracture alters the way the light passes through it.

When I think deeply about it, I believe that trust isn’t ever really about being certain of another person. Certainty is too much to ask of anyone. Trust is the decision to believe that somebody will handle the parts of us placed in their care with honesty and kindness. When that belief is honoured, a relationship deepens. When it’s broken, the relationship possibly survives, but our innocence about it doesn’t.

Learning to trust that person again is a possibility. Seeing them in the same way isn’t.

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