Trust Is Like A Chair: A Metaphor

Trust is a big topic nowadays. Trusting others. Trusting ourselves. It all feels hard. My clients also talk about not understanding why it’s hard to rebuild trust-whether it’s with someone who has hurt us or with someone new. I offer this metaphor to help illustrate what trust feels like for most of us.

Suppose you walk into my room and you see a chair. Up until this point, you have no reason to have any special feelings about the chair so you sit in it. Then imagine that the chair breaks. You may feel shocked, you may have hurt yourself, you may feel embarrassed. Imagine that you come back the next week and “the chair” is back and appears to be in one piece. I know that some part of you will be suspicious of the chair. You might be willing to sit in it, depending on the level of hurt, shock, or embarrassment you felt last week. If that chair breaks a second time, there is almost nothing that will convince you to give it a third go. However, if you begin to work on the broken chair and find the weak points while also mending the broken parts, you will likely choose to sit in the chair once more because you built it yourself.

The old adage “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me,” comes to mind in this moment. We don’t like to experience broken trust. It hurts. We want to protect ourselves from hurt. That is normal. When we begin to think about our natural response to a physical hurt, it begins to make more sense on how we might respond to an emotional hurt that can come from trust being broken.

This metaphor continues:

Now imagine that you come into the room and a new chair is presented to you. It looks like the first, but you know it’s a different chair. Some people will actually struggle to sit in the second chair even though it isn’t the same because it “looks like” the first.

This is true for trust as well. Our brains are hardwired to protect us from both physical and emotional harm. Which means, when we experience hurt or broken trust, our brains will pay attention to details that may have nothing to do with why “the chair” was broken. This is done in an attempt to prevent future harm. So when our brains recognize one of these “false flags,” it doesn’t matter if it was the cause of the hurt or not, we will have a warning system activate. If you go through a painful break-up from a person who loved to drink Mountain Dew, and then your new partner buys a pack of Mountain Dew you could get scared and think, “the chair is going to break again.”

In these moments where your warning system kicks on unnecessarily, think about how the chairs are different. Not every chair will break on you.

And, if you do find yourself in a multiple-chairs-breaking scenario, it might be helpful to look at where you’re getting your chairs. Chances are, if you’re getting them from the dump, they were bound to break anyway.

The chair metaphor works to help us identify which chairs or trust we want to repair and which places it is better to just surrender the chair. If you are in a chair that breaks multiple times and even in your repair process, it feels like the pieces aren’t holding together, it may be time to leave that chair alone.

While there may be times that we need to let go of a broken chair, there is hope in fixing trust.

One of my favorite authors, Brene Brown has developed a model for trust called the Anatomy of Trust that can be our template for repairing the chair. In this model, she highlights 7 areas where we build and break trust and how we can have conversations about each of these areas to help repair trust.

Sometimes, even our own trust chair needs to be repaired. Understanding the nuts and bolts of your chair-the areas where you struggle to trust yourself and in the areas you have a strong trust-can help you do just that. If you’re interested in more information about the Anatomy of Trust, I encourage you to check out her website or read Rising Strong as she talks about what trust looks like and how we can build (or rebuild) that both within ourselves and with others.

If you feel there are areas in your own life that trust has been broken and you want extra support in rebuilding this trust, reach out to me. I am happy to help in any way that I can.