Have you ever felt sure that you couldn’t trust someone, even if they had done nothing to cause you to doubt them? Trust issues can cause suspicion, anxiety and doubt, and can be very damaging to romantic, personal and professional relationships. Learning to trust again can be difficult, but necessary to maintaining your emotional wellbeing.
What Are Trust Issues?
Trust is believing in the integrity of others. Building trust means that you feel secure in your interactions and relationships, and are able to be open and vulnerable with others. When people harm you and betray your trust, your feeling of security can be shattered. You start to expect the worst from others and become suspicious and skeptical. This lack of trust, commonly referred to as having trust issues, can be very harmful to your mental health and your relationships with others.1
What Do Trust Issues Affect?
Trust issues can affect many areas of your life, including your mental and emotional health and your professional and personal relationships. Trust issues can lead to relationship problems, loneliness, isolation, stress, burnout and perfectionism. When you don’t trust others, it causes you to obsess about other people’s actions or feel like you have to do everything yourself. It can also lead to controlling and perfectionism.
Trust issues can negatively affect the following:2
- Work relationships and productivity
- Romantic relationships
- Friendships
- Relationships with family members
- Relationships with your children
- Your own mental health
13 Signs of Trust Issues
How can you tell if you might have trust issues? One sign is that trust issues can cause you to have relationship anxiety. Building trust in a relationship is key to counting on each other and maintaining longevity. Trust issues can cause you to feel suspicious, to doubt others and even to isolate yourself. You might have volatile, unstable relationships, pick fights or accuse others of dishonesty or betrayal. You also might spend a lot of time worrying, wondering or even obsessing about what others are up to.
Signs of trust issues include:
1. You Focus on the Negative
People in trusting relationships are more likely to see the positives in each other, whereas people with trust issues are more likely to focus on the negatives. If you often find yourself assuming the worst and noticing people’s weaknesses rather than strengths, these could be signs of trust issues.3
2. You Feel Like You Have to Do Everything
You have a hard time relying on others to follow through, so you do it all yourself. This leads to perfectionism, stress, and overwork. In the workplace, it can make it difficult for you to work as part of a team, because you don’t feel comfortable delegating or counting on others to do their part.4
3. Being Suspicious of Friends & Family
You are always preparing yourself for the next betrayal, letdown or ulterior motive. You don’t believe what people tell you. Your knee-jerk reaction is to assume that they are being dishonest or have broken your trust in some way.
4. Avoiding Intimacy
Intimacy requires vulnerability, and people with trust issues try to avoid feeling vulnerable at all costs. If you have trust issues or a fear of intimacy, you would rather be on your own than risk being hurt.
5. Holding Grudges
Once someone has broken your trust or let you down, you never forget it. You are not likely to ever forgive or trust that person again.
6. You Pick Fights
When you have trust issues, you are hyper-aware of any little thing that could go wrong in a relationship. You don’t trust your partner, so you bring up issues from their past or find things that bother you and start a fight.
7. You Keep to Yourself
Sharing your inner world with others requires trust. When you have trust issues, you would rather keep things to yourself than risk trusting someone else.
8. You Avoid Commitment
You have trouble committing, because committed relationships require trust and vulnerability from everyone involved. When you don’t trust others, you avoid getting into situations that cause you to feel vulnerable, and you have commitment issues.
9. You Spy on People or Check Their Phones
When you have trust issues, you are always looking for evidence to prove whether someone is being honest with you or not. Since you don’t believe them, you seek out evidence to either set your mind at ease or prove you right.
10.You Are a Loner
You prefer your own company to anyone else’s, because at least when you are by yourself no one else can let you down.
11. You Find Yourself in Relationships With Untrustworthy People
Frustratingly, having your trust broken can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you expect a certain thing to happen, in the case of having trust issues, being betrayed, your subconscious mind will seek out those situations.5
12. You Smother People You Care About
When people are in your inner circle, you protect them fiercely because you fear that they will leave you or that something bad will happen to you. This can result in smothering or hovering behavior in your relationships.
13. Fear of Abandonment
You live in constant fear of being abandoned or rejected in all of your relationships. When you get a “please stop by my office” email from your boss, you are sure you are being fired. When you see photos of friends having fun, your first thought is that they left you out on purpose. In romantic relationships, you have constant fear of abandonment lurking under the surface that they are getting ready to break things off.
Why Do I Have Trust Issues?
After self sabotaging a relationship or keeping people at an extreme distance and preventing friendships from forming, people often ask themselves, “why do I have trust issues?” Possible origins of trust issues include low self-esteem, past betrayals, mental health disorders, adverse childhood experiences or traumatic events. Any time your sense of safety or security is threatened, it can cause trust issues to arise.
Childhood is an especially vulnerable time for trust issues to show up. Children are 100% dependent on their caretakers to keep them alive. When that trust is broken in childhood, it creates the feeling of not being safe, and children learn to feel insecure and that they can only rely on themselves.
Trust issues may be caused by:6
- History of abuse
- Low self-esteem
- History of betrayal in relationships
- Childhood trauma
- Abandonment issues
- Fear of rejection
- Loneliness
- A history of being bullied
- Disorders like depression, anxiety, PTSD or adjustment disorders
- Attachment disorders
- Personality disorders like borderline personality disorder
How to Get Over Trust Issues
The good news is, you can learn how to overcome trust issues! The best way to start to get over trust issues is by allowing people to earn your trust. Trusting someone too quickly who you just met can backfire, as can doubting someone who has done nothing to cause you to not trust them. The key is to start to take safe emotional risks with people who have not harmed or betrayed you.
Here are some tips for how to deal with trust issues:
- Take safe emotional risks: Allow yourself to practice trusting in small, safe ways. Take someone at their word. Give them the benefit of the doubt.
- Allow yourself time: If your trust has been broken, it’s going to take some time without further betrayal for the person to earn it back.
- Avoid the temptation to snoop or spy: Snooping or spying can easily become an obsessive behavior that will only make your trust issues worse.
- Take your time getting to know new people: Don’t jump into trusting people before you know them. Many people with trust issues tend to trust too quickly, keeping you stuck in the pattern.
- Communicate with your partner: Be careful not to accuse or blame. Instead, communicate clearly how you are feeling and what you need. For example, “When you came home late, I felt worried and insecure. I need you to give me a call next time.”
- Self-reflect: Spend some time thinking, journaling or talking to a friend about this pattern in your life and what is within your power to change.
How Therapy Can Help With Trust issues
When trust issues interfere with your relationships, impact your ability to function in life, or persist for long periods of time, talking to a licensed professional can help. Consulting a therapist directory is a great way to find a therapist who meets your needs.
Individual therapy can help you process past betrayals, abuse, and trauma, heal from rejection and abandonment and improve your self-esteem. If you are experiencing any symptoms of possible disorders like depression, anxiety, or PTSD, talking to a licensed therapist is the first step toward relief.
When your trust issues are causing arguments or problems in your relationship with a significant other, or you have difficulty communicating about it, couples therapy could be a helpful option.
Final Thoughts on Trust Issues
Trusting others is hard when you have trust issues and have been hurt or betrayed in the past. It’s understandable that you would feel reluctant to trust others. However, trust is a necessary component to any healthy relationship. Therapy and reaching out to your support network can help.
For Further Reading
- MHA
- NAMI support groups
- MentalHealth.gov
- In-depth review of the best online therapy companies
- Learn about codependency
