Forgiveness has to do with the past, and it's free. One person can forgive.
It takes two to reconcile, but one person can forgive. But while forgiveness is free, trust is earned. Well, that's Dr. Henry Cloud talking about the importance of trust in all of our relationships, and he's back with us today on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly, and I'm John Fuller. John, trust is such a crucial part of the human experience because it leads to intimacy. You think about broken intimacy, you're usually looking at broken trust of some sort. And I think everyone's been a victim of trusting the wrong person.
We have kind of colloquialisms that we use in the culture for that. You know, when someone breaks our trust, who can you trust? Last time, as we talked with our guest, Dr. Henry Cloud, he mentioned a story about a man on an airplane saying, I trust no one, to which he quickly pointed out, you trusted the pilot, right?
You're up at 40,000 feet. So a lot of the trust that we have is unseen. We just trust because we get in the car, we get in the airplane, we do what we do. We trust the food we eat.
How about that? But to nurture and to cultivate trust is going to deepen our ability to have intimacy in our workplace, in our marriages, as a parent. And so that's why we're coming back for day two. Let's just think of Isaiah 12, too, which says, Behold, God is my salvation. I will trust and will not be afraid, for the Lord God is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation. Okay, there's one, trust in God. Yeah, we all need trust, and I'm so glad Dr.
Cloud is back. He's a very popular speaker. He's a clinical psychologist. He's written dozens of books.
Almost 50. I believe so. And the book that forms the foundation for our conversation today is called Trust, Knowing When to Give It, When to Withhold It, How to Earn It, and How to Fix It When it Gets Broken in Life and Business. There are so many applicable principles in this book. Get a copy from us.
We've got details in the show notes. I think it'd be good to mention, too, if you missed last time, you can go back and get that at our website or download the smartphone app. That's another way to do it. Or you can watch YouTube, so that's a good reminder. Henry, welcome back.
It's good to be here. Hey, could you just give us the five essentials or the algorithm as you referred to it last time? Just hit those five.
People can go back and listen to that on YouTube or the smartphone app like I just mentioned. Yeah, you know, when we're trying to figure out can we trust somebody or when trust has been broken, how do we get back, it's really good to have a map. And so what we talked about yesterday was when you look at all the research and what the scriptures say and all of that, I took all of that and tried to do, you know, what's called a factor analysis.
What does all this add up to? And there are really five essentials. The first one is we trust someone when we feel like they really understand me. They know what I need. Kind of empathy, right? The empathy and the deep understanding. What hurts me? What do I need from this relationship?
What do I need from you? So the deep empathy. Number two is we trust somebody when we sense that their motive is not just about them and their agenda, but they've got a motive to look out for me and what's good for me, they're for me.
They actually want me to do well in this relationship. Being selfless. Being selfless and being other oriented, right? The third one is that we trust somebody when we begin to sense that they've got the ability to pull off what I'm entrusting to them. So we can have somebody that's caring and have good motives, but we're going to trust them with a job or trust your teenager to drive a car or trust your, you know, your spouse to, you know, do something for the house.
We got to believe in their abilities. So that's number three. Number four is their character makeup. And what I mean by character is it certainly includes moral character, lying, cheating and stealing. That's foundational. If you don't have that, you don't have trust.
But it's past that because we all know people that we've had bosses or people we work with, they wouldn't lie, cheat or steal, but you wouldn't work with them again. Because other things about their makeup, you know, what's their emotional intelligence? What's their compassion? Their patience? Do they have an anger problem? Are they calm under pressure?
Can they persevere through an issue or do they run from problems or, you know, get into big conflicts? So the character piece, their makeup is very important. And the last one is a track record. You know, we build mental maps in relationships. And when somebody has a track record of being trustworthy, then we tend to trust them again without even thinking about it because the track record, the map drives that.
That's really good. And it's the small things and the big things. We even create these things around that. Like, you know, my word is my bond and things like that. Those are people that carry a certain amount of trustworthiness because what they say is what they do. And we all know that working in the business world or even in your relationships. In your book, you list several fears that hold us back from trusting people. I guess as a precursor to this question, that first one being the dependency, you know, being fearful of depending on someone. But before we get to that answer, family origin has to play into all of this. You know, what you learn as a child.
I'm sure I'm more and more amazed at the fact that so many of my reflexes, so many of my triggers, my buttons that can get pushed, particularly by Jean. You know, those are things that I learned early on in insecurities or something like that. So let me ask a two parter then as we go into this, as we talk about the fears, a lot of those fears are developed through childhood, teenhood, etc. So speak to that and then talk to the dependency one, our fear of being dependent on others as the first example. Well, there's a reason you guys call it focus on the family, right?
Because the family is the place. If you think of a factory building a car, okay, the factory is pretty important to that end consumer. Yeah, that's true. You don't want the wheels on the roof. You don't want the wheels on the roof or what about some parts that weren't installed? They're going to be needed later. It's pretty good if you put the ignition switch in there, right?
Or what if somebody along the process came with a sledgehammer and bent the axle? So our developmental years, God has designed his ways to be followed and they're in very, very specific stages. And what happens in the growing up years is the equipment that you bring into marriage or you bring into the workplace, you're coming in with equipment that was built in the past. Now it's not only childhood, it could be a prior boss that taught you to fear future bosses. It could be a trauma that happened, you know, later in life. But we carry those until we have new experiences.
New experiences of healing can undo prior experiences that were traumatic or lacking. But we always come to every situation bringing who we are as a person and that becomes hugely important. You know, the Navy Seals have a great saying, no one rises to a challenge.
You fall to your level of training. Speak to that idea of fearful of dependency on others. Well, trust basically is all about dependency. When we trust somebody, by definition, I am opening myself up to be able to be hurt by you. That's what we're doing.
When a boss gives an assignment, somebody go open up a division across the country, if that person doesn't perform well, the company get hurt by that. When a spouse begins to open up and invest more and more of their heart to somebody, by definition, we're making ourselves vulnerable. Trust, I love the word careless, trust equals carelessness in this way. That right now, today, I've been here with you and doing all this. I'm not obsessing, worrying about how's my wife going to do me in today? You know, she's going to run up big bills or she's going to go do something bad. So I can be careless. I'm not guarding my back.
Trust means to not have to worry and guard yourself because somebody is worthy of what you've given to them to trust them. Yeah, that's really interesting. It could be your heart, your pocketbook.
It could be the car with a teenager. It's everything in life. Henry, let me ask you about narcissism. It's used a lot, you know, if you're scrolling through YouTube or something like that, how to identify a narcissist, it occasionally pops up. And I'm just saying, I think in this culture today with social media again, the incidence of narcissism might be on the rise.
Oh, for sure. Because it's really a self-centeredness that is blind to everything else, seemingly. So why don't you give us that definition and just touch on this issue of narcissistic behavior. Well, it's a big one in trust, you know, because we started with trust having elements of being empathic towards others, you know, caring about the other and what's good for them and all of those. And what a narcissistic personality disorder is concerned about is themselves. It's all about nothing but themselves. Now, one of the big problems and I hear this a lot, you know, in call-in shows and other people call in and say, well, you know, my therapist said my husband's a narcissistic personality disorder and, you know, they never change. So I'm going to divorce him. Well, stop. That's not true that narcissistic personalities can't change.
We've been doing this for decades. What's true is that many times they don't, sometimes many times they do. And not only that, there's different kinds of narcissists. And some of them are more malignant and resistant to change than others. Broadly speaking, you've got an invulnerable, arrogant, godlike, envy-based narcissist who wants to be God and they're out to seek and destroy if somebody doesn't do what they want. But you've also got people that illustrate a lot of narcissistic behavior that are really shame-based and they're very vulnerable underneath that. And you approach those two very differently.
So it's a big problem in the culture, Jim, but it's also a big problem because we're fueling it. You know, and you know, you see this a lot of times when you deal with singles. I always say, look, you're attracted to their outsides initially, probably.
Maybe it's how they look or how they perform in life or their, you know, great things they do. But you're going to live with their insides. It's the character that you end up experiencing. You don't experience somebody's externals. You experience their internals, their heart, mind, soul, and strength. Again, Scripture talks about that, right? God looks, man looks on the outside, God looks on the inside.
Yeah, nothing's changed after thousands of years. So really that idea of fear, your fear of being controlled, fear of commitment, fear of imperfection, fears around trauma, fears around inequality. We're not covering them all. I just want to make sure we mention them, and then fears around oneself. The book is what you need to get in order to get a definition of all that.
Let's move into repairing trust and what that means. You have a story in the book about Drew and Bella. What was their situation and how did it turn out? Well, you know, good old Drew had two lives. Okay, he's one of those guys.
Yeah, one of those guys. And then he got found out and his wife and his business partners and everybody decided they would give him another chance. And he had multiple affairs. And they would give him another chance. And so we started to engage in a process of how you repair it. And what the story does is it really chronicles how both the mistakes that people make. Sometimes, you know, he or she will come around and say, I'm sorry. And, you know, they're really repentant and you see all this brokenness. And then the other goes, okay, I'm going to forgive you. And we move on because of forgiveness. Well, remember, forgiveness has to do with the past and it's free. One person can forgive. It takes two to reconcile, but one person can forgive. But while forgiveness is free, trust is earned. And so the immediate thing that had to happen was we needed to structure a process where this could be repaired both in the wounding that had happened and everything that had happened, but also in the changes that he had to make to ever get to a place where she could really trust him again. Or even his business partners, because he had done a lot in the context of the business. In that context, just for description purposes, that mountain can seem so high.
It is high. For both the spouse and the offending spouse. I mean, you're having those discussions. Can we ever get to a better place? That's got to be one of the darkest discussions you can have. It's sort of what we said earlier, you know, about the narcissist.
And you understand why people say they never change. Well, that's not true because we know of given the right process that many of them can and do. But by and large, in some situations, the mountain is so high that can Everest be climbed? Yeah, but you better be pretty good at mountain climbing to pull it off. And carry some oxygen.
And you don't just go up there without a guide, right? So, the main thing I want to offer here is I want to offer hope. Because, remember, God had a horrible breach with us. And God repaired it. Now, just like the narcissists or the people with affairs, not everybody comes into that offered reconciliation. Because they don't go through the process that he requires. Some do. So, the hope is marriages can be restored. I've seen marriages, horrible things happen. And they're restored.
And they can be. But it can't be just this, you know, oh, you know, all is forgiven. And what you see oftentimes is the offending spouse will, when they start to get into it, let's say, you know, however long down the road, they're in a situation and something taps into a memory for her or a fear for her. And she starts to bring it up.
And he gets defensive and reactive. Why can't you leave the past? You know, can't you forget this? You said you would forgive me.
The forgiveness has to do with the debt. But the woundedness might take a process. And he or she's got to come to that other person's woundedness with the elements of trust we talk about and show that you can trust me with even bringing your pain about this to me. And the reason I wrote about, and in fact, I think I said this in the book, when I was writing that, I called him and I said, dude, because they're like five years later now and they're just doing great. I said, I just got to call you and say, you are like my hero. And particularly I was thinking about when they started to go through the repair, I watched him when she had to unload the pain and the anger and everything that she went through, I watched him live out that number one understanding without getting defensive, with empathically seeing what he had done to her and hearing that. And he did it better than anybody I've ever seen. And it's so important.
Well, also I'd call her and say, you're a hero. Because that person has the get out of jail free card, even with scripture. This is the thing that if you violate that, the Lord says you can go for the exit door.
I mean, which is amazing. Let me ask you here as we zero in on the end of our time, what are some indicators of true change in another person? What do we look for? Well, in some of the indicators are also some of the drivers of the process.
You know, we talk about the five elements. What I would want to see when you're repairing trust, can you sit down with the person, you talk about whatever the violation of trust, could be work or personal. Are they really listening and understanding what their behavior did to other people? Because if they're really getting it and empathic about it, that's what Corinthians calls godly sorrow. It says there's a sorrow of the world that leads to death. People feel guilty and I'm so bad and all that.
But a godly sorrow is other oriented. We say, I see what I did, I would never want to do that again. That leads to a change because of the care and empathy for the other. The second thing is, can they see how self-centered and only self-oriented, whatever they was doing, was without taking others into consideration of how that was going to affect them. Because you want to see that going forward. That they're thinking about the other person so it doesn't happen again. Thirdly, are they developing the abilities? In a marriage, for example, maybe that whole breakdown happened because there was all sorts of, they get triggered and they start screaming and they don't have the skills of conflict resolution. That third piece of competency, are they developing the abilities to stay sober?
Are they developing the abilities to resolve a conflict? All of this stuff and then you go down the line. So I like to see them, let's work back through the tree and the indicators, as you're saying, are not only going to be indicators that we can go a little further in trusting, but they're also building new elements into the marriage or the work relationship to go forward. That becomes important. Now you get on another trail, and I talk about it in the book as well, I've told so many spouses this, they're going, I don't know, I ain't trusting me.
I want to have another affair or she or whatever. I go, look, the last thing you need to be doing is feel like you've got to be a fortune teller or have a crystal ball. Right, or be the police officer.
Or be the police officer. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to establish a process. You're going to sit in the bleachers and you're going to watch because he is going to self-select out by not performing through this process or you're going to see it and that's going to help you trust.
You can't be a fortune teller. And so do you see, number one, an admission by them, they have a problem. Okay, and they're not blaming, well, she had been meeting my needs or this or that. No, I have a problem. Number two, I need help. If they're depending on themselves, I say, well, this time I'm really going to be committed. Of course you want to hear that.
But you were last time as well. So what help are you asking for? Number three, is the help that's coming, is that Billy Bob down the street? No, we want to have them in a proven change process by somebody who's done this before. And that could be a mentor, a coach or a friend, but probably in the hard situations they probably have a shingle that they hang up because this is what they do. And then are you seeing consistent self-motivation to go there? Do you have to talk them into going to the marriage counseling? Do you have to talk them into going to their meetings? Do you have to talk them into, they'll tell you, no, I can't go to the movies at night.
I've got to get to my group. Or I've got to get, you see a self-driving hunger, the Bible says hunger and thirsting for righteousness. Where it's self-motivated, you're not pushing it. And then also you have some verifiable way that they're in the process. You don't have to know everything, the confidentiality and all that. But we've got to know they're doing it. And then you want to see some things changing over time.
So we don't have to, you know, kind of like guess. There's a difference between wishing and hoping. You say, I hope he turns around.
I'm desiring that he turns around. I'm only going to have hope like the Bible talks about hope. Hope is objective. We have a hope in Jesus because we have an objective reality that he was raised from the dead.
And it's in that objective reality. I'm not wishing, I'm hoping. And so what we're going to do is we're going to watch for some objective indicators that would cause you to have some hope and then a little more hope and a little more hope. And finally, you can give up hope because we have the reality.
What we hope for has been realized. And I've seen couples get to carelessness after awful situations. And some don't. And that's the reality we live in. But I think, too, that trust with God so you can trust others is pretty critical. And we can be shallow with that at times.
You know, a person who suffers horribly, maybe the loss of a child, as an example. And I know a handful of people that have gone through that. It's the worst.
It's the worst. And there's this question that always lingers with them. Lord, why did you let that happen? So that trust connection is somewhat broken. And they've got to work through that to really believe that God knew what was going to happen. And it's almost unexplainable.
And we won't probably know that. But even that ability to push through that and then, at the end of that process, still trust the Lord, even though something that devastating has occurred, that's a bond. I think it's the hardest problem. I just finished writing another book that's to my non-Christian friends about why I believe. And I go through all of the objections that I had to work through when I came to faith.
And I get through all the, you know, you've got all the sciences and all this kind of stuff. And then I have a chapter called The Hardest One of All. The Hardest One of All is the problem of pain when God doesn't do anything about it except says, I will be with you. And how do you have an all-loving, all-powerful God who could do something to have prevented this or stop it?
And he didn't. How do I trust him? And I think it's the toughest one. And Job said, in the midst of it, in the end of it, though he slay me, I will trust him.
And then where else do we go? And you get all these elements of trust and it gets to, ultimately, God does understand he is for us. He does have the ability to take us through whatever we're going through. We know his character even then we don't see certain things happening around us. And he has a track record. And you've hit the nail on the head that that's the hardest.
And what I would tell people that are going through that is make sure you surround yourself with people who can be with you in it and understand it and still hold on to him with you. Yeah. That is good. Dr. Henry Cloud, man, thanks for joining us. What a wonderful book. There's so much more in here that we haven't been able to cover.
But trust, knowing when to give it, when to withhold it, how to earn it, and how to fix it when it gets broken. It's a pretty good title. It covers it all. But thank you so much for being with us.
It's always good. Let me turn to you, the listener. If this is a place you're living, and it might be what we talked about right at the end, this unresolved bitterness that you might have toward something that's happened in your life and you haven't given it over to the Lord.
That's probably 95 percent of people at some point. Get in touch with us. We have caring Christian counselors who can help.
If it's specifically in your marriage, we've got a number of great resources there like Hope Restored and other things that can get you on the right track. But right now, I mean, for a gift of any amount, and if you can't afford it, we'll get it to you. Just get in touch with us. But be part of the ministry. If you can make a gift of any amount, we'll send you Dr. Henry Cloud's book, Trust, as a beginning to getting the help that you need. And you can get ahold of us. Of course, if you're in a spot to do so, we would invite you to join our Friends of the Family team. These are folks who contribute to the ministry on a monthly basis, signing up to sustain us month by month.
It really helps level things out for us. We'd really appreciate it if you can do that. Either way, donate and request your book when you get in touch. You can do so through the link in the show notes or when you call 800, the letter A in the word family. On behalf of the entire team, thanks for joining us for Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller inviting you back as we once again help you and your family thrive in Christ. We'll talk with you, pray with you and help you find out which program will work best. Call us at 1-866-875-2915.
