How do you restore trust?

So this is something new.  Until now pretty much everything on this blog has been my own creation.  Every post has been an idea that I have come up with and wrote about.  Although with the short stories they were written by me in response to requests made where people gave me a name, a place, and a random object, and I wrote a story from that for them.  Apart from that everything to date has been my own design.

This post is a little different because it was a request, I don't know who made it because they left an anonymous comment they didn't want published so I had no way to reply:

"You talk about trust a lot but if you lose someones trust how do you get it back?"

Note: This isn't the part of the comment they did not want published.  There was a lot more which I have not included.

Trust is something that has two basic forms, explicit and implicit.  Implicit trust is where you expect it from someone but it is never outright asked for, like a newborn baby implicitly trusts its mother to care for it.  When you start a relationship with someone, whether it is romantic, or platonic, trust is implicit at first.  It grows over time as you open up more to each other, confide in each other, and rely on one another.  There are many expectations of each other that naturally evolve based on the understanding you have between one another.  The path your relationship takes determines those expectations, they are not usually explicitly stated.

When you do something that makes someone lose trust in you, some people think to regain it you can essentially start again and rebuild implicitly.  It doesn't work like that.  If you think it does, the trust you rebuild will be false.  They will always doubt you, they will always question you, they will never fully trust you again.

The reason it won't work is because the reason the trust was lost is definitive and explicit.  As such if you want to rebuild your trust in one another you need to do it through explicit trust.  To do that you have to be explicit.  Explicit trust means giving up your right to privacy.  You need to be completely open with them and answer any question they ask, hide nothing from them no matter how big or small, if they ask, you tell them.  Over time their trust in you will return.

If you don't do this, every single thing you hide no matter how small will contribute to their feeling that you are deceiving them, and over time that will mount up.  No matter how small and insignificant you think what you hide is, they will always think you are hiding more than you are.  They will think, if you can't tell them something so small and insignificant that there's no reason at all to believe you would tell them something big that had a deep impact.  This is paranoia, and this is what results from mistrust.  You can label it in whatever way you want but ultimately you are the one that caused it by betraying their trust and giving them reason to doubt you.  In many ways this is like the concept movie Inception tries to depict - once an idea is planted, it grows.  There's nothing you can do to stop that growth, except remove the root cause.

Trust once lost is incredibly hard to get back, and in many ways you might not be willing to do what it takes to rebuild it.  If you are not willing then you have to ask yourself how much the other person means to you, how much you want them in your life and ask yourself if what it takes is more than that.  If the answer is yes then you should walk away and stop prolonging the inevitable.  If the answer is no then you will be explicit and give up your right to privacy completely.  This won't last forever.  As trust is regained your privacy will be regained, you can use that as a measure of how much they trust you - that is of course so long as you are not doing anything that causes them hurt or distress, in which case distance does not imply their trust has been restored, but rather that they have stopped caring and have slowly begun to detach from you.

I'm not sure how I feel about these types of posts, but if you have anything you want to ask feel free to comment below.  I won't guarantee I will make a post about it, but at the very least I will read what you write.  As usual all comments are moderated and don't appear until I approve them so if you want to ask something privately just ask not to publish it.