I appreciated Kory Pearn’s recent Friday Truth article, “Who Believes In You, Challenges You, And Understands You?” because he asks a question we probably don’t ask often enough: Who do I have around me?
Lately, I’ve been working on a new course about how people of action move through grief, and I’ve been thinking about a related question.
What can I trust the people around me with?
Grief is one of the most difficult human experiences because it can make us feel raw and vulnerable at a time when we may have very little tolerance for feeling either of those things. It can also bring up reactions that don’t fit neatly into what people expect grief to look like.
You can love someone deeply and be furious with them for dying. You can miss them and feel relieved that something difficult has ended. You can be devastated and still laugh at something funny two hours later. You can want people around you one day and want everyone to leave you alone the next.
Who can handle that?
Trust Isn’t All or Nothing
I use the concept of bounded trust to think about this.
We tend to talk about trust as though it is binary. I trust you or I don’t. But most of our relationships don’t actually work that way. We trust different people with different things, often without consciously thinking about it.
After a death, for example, there may be someone I would absolutely trust to organize a meal train. Give them a list of names, dietary restrictions, and a calendar, and they will take care of everything. They are practical, reliable, and exactly who I want handling something that I don’t have the bandwidth to manage.
That does not necessarily mean I want to sit across from that same person and tell them that I am furious with the person who died.
Maybe they would immediately try to talk me out of feeling that way. Maybe they would remind me how much the person loved me. Maybe they would tell me not to say something I might regret.
They may be a wonderful person. They may love me deeply. They may also be the wrong person for that particular conversation.
Someone else may be terrible at organizing a meal train but completely unfazed when I say something complicated, angry, dark, or contradictory. They can sit with me without trying to clean up what I am feeling. They don’t need my grief to make sense to them.
That is a different kind of trust.
Different People Can Hold Different Things
This is especially relevant for first responders because people of action are often surrounded by other people of action. When something terrible happens, everyone wants to do something. They bring food. They cover shifts. They take care of the kids. They handle logistics. They fix what can be fixed.
That kind of support can be incredibly valuable.
But grief eventually takes us into territory where there may be nothing to fix.
Knowing the capabilities of the people around you can help you decide where to go with different parts of the experience. Who can handle your anger without becoming alarmed? Who can hear guilt without immediately trying to convince you that you shouldn’t feel guilty? Who can tolerate silence? Who can sit next to you when there is no useful advice to give?
There may be another person you trust with the story of what actually happened because they understand the job and you don’t have to translate it for them. Someone else may be the person you call when you need to get out of the house and do something completely normal for a few hours.
None of these people has to be everything.
Expecting one person to meet every need we have during grief can put tremendous pressure on a relationship. A spouse may be grieving, too. A close friend may be excellent at listening but have no understanding of the operational side of what happened. A peer may understand the call perfectly but not be the person you want to talk with about what is happening in your marriage six months later.
Know Who Can Hold What
Bounded trust gives us permission to be more discerning.
Instead of asking, “Do I trust this person?” we can ask, “What do I trust this person with?”
That question can also help explain why we sometimes feel unexpectedly hurt by people we love after a loss. We may have trusted someone with something they did not have the capacity to hold. Their response disappoints us, and we begin questioning the entire relationship.
Sometimes that response does tell us something important about the relationship. Other times, we asked the meal-train person to hold the rage.
Kory writes about looking around and noticing who is there but also noticing what may be missing. Bounded trust gives us another way to make that assessment.
Look at the people around you and consider what each of them can actually hold. Who helps you take action? Who understands the culture you come from? Who can challenge you when you need it? Who can tolerate the messier parts of grief without rushing to make them disappear? Who can sit beside you when there is nothing to solve?
You may discover that you have more support than you realized because you were expecting support to come from one place or look one particular way.
You may also discover a gap. That is useful information to have before the hardest day of your life.
What Can People Trust You With?
There is one more question worth asking: What can the people in your life trust you with?
Maybe someone trusts you to show up with a truck when they need to move. Maybe they trust you with their kids. Maybe they trust you to tell them the truth when everyone else is telling them what they want to hear.
And maybe you are one of the rare people they trust with the things they are afraid to say out loud.
Knowing the boundaries of our trust helps us understand both where to go when we need support and what kind of support we are capable of giving when someone else needs us.
Shauna ‘Doc’ Springer, PhD is a pioneering psychologist, award-winning Military Times podcast host, and one of the world’s leading experts on psychological trauma, moral injury, suicide prevention, close relationships and the unique needs of the military and first responder communities. Doc Springer provides highly specialized consultation and confidential advising to organizations and public safety agencies that support protectors and defenders through her company THIN LINE ADVISORY.
