A Literary Prescription for
For learning to rely on someone again, or on yourself, after either has let you down.
Trust is not a single decision but a habit, rebuilt one small kept promise at a time, whether the person you are rebuilding it with is someone else or the version of you that used to make better calls. The books, poems, and words gathered here are for that slow rebuilding, and for the particular vulnerability of choosing to rely on something again before you have any proof it will hold.
“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”Ernest Hemingway
Books
Books on rebuilding what got broken.
Johnson, the originator of Emotionally Focused Therapy, argues that most relationship conflict is really a protest against disconnection, a fight to re-establish trust rather than a fight about the dishes. Her seven conversations are designed to rebuild the felt safety that makes trusting someone else possible again.
Hendrix’s now-classic Imago framework suggests we unconsciously choose partners who can reopen our oldest wounds, not as bad luck but as an opportunity to finally heal them. It is a useful, if challenging, lens for understanding why trust feels harder to extend in some relationships than others.
Wilding writes for the “sensitive striver” who has plenty of external success but a quiet, persistent inability to believe their own judgement. Her focus is self-trust specifically, the kind that has nothing to do with anyone else letting you down and everything to do with learning to take your own read on a situation seriously.
Hawkins’s thriller is narrated by an unreliable witness to her own life, which makes it a sly, gripping exploration of how hard it is to trust your own perception when memory, alcohol, and other people’s versions of events keep contradicting it. Fiction, but a sharp reminder of how disorienting eroded self-trust actually feels.
Poetry
Poems on the leap, and what makes it worth taking.
Sonnet 116 (extract)
William Shakespeare, 1609
Shakespeare defines trustworthy love by what it refuses to do when conditions change — bend, alter, disappear at the first sign of difficulty. It is a useful, demanding standard to hold both other people and yourself to.
“How Do I Love Thee?” (Sonnet 43)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1850
Browning wrote this in secret during a courtship her own father had forbidden, which makes her certainty all the more striking — trust extended in defiance of every external reason for caution. It is a useful counterweight for anyone who has been told their trust is naive.
“The Spider and the Fly” (extract)
Mary Howitt, 1829
A children’s cautionary tale, but a genuinely useful one for adults too — about recognising flattery designed to lower your guard, and trusting your own hesitation even when someone is working hard to talk you out of it.
Quotes & Prose
For extending it again, carefully.
Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.
William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well
You may be deceived if you trust too much, but you will live in torment if you don’t trust enough.
Frank Crane
The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.
Ernest Hemingway
Trusting yourself again does not require forgetting what taught you to be careful. It only requires deciding you are allowed to try.
Georgia Clare
From Georgia
A short practice for sitting with trust, whenever you need somewhere to land.
Fear Or Intuition? Learning To Trust Your Inner Yes
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