ON RELATIONSHIPS: On Intimacy [trust]
Are you missing friendships in life or even feeling you’ve lost the friendship in your relationship?
Are you experiencing loneliness or feeling disconnected to your partner and others you thought might be "friend material" but then...something happened?
We build relationships through building trust.
It could be a matter of trust and noticing trust-building moments.
These moments can be as simple as a moment when someone asked "how are you doing" in the hall at work, and rather than just continuing to walk down the hallway, they actually stop to hear your reply...or perhaps after you ask about someone's day, they respond with a genuine, "and how are you doing?"
Or maybe it was someone on social media who saw one of your posts and noticed "it just didn't seem like you" and reached out via DM to see if there was anything you needed.
Maybe someone sent you a GIF that reminded them of you out of the blue and just for fun.
It could be someone asking for your advice.
Maybe a compliment on a dish you brought to a gathering.
Perhaps it was when you took a risk to smile at a stranger and they smiled back.
Could it be the time you asked your partner to wake you in the morning, and they did so with a gentle hand on your shoulder…
Or when you felt overwhelmed with work and they grabbed dinner…
Maybe when you felt overwhelmed with stress and they listened and seemed to be on your side (or at least not taking the side of the other or contributing to the stress).
Trust happens in these small moments.
It's saying: I see you. You are important to me.
Trust develops first with understanding your own needs. So, for today, take a moment to identify the trust building moments in your life and expand it to the world around you.
Contribute to that need and see how it affects those relationships you thought of at the beginning of this post.
The trust of another is often an overflow of trust of self and noticing/meeting of the needs of self and the world around you (please note that the typical trauma response in recent or past traumatic moments can make one negate the needs of self for the other and can often make deepening relationships even more difficult).
Trust, like empathy and compassion, is something that can best be built within the individual - it begins with exercising trust toward self and then can overflow to build stronger relationships with a partner and to develop deeper friendships.