Having trouble trusting your partner can be a barrier to fulfilling intimacy. The anxiety and suspicion that come up have the potential to perpetuate harmful cycles in your relationship. If you struggle in this area, it’s natural to wonder how to get over trust issues. Exploring the root causes, signs, and ways of overcoming challenges in this area are steps toward creating a healthier dynamic between you and your partner.

Why You May Have Trust Issues

Your experiences weigh heavily when looking at how trust issues develop. Exposure to unhealthy or traumatic relationships, whether directly or as a witness, is a major predictor of future lack of trust. In fact, the earliest years of your life are centered around figuring out whether or not you can trust primarily caregivers. Feeling a lack of security during that time can carry over into adult interactions and relationships.

Several factors that impact your ability to trust include:

Childhood Experiences

As mentioned above, your experiences growing up have a large influence on how you show up in relationships. Seeing unhealthy patterns occur between parents of caregivers makes it more difficult to trust in your own connections. Underlying beliefs such as, “People’s actions don’t match their words,” or, “Being close means being betrayed,” may have become part of your psyche.
Allowing your authentic self is also tough when you have had adverse childhood experiences. Hiding important parts of yourself, such as your core emotions and motivations, leads to feeling unseen and unheard. Learning how to get over trust issues is more challenging when you have internalized that vulnerability equals rejection rather than an increase in closeness and respect.

Past Relational Experiences

Previous romantic partnerships, friendships, and other significant connections can also contribute to trust issues. Unhealthy patterns and traumas that have occurred in your relationships inform your narratives around trust between you and your partner. For example, being a part of situations where infidelity was involved might lead to a higher level of mistrust around faithfulness.

It is important to note that difficult relational experiences and difficult childhood experiences often go hand in hand. If you witnessed violence in your childhood, you are 3.5 (for women) or 3.8 (for men) fold more likely to be a part of the cycle of violence in your adulthood. Recognizing and processing complex trauma in individual therapy is a key piece of breaking the cycle, healing old wounds, and gaining trust in your current healthy relationships.

Attachment Insecurity

Difficult relational experiences and relational traumas sometimes lead to the development of an insecure attachment style. Having an anxious, dismissive avoidant, or fearful avoidant attachment style means that it is harder to trust your partner will be there for you. This often looks like needing a very high amount of reassurance or withdrawing from the relationship when you perceive it has become too close.

Working toward a secure attachment style is possible. Building stability in your own life, seeking guidance from a trained therapist, and discussing attachment patterns with your partner can help. Gaining a sense of safety in your connections allows you to be open and move beyond trust issues that have held you back.

Present Concerns

Remember that there are situations where your trust issues may not be unfounded or due to past experiences. Learning how to get over trust issues is only pertinent if the trust issues have to do with factors outside of your present relationship. If your current partner has engaged in behavior such as lying, infidelity, breaking relational boundaries, gaslighting, or any form of abuse, you have reason to be concerned. This is particularly true if they have not made a concerted effort to change.

Attempting to shift trust issues within yourself will not help if you are experiencing relational issues that continue to exacerbate them. Speaking to a professional about what you are experiencing can provide you with support in finding your best next steps.

How Trust Issues Harm Relationships

Trust issues can create distance in otherwise healthy relationships. They can also be detrimental to your own mental health and overall wellbeing. You and your partner might not be able to have conversations about certain topics without the presence of defensiveness of suspicion. You might struggle more intensely with depression, anxiety, or ruminations centered on your relationship.

Your ability to be emotionally available in other important relationships can also be blocked by trust issues. Spending time with and listening to friends and family is hard when you are focused on what your partner is doing. If you have children, you might find yourself less able to invest in quality interactions as a family.

When all of the above challenges come together, trust issues are likely to bring up loneliness. Leaning on others, whether it be your partner or your loved ones, is tough when you are worried that they will reject, betray, or abandon you. What developed as a way to protect you against pain ends up being more painful. Learning how to get over trust issues is vital for reducing your stress levels and expanding your capacity for meaningful connections.

Types of Trust Issues

Although trust issues are individual to each person, there are common themes that tend to exist between them. Several types of trust issues you may experience include:

Challenges with Commitment

Trust issues can cause difficulty in choosing to commit to a romantic partnership. If you are single, this might look like an avoidance of dating despite a desire for a relationship. If you are in a relationship, this might look like hesitance toward fostering a greater sense of interdependence. Concepts such as reliance and reciprocity in a connection tend to feel unfamiliar or evoke fear.

Challenges with commitment come up due to an association of commitment with betrayal. Watching a parent, caregiver, or loved one experience betrayal can inform this association. Experiencing betrayal in past important relationships can contribute to these feelings as well.

Intense Jealousy

Jealousy is a human experience in the context of relationships. It is natural to occasionally feel insecure, worried, or in need of reassurance from your partner. However, the type of jealousy experienced when trust issues are present is likely to be overpowering. Instead of being able to address and work through it with each other, triggers for jealousy become roadblocks that may seem insurmountable.

Intense jealousy can look like a hyperfocus on your partner’s whereabouts, other relationships, or what they are doing. This occurs even though worries are unfounded based on past behavior. The feeling of being watched or controlled often creates disconnection rather than building intimacy within the bond.

Distrust of Self

Learning how to get over trust issues includes addressing how those issues show up within you. Trust issues can look like trouble feeling secure with your own choices. Believing that you can choose suitable partners, listen to your gut instinct, and show up as your authentic self presents challenges. You might spend an undue amount of time second guessing yourself or wondering if there are better options out there.

Having a sense that your partner knows better than you is also common in this type of trust issue. Maintaining your sense of self in a partnership can seem like a threat to the relationship. Because a sustainable relationship happens between two individual people, a healthy partner will provide support and encouragement as you work through your fears.

Signs of Trust Issues

There are a number of signs that indicate you may have challenges with trust or trust issues. They include:

Self- and Relationship- Sabotaging Behaviors

The behaviors that result from trust issues tend to have results that hurt the relationship in question. For example, over-questioning a partner who has shown no signs of being untruthful may push them away rather than providing security. Excessive worry about a partner’s faithfulness may block opportunities to connect on a deeper level. Patterns of pursuing and withdrawing can form, leading both of you to feel unseen and unheard in your experiences.

Hypervigilance

Trust issues put you on edge and cause you to assign meaning to small moments that others may not notice. This sense of hypervigilance is exhausting – there is no “off” switch you can push to break the cycle. Figuring out where hypervigilance is stemming from is an important component of learning how to get over trust issues. Developing the skills necessary to regulate hypervigilance leads to more productive, more stable interactions between you and your partner.

Low Self-Esteem

When you are in a healthy relationship, the root causes of trust issues are not about your partner. Behaving in ways that feel misaligned with your intentions is a natural reaction to unprocessed fear and trauma. However, this natural reaction can stir up guilt, shame, or self-esteem issues. Putting in the work to resolve the driving forces behind your actions can empower you and expand your ability to attune with your partner in the present.

Anxiety and Depression

Carrying the weight of trust issues can have an impact on your overall mental health. Seeing an increase in anxiety and depression is common. You are likely to feel more isolated, have greater chronic stress levels, and experience nervous system dysregulation when you are persistently worried about trust. All of these factors may lead to mental health symptoms such as overwhelm, rumination, low energy, and a sense of hopelessness.

How to Overcome Trust Issues

Learning how to get over trust issues is a process that takes time. Acknowledging that trust issues are impacting your relationship in a detrimental way is the first step toward getting the help you need. Giving yourself grace as you work through the root causes of trust issues helps to build your capacity for self-compassion and your overall self-worth.

Opening up lines of communication with your partner is another key piece of overcoming trust issues. If you are in a healthy relationship, your partner might feel lost or unsure as to why trust issues have been coming up. Honesty with one another begins the repair process for rifts that may have occurred due to trust issues. A couples course, such as the 8-week online relationship course, can help if you and your partner are feeling stuck in this area. Here you will learn the principles that are central to breaking old patterns and increasing the love you have for one another.

Attending couples therapy and individual therapy for relationships provides a longer term resource. A trained therapist will be able to guide you in identifying the causes of your trust issues, growing your connection with your partner, and learning useful tools and skills. They will also address past experiences in a way that can aid you in improving your sense of trust throughout the course of your life.