More recently we’ve been looking at trust and betrayal in relationships, and I want
to talk some about
why.
There’s a lot of couples that we see, and we try to teach them to be like the masters,
and try to
understand how they’ve gotten into these stuck places in their relationship, and maybe
we’re too late
for some couples.
Too much water under the bridge.
We know the average wait time from the time
somebody notices that there’s a real problem in their relationship to when they get any
kind of help is
6 years.
That’s a long time.
But maybe, you know, there’s something else going on that we’re missing,
and being able to help couples.
Okay, so we can help about 70 to 75% of couples, and they stay changed
after our therapy or our workshops.
But what about the other 25 to 30%?
How do we deal with this
problem of a lot of couples relapsing after treatment?
Not using these skills?
Not really, even though
they know what to do, not doing it?
Well as we did focus groups around the United States, at every social class level and every
ethnic
and racial group in the United States, as we wound up being involved in the Administration
of Children
and Families looking at relationships, particularly for couples about to have a baby.
And we found also in
our work with the army, looking at soldiers who are deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan,
we’ve been doing
that for the past 2 years, that trust and betrayal was the number one issue.
And as I started looking at
this, I went back and looked at all the conversations in these new relationships of, we started
a study
in Seattle a couple of months after the wedding, and just about all of the conflicts were about
trust.
And you can think of there being a fan that opens up, where every region of the fan is
a different area
of trust.
That would describe all of our conflict discussions.
Can I trust you to be there for me when I’m
upset?
Can I trust you to listen to me when I’m upset?
Can I trust you to choose me over your mother?
Can I trust you to work for our family?
Can I trust you to choose me over your friends?
Can I trust you to
not take drugs and go back to those bad habits?
Can I trust you to not cheat on me?
Can I trust you to be
sexually faithful?
Can I trust you to respect me?
To help with things in the house?
To really be involved
with our children?
All of these were issues that couples were working on in the first couple years of their
relationship.
So trust appears to be very interesting and very important, but how do we define it?
What is trust and what are its dynamics?
And betrayal we think of as some critical event like an affair that’s revealed in
a heterosexual relationship.
But there are other dynamics to betrayal.
There’s something we can point to so we can understand this.
Process.
How do you measure these things?
How do you establish them?
By measuring stuff, then you get a recipe for changing it, right?
So because Bob and I were measuring the differences between disasters in the masters is when you
measure it, you can define it then you can tell people how to change it because you know
what it is.
You know, trust is one of the most common used words in the English language.
It’s number 949.
And when I went into Amazon.com and typed in “trust,” I was surprised that there
was 36,000 books
available.
Now, a lot of these were on, you know, trust used in business, how do you set up a trust,
but
most of them were really about trust in relationships, and trust in general.
On PsychInfo, which is the
database that psychologists use and sociologists use to do a lit review, there were 96,000
references to
“trust.”
Now, commonly, when we think about trust, we’re really thinking about dependability,
honesty.
Dependability’s not enough by the way.
I can trust you to always be evil.
That doesn’t quite work.
I have
to trust you to be moral.
I have to trust you to care for me.
And it turns out that actually when social
psychologists that ask people in relationships, “What is the most desirable quality you’re
looking for in
a partner when you’re dating,” trustworthiness is number one.
Interesting.
I mean, it’s not, you know,
being sexy or attractive, it’s really being able to trust somebody.