On the subject of trust…

My mind is whirling around the subject of trust today. More specifically, when trust is broken, how do you get it back? Or can you ever repair that kind of damage?

My first few years of college, I had several really hard lessons in lost trust that came within about a two year period. I’ll never forget moving in with one of my best friends from my hometown into our college dorm. I was a little worried about having a roommate, but excited too. I only had one sibling, who was eight years younger than myself, so most of my life I had been an only child and I’d never shared a room. My roommate had three other sisters, all close in age, all squeezed into a tiny house and she had always shared a room.

So, I thought I would be the one who struggled with space issues and the need for alone time. As it turns out, and I’m still not sure why, it was the opposite–my roommate had trouble living with me. First, it was the whole schedule issue. I am and have always been a night owl. I didn’t realize that she was the polar opposite of this. At 9 p.m. each night, just when things started buzzing on our dorm floor, she would announce it was bedtime and cut every light off. It didn’t matter if I was sitting and doing something or not. It was bedtime.

Inevitably, I would end up sitting in the hall typing my papers. Thankfully, because of her inflexibility, I made good friends on the floor who let me come and hang in their rooms when I didn’t have studying to do. I’d study in the atrium area that connected the boys dorm to our girls dorm. I made some great guy friends that way as well!

But, back onto trust. During that time, both my roommate and I kept a journal. We both knew one another had one and often wrote in them at the same time in our room. I don’t know why it never occurred to me to wonder what she was writing in her journal. College, for me, was a rather self-absorbed time where I was just so happy to be living my own life and on my own, that I didn’t worry about what others thought of me until it slapped me in the face. And, oh, did I get a few slaps!

I don’t remember how I suddenly clued in to the fact that she was reading my journal when I wasn’t there, but something was said that laid out my suspicions. My first instinct was to get back at her by going to read HER journal. Well, either I couldn’t find it or she had written nothing in it (I forget). So, I decided to fight fire with fire and set a trap for her. I wanted proof that she was actually betraying my trust in that way, and deep inside I think I hoped that I’d find she wasn’t. I had grown up with a mother who went through my sister’s and my personal things, read our notes to friends, and spied on our phone calls. I needed to feel someone could respect my privacy for a change.

So, I learned to use my words as a weapon that day. I wrote and wrote, my pen spilling out really mean and hateful words that I did not feel at all but that I knew would sting enough for her to not be able to contain her hurt. Looking back, it was very immature of me, but at the time I felt like I had to find out if she was betraying my trust. I had written some private thoughts about a boy we were mutual friends with, and I could tell by how he’d cooled my friendship right after that maybe she’d shared my unsaid crush with our friend or something.

In the journal, I detailed how I hated living with her. I wrote about how difficult she was, how she had food everywhere and we were getting bugs, and how I hated that every night I got booted out of our dorm. I wrote how everyone on the floor felt sorry for me and how I was tired of watching she and her boyfriend and their P.D.A.s. In short, any negative thought I’d ever had about her, I put out there and I magnified it.

I put the journal on my shelf between the books where it had always lived, feeling a bit guilty and hoping that it would never matter and I would feel silly later for having set the trap. I got ready and left for my mid-morning class. I knew I’d be gone until the afternoon and she got back early that day, but I expected to wait days to find out if she read it.

When I came in from class that afternoon, my Resident Assistant (RA) in the dorm stopped me and said she felt like there were some problems between me and my roommate and that she was waiting for me in our room to have a talk. Apparently, my roommate had not only read the scathing page in my journal, but she’d then gone and cried to the R.A. about it making me look like an awful beeotch? Wonderful.

When I walked in the room, I could see the hurt and anger draped across her like a quilt. In that instant, I felt both rage and remorse and I realized how powerful words can really be. Our talk turned into a screaming vent session at one another for everything we had been keeping bottled up for the 2-3 months of living together. And, then she started bringing up things that were only written in that journal. Things that weren’t totally true that I’d magnified to see if she’d read them.

And, I busted her. “Well, why would you THINK I felt that way? I have never said that. I don’t know WHERE you got that.” She danced around it and then I finally let her off the hook and told her that I’d written that in my journal to SEE if she was betraying my trust. That none of it was true and that I’d put it there purposefully, because I knew she had betrayed my trust. I loudly let her know that, no matter how horrible she’d made me look to the girls on our hall, that she was the one who should be embarrassed and could not be trusted.

And, sadly, I took out some of my years of feeling my privacy completely invaded by my mother on her. She took out her frustrations, most likely, from her sisters on me. And, then we decided we’d finish out the semester together, then try to get rooms on the same floor but alone after that.

Our friendship was never quite the same. Not long after that, we both dealt with unfaithful boyfriends and I suffered through one of the worst back-stabbing experiences in my life by a group of girls on our floor. We did remain friends, but I could never get past that broken trust. It didn’t help that she also continued on with her betrayals, later calling to report to her mother that I’d been out “partying” too much and getting in late at nights, which resulted in an immediate call and scolding from my own mother. It completely broke the “what happens at college stays at college” rule and finished off my feelings of trust in her.

We finished off our college years living with separate friends and separate goals. I had always known we had different plans for our future. She would marry and move back to our hometown area with her high school boyfriend. I would break it off with my high school boyfriend and find my now husband and make a great group of friends through him and through my sorority. But, I always felt some sadness that things had unfolded as they had. I always wondered if I would have tried, if we could have worked through our trust issues and rebuilt the friendship.

That same few years, I dealt with losing trust in my boyfriend and in my own mother. New friends I’d made betrayed and hurt me, leaving scars that took years to heal. I was a changed person by all of this. Guarded. Less willing to fully open up to friends.

I’m still this person today in some ways, although I’ve slowly let some friends in over the years. And, I just wonder, how does one get past a betrayal of trust, no matter how small it may seem? Are you ever able to get past that and get back to fully trusting the person again?

Deeper than that, can anyone really be fully trusted? As sad as that may sound, I sometimes wonder about the answer to that and that scares me, quite frankly…

What are your experiences with broken trust? Have you been able to rebuild and fully trust someone who has let you down in the past? How did you do so? Share!