What To Do When You Want to Say “I Don’t Trust You” (Hint: Don’t Say It)

“I Don’t Trust You” Is a Nuclear Device. There Are Other Options

Trust Is a Fundamental Human Value

I once worked for about eighteen months with a peer I couldn’t trust. It was awful. I wasted time, effort and attention on parsing his emails, protecting my team and laboriously documenting “agreements” that “clarified the situation” to my boss. Agreements which would be run over an hour after we had met to “ratify” them.

And I felt bad. All the time. There’s just something nasty about not knowing: not knowing what will happen in the next meeting; not knowing if an agreement will be kept; not knowing when another email will come in with another set of bruises and breakages and emotional upset.

And there’s something more than that: having to be around somebody who you don’t fundamentally trust is spooky, uncomfortable, unpleasant.

Trust is a foundation for everything we do as humans. We are necessarily social. We are successful as a species because of our ability to work in groups — to share ideas and then collectively work with them, refining, adding, making them real. And, it turns out, we have evolved specific mechanisms for recognizing and remembering people who “cheat” — that is, break a reciprocal exchange.

Deciding that we don’t trust somebody is wired very deep into our systems. It feels bad because it’s supposed to: if we can’t trust somebody, it threatens the group, and because the group is vital to our existence, a person we can’t trust is an existential threat. That bad, uncomfortable feeling is telling us we need to the fight or run.