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The word distrust stemmed from the word trust and there are two key elements associated with trust.
Confidence-in and reliability.
What happens when there's a lack of these elements?
Distrust!
Personally, I don’t easily trust people, including things.
Even hair creams, body creams, clothes, people, purchases, transactions, plates..
The list is endless until they have actually proven themselves.
The thing about my distrust is that I want to be reassured and proven right at every encounter.
I don’t want a one time proof of efficacy or suitability.
This is not entirely my fault, the street is hard and what you’ve trusted for a while can decide to work against you. Experiences and situations have made my system(mind) shield me from being involved in bad happenings.
This is the same for many people too.
We live in a society, in fact, a whole wide world where deceit is the order. It’s a natural human mechanism to protect the body and mind.
Gradually, one wants a safe place physically, mentally, emotionally and even financially. And the easiest way to escape is to combat the bad reality and rewire what made one fall in the past toxic experiences.
Lack of trust (distrust) makes vendors place a hold on trading until bank transactions are confirmed successful at the vendor’s side. This is not the problem, the significance of this is that why can’t the vendors trust that the buyers have actually made the transactions even after getting proof of payments. That is how low trust has reduced.
Imagine buyers using fake alerts to purchase material and eventually get away with it. What would be the fate of the vendor?
If it was you, wouldn’t you shield your mind and repel from trusting subsequent buyers ?
Okay, let me take it from this angle..
Like I said, unreliability is a basic element of distrust and this can also be seen as being unethical.
When someone who is supposedly at a 20 minutes distance from you told you that they’re already on their way to see you and they didn’t show up for several hours without a genuine underlying reason(s), how would you react to subsequent meetings and if such situation repeated itself over and over even with other people, how would you see “waiting for people” in general?
Generally, distrust becomes a safe emotion unless they( people and things) have proven themselves otherwise on several occasions.
Another unethical behavior that’s associated with distrust is missed deadlines/ not keeping to time.
When a person regularly misses deadlines ,that can be referred to as irresponsibility and as such, confidence would be lost in the said individual. Same goes with not keeping to time.
I have this business that I do where I get consulted about natural hair care. There’s always room for a one-on-one virtual consultation for any one that has a complaint plus looking for a remedy. So, I fix the date and time for each person to get maximum benefits.
One day, I set time for three ladies and the first two responded late while the last person didn’t even respond at all for the whole day without a prior notice.
In this situation, I was the one trying to help, all they needed to do was to show up and get their solutions but I didn’t like how things played out that day. I actually left some important things I could do and made time for the consultation sessions.
However, subsequently I just do what I have to do and allow them to choose the time that’ll be convenient for them( no longer than two hours from when they decide).
To me, distrust is a chronic feeling. It’s progressive, it may start off as fear then suspicion and then anger follows before a person closes up and results in guarding their heart with distrust.
There are so many causes of distrust but based on what’s trendy these days I decided to list the ones I consider to be the top three.
- Lies
- Betrayal
- Broken promises
Based on these top three causes, I placed a question on my WhatsApp status to actually find out which is the strongest and a few people replied with their opinion about distrust.
I’ll include screenshots at the end of this article.
However, I learnt from these people that betrayal is what they consider as the leading cause of distrust. One person further explained that there’s no betrayal without lies and broken promises i.e these other causes work together to make betrayal successful and I totally agree with it.
This particular point cast my mind back to when I was still in the university.
There was one of our lecturers who took us a very voluminous but vital course. He promised us that no student would fail his course. He hammered on it and acted it until the end of lectures and revision classes.
I know there’s this saying that “ do not trust your lecturers” especially when it involves AOC – area of concentration for examination questions but this particular lecturer seemed like a faithful person and we believed him plus we actually haven’t had a bad experience with him before.
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To boycott long paragraphs describing this lecturer and the revision class, the examination day came and we received the shock of our lives right inside the examination hall. The exact things he asked us not to bother about were the ones that glared at our faces from the question papers.
In the above scenario, the lecturer betrayed us but something happened first which was lies. He lied about the areas that we shouldn’t worry about and at the end of the day, he broke his promise of not failing any student as well as the trust we had for him as a good, faithful lecturer.
Since then, we became immune to promises and revision classes. We couldn't trust any lecturer anymore. Ever since then, we follow new revision class abbreviations. AOC- COA which means area of concentration – concentration on all.
Below are the screenshots from other people’s point of view about distrust.
I also did a poll question and asked a few of my contacts in their DM. This was just to get a one click answer but some others gave short explanations about their take on distrust.
Thank you for reading my entry on this month’s theme – Distrust.