What is needed for trust to be re-earned?

Right now a close family member has lost my trust by blowing hot and cold and going incommunicado for months at a time. I was heartbroken but now I’m angry as well. I think for that person to regain my trust they would have to show a consistent pattern of re-engagement for quite a long period of time.

No personal stories. I’ve never really been in a spot where lost trust needed to be regained.
Most of the people who let me down, I don’t give a shit. They are gone.

When I have let others down, I probably deserved being placed on their shit list. And they understandably moved on.

But if it ever came up…
About five years of absence of what violated the trust in the first place.

Bury your ego, gain a little mature intellect & pie…dine on a decent portion of humble pie.

Well, firstly, the betrayed person has to want to trust again. I have never wanted to try to trust again, usually because I have stayed around far too long to believe that the person could be trustworthy again.

But I guess that whatever is at stake would have a bearing on all this, I think each situation would be different.

My step-daughter went through a very dark period involving bad boyfriends and heroin. She did about everything she could to kill our trust in her. When she started turning her life around, she immediately started getting mad if people didn’t trust her. She felt she was being honest and sincere, but everyone else was skeptical. I told her that she shattered trust with everyone. She just spent years lying, stealing, and using everyone. She even often claimed she was being honest with everyone. After all that, it is the behavior they have come to expect out of her. I told her that restoring trust takes time and consistency. I told her it might be a long time before it is fully restored and in that time she will just have to accept and understand the distrust. Eventually people would accept the new her as the normal and those that didn’t would lose their footing when questioned about her behavior. When you try saying someone is behaving badly and your only basis is a year old, for example, you show you haven’t been noticing current things. I told her if she ran into that, she could simple point out she had been bad, and was turning her life around and ask what she was currently doing that caused the distrust. But she had to prove herself first.

@seawulf575 excellent example! Give her my best wishes!

It is simple and very difficult. You have to become trustworthy and go on being trustworthy regardless.

I think the answer can vary a lot depending on the circumstances. People can change their ways. And I can trust conditionally. You may argue that that’s not trust, but I will reply that some trust is better than no trust. Maybe I don’t leave my purse in plain view, but I still know the person would come to my aid if I were ill or injured.

@janbb, never would I argue with your feelings or say you were wrong to expect better treatment. But I have been that family member who stopped communicating, and I can tell you from here that for long periods of time it was just too hard to overcome that barrier. From my end all the news was bad: setbacks, illness, chemical dependencies (not mine), court matters, and a whole lot more. I was barely coping with my day and trying to keep a rein on my grief and anger, and I had nothing left for cheery banter with relatives whose kids were working, married, finishing school, buying houses, etc.

If I had told the truth, I’d have had to answer reams of questions and probably faced uncomprehending judgment to boot, and I didn’t want to attempt any of that either over the phone or in writing. I chose silence for the sake of my own well-being. My family is all on the other coast, so nothing less than a major trip would do to reestablish connections, and last year I took it.

Until then, they might have thought I was blowing hot and cold, but that wasn’t it at all. I was hanging on, trying not to lose myself, and sparing no energy for those who were doing fine without me. Whenever I did manage to reach out and connect, they never could have guessed how much it cost me. It was impossible to keep it up on a steady basis.

I have no idea what the situation is among your relatives, but one thing I’ve learned in the past ten years is that people may learn to mask so well that no one can guess the horrors behind the facade. And keeping up the facade feels like the only way not to break completely.

All my life I’ve held to the belief that it’s better to trust someone who doesn’t deserve it than it is to withhold trust from someone who does. Even now, I do that.

For me it’s kind of just a leap of faith, and also an experiment (but NOT a test) – I have to make a conscious decision to extend the trust again, for better or for worse, and see what happens/experience the consequences.