What do you do when someone breaks a trust?
Trusts can be established or implicit. We trust that people will keep their promises; we trust that our friends won't steal the belongings we leave at a table; we trust that the strangers in bathrooms won't try to kill us. Sometimes, if we're lucky, we have someone we trust more than normal.
If the stranger in the bathroom breaks my trust in strangers in bathrooms, or a friend breaks my trust in friends, I experience a mini-trauma. There's a shock. There's a re-evaluation of the way I see my world. There's a scramble of guilt and doubt and searching to see if maybe I violated some tenet and this break is my fault.
But when someone I trusted more than other people violates the trust I put in them, it's more like getting socked in the gut. A semi-friend can steal my things, or a stranger can try to kill me, and I'll feel for it a bit and move on. But someone I feel safe with can cross a boundary we never defined and leave me gasping in a corner trying to breathe.
How do you deal with a break of trust? How do you work with relationships when people break the rules? How do you move on with life when your world is different?
And when trust is broken, can you mend it? How?
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