TRUST

In one ordinary use, trust is relational: a prediction that a person or an institution will do what they say. This relational use also has an inner face. To trust someone is not to be on guard with them, not to need a defence, or a version of oneself prepared in advance for how it might be taken. Ordinary language also uses the word with no second party in it at all. We speak of trusting ourselves, and of trusting a process to come good if it is left alone. In each of these, the one doing the trusting is a person.

A system can trust too, though we rarely use the word there. Checking seldom goes by the name of distrust; it is called governance, accountability, quality assurance. A ministry, an examination board, a school each need to know what is happening, albeit at a distance from where it happens, and the checking sits at a level above the experience it reports on. A system can choose to build quality monitoring into the processes lower down, nearer the work, where what is attended to is the thing itself rather than a report of it. Such a choice rests on trust. A process with room is one that can run on its own terms: a lesson that goes where the class takes it, a teacher's work that is not shaped by what will have to be shown afterwards. The trust runs in both directions. A ministry has to believe that a school will attend honestly to what it finds; a school has to believe its own account will be taken seriously.

Trust is one of the three terms in ACT, alongside awareness and choice, and none of them stands alone. A person on guard perceives through a filter. So does a system: one that watches only from above sees what its instruments report and little else. When the need to defend falls away, what is actually happening can be taken in, and the choices available come into view. That is also where trust meets dignity, which holds the value of the whole person: trust is that value held from the inside.