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Trust is a very simple thing

Updated Mar 21 2025

I often hear the line now, “when someone shows you who they are, believe them.” It’s come up in therapy, it’s shared online a lot. I hope that means it’s becoming common knowledge, because it often really is that simple: trust is simple and usually very obvious.1

Trust is a very simple thing: you can trust people to act out the behavior patterns they normally act out. Behavior patterns are generally pretty trustworthy. You can trust nurturing people to do nurturing things,2 and you can trust destructive people to do destructive things. As long as you’re trusting someone to do what they normally do instead of what they don’t normally do, your trust will probably be well-placed.Caitlin Johnstone, Stop Trivializing the Term ‘Coup’



  1. Although we’ve had the “actions speak louder than words” adage around for aeons and plenty of people still fall for the words. ↩︎

  2. This makes me think of Katerina Kepler’s line from Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch by Rivka Galchen: “Anyone who takes gentle care of a cow is someone I trust. It’s a more telling characteristic of a person than taking Communion.” ↩︎