113: How to Believe in Others — Especially When You Shouldn’t

laura: How to make love. Now, is that from recipe or from scratch? This is how to make love. Wow. Oh gosh. Oh my God. Yeah. A little to the left and faster. A show that tests the edges of what love is, worthiness, empathy, beauty, sex, positive, the borders. It can cross how we do integrity in all of our relationships and its hidden costs and shadows in a world where we other people, where we build walls, we sit hair down walls, fuck finding it or falling into it. Our future depends on making it. Hey everybody, I am Laura. Welcome back to a podcast design to give your heart and our practice of liberation. A really good workout. I am super glad you're here and we're going to jump right in, right with the contradiction of the title of this episode, how to Believe in Others, especially When You Shouldn't.
I realized that's a bit of an oxymoron, and I think so many of us have internalized that. Like at some point some people, certain people just aren't worth trusting, aren't worth believing in. They've gotten it wrong so many times or too many times, or they're irredeemable or they've heard us too many times to trust or something along those lines. But when I talk about belief like as in how to believe in others, I don't mean optimism exactly. I don't mean pretending nothing has happened. And I certainly don't mean keeping the door wide open to people who have shown you that they are not safe or that they intend to do harm. What I mean is this belief is the radical act of seeing someone as unfinished. It is the choice and it's the capacity to see someone exactly as they are without forcing them to be any different than they are right now, but also still holding a belief in their innate benevolence and their unfinishedness.
It's refusing to collapse a person into their worst behavior or their hardest season or their most limited self, and it's riddled with paradox. You are still becoming an unfinished and also you do not need fixing. I'm using air quotes around that. That's what I mean by belief or believing in people. That orientation alone is a really fucking hard practice and it is a lot more nuanced than how we tend to operate in the society, which is sort of dinging people when they mess up or determining that they have no more at bats. And I'm not saying that that's wrong, I'm just saying it doesn't hold the full complexity of our humanity. So for this conversation moving forward, believing in others means you're not done. You're not fixed. And no matter what, no matter what you do, your humanity is not disposable. Okay, cool. But let's be honest, there are legitimate reasons why we stop believing in others.
Some of those reasons are protective reasons. Some of them are inherited reasons. Some are deeply earned reasons like we've been hurt by friends, by lovers, by parents, by communities and organizations that preach love, but practice punishment by institutions that promise support, but only offered surveillance. And in many ways our skepticism is super smart because belief in the world that we live in, it has consequences in systems of control. A patriarchy or white supremacy or carceral thinking belief is risky. Belief says people can grow. Belief says repair is possible. Belief as a person is not the sum total of their worst moment, and that threatens the systems that rely on permanence, permanent punishment, permanent labels, permanent exclusion, permanent control. So we're taught don't believe too quickly, don't believe unless it's earned. Don't believe unless they prove it. And that lesson well, it makes us feel wise, it makes us feel safe.
But here's the question I want us to sit with, is that wisdom or and is that survival strategy and potentially oppressive behavior dressed up like discernment? I think probably both in many circumstances, probably both. But since some part of it is survivalist and fear-based and rooted in control, we need to take a look at those parts and make sure that it's what we want to be practicing. So before we talk about why belief matters for other people and for us, we need to talk about why it matters, period. We need to talk about why belief isn't just a nice personal virtue, but it's a radical necessary act. And that's because belief is not just about people. It's about the kind of world that we need to build. If we want to build a world rooted in justice, rooted in repair and liberation, we have to believe that people can change.
We have to otherwise what are we even fighting for? Society and culture and organizations and relationships will only change when the people inside them change. And that of course my friends begins with us, but we're not alone. There is a long precedent of history that can guide us here. So let's talk a little bit about the history of belief as resistance. To do that, we need to look at freedom movements throughout history. So let's start with the abolitionists. They believed that enslaved peoples were fully human in a society that said otherwise, and that belief was deviant and it was dangerous, but it was necessary and it asked people to change civil rights. Leaders believed in the potential for a country that had never given them a reason to trust it. That belief was costly and it was necessary restorative and transformative justice. Movements today believe that harm can be healed outside of cages and a system of violence and inequity.
That belief is still controversial and it is necessary over and over and over again. The people who changed the world do so because they believed in human possibility, even when that was irrational, even when it wasn't rewarded, even when it hadn't worked, even when they had been personally betrayed by their belief system, even when they'd been personally attacked and they didn't just believe one person could change, they believed in institutional systemic change through the changes of individuals making different choices. That kind of belief isn't naive, it's strategic, it's prophetic, it's essential, and it is also very, very, very, very difficult to hold the belief, to hold onto the belief in spite of the droves of evidence that we have. To the contrary, one of the things working against us is that systems of oppression are really invested in the lack of this belief and the lack of our ability to maintain a belief in other people.
Disbelief is profitable. It keeps people locked up. It keeps communities under surveillance. It keeps us investing in punishment over restoration, control over care. It enables the use of fear to embolden and perpetuate control, but call that safety. We're seeing that all over our government right now. If we stop believing in others' ability to grow, the prison system wins. Supremacy, culture wins the punishment paradigm in our relationships or our families or our parenting or our workplaces wins. Because those systems depend on a fear-based lie. They depend on this lie that says some people are fundamentally irredeemable and dangerous. And I'm not here to prove that that isn't true. I'm not here to ask you to believe the opposite. I am here to say though that if we keep investing in the belief that some people's humanity is irredeemable, that their capacity for change is beyond hope.
Even if it is, we run the risk of using the same tools, becoming the same tools of the systems that we're so desperately wanting to re-envision and rebuild and it just won't work if we use the same tools, it just won't work. So remember belief and believing in others, it's not about softness, belief and believing in others is about subversion. It is subversive to the current systems and to our current culture. It paves a path toward change, but we ourselves have to change, and that includes being willing to hold and practice different orientations, different beliefs, even when they're hard just like this one, like believing that all people are in process. I think it actually costs us to stop believing that, to resist believing that. But the world does such a good job of justifying the opposite, that sometimes it's hard to see when we stop believing in others.
I think something inside us tends to go cold. That has at least been the truth for me. You may not even notice it at first. You might just become a little more skeptical or a little more guarded or a little more worried. All of those things are happening to me right now. You might stop expecting beauty from people. You might stop seeing beauty in people. You might stop expecting, repair, wanting, repair, and eventually you might even stop expecting it from yourself. We don't mean for this to happen, but what can happen as we stop believing in the capacity of people to change is that the range of others', humanity shrinks in our eyes. But the problem with that is it also shrinks our own range of humanity. When we believe in others, we fight to keep our own spirit alive. We're more able to hold complexity.
We're more able to seek out hope. Our belief in others helps us refuse to become hardened. It helps us refuse to settle for what is what we're essentially saying as a spiritual practice, as a practice of justice and love and liberation, I still believe there's something worth hoping for. Even if that belief never gets rewarded, even if that person doesn't rise to meet it, the act of believing still makes us more human. So if you're asking, why should I believe in someone who hurt me? Why should I believe in someone who failed, who disappointed, who relapsed, who resisted growth, who enacts horrible things against other human beings? The answer isn't simple, and also it is. It's not because the other people deserve it. It's because we can't build a liberated world without it because belief about the possibility of our change is the oxygen, my friends, for transformation. And without it, nothing new can grow.
Let's bring this down from the clouds a little bit. So let's talk about what belief, what believing in others actually looks like in real life. I'll give you an example to start. So let's say you have a sibling who's maybe been unreliable. Let's say they've made promises and they've broken them and maybe they've apologized and they've repeated and they've done that for a very long time, and you are tired. Believing in them doesn't mean handing over your trust again, without any considerations or any boundaries. Belief might sound something like this. Hey, I'm going to hold onto some boundaries in this relationship because I can't fully rely on you in x, y, z way. But I still believe that we love each other and that love compels us to try again or try differently so I'm not closing my heart completely. That's something you might say to yourself or to your sibling.
That's belief with integrity and with care. It's a sense of staying open. It's a sense of commitment in the relationship, and it's a sense of taking appropriate care given the actions that have occurred in the past. So let's look at another example this time. Historical, the civil rights Movement, Dr. King Ella Baker, Fannie, Lou Hamer, they weren't naive about harm. They had seen violence, they'd seen betrayal. They'd experienced systemic dehumanization. They had experienced all of it personally and still they believed in the possibility of transformation, not just for black people holistically, but especially for white people, for institutions, for the country that continued to betray them, actively betray and enact violence against them. They understood that belief isn't weakness, it is strategy. It is a moral stance and it's fuel for long-term change. One more example here, this one communal. Imagine someone in your community or organization who's caused harm.
Maybe they were called in or out for behavior that hurt others to believe in them. Doesn't mean excusing the harm that they created, but it means making space for accountability and possibility for something else, both together, accountability and possibility for something else, it means saying, listen, you're not only what you did, you're what you choose to do next or moving forward. I have to tell you, I would not be here without people in my life doing that. Me specifically friends and colleagues of color who have sat me down and said to me, you can do better. This is not your best and it's hurting me. It's hurting others, and you have it in you to do so much better. And in spite of the harm that I had created and I've created a lot of harm and all of the reasons that I gave them to stop believing, to walk away, they chose to believe in my capacity for growth.
They mirrored possibility to me, and that was labor for them. There was risk to that, but their belief made the path of change so much more possible for me, so much more efficient for me. It pointed me in the direction I needed to run, and I'd like to think that I would've gotten to some of those places or these places without their profound courage and their belief in me. But I'm honestly not sure. In fact, I sort of doubt it. I think that is the power of belief. They didn't treat me as broken or unworthy or irredeemable or something that needed to be fixed. They simply said, that sucked what you just did. It was harm inducing, but you are more than that moment, so much more so go make it right, go do better. And their belief in me led me to change, continues to lead me to change and grow.
I alluded earlier to the fact that it costs us to keep believing, and I want to get into that just a little bit more. In the short term, you might feel safer if you stop believing in others' capacity to transform. If you just write some people off, you might feel a little bit more in control, but you also might feel a bit more alone. You might end up managing people instead of relating to them. You might close off, you might harden, you might shrink. You might start to relate to others from a little bit of a suspicion or skepticism instead of solidarity. That's for the short-term risks. I think the long-term risks are that we fundamentally harden, that we wall off, that we start enforcing the superior absolutist logic that we've been trying to escape, like this notion of merit over mercy or perfection over process or punishment over possibility.
That's how supremacy culture wins. Not just out there but inside us, inside our minds, inside our behaviors. And I know I'm using language that makes this seem maybe overly simplistic, but it happens every single day to lots of us. We are walling off as we let go of our capacity to believe in others. And remember, it's a muscle. It's a muscle. We've got to exercise. So how do we do this? How do we believe in others when we have really, really, really fucking good reasons not to? How do we believe in others even when it feels unsafe or unwise or unfair to do so? Because those are really valid fears and emotions. I'm going to offer you some practices. None of them are a magic solution. They are meant to be practices and orientations that you engage with every single day. So the first is practice holding belief with boundaries.
Belief doesn't mean that you need to remain close to someone. It means refusing to collapse a person into a single moment. You can love someone from a distance. That's totally fine if that's a boundary that helps support your wellness and your ability to hold belief for the other person. Another practice is to work to speak what's possible. That's what friends and colleagues of color did for me around the ways I'd internalized oppressive behaviors and white supremacy. They said something like, I see where you are and I see where you could be and I'm holding that vision for you even if you can't. Yet they spoke possibility into me. My partner, Renee has done that for me too. In moments where I've been fear-based and not nearly as courageous as I could be or our relationship called for frankly, she said, listen, I'm going to believe that you have more in you than what you just showed me, and I'm going to hold my expectations of you at the level of that belief.
None of that is about making someone wrong or insinuating that they need to be fixed. It is simply about saying more is possible. I believe more is possible. Another way to practice believing in others when you have really good reason not to is to detach belief from outcome. Separate the two. The person you love may or may not change. Their changing isn't actually the point. The point is that holding the belief is about your integrity, your humanity, your skills and courages toward liberation. Your counter cultureness your spirit and the repair of it. It's not about their performance. So hold the belief and detach from the outcome. The belief is the practice, not the result. You also have to practice by training this muscle. It takes practice. Use belief like resistance training. You got to keep practicing even in really small discrete ways. For example, ask, what would it look like to believe in this person's possibility even if I don't trust their patterns?
Over time, you can add a little more weight on as you start to feel yourself able to lift more and more possibility, just remember that this is a muscle that takes building. So last, I know I sound like a broken record, but believing in others requires us to do our own inner work. Don't be fooled that this is about others. It's about you, your skills, your capacity to hold the belief in other human beings. Sometimes the person we've stopped believing in also happens to be ourself. If that's you, start there. Start small. Say, I am not done yet. There is more of me to become and then go outward into the relationships that you have with others and practice holding deeper and deeper and deeper belief in the innate goodness of other human beings and their capacity to change and grow.
So like always my friends, let me leave you with a few reflection questions. In addition to the practices that we just spoke about, where have you stopped believing in someone? Not because it was wise exactly, but because maybe it hurt too much to hope, to continue to hope. Where have you potentially confused protection with disconnection and what would it cost you to believe? Again, just a little bit, and where do you think you might want to start? What might soften? What might heal in you versus for the other person or about the other person? Here's the final reminder for today, my friends. I really got to hit it a few times. Believing in others isn't about them. It's not about the other people. It is about you. What you choose for your spirit, what you choose as your practice, what you choose for your becoming rather than their becoming. Thanks for being with me today, y'all. If this resonated, pass it on. Encourage your friends to join the community or consider joining Patreon for weekly doses of inspiration and pretty rigorous personal reflection questions. We will keep practicing together. Until next time, y'all, as the band journey tells us and as mediocre wedding DJs insist on reminding us all the time, don't stop believing.