A number of years ago, I found myself in the position of explaining the concept of "trust" to an eight-year-old. I lived in a mobile home community and kept a slew of animals. There were a number of exotic types...snakes, lizards, and small rodents...all of which were tame, sociable, and easily handled. She had been having trouble with her guinea pig, who bit her quite often, and had a tendency to avoid her. She wanted to know how I had managed to convince my pets that people were not to be feared.

I told her that the secret to a friendly pet started with trust. Trust is important if you are going to forge a lasting and pleasant relationship with any living thing...animal or human. I explained that if an animal hasn't been handled gently and consistently all its life, its natural instinct is to protect itself from danger. What could be more dangerous than gigantic beings with large hands that made sudden movements? I asked her to think about being in a pet store for a few months, living behind a glass window, with alien monster faces and hands lunging at her all day. If you were a guinea pig, you wouldn't be able to understand what those faces meant, or said, or wanted from you. It would make sense that the first time you were freed from your cage, you would run away and bite anything that tried to stop you.

She saw the point but then wanted to know how you "fixed" that. I said that the only way to win trust was with consistency. You had to act the same way all the time, no matter if you were feeling angry or bored or frustrated. This way, the animal would learn what to expect and know how to behave, and that was the most important thing to her pet....knowing what to expect. That's what trust was made of.

I sent her home with instructions. She learned how to gently reprimand her pet when he bit (usually a tap on the nose and a "no" is all it takes), and to always return him gently to wherever she had picked him up from, after she had given him a little treat. He soon learned to associate her approach with ear scratching and nice things to eat, and in a short time he was coming to see her on his own. She was delighted with the results and came to thank me.

I told her that all animals associate the things we do with things that happen to them, and if those things were good, they wouldn't be worried about the results. They would trust us, because they knew how we would behave and that our behavior wouldn't hurt them. I explained that she must make sure that all her friends treated her pet the same way. In this way, he would learn to trust people in general...not just herself...and would forget that he ever had a reason to bite. I did warn her that if she frightened him by accident, he might bite anyway, because that's what guinea pigs instinctively do when they're scared. I warned her not to punish him for that, because it wouldn't be fair and might break his trust. Once that trust was gone, it would be twice as hard to get it back, because he would remember the bad things that happened a lot longer than the good things.

I also said that what she had just learned about pets was also true about people, and I asked her to think about her best friend. Would she tell her a secret that she didn't want others to know? She said she would. I said that that meant she trusted her friend, and she did so because she knew what to expect. I explained that when you absolutely know, in your heart, that your friend won't tell a secret, you trust her enough to tell it. If you're not sure, you don't, which meant that you didn't trust her enough.

Then she asked me how to know if a person could be trusted, if you had never told them a secret before. I realized I was now in deeper perceptual territory and started thinking a bit more about my answers! I told her that was a tough question that she would ask herself many times in her life: How can I trust this person if I don't know how they will behave? How can I trust my decision, if I don't know how it will turn out?

I explained to her that we would often have to take risks when we decided to trust...but that deciding to take a risk would be based on the information we had about things. If we didn't know anything about the person, than we would be wisest not to tell the secret. On the other hand, if we knew this person had other friends who trusted him, then we would be more likely to take the risk. Of course, if we knew that person had already told other people's secrets, we would be foolish to share ours. It was all based on the consistency of behavior.

She went home again, pleased with the answers....leaving me to turn this conversation over in my mind a million times in the years since. I was afraid there was so much more that needed saying...not so much in the example of trusting someone with a secret, but in the other areas of trust. How do we learn to trust ourselves? How do we learn to trust our mates, our employers, our peers? It seemed so much more complicated than the way I had laid it out back then. I've had a long time to hash it all out mentally, and I still come full circle back to that little talk.

We learn to trust ourselves when we know what our behavior is going to be. We learn to trust our mates and friends when we know what their behavior is going to be. We learn to trust our decisions when we know in our hearts what the consequences will be for us. We go by the information we have and the consistent patterns we, and those around us, exhibit. I once told a friend that we give those we love the weapons to destroy us and trust them not to use them.

Sometimes it doesn't work, and we are betrayed. Then we may decide not to trust anyone based on that betrayal. But if we look closely at the circumstances of betrayal, we often find unheeded warnings. Perhaps others warned us, but we refused to listen, thinking we knew better. Perhaps we had doubts all along but wished so hard for a thing to happen that we believed we could make it so. Perhaps there was a sudden change in behavior in the other person leaving us with an inconsistent pattern to follow. Maybe we were inconsistent and didn't earn the trust we hoped for. Whatever the reason, never trusting again is not the answer.

In a sci-fi book I read recently, the author intimated that trust is a crapshoot and can never truly be practiced between human individuals. He implied that humans are too good at feigning behaviors that elicit trust for the concept to ever work. The con artist will always be with us, and that will prevent us from being able to trust implicitly. Of course, there will always be people who will take advantage of our trust...who will use it as a tool to get what they want from us. They are, fortunately, a minority. I honestly believe that most of us sincerely desire to trust one another.

Unlike most pets, we have the option of examining our own behaviors, finding the flaws in our thinking, and changing. We can gather information from the behavior of those around us and can make decisions regarding each individual. We are able to differentiate between the person who cannot be trusted and those who can. We have the ability to learn from our mistakes and to try a different course. We are social, and we need to trust each other...or risk the pain and loneliness of self-imposed alienation.

As I said in the beginning of this article, trust is important if you are going to forge a lasting and pleasant relationship with any living thing...animal or human. People have more complicated behavior sets than our pets do, which makes for a higher degree of risk...but in the long run, there is no real and rewarding relationship without it.

(Copyright 1998 by Denise Ruiz - No reproduction without express permission from the author)

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