You Can Be Honest and Still Not Be Trusted
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Hi Reader, I've done a lot of interviews. This one, I let myself go further than usual. Further into what I actually got wrong, not the version of it that's safe to tell. And it's based on two beliefs that showed up in my own life, and still show up in the lives of the couples I guide. The first: if you don't lie, don't cheat, you're automatically trustworthy. The second: if there was real chemistry once, the spark is supposed to keep running on its own. Neither is true. I sat down with David Chambers on The Authentic Man to talk through why, and what's actually underneath trust when honesty alone doesn't get you there. Here's the basic of what I proposed: A person can report every fact correctly and still not be telling the truth, not because they're lying, but because they've never gotten underneath their own experience long enough to know what the truth was. That's the real problem. Trust isn't just a word problem. It's a whole-person problem. And it shows up in four places: Word. Are you saying what's true? This is the floor, not the ceiling. Most people stop here and wonder why it isn't enough. Body. Are you actually in the room, grounded and present, or are you three conversations ahead, managing what comes next? People feel the difference before you say a single word. Heart. Do you know what you're feeling, specifically? Not "fine." Not "good." Many of us were handed only a handful of words for our inner lives as kids and never learned to build much beyond them. You can't offer someone access to an interior you haven't found yourself. Soul. Are you doing what you're here to do, or making excuses for why you're not? A man out of alignment with his own purpose is not trustable, no matter how honest his words are. For years, I ran a version of this myself. I knew exactly how to be vulnerable enough. Curated it, really. Like putting grief up in a museum exhibit. Enough exposure that people would say, wow, that's deep. Never the parts underneath that I hadn't let myself feel. Sometimes we hide something from ourselves so well that we no longer know we're hiding it. And that doesn't just affect us. It affects the person sitting across from us. A partner may know that something is missing long before we do. They may experience our distance, our defensiveness, our certainty that everything is "fine," without having the language to explain what they're actually feeling. And this is where I think we need to get more sophisticated about honesty. Because being fully expressed doesn't mean saying everything exactly as it comes out of your mouth. There's another question: Is it true, and is it kind? Truth without kindness can become an attack.
Kindness without truth can become avoidance.
Trust grows when we learn to bring what is true into relationship in a way the other person can actually receive. That takes practice. It takes attention. And that brings me back to the other belief David and I talked about: if there was chemistry once, the spark should just keep going. Maybe the problem isn't always that the spark disappeared. Maybe sometimes, we stopped paying attention. We stop being curious about the person in front of us. We stop revealing ourselves. We stop noticing what nourishes them, what moves them, what they're afraid to say, what they're discovering about themselves. Leslie and I have been together for ten years, and I don't experience the spark as something we had to preserve. In many ways, it has grown. Not because we figured out some secret to keeping things exciting. Because we keep paying attention. We build trust. We create rituals. We keep discovering each other. The more we trust, the more we can reveal. The more we reveal, the deeper the intimacy becomes. And intimacy can create more spark. That's a very different picture of a long-term relationship than the one most of us were given. Not: We had chemistry, so we should always have chemistry. But: We had something alive between us. How do we keep showing up for it? Whether you're an individual trying to become more trustworthy, or a couple trying to find your way back to each other, the question is surprisingly simple: How much of you is actually here? That's part of why I built the short practice I mentioned on the podcast. It helps you notice where you're strong across Word, Body, Heart, and Soul, and where you may still be curating yourself. It's also designed around the two patterns that show up most often in conflict: withdrawing, or moving in to attack. If you want to go deeper, you can find it on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts:
Blessings to you, Ted P.S. Toward the end of the podcast, David and I also have an important conversation for men around menopause. |
