A Literary Prescription for

Trust

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.

Books Poetry Quotes & Prose

Books

Books to read about trust

Books on rebuilding what got broken.

Hold Me Tight

Dr. Sue Johnson · 2008

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.

Getting the Love You Want

Harville Hendrix · 1988

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.

Trust Yourself

Melody Wilding · 2021

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.

The Girl on the Train

Paula Hawkins · 2015

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.

The Dutch House

Ann Patchett · 2019

A brother and sister keep returning to the house they were turned out of, retelling the story to each other for fifty years. Patchett writes about who you let hold your version of events, and about the sibling trust that survives when almost nothing else does. Quiet, and much bigger than it first appears.

Atlas of the Heart

Brené Brown · 2021

Brown maps eighty-seven emotions, and the sections on trust are the most useful thing she has written on it: trust as something built in very small increments rather than granted in one piece. Helpful when you want to rebuild with someone and cannot work out where to start.

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Poems about trust

For when prose is not enough

Poems on the leap, and what makes it worth taking.

Sonnet 116 (extract)

William Shakespeare, 1609

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken.

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.

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“How Do I Love Thee?” (Sonnet 43)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1850

I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

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.

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“The Spider and the Fly” (extract)

Mary Howitt, 1829

“Will you walk into my parlour?” said the spider to the fly,
“’Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy.”
“Oh no, no!” said the little fly, “to ask me is in vain,
For who goes up your winding stair can ne’er come down again.”

“Sweet creature,” said the spider, “you’re witty and you’re wise;
How handsome are your gauzy wings, how brilliant are your eyes!”

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.

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Quotes & Prose

Quotes about trust to keep

For extending it again, carefully.

He who does not trust enough will not be trusted.

John Gottman

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Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.

William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well

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You may be deceived if you trust too much, but you will live in torment if you don’t trust enough.

Frank Crane

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Trust is built in very small moments.

Ernest Hemingway

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Trusting yourself again does not require forgetting what taught you to be careful. It only requires deciding you are allowed to try.

Georgia Clare

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From Georgia

Pause here, if you need to

A short practice for sitting with trust, whenever you need somewhere to land.

Trust the Timing of Your Life

Premium meditation · Georgia Clare

An extended guided meditation for the quiet seasons when growth is happening beneath the surface, easing the pressure to rush and reconnecting you with trust in your own timing.

Listen to the preview →

You Are Guided

Premium meditation · Georgia Clare

A gentle guided meditation to quiet an overthinking mind and reconnect with your own intuition and inner knowing, so you can trust what already feels true.

Listen to the preview →

Fear Or Intuition? Learning To Trust Your Inner Yes

A short talk by Georgia Clare

A reflective talk on telling fear apart from intuition, with a simple body-based exercise to help you recognise your inner 'yes'.

Listen Now For Free

How to Stop Seeking Validation from Other People

Personal essay by Georgia Clare · The Library

On why we look outside ourselves for reassurance, where self-doubt comes from, and how to slowly rebuild trust in your own quiet voice.

Read the Essay →

The 21-Day Meditation Course

Guided Meditation Course · Georgia Clare

Three weeks of short, guided meditations to help you build a calm, steady daily practice — gently softening how you meet stress, anxiety and overwhelm, one day at a time.

Start the 21-Day Course →

The Inner Peace Toolkit

Digital Self-Care Toolkit · Georgia Clare

2 guided meditations, an Inner Peace Journal, an affirmations eBook, 10 printable affirmation prints and 10 calming phone wallpapers — small daily practices to come back to whenever you need to slow down and reconnect with yourself.

Explore the Toolkit →

Questions people ask

Reading for Trust

If I only read one thing about trust, what should it be?

If you only read one thing, begin with Hold Me Tight by Dr. Sue Johnson. 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. And if a whole book feels like too much today, scroll to the poems below — “Sonnet 116” by William Shakespeare can be read in a minute and asks nothing of you.

What can I read about trust if I only have a few minutes?

Go straight to “Sonnet 116” by William Shakespeare below. It is short, and it does not need you to be concentrating well. The lines to keep, lower down, ask even less than that. There is no order to follow and no obligation to reach the end of anything.

Which quotes about trust are worth keeping?

Quotes about trust worth keeping include “He who does not trust enough will not be trusted.” (Lao Tzu), “Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.” (William Shakespeare) and “You may be deceived if you trust too much, but you will live in torment if you don’t trust…” (Frank Crane). You’ll find these and more in the quotes section above.

Why read when you’re dealing with trust?

Because it helps you feel less alone. The writers here have lived through trust themselves, and reading them is a little like being handed a lamp in the dark — not a solution, but company, and the reassurance that this has been felt, and survived, before.