Ok, you fucked up and didn’t heed the advice in the previous post, and now you’re experiencing the utterly unpleasant experience of distrust.
Let experience be the solution; it’s not called the best teacher for no reason. Actually, in the case of trust, its uniqueness makes it the only option.
Often we think of our experiences as being a conglomeration leading to the present state of who we are, and how and why we are (well, at least I’ve had that thought). We realize that learning about something from a book or talk is very different from the “hands-on” input we receive by actually doing.
Think of catching a baseball. All the learning of physics, trajectories, mass, inertia, force, and physiological mechanics of body movement can provide an understanding of what makes up the act of catching a baseball. But until a ball is actually thrown to you and you actually make an attempt (hopefully one that is successful), do you know what it’s like to catch a baseball?
There is no substitute for doing (experiencing) the actual act of catching the ball.
But let’s step away from how experience relates to us and consider how experience is the best teacher for others.
Consider the situation of broken trust in a relationship. The one who broke the trust can explain how it will never happen again and how it happened in the first place. Promises can be made and constraints set up to prevent the trust from being broken again.
But how does all this relate to the other person? The same way in which learning all the book knowledge of catching a baseball explains how to catch a baseball. There needs to be actual experience—experience of the offending partner not breaking trust. This, of course, requires time; most experience does. And like most experience, the reinforcement (trust) comes from consistency across time.
Very often the offending person immediately understands this experiential necessity, while the offended person demands immediate reparation—this is not possible. Frustration often manifests in the offending person, taking the form of asking what more can be done to ensure the trust will not be broken. The offended person cannot provide an answer, as the answer is: nothing else can be done now. Experience, extending forth into the future alone, is the only thing that will suffice.
Here we see the importance for both people to recognize the necessity and sufficiency of experience.
Perhaps explaining how the trust was broken and how it will not be in the future is necessary (we all clamor for a good narrative), but it is not sufficient. What is, is the experience, consistently over time, of trustful behavior.
Perhaps our impatience clouds this realization—the wanting to do something now to fix the situation by the offending person, and the wanting of the situation to be fixed by the offended person. We do seem to have an uncanny tendency to want to move forward in life, leaving situations often unresolved in doing so.
But the point is that even though there may be a want for something, that does not mean there is a ready-made means that will satisfy that want.