Repairing trust starts with what we do

I recently completed Clearer Thinking’s Effective Trust Repair tool. It walks you through what makes a good apology and how to give or ask for one.¹

I’ve tried a bunch of their other tools too, including their personality test. But this one helped me think about something we all deal with: how to have better relationships and build more trust with each other.

As Muslims, and as people in general, I think this is something worth learning.

What part of trust was broken?

One of the things I learned was the acronym BRAVING. It’s a framework developed by Brené Brown that breaks trust into seven parts.²

• Boundaries: respecting what someone is and isn’t comfortable with.
• Reliability: doing what you say you’ll do, consistently.
• Accountability: owning your mistakes, apologizing, and making amends.
• Vault: keeping other people’s private information private.
• Integrity: acting according to your values.
• Nonjudgment: being able to ask for help and speak honestly without judging each other.
• Generosity: allowing a generous interpretation of someone’s intentions and checking with them instead of assuming the worst.

That helped me understand why just saying “you broke my trust” might not explain enough. What part of trust was broken? What actually happened?

The exercise asks you to write about a situation where someone broke your trust, or where you broke someone else’s. Then you work through it. I found that useful because you’re applying what you’re learning to an example from your own life.

What makes an apology useful?

These were the five things I took away from the exercise:

1. Say you’re sorry.
2. Take responsibility for what you did.
3. Explain what happened without making excuses.
4. Offer to repair the harm.
5. Say how you’ll change your behavior in the future.

It’s useful whether you’re the one apologizing or the one receiving an apology. It gives you a way to think about what needs to be addressed, instead of just waiting for someone to say the right words.

What stood out to me was that last part. What are you going to do differently?

Do we do what we say?

This reminded me of the passage in Surat al-Saff where Allah questions believers who say things they do not do, and strongly condemns that mismatch between words and actions.³

I have to apply that to myself too. If I expect someone else to keep their word, do I keep mine? If I want someone to take responsibility, am I willing to take responsibility?

In my article about preparing for marriage, I talked about writing down the characteristics you want in another person, then looking at yourself. Are you working on those qualities too?

You need to be what you want. If you want honesty, be honest. If you want someone who listens, learn how to listen. I think it’s hypocritical to demand things from someone else while refusing to work on them yourself.

That same question applies to repairing trust. Am I willing to give the kind of apology I want to receive? And am I willing to follow through afterward?

Understanding each other

I want to write more about relationships, including how we understand each other, communicate, and apologize.

One book I recommend is John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. It helped me think about how men and women may respond differently when something is bothering them. One of its ideas is that men retreat into their “cave” and want space, while women want to talk things through.⁴

I find that useful as a starting point, but people aren’t all the same. I still need to understand the person in front of me. Do they need some time alone, someone to listen, or help thinking through a problem?

For me, that connects to repairing trust. Learning what someone needs can help us communicate more clearly. And when we’ve hurt each other, we still need to apologize and follow through on what we say we’ll change.

I’ve made some videos about this book on my YouTube channel before. They’re older, and I’d like to make new ones that explain these ideas better. I want to keep learning about this and sharing what helps me.

Learn how to do it

Sometimes we want better relationships without learning how to have them.

The Quran includes Allah’s instruction to the Prophet ﷺ to ask Him for an increase in knowledge:⁵

For me, this is a reminder to keep learning and to use what I learn.

The Effective Trust Repair exercise helped me understand what I should look for in an apology, and what I need to do when I’m the one who has broken someone’s trust.

Try it yourself. Think of a situation where trust was broken, then work through the exercise with that example in mind.

References

The Quran quotations and paraphrases use The Qur’an, translated by M. A. S. Abdel Haleem. The connections to my own relationships are personal reflections.