Intimacy in Group Living: Truth and Trust

How do you get closer to people in your life? Safety or Risk?

This was the really good question one of my friends and member of our extended community posed on facebook a couple weeks ago.  I weighed in among the many useful responses with “ Tell the truth.”  Another good friend living in our community for over 30 years added, “Know who you trust and tell them the truth.”  Trust and truth are key elements of intimacy in my experience.

Telling the truth can be a daring move.  It means putting all your cards on the table. Telling the truth almost always means revealing something about yourself, even if the truth you are expressing is about the other person.  You are still exposing a thought or an opinion that is something of yourself.  Last night one of my housemates gave another some feedback about how a communication she made hurt his feelings.  In telling her the truth about how her communication landed, he exposed a sensitive part of himself.  He didn’t have to say anything at all to her.  I had witnessed the conversation he was talking about and it was indeed civil, but a little rough.  It’s the kind of thing I typically chalk it up to “that’s just how she is”.  That is an attitude of resignation.  It doesn’t allow us to be closer.  In fact it creates distance as it becomes another slightly charged piece of communication I have withheld and is added to the pile of other withheld communications between us. Instead, he chose to be closer by exposing his hurt in a fairly neutral manner, and diffusing and the charge that could have grown between them.  That’s one way to get closer.  Pure and simple. Tell the truth.

A significant piece of this story, though, is trust.  I know this man.  He does not give unsolicited feedback very often.  I also know he really enjoys this woman, his friend, and would genuinely like to be closer to her.  Over the years, they have built a track record with one another that began with small bits of communication and later feedback that resulted in more interactions that felt increasingly comfortable. They built a certain level of trust.  They had a pretty good idea how the other was going to respond.  Moreover, they knew they had the same goal.  The same goal shared by almost all of us who live here, which is to have fun and have increasingly pleasurable relationships with ourselves and each other.

You do not have to live in a group to have relationships where trust is present. However, what I have experienced is that I have more relationships in which there is a bedrock of trust strong enough for me to risk exposing myself, telling the truth and being willing to hear it.  In-to-me-you-see.  Cliché, I know, but relevant none-the-less.