Power & Trust
The Relationship between Power and Trust
When people are clearing and one person won’t let go of their story about the other person, I know there’s a power/trust problem. Either the person doesn’t trust the other person, or even more importantly, they don’t trust themselves to take care of themselves if things don’t go well. Sometimes, simply pointing this out will help someone change their position relative to the story, or at least we can make a plan for what they need to do to build trust with themselves before they will change their story to include the other person’s story. I don’t even try to build trust across a relationship between two people when the person doesn’t trust themselves.
One of the reasons people hold onto their defensive stories is that they don’t trust themselves to hold boundaries without their story. The negative story holds the boundary and then we can take the action we need to take. If we have a more compassionate or big picture story, we might not then take care of ourselves and our needs. If we can build self-trust that we will hold a boundary anyway, then we can accept other people’s stories as also true.
Once we’ve established self-trust, then we can apply the Trust Formula to create an analysis for why they don’t trust the other person. We’ll talk about that more in the next activity.
