What Makes a Person Trustworthy?

Pretending that you have more emotional capacity than you actually have leads to resentment, conflict, and alienation. Embracing love without fear requires honesty about your limits.

Nephaster cyaneus (Cloudstar)(1997), Dorothea Tanning

Many people are working far beyond their emotional capacity at all times. You might not realize it, but you’re taxing their systems just by being who you are. What’s worse, a lot of people promise way too much, both because they overestimate their own emotional capacity and because they’re trying to embody some ideal that lives inside their heads. They know exactly how a person should be: supportive, dependable, consistent, devoted, affectionate, open, and willing to listen.

But then life happens. Emotions take over, anxiety sets in, and the actual flawed human being who promised so much finds it impossible to deliver anything at all.

As a longtime romantic idealist, I recognize this flaw in myself. I used to tell people I was the best friend you could possibly have after a break up. This was sometimes true. But I also believed that I was the best friend anyone could have at any time, and this was inaccurate. I had a terrible habit of working too hard and wearing myself out emotionally until I was alienated and resentful. I didn’t respect my own limits, so I didn’t respect other people’s limits, either. I was like a solar generator that claims it can run your whole house in case of a power outage, but when the outage comes, it can only run a few of your phones plus maybe a mini fridge.

I was so controlled by my ideas about the ‘right’ way to be that I couldn’t handle the notion that I would ever disappoint anyone. These days, I know my limits better, because I pay more attention to minor emotional reactions and disruptions. My goal is to stay engaged and present often but to tell the truth when I can’t.

I’m still very sensitive and emotional, of course. But I find that the more I soothe myself and also pay close attention to the scenarios that threaten to get heated or incoherent, the more I can avoid feeling terrible, saying something I’ll regret, or tripping the wrong wires when people around me are already throwing off sparks.

This means that I’m very direct when I sense danger: “I don’t know if I can be as supportive as I want to be at this exact moment,” I’ll sometimes say to my kids. “I just need a few hours. Can you wait or does this feel like an emergency?”

I don’t pretend that my resources are endless. I don’t want my kids to think that their resources are magical and eternal, so I feel like being direct about my own limits is good for them. I have always said, very openly, “I’m feeling overwhelmed right now; I’m sorry for any disruption in service you might experience at this time.”

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Now let’s talk about extremes: The most emotional, anxious, and bewildering people you’ll meet in this life often talk like hybrids of SEAL operatives and hyperfocused Romeos. They claim incredible resources and capabilities under extreme duress. They will pledge to you, without breaking eye contact, that they will run across the hot sand in soaking-wet combat boots carrying 15 pounds of heavy equipment in order to bring you the love and support that you deserve. They also might try to show you glimpses of how hard they want to work for you. People like to call this love bombing, reducing it to a manipulation consciously devised by a nefarious mind. But from what I’ve observed, it’s more like an extreme version of something that’s very common: a compulsion to overpromise in spite of (and also caused by) major emotional limitations.

It's overcompensation. After all, what causes reduced capacity for emotional processing under stress? Shame, insecurity, anxiety, and unprocessed rage. How do most of us manage these feelings? By moving out of our bodies and into our heads, where we tell stories about how other people create these negative sensations. We pretend everything suboptimal starts outside of us. We’re acting angry or crazy because we were triggered by evil humans and we don’t deserve that. We deserve unconditional love and care. We deserve all of the resources on earth, delivered to our doorsteps with zero lapses in service.

Thanks to this defensive reaction, what kinds of fairy tales do we tell about ourselves? That we will never let anyone down the way other people have let us down. That we are Good with a capital G. We can deliver devotion, loyalty, support, affection, romance, and praise 24-7. In the wake of each major storm, we make even more outrageous claims about how we can power your whole house in case of a disaster.

But when the storm comes, our faulty systems burn the whole house down instead.

People don’t like this kind of overpromising, because it feels like being consciously tricked into loving someone with no ability to love back. The truth is that people who overpromise are often quite earnest in their belief that they’re capable of pure love and goodness. When other people accuse them of being Bad with a capital B, they can’t understand what they’re hearing. Even after decades of hearing these words, they react with the same shock and surprise: What do you even MEAN? Look at everything I DO FOR YOU! I am an honorable hero, dragged to hell by an inferior, needy lunatic!

And then the rivers of contempt start to flow, and they unleash a torrent of insults and describe endless scenarios in which they were tricked and betrayed by the other person’s mixed messages, their confusing words, their unbearable emotions. It doesn’t matter if the other person was just showing up and describing the world honestly and without accusation. For these ultra-romantic SEAL operatives, all emotions and ideas are welcome until they’re not. And when they’re not welcome anymore, everything that was shared openly becomes another reason to blame the other person for being a big disappointment, for being imperfect, for inadequately regulating themselves (the irony!).

Of course, the most enraged and contemptuous of all simply remove themselves from the relationship. They disappear or start an affair with someone who will get the SEAL/Romeo treatment. The reasoning is airtight: My ex was crazy and made me crazy. But now I’ve finally found someone worthy of the full force of my endless love.

I don’t think very many people walk around with a plan to manipulate others. Yes, I know about pick up artists. It’s easy enough to avoid those jackholes. What’s much scarier is the fact that a lot of humans you’ll meet are already overtaxed and overwhelmed the moment you meet them, but they’re using someone else’s operating manual to live. They want to be better than they are. Their low self-esteem and lack of self-awareness renders them insecure at such a deep level that they depend on their triumphant stories about themselves in order to get through the day.

Nonetheless, those stories keep them locked in a state of anguish and rage that’s transmuted into distractions, busy-ness, and a complete inability to show up for whatever emotions and thoughts are floating around them on any given day. They seal off their consciousness from outside influences, and seal their brains off from their bodies. They spend their days doing The Right Thing and saying The Right Thing. Everything bad comes from the outside. If a bad feeling breaks through the locked gate between their body and their mind, they know that someone outside them is to blame.

It's easy to feel compassion for people like this when you really examine how their systems work. Because we’re all a little bit like them. We all try to be better than we really are. We’re all astonished by our own limits under duress. And if we’re shocked by our strength under duress, or our pain tolerance, or our ability to face untold tragedies without batting an eye, we’re also aware that this resilience is often just evidence of exactly how much trauma we’ve endured and how good we are at ignoring our bodies and our distress.

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That said, reckoning with a SEAL/Romeo idealist when they’re in fight-or -light mode is unspeakably difficult. Once you understand that their primary intention is to get away from you, keep you out, and/or prove that you are BAD, it’s very hard not to take that personally.

Some only stay in that defensive stance temporarily, and then they’re willing to examine their culpability. My husband, for example, has an interesting habit of becoming the most recalcitrant when he’s the most culpable. Even though he recognizes this, the pattern repeats itself whenever he fucks up in a big way. But to his credit, he’s always able to slowly (SLOWLY, MOTHERFUCKER! SO SLOWLY!) absorb reality, make an adjustment, and apologize for taking such a defensive stance under duress.

In extreme cases, a person truly cannot absorb emotional reality. These people are like well-defended forts. Eventually you’ll notice that even good emotions are being shut out or rejected by them. They abhor intimacy. Once they feel so attached to you that it makes them feel vulnerable, they don’t even want your love or kindness anymore, or they perceive it as a manipulation. They refuse honest attempts to connect. Even though they have a bulletproof story about how dependable they are, when someone else tries to lean on them, you’ll hear them start to distance themselves or denigrate the person who needs them.

There’s a river of contempt and fear and anger running under what looks like solid ground.

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When you see this for the first (or 100th) time, you might be tempted to believe that there’s something fucked up about you that led you here. Here’s what’s challenging about that feeling: It’s not true at all, but that doesn’t mean that there’s NOTHING fucked up about you.

You have gigantic flaws and imperfections because you’re a human being. Hold that humbling feeling inside you and try to make peace with it.

Okay, you’re fucked up! You’re not perfect! You do all kinds of ridiculous things when you’re stressed out or emotional!

That said, a person who, under duress, spits out rage and insults at the people they love the most is not someone whose words you need to take to heart. In fact, when you hear someone take you apart with their words, it’s absolutely pointless to tune into what they’re saying. Because anyone who wants to rip another person to shreds using their language isn’t a trustworthy storyteller.

I want you to understand this and take it into your body and trust it from this day forward, because I have never met a single person who behaved this way who wasn’t fifteen times as fucked up as the person they were denigrating. (I’m not talking about people who are pushing back against abuse or injustice here. I’m talking about friends, partners, or family members who malign others whenever they’re upset.) You just don’t speak that way when you know yourself well, you respect yourself, and you’re mostly at peace with your strengths and also your enormous flaws.

None of us require feedback from people who don’t know themselves or who hate themselves.

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But this is also why we need to learn what our own flaws and weaknesses are: So we can learn to examine our emotional challenges in the company of trusted, dependable friends and family. So we can stop promising more than we can deliver. So we can foster trust in others and also learn to trust ourselves more.

We need to know what’s fucked up about us so we don’t walk around ripping other people to shreds without realizing how similar we are to them. Every incredibly fucked up person you know — and this is even more true for people who are in your immediate family — are manifesting deep internal turmoil and struggles that you’re also grappling with every single day. That’s not a reason to tolerate those people when they’re verbally abusive. It’s a reason to refuse to treat their abuse like it’s a normal way of interacting or giving feedback to others.

Again, no one who understands their own limits and perceives their own enormous flaws angrily lists another person’s limits and flaws to them on the spot just because they’re upset. If you love someone, you tell them what you need when you’re calm. You don’t lash out at them whenever they make you mad. You always remember who they are and why they deserve your respect.

And when relationships become openly disrespectful, you treat that like the emergency it is. No one needs to live that way. No one should tolerate being drowned by severe emotional storms regularly. This is where those rivers of contempt come from. Don’t make more of them.

The good news is that the more often you ask people very directly and calmly for what you need, the less you’re tempted to promise way too much, give them way too much, and then blame them for your growing resentment. The more you tell people your limits, the less you’re tempted to rip them to shreds simply because they also have limits — or because they remind you of someone who ripped you to shreds before you could protect yourself.

The more you understand the shame that springs from being attacked without any reason, the more you’ll be able to release and reject that shame, and live in reality instead. In reality, away from shame, you are lovable and you deserve love. You always deserved love, and you still deserve it now.

Ask for love. Give love. Don’t make yourself smaller or colder or more aggressive just to live in someone else’s well-defended fort with them.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy. When you’re actually embodying your ideals — attuned to the world around you, aligned with the full force of your emotions and desires — you will feel overwhelmed often. If you’re manifesting openness and compassion and joy, you will also feel sad and intensely regretful at times. People are going to misunderstand you and underestimate you and fear you. Tackling this life with everything you have is no small task.

Take it on anyway. Find people who welcome honesty and who are truly honest with themselves about their limits.

Be one of those people.

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