Trust
Trust isn’t a competition. It doesn’t depend upon being the best. It depends upon being authentic, which means being honest about what’s happening instead of pretending that things are better than they really are. Trust is built when people and organizations are open about their shortcomings, instead of hiding problems from public view in an effort to fake-it-til-you-make-it. Trust is the feeling of making it real.
This episode of Stories of Emotional Granularity features insights into trust by Betti Rooted Lionheart, Kristen Donnelly, Robin Hafitz, Shannon Haskins, and Marie Thouin.
Full Transcript
Jonathan Cook:
Welcome to Stories of Emotional Granularity, a podcast that explores the wide range of emotional experience, describing the feelings that can’t be reduced to the basic emotional categories of happy, mad, sad, and glad. One of the more complex emotions a person can feel is trust.
Betti Rooted Lionheart, custodian of the Braided Root Waters Healing Sanctuary in Ithaca, New York, who we heard from in last week’s episode on climate grief, has a daily ritual through which she aims to cultivate the feeling of trust.
Betti Rooted Lionheart:
I have a, very simply, almost daily ritual of making a cup of tea and sitting at what I call an altar every morning, and my altar has candles on it. It has all kinds of objects that remind me of my spirit guides and different aspects of healing work that has moved through my life. When I sit there in the morning with my tea, I ground, center, and shield so that I can start my day from that grounded place of trust.
Jonathan Cook:
What does this mean, for Betti to sit in a sacred space for a daily ritual with a cup of tea to ground herself in a feeling of trust? I hope to come around toward an explanation of this by the end of this episode. For now, though, let’s listen to a proud mother who manages the financial affairs of a tech startup company.
Laura:
My name is Laura, and I am a finance professional. I've been doing accounting for over 20 years now. I also have two children and I play lots of bridge.
Jonathan Cook:
As an accountant and a bridge player, Laura is skilled at maintaining a dynamic equilibrium in rapidly changing environments. As a mother, she trusted her body to go through the process of pregnancy with a healthy outcome.
Laura:
When I was pregnant, I trusted my body, so I was very trusting of that things would, it was really the only time I felt like I had faith, because I'm not a religious person and I don't really, I don't consider myself to have faith in much, but I had faith in myself and I had faith in my body. I trusted that things would work out and that I could handle the experience of growing a person inside me and having them come out of my body. I wanted the least medical intervention levels as possible. I managed to accomplish that, and then I was in a hospital and I trusted that they would treat me with respect. I was very lucky and blessed to not have any kind of traumatic birth experience as I know many women do have. I trusted the team that I was with, and it served me well. So, I mean, at certain times you do need to have a lot of trust in the people around you, and you're extremely vulnerable at that time. I mean, if you're untrusting, I think you're more likely also to not have a good experience.
Jonathan Cook:
Of course, Laura didn’t really know for certain that her pregnancies would turn out okay. She couldn’t have known. There are serious risks associated with pregnancy. She and her kids are all okay, but they could have suffered a traumatic event. They could have died.
As an emotion, trust is most important when the outcome of a situation isn’t certain. Laura acknowledges that she was lucky, and she knew that her luck could been bad, but she chose to trust anyway.
The elusive, uncertain nature of trust is what makes it such a good subject for dramatic fiction. It’s entertaining to read a book or watch a movie in which the characters struggle to understand who and what they can trust. In reality, however, it’s not as much fun when we encounter this kind of uncertainty, especially when the people and things we care about are at stake.
We give trust because we trust in trust. When people choose to trust each other, people actually tend to be more trustworthy as a result. On the other hand, Laura points out that the opposite is also true. Once people begin feel distrust in each other, they become more distant and wary of each other, making untrustworthy behavior more likely.
Laura:
I think situations create a feedback loop. So, if you're not trusting and then you're acting in such a way that the people feel they're not trusted, then they might question their own judgment as well. It might, the direction might not go as well as it could.
Jonathan Cook:
Trust is tricky. Actual trust is marked by the feeling that others have goodwill without needing proof that everything is as it seems to be. One way of understanding trust is that it’s the feeling of being willing to accept what others say at face value. Unfortunately, people often deceive. Laura experienced the struggle of broken trust as President of the PTA at her children’s elementary school.
Laura:
The local principal at the school my children went to was I had a reputation for everything being rainbows and butterflies. And there were issues at the school that were not shared with parents. And then when parents found out about these things, shit hit the fan. People would get really angry because the communication was so lacking, and then you feel like you can't work together to make changes and create inclusiveness. Public school is a challenge because there's so many different types of people that all get together and have different backgrounds and there's not a one size fits all solution to educating children. I don't think they give. I just, I don't know. It's hard and you have to recognize that it's hard. And if you say it's all great, then you don't recognize the challenges. So, it's denial.
I was the PTA president at the time, so I was very frustrated because parents would come to me with information. They found out through the grapevine, and I was not in the loop. Then I felt like it was my responsibility to discuss those issues with the principal and put me in a position of being somewhat confrontational because I don't know. I mean, if you're bringing up an issue, it's always confrontational. It's just how you bring it up to another person. So, it made me nervous. I wanted to deal with the issues in a way that was productive and figuring out how work with the principal was a challenge.
Jonathan Cook:
The thing that strikes me about Laura’s experience is that her trust wasn’t broken because of poor academic achievement in her children’s school. The quality of education at the school may have been impacted by circumstances there, but what really broke her trust in the school principal is that the school’s administration had not been transparent about its operations
Trust isn’t a competition. It doesn’t depend upon being the best. It depends upon being authentic, which means being honest about what’s happening instead of pretending that things are better than they really are. Trust is built when people and organizations are open about their shortcomings, instead of hiding problems from public view in an effort to fake-it-til-you-make-it. A trusting relationship doesn’t depend upon things being perfect, or, as Laura puts it, rainbows-and-butterflies. When people are seeking trust, they’re looking for signs that things are as they appear to be.
Laura:
I think you lose trust in somebody when they aren't willing to disclose information about issues that are going on that affect your children, and anyone that sends their kids to school wants to feel comfortable with the school that their children are in. I mean, there's a trust there, and we're in the age of mass shootings where people show up and kill children at schools so people get paranoid. You want to trust that where your children are safe. And if there are issues where there's potential, there was some heightened conflict in the school at the time. I mean, it was not like a safety hazard, but it could be an emotional hazard for some of the kids. It was really kept very quiet. And then you don't really trust the judgment of the people who are in charge. So, you don't really want to leave the most important people in your life in their care. That's definitely a huge trust issue.
My children were in the school for years, and you build trust over time. It's something that develops. Other people in the community have experience with schools and they are fond of the schools and kids have good outcomes at the school. So there's like a baseline level of trust that is established just based on your experiences or other people's experiences. When that becomes eroded, I think it's hard to build back. I think it is an individual. It's challenging to trust. Some people are more trusting than other people. And I know for me I find that it's hard for me to establish trust. So having the baseline be lower, I feel like I need more evidence and more experience to build that trust over time. And then, if somebody or an institution violates that trust, it will always be something that that's haunting in the background. And I don't know that it'll ever come back. When you catch someone in a in a lie that's significant and made a huge difference in the direction that you're going with that person, how do you get back to trusting them? That doesn't happen easily, and it might never happen, and then you either have to accept that, well, I'm always going to have this certain level of distrust there.
Jonathan Cook:
Trust is the feeling agreeing upon a version of reality with other people. When things happen that are inconsistent with this shared sense of reality, the common ground that trust had enabled is fractured. This divided sense of reality makes interactions awkward. When distrust develops, even when people had previously interacted with a sense of easy synchronicity, they now feel uncertain about where they stand with each other, and feel the need to check before taking a step forward together.
Trust in a romantic relationship can be established through the kind of long, slow improvised process that Laura describes, or it can be purposefully crafted through explicit negotiations of terms. In the first season of this podcast, we heard from Marie Thouin, who spoke of the emotion of compersion, in which a person feels joy when their romantic partner finds love with somebody else.
Polyamory can be a more complex kind of relationship than monogamy. Many polyamorous people choose to address this complexity by having purposeful conversations about the boundaries of mutually acceptable behavior within their relationships. It isn’t that trust is broken when a person in a polyamorous relationship has sex with someone else. Instead, polyamorous people trust that such additional sexual relationships will be practiced honestly and openly, according to agreed upon rules. Marie explains:
Marie Thouin:
If someone is in a relationship in order to experience compersion for that particular partner, they would have to feel like there is a foundation of security, and that there is trust and communication happening, that the relationship is solid, on good grounds, in good standing, so to speak, and there is no reason to feel like my partner is playing behind my back and not telling me what's really happening, and they're actually planning to leave me.
There has to be trust. There have to be relationship agreements. So, when people go outside of monogamy, oftentimes they are a little bit confused about, well, what rules are we playing by now? You know, what are the agreements that we want to make? Because there are so many ways to construct non-monogamous relationships, so having agreements and respecting them, and having really solid communications come communication with that partner so that you feel like everything is out in the open. There's no secrets. There's no hiding. There's no feeling excluded.
Jonathan Cook:
People in polyamorous relationships can feel cheated on, even if it’s not the same kind of cheating that monogamous couples worry about. Cheating can be about trying to hide a romantic relationship, or it can be about entering into a relationship with another person whose personality creates a new sense of tension for everyone involved.
Marie Thouin:
If I feel that this person that you dating is out to try to steal you away from me and I don't trust them, or if I feel like they're kind of a drain, maybe they're someone who experiences a lot of drama and you're constantly, you know, over there spending all of your energy trying to support that partner, they feel like it's pulling away from our plate, it's going to be harder to feel compersion because I feel like all of a sudden this person over here is not someone that is bringing more to the plate. They're actually someone who is kind of taking away from the plate.
Jonathan Cook:
Trust in any kind of romantic relationship can be challenging to maintain, but romantic love isn’t the only setting in which the feeling of trust matters. Trust is essential in professional relationships as well. Kristen Donnelly, founder of Abbey Research in Philadelphia, talked with me about her experiences with some of the difficulties in establishing trust in people who work for her company. Part of the problem, she explained, is that people carry the memories of their previous bosses, many of whom were not worthy of trust.
Kristen Donnelly:
Trust is really rough to build, but necessary. Fundamentally, everybody is doing the best they can, by your definition or not. These are some just straight, simple, straightforward statements that I have found to be true throughout, again, research, life experience and gut reactions.
If we were doing this in life, let's say that this was an online dating thing, and you and I were. We're doing. We're doing dating. You are not just Jonathan. You are every ex-boyfriend I've ever had, and you're not just my ex-boyfriend. You're my father and my brother and my expectations that have been filled by a whole lot of other things. You are all of those people at once. So, what I need to learn and what building trust is, is discovering what pieces are you and what pieces are the things I put on you, and that takes time.
Jonathan Cook:
Kristen points out that our judgments of the trustworthiness of people we’re just beginning to interact with are made according to our history of interactions with other people in similar situations. That may not seem fair, but then, the emotion of trust isn’t about fairness. It’s about balancing self-protection with the need for social connection. Trust is an emotion, not a rational calculation of the actual risk of betrayal. Despite the pretense of cold, dispassionate calculations in corporate life, emotional judgments of trust influence decisions in the business world as much as in personal interactions.
Kristen Donnelly:
It cracks me up in a certain way that all of the things we talk about externally in organizations, innovation is important, people do business with people they trust, is stuff we forget inside organizations. People do business with people they trust includes your coworkers. Innovation that you're doing on your product line also needs to be how you handle your employees.
Trust is knowing someone enough to be able to trust them. Working here, for instance, we have made the promise to our employees that we do not want them to have their email on their phones and check it after work. If we see them replying to an email at 9:00 at night, they actually get jokingly written up for it because none of their names are on the building. That is none of their jobs. That is the job that my brother and I have stepped into, that we don't ever go off the clock. We agreed to that life. I say that in every interview. I say that in every on-boarding. People usually cry or get really excited. That's often cited as why people join us. The First eight months, ten months, two years, sometimes I'll have conversations where they still don't believe that I'm right. They still don't completely trust it, because I'm not me. I'm their old boss. And so, I look at them and I say, “No, I really meant it. That email did not need to be replied to at 9:00 at night, and if it did, we've talked about this. You just text forward it and text me and I handle it. Your job at 9:00 at night is to be a mom.”
Jonathan Cook:
The trouble with trust as a motivator in business is that it’s routinely undermined by the profit motive. Businesses are organized to make money first, with all other factors, including human-to-human connection, considered only secondarily. It’s a valid strategy to attempt to use trusting human connection as a method for supporting financial profit, but such an approach is a long-term effort, and it’s always going to be tempting for business leaders to make impressive short-term profits by reducing investment in trusting relationships or exploiting trust through deceptive measures until reserves of goodwill are depleted.
Business leaders who want to build trusting relationships with workers, Kristen points out, need to engage in repeated reassurances that the company actually means what it says.
Kristen Donnelly:
You're giving these people new data. I'm not just who I say I am. Look, I'm who I say I am. You’re overriding the other evidence in their brain that can say, no, this person could still do this. This person could still do this. This person will do this. No, no, no, no. You're helping people understand the difference between the narrative they're making up in their head, the story they're telling themselves an actual factual reality.
I've had female employees who got fired during their maternity leave. So can you imagine the emotions they have when they have their maternity leave with us? And the number of times, some of them the number of emails I got during their mat leave, I can come back. No, your doctor is not cleared for work. Your job is, say, the number of times I spend someone's maternity leave saying your job is safe, your priority is your body makes me rage at every other boss they've had. The world has taught them that this is how we treat women who have babies. It's my job to build the trust that I'm different.
Jonathan Cook:
Kristen works directly with her employees to cultivate their trust. It is inevitable, though, that businesses would try to make this process more efficient, taking shortcuts to support trusting relationships at scale with a fraction of the investment of time and money.
A few years ago, the business world heard wild boasts about a new kind of digital technology that, it was promised, would revolutionize everything. Promoted under different names, from “affective computing” to “emotion AI”, new software was supposed to be able to automatically detect emotions after a quick scan of the human body. Using cues such as facial expression, heart rate, body posture and skin conductivity, computers would soon, it was said, be able to detect people’s true feelings, even when the people being scanned weren’t aware that they had those feelings.
One of the technology’s most prolific promoters, Rana el Kaliouby, bragged to the IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, that, “all of our devices will have an emotion chip and will be able to read and respond to our emotions. We will interact with our technologies—be it our phones, cars, AI assistants, or even social robots—in the same way we interact with one another: with emotion! I think that, in three to five years, we will forget what it was like when our devices didn’t understand emotion. It’s similar to how we all assume that our phones today are location aware and have GPS chipsets in them. Someday soon, it will be the same for emotions.”
In three to five years, all our digital devices will have an emotion chip, and we will forget what it was like when our devices didn’t understand emotion? Rana el Kaliouby said this way back in 2016, seven years ago.
It never happened. Like the promises Elizabeth Holmes made to Theranos investors, the predictions of Rana el Kaliouby never came true. What did happen was a meta-analysis of scientific studies of the claims of emotion AI companies like the one founded by Rana el Kaliouby. That meta-analysis concluded that the theoretical foundations of emotion AI were not supported by available evidence.
That didn’t interfere with the hype, of course. There were even companies that sold dog collars that their manufacturers’ said would display the emotions of the pets who wore them, just by measuring heart rate and temperature. Rana el Kaliouby is still out there, giving speeches and making promises about the dazzling future of automatic emotion detection, which is always, just a few short years away.
How can anyone trust what Rana el Kaliouby has to say any longer, given her track record of using pseudoscience to sell products that don’t work?
Trust isn’t established through facts and logic. Trust isn’t a matter of scientific reality that we calculate through a rational examination of the available evidence. Trust is a feeling that we have, an emotional frame of mind that makes us feel that we ought to believe in something, that we can rely upon it.
One of the reasons that emotion-detecting artificial intelligence doesn’t work is that emotion is bigger than just a facial expression or biometric measurement. Emotion isn’t something we possess in isolation, like skin temperature or a fast heart rate. Emotion is a relational experience. Emotions are aroused in physical and social contexts as a result of our interactions with the people and places around us.
That’s how we feel trust. Trust is not something that people can simply feel, on their own. We feel trust in other people and in things. Even when we feel that we trust in ourselves, the emotion is cultivated through a sort of self-externalization, as we try to consider ourselves as if we were outside observers of our own lives.
Trust isn’t a thing that we can simply observe with a camera and a digital algorithm. Trust can’t be isolated to any single place and time, because it’s a feeling about the future that’s based in the past history of our relationship with the world around us. It’s not possible to operationalize trust through any measurement of simple physiological impulses, because trust is a feeling about our relationships with people and things in the world beyond us. We feel trust out there in the world as well as within ourselves.
So, the companies that market artificial intelligence systems that claim to automatically make digital measurements of human emotion simply don’t include trust within their lists of basic emotions that matter to business. This doesn’t mean that trust is actually unimportant in business. It’s simply neglected by businesses that are more interested in automation than actually connecting with their customers and employees. Sadly, these days, that’s the dominant attitude in most corporations.
Not everyone in business is willing to abandon trust for the pursuit of a quick profit, however. As founder of Open Mind Strategy, Robin Hafitz is working to foster empathy in business. Empathy is fundamental to trust. We become trustworthy when we pay attention to the feelings of others, becoming able to respond in a way that matches their needs. That kind of responsiveness is what business really needs.
Robin Hafitz:
Open Mind Strategy is essentially an insights company. We do mostly hybrid research, quantitative research like surveys and trackers, and also qualitative research like focus groups and IDIs.
We talk a lot with our clients about consumer empathy. It is what tends to separate us from other research companies and what you get with an approach that sort of gives you, with a going in of wanting to come out with consumer empathy. It leads to deeper conversations, it leads to more trust between us as researchers and our respondents, and so we get deeper, better answers when we're talking to people we're serving.
Jonathan Cook:
Trust is a part of effective business practices, Robin says, even in the aspects of business that are being overrun by social ratings and recommendation algorithms.
Robin Hafitz:
Trust certainly has a very commercial aspect. Many companies are rather obsessive about their NPS, their net promoter score. Their net promoter score is about whether or not you would recommend something to somebody else. People will generally not recommend something to somebody else unless they trust it, and in the sort of world of brands, in the world of products trust is that you got what you paid for or more than what you paid for, and that you got what you expected and that you got what you expected more than once. You don't build trust with your first interaction with the product. You build trust with a product or a service over repeat interactions.
Jonathan Cook:
The cultivation of trust in business isn’t always ethical, Robin warns. Trusting feelings can be exploited by those who seek to gain power by manipulating others.
Robin Hafitz:
I think trust is a complicated, I think between people, it's a complicated emotion, but that you can jumpstart it. Of course, con artists are really good at jumpstarting it early, you know, if they're successful con artists. That usually means that they will say something to you that's very vulnerable about themselves. That wouldn't seem like you would say it to somebody unless you were willing to be vulnerable or in trouble or something along those lines.
Jonathan Cook:
Like so many other aspects of human experience, con artists’ false performance of vulnerability as a cynical tactic to gain the trust of intended victims has now been automated in the form of large language models such as ChatGPT, which routinely convinces people to share deeply personal information by imitating displays of human emotion. These systems of artificial intelligence hijack our instinct to extend trust in response to prolonged conversation.
Robin Hafitz:
The question of trusting ChatGPT is like, it's pretty clear that you can trust it to give you a really interesting response to an interesting prompt, but it also is clear that you really shouldn't trust it as something to write a paper that you're going to hand in a teacher to unless you happen to have access to, you know, some sort of bot screen to see if it'll pass, but Google keeps its bot screening secret, so that's not known. I know people who are using it for writing prompts, putting together the pieces, then running it through bot screening, then humanizing the pieces that are getting flagged and writing things faster than they would have written them otherwise. But they're in essence mimicking their own voice. They’re the proof readers of this stuff, and so that kind of leads back to a question. The question is, what is it that you're trusting? I mean, if you're trusting that your student is handing in something that they wrote 100% by hand, you know, in their own language, um, if that's what your requirement is, then obviously you got to be pretty vigilant.
Jonathan Cook:
As Robin points out, even as systems like ChatGPT manipulate our propensity to offer trust in response to conversation, they also encourage their human users to engage in untrustworthy behavior, offering up automatically generated text as if it’s their own.
Shannon Haskins is a mental health therapist and a massage therapist living in Lansing, New York. Shannon told me that she has noticed a recent decline in trust.
Shannon Haskins:
A lot's changed in the last seven or eight years. The climate and everything, I think has caused a lot of distrust in the media. That was more recent, like a huge shift in trust.
Where we're at with technology and just, whether it's TV or even again, I don't watch much TV, but even just the Internet, there's so much information and it's so easy to click on the next thing. We know what's going on around the world practically in a nanosecond, and we've also gotten to a place where we question what we're reading. We don't know what's fake or what's real anymore. It’s hard to know what to even trust in terms of news and journalism. So, we can choose. We can choose to watch as much or as little as we want, but it's hard to avoid it these days unless you're completely off technology.
Jonathan Cook:
Trust builds connection, but trust is also dependent upon connection. Shannon discusses the way that global media such as television and the internet, even as it connects us to sources of information, weakens our connection to a certain sense of shared reality based in direct experience. We see plenty of facts, but they’re at a distance, and so it feels difficult to know the truth.
Trust is grounded in truth. In a way, trust is the emotional dedication to a model of what’s true.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said that language is fossilized poetry. “Though the origin of most of our words is forgotten,” he said, “each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.”
What did Emerson mean by this?
The way I interpret his words, it has something to do with a hidden richness in our everyday language. The etymologist studies the history of language in the way that a paleontologist studies the history of life. Each of us lives in the moment, experiencing our bodies on our own terms, not thinking of the tremendous depth of change over time that has made each part of our bodies the way that it is. In a similar way, the words we use have evolved into different forms over time.
Often, different words that we use have a common ancestor, a root word perhaps thousands of years old that gave part of its original meaning to each of its descendants, each in a different way. Word histories show us these fossilized associations, which in turn reveal to us poetic metaphors hidden in the everyday words.
In a poem, words often have multiple simultaneous meanings. Poetic language doesn’t simply accomplish a task. It doesn’t move in a straight line.
Words aren’t just codes that people use to communicate in the moment. Words are traditions that have developed over hundreds of thousands of years of human struggle. Our languages are repositories of wisdom.
There’s a depth to our language. When we speak, we speak in metaphors, even when we don’t understand that’s what we’re doing.
So it is with trust and truth. When we speak of trust, we speak of our sense of truth. Both trust and truth are derived from an ancient proto-Indo-European root word, dreu. The meaning of dreu is revealed by other of its descendants. Duration and duress speak to the way that we deal with challenges over time, a theme that’s verified by another child of dreu: Endurance. The word truce, signifying an agreement to end conflict, is another member of this etymological family.
Truth is a particularly important concept in this linguistic family, especially in its manifestation as a true line. A true line is perfectly straight. In construction, a true line is often created by holding a weight at the end of a string. The power of gravity holds it true. If we hold ourselves true to this line, our lives may waver from it now and then, but we can feel sure that we will return to its center. As we travel the path set by that true line, we feel that we know where we’ve come from and where we’re going. We know the truth of who we are, and where we fit in the world.
Trust is a truth that endures, even under duress, for a long duration.
There’s another idea that’s hidden even deeper within trust, and it was hinted at in my conversation with Shannon. When I asked her about what she does feel trust in, Shannon didn’t hesitate to answer. She feels trust in the natural world.
Shannon Haskins:
The natural world, the sun will always rise. The sun will always set.
It just feels factual. Constant. It's a given. It's stable. You can count on it. I think humans are more flawed in that way, right? Journalism media is more flawed in that way. It’s all biased. So maybe there's something about the sun that doesn't have that bias. It just is.
Jonathan Cook:
The sun just is. It endures. Yes, it travels across the sky and disappears during the night, but we trust that it will return to start another day. There is something about nature that seems especially trustworthy. To explore this aspect of trust, we return to Betti Rooted Lionheart, who provides us with this emotion’s deepest metaphor.
Betti Rooted Lionheart:
One of the most important things that my shamanic teacher, her name is Bekki Shining Bearheart, that she teaches people when she teaches us to shamanic journey is grounding, centering and shielding. That's like the very first thing. So, for me, grounding is basically imagining or becoming a tree and sinking my roots into the earth, very specifically sinking a taproot all the way to the core of the Earth first and starting a energy exchange between myself and the core of the Earth. And then after that is established, sending other roots in other directions into the earth.
When I'm not calm, it's a way I can help myself find calm, find some amount of peace, find trust. It helps with a feeling connected to myself and who I am, and making peace with who I'm not. There's a lot of, I feel like in this world, there can be a lot of who we ought to be. It lets that fall away.
For me, it's trust in that which is greater than myself. I am just one small molecule or cell or whatever microscopic analogy, to the greater whole that encompasses the cosmos.
Jonathan Cook:
When I asked Betti about trust, she spoke of trees, of their roots in the ground. When I asked Betti to explain the connection she sees between trust and trees, she told me of a moment in the woods where she lives.
Betti Rooted Lionheart:
One time when I was walking in the forest here, I stopped and spent time with an oak tree. I think I just sat with it or stood with it, touching it. Trees are here to give us love, and not just as humans, but all of creation. Their purpose is to give us love, and they do that by connecting, rooting into the earth, and by reaching up into the sky and pulling love energy from both places, from the earth and from the cosmos, and bringing it here for our benefit.
Jonathan Cook:
In what ways are trees here to give us love? In the first season of this podcast, there was an entire episode devoted to the emotion of love. One of the central ideas of that episode is that love can mean many different things. Romantic love and parental love are just two of many expressions of love. One expression of love could be a calm and steady sense of presence that provides a sense of reliability. That’s what trust is all about.
Trees are not conscious, at least not in the way that humans are, but they do embody an enduring trustworthy presence.
Trees don’t walk about like we do. Through their roots, they build a connection to the ground, and a consistent place in the world. Trees live much longer than we do, and become landmarks that hold true for generations. Trees bend with the wind, but their wood is strong and endures all but the worst of storms. Their roots hold them firm. Every day, we can wake with the sun trusting that a tree will be where it was the day before.
Betti Rooted Lionheart:
I have a, very simply, almost daily ritual of making a cup of tea and sitting at what I call an altar every morning, and my altar has candles on it. It has all kinds of objects that remind me of my spirit guides and different aspects of healing work that has moved through my life. When I sit there in the morning with my tea, I ground, center, and shield so that I can start my day from that grounded place of trust.
Jonathan Cook:
Betti’s daily ritual is a symbolic alignment with the nature of a tree. Through this ritual, Betti is finding trust, remembering her figurative roots, and becoming grounded.
Words are fossilized poetry, and in the poetry of trust, we discover that trees are metaphors of trust. Trees are, like trust and truth and endurance and duress, children of dreu.
When a person talks about trust, they speak in that one word a poem of truth found in groves of trees that bend with the wind without breaking, rooted to the ground while reaching for the sky, crossing the boundary between the eternal earth and the ever-flowing wind.
This way of looking at communication, meaning, and emotion, reaches deeper to levels of more evocative ideas than the superficial knowledge that can be attained through automated scans of facial expressions. Some people in Silicon Valley don’t think that this difference matters. They’re willing to label emotion as nothing more than a curvature of the mouth and a contraction around the eyes.
When I talk to people about their emotions, however, they tell me a different story. They don’t tell me about their facial expressions. They tell me about the internal impact of their experiences, and what that teaches them about how to live. It’s in those feelings, not in a frown or a smile, that the motivations for their behavior are to be found. Their emotions, like trees, have deep hidden roots even as they extend their visible branches out into the world.
Next week, I’ll be discussing another emotion that has its origins in the natural world. Next week’s episode of Stories of Emotional Granularity will consider the emotion of flux.
Until then, thanks for listening.