After looking up the word "trust" in many dictionaries, I found many heavy weight words associated with it......reliance, integrity, virtue, faith, help, confidence, support, comfort, consolation, reliability, trustworthiness, fidelity, faithfulness.... Wow....it's no wonder when trust is violated in any relationship, the sacred web, which contains all of these other words within its delicate strands, gets a pretty darn good shake, sometimes tearing a hole so ragged that it is beyond repair for the wounding it delivers.
In his decades of working with couples, John Gottman, author and well respected marriage therapist (and who I had the honor of studying with), says that just about all conflicts are about trust. "And you can think of there being a fan that opens up .. where every region of the fan is an area of trust. That would describe all of our conflict discussions."
In his book "The Science of Trust" Gottman identifies the following trust related...read more