These thoughts were counter to the way I’d learned that trust worked. Yet as I continued to watch and experience how this worked in real life, I couldn’t help but question common “truths” of trust. Statements like, “It takes time to rebuild trust once broken” seemed unlikely when an action of trust would immediately follow. “I can’t trust you with anything” was increasingly confusing as I witnessed a trust leap in the next encounter. My tragic divorce altered my life’s path in many significant ways. It changed the way I observed the world and those around me. I began gaining new insights into how people belong and build community, how organic systems are sometimes altered into fabricated institutional systems, and how observing people, with as little bias as possible, leads to unconventional understandings of the natural universe. 1 The system of trust and distrust is no different. Separating trust from distrust was the first disruptive observation and has (so far) taken the longest to develop and understand. Trust And Distrust are Separate Entities At first, it seemed absurd to consider trust and distrust as two separate, unattached entities. I understood trust and distrust as opposite ends of one spectrum, or balancing on a scale. It seemed obvious that if you have more of one, you would have less of the other. But the more I let myself observe people’s actions, free of mainstream presuppositions, the more it became clear: trust and distrust operate independently, react to different stimuli, and speak different languages. However, beyond my personal observations, the existing research consistently married trust and distrust as two sides of the same coin. Until recently, there wasn’t “hard evidence” that these two
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