What is trust?
CW: loss, divorce
One afternoon…
when my daughter was eleven, we were running errands and talking.
She mentioned a recent fight she’d had with a family member, and I shared a story of a time I’d reconnected with someone after a conflict.
Then I said something that—until it came out of my mouth—I didn’t know I thought:
“That’s what it means to trust someone: you know conflict won’t destroy the relationship.”
There is some research-based evidence for that idea, and we’ll get to that in a moment.
But first, what is trust?
We can think of trust as a neurobiological phenomenon; our brain releases pleasant neurotransmitters—like oxytocin—which decrease our stress and help to regulate our nervous system.
Trust is also a relational phenomenon; when a relationship is tested and proven capable of withstanding closeness and distance—connection and disconnection—our trust in that person is strengthened.
“We can think of trust like a thermostat for the body.”
Therefore, we can understand trust to be an automatic response to encountering a trustworthy person or situation, and perceiving them accurately.
And we can also misperceive a person or situation as trustworthy, when they’re really not, and vice versa.
That is why it’s helpful to pay attention to patterns over time, in a relationship and also within our own bodies—to help us determine how we’re feeling and how much trust we’re experiencing.
Trust can function like a thermostat for your body.
When your stress is too high, trust can lower your bodily stress to more manageable levels.
When your stress is too low, trust can raise your bodily stress to help you face threats that need your attention.
When Jesus faced violent threats—and remained creative, compassionate, and nonviolent himself—what do you imagine was happening inside his body?
If you take seriously the notion that Jesus was God in a human body, then you can imagine Jesus’ nervous system reacted to stress much like yours does. When your brain perceives danger, your brainstem sends an alert to the rest of your body: prepare to fight, flee, or freeze!
And yet, in listening to the stories of Jesus, I have not found an instance where his body appeared hijacked by this brainstem.
Rather, in instances like Luke 22 when Jesus is arrested and Peter violently defends him by slicing off the ear of the high priest’s helper, Jesus appears to be functioning with a very well-regulated nervous system.
He is neither fighting, nor fleeing, nor freezing.
We are told instead, Jesus interrupts Peter’s violence, heals the ear of the injured man, then addresses his assailants directly.
“I wrote 100,000 words and erased them all.”
I often think of that moment in Jesus’ life when I’m experiencing a crisis of trust. Until a couple of years ago, I was married to a man I fell in love with at age eighteen. We spent twenty-five years together; he was a Southern Baptist pastor and I believed we would always be together.
A few months after I’d put the finishing touches on The Brain & the Spirit, my husband announced he needed a divorce. We had been in counseling and divorce had never been brought up; we both had recently doubled our commitment. Our children were almost grown; we were planning our second half of life together.
The devastating loss was a violent shock.
And I’m not hardwired to fight or flee… so I froze.
The clearest sign I wasn’t myself in the year and a half following: I couldn’t write.
Everything I tried to say sounded hollow. Words were empty. I lost the capacity to speak about things that really mattered. I would guess I wrote 100,000 words that year and erased them all.
Suddenly, I regarded my inner voice with suspicion. What I thought I’d learned to trust about love, forgiveness, God, trust, relational commitment–over twenty-five years of adult learning—had been shattered. When the pieces fell, without any indication they would ever fit back together again, I started operating with a single assumption: “Everything I trusted before with theology, marriage, ministry, writing… it was probably an illusion.”
From that “ground zero” spot, I came to see that large chunks of my story were an illusion.
As an evangelical pastor’s wife, I had lived for two decades with pervasive shame about wanting to work outside the home.
The unspoken message was that I was already asking for a lot; in our pastoral circles, I was often the only wife drawn to a full-time vocation.
Because of the shame and inner conflict I felt, I had tried many times to give up my academic pursuits, but something withered inside me every time.
So I tried doing both—being vocationally active outside the home, and deferential and submissive inside it. The shame over not fulfilling the role of an “ideal pastor’s wife” silenced me from speaking up about the shame I was feeling or the other dynamics in our home which needed addressing.
But everything fell apart, scattered across dry ground.
The shame hadn’t protected me or us or anything I held precious.
Who taught me to shame myself?
Who taught me to tolerate mistreatment?
Who taught me to never ask for anything?
Who benefits from my passivity?
In that dirt-low place, I discovered some new words.
I dusted them off, one by one, the words that were helping me become one-who-speaks.
I strung the words up like lanterns, lighting the path back to trust.
The first spiral of the labyrinth I traveled through grief.
The next spiral took me into anger.
After that, was the fear of the unknown.
And finally, I found the words that helped me surrender.
One night that year, I dreamt I was floating in a massive sea, treading water, exhausted, and couldn’t go on. In a moment of surrender, my head slipped below the surface and I began sinking. At first I panicked, then to my surprise, I could breathe underwater.
Slowly I sank, until eventually my feet and the sea bottom connected. And I started walking, in the same direction I was swimming before, now along the ocean floor—quicker and with less effort.
What I discovered in that sinking season is this: when all the pieces fall apart, you learn which pieces are shatterproof.
And when you engage in conflict with God, you discover whether or not your relationship with God can weather conflict.
For me during that season, I learned that the nonviolence of God reflected in Jesus is capable of sparking within us bodily trust—and restoring our trust in ways that wouldn’t have seemed possible.
And the relationship God offers you is capable of withstanding connection, disconnection, and reconnection.
The stories of Jesus—and what they reveal about who God is and how God relates to us–speak to the problems we care about most, whether on the surface of the ocean or the bottom of the sea.
And surprisingly the elixir of trust they spark within us may make breathing underwater possible.
∞
In Luke 22, when Jesus is arrested, Peter violently defends him. But in contrast, Jesus was not violent with his enemies; was he trusting that God cared for him physically, emotionally, and relationally? Jesus may have trusted that God would provide what he needed and help him endure the ordeal he was facing. Intimacy with God which sparks bodily trust within us may be what makes that humanly possible.
Listening with you,
Questions for reflection:
Who in your life do you trust, meaning you know conflict won’t destroy the relationship?
What or whom do you imagine Jesus was trusting when he faced extreme stress?
When have you experienced a crisis of trust, and what has helped restore your trust again?
Further reading:
Luke 22:49–56
A Grief Ritual in Four Movements
The Brain & the Spirit, Chapter 7, Reconnection, “The Brain on Relationship,” pp. 151–153.
A Blessing for One Who Is Embarking on an Adventure
