10 Signs You Have Trust Issues and How to Begin Healing

Trust issues may be your number one obstacle to connection, warmth, and intimacy.

When you’re experiencing trust issues, you cannot extend yourself, or make yourself vulnerable in relationships, which is essential to lasting success, according to experts. This post offers unmistakable signs and symptoms of trust issues and points toward their resolution.

But before we get into the 10 signs of trust issues, let’s get the bad news out of the way.

The bad news about trust issues….

Overcoming your trust issues, if you have them, is probably going to be difficult. If you have real trust issues, you’ve been hurt in the past. Your trust issues are held in place by fear of being betrayed, humiliated, taken advantage of or otherwise manipulated all over again. This may make the risk appear insurmountable.

The aching, hurt, and humiliation of the past have become so familiar – the feelings, although heavy and burdensome, are hard to let go because I’m not sure I know how to feel anything else. Just cold and numb.

Trust issues are based on real life experience, some of it probably originating in childhood, although this isn’t always the case. Some adults legitimately experience horrific betrayal and pain at the hands of others. Trust issues show up as a natural defense mechanism.

Why is it so difficult to let go of trust issues?

One surprising reason stands above all. Prejudice.

Not in a racial sense. Legitimately obtained trust issues color your thinking, however, causing you to anticipate negative consequences should you let down your guard. The prejudice (pre-judging) here is an ongoing suspicion that people are going to hurt you in some way.

Joshua Coleman, Ph.D. at Berkely.Edu discusses hypervigilance in one of his pieces on trust and betrayal. Coleman suggests being hypervigilant after a betrayal is evolutionarily intended to keep us from haplessly wandering into another betrayal. The downside of such hypervigilance is that it keeps you isolated from others.

You look for the signs. You play movies in your head of how someone is going to take advantage of you. You predict betrayal. The fear and anticipation of pain keep the trust issues alive, giving them newfound relevance.

Unfortunately, trust issues inevitably turn into self-sabotage. For example, when you don’t trust, you don’t connect with others. Missing out on chances to get to know people, to network, form friendships, and intimate relationships can only be called self-deprivation.

Lack of self-confidence, missed opportunities, loneliness, and even social anxiety are the results of this kind of self-sabotage, which is maintained by painful trust issues that will not relent. You’ve got your reasons for self-sabotage in the form of very real trust issues. However, it is self-sabotage nonetheless.

Overcoming trust issues requires seeing things differently

Seeing trust issues, not as a self-protective, but as self-sabotaging is one way to motivate yourself to work through them. This isn’t necessarily easy or obvious. The pain you’ve experienced is real and must be validated. And there does exist the possibility of being hurt again. Worse, if you’re already anticipating a breach of trust, then you’re also likely to be hypersensitive to apparent breaches, even when they don’t exist or aren’t intended.

You’re in an emotional double bind. Damned if you do trust, damned if you don’t. Understanding the various signs of trust issues is a starting point toward resolution. Below are 10.

1. You predict how people will betray you without evidence of betrayal

If you’re with someone who has a track record of misdeeds, a lack of trust is appropriate. You should proceed fully aware of his or her potential to be devious. However, many of us have trust issues with people who never shown any sign of untrustworthiness.

Still, we anticipate the breach. Why? Trust issues from past experience are being cast into the perceived future, contaminating the present relationship.

2. You trust people you have no business trusting

It’s counterintuitive, but it happens all the time. When you have trust issues, you may often place your trust in those who are mostly likely to take advantage of you. Your trust issues at this point have become an emotional self-fulfilling prophecy, as if you were unconsciously confirming how untrustworthy people are.

3. You trust people too quickly

It may be due to the self-fulfilling prophecy, but this one may also come from failing to understand how trust works. Trust is earned. As an adult, you’re best off starting with an open mind and extending trust to people as they build a track record with you.

If you’re not experienced with creating trusted relationships, you may extend trust blindly.

4. Sharing is not caring

With flaring trust issues, sharing isn’t caring. It may feel more like emotional masochism. It takes trust to open up and share your thoughts and feelings. Trust issues predict that other people will use your inward feelings against you at some point, so it’s best to be guarded.

5. Your relationships are shallow, even if you aren’t

You may be a deep thinking and feeling person, but your relationships that are marred by trust issues will be shallow. You’ll be ‘protecting’ your inner, truer self and not openly sharing, so your relationships will be based on lighter, less threatening communication about external things.

6. Emotional commitment? Uh—no!

Trust issues dictate that you live in a world of anticipated loss. Your relationships don’t feel solid or grounded. At some level, you believe betrayal is inevitable. This makes it difficult to commit emotionally. You do not want to become attached to something you already ‘know’ you are going to lose.

7. Genuine mistakes are seen as awful breaches of trust

People are imperfect, we all know that. If you have trust issues, however, you may not be able to tolerate others’ imperfection when you see their mistakes though the prejudice of trust issues.

• If she’s running late, she’s hiding something from you.
• When he speaks loudly, he secretly hates you.
• If she can’t talk right now, she is rejecting you.
• When he won’t let you scan through his phone, he has a secret lover.
• If she doesn’t want to have sex tonight, she is not into you anymore.

8. Others may see you as self-righteous, impossible to please, or unforgiving

Your trust issues don’t just affect you. They dictate how you respond to others. When you find it hard to trust, and follow some of the signs mentioned above, others will find you difficult. For example, when your girlfriend who is running late arrives to find you suspicious, she’s probably not going to be inspired to console you. More likely, she will expect you to apologize for being so suspicious.

If when your friend can’t talk right now, you respond with accusations, he is not going to feel encouraged to talk to you anytime soon. One author put it this way…

Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way, but often is.

9. You feel lonely, isolated, and like an outcast

When you cannot trust people enough to share your true self, no one is going to know or witness your true self. Without being known to others, you’ll feel lonely and perhaps like you don’t belong.

There are reasons you learned not to trust. Most likely, those reasons have everything to do with one or two specific people in your past. However, the mind naturally generalizes lessons learned. Without realizing it, you now have trust issues with most people. Unless you have a few people who know you – whom you really do trust – it’s hard to feel like you belong.

You may even feel like a total fake – an impostor – who fears being discovered as an illegitimate person.

10. Despair

All of this may lead to depression and despair. Since it is impossible to be socially adjusted without trusting others to some degree, and when it is painful to consider trusting anyone, you may feel trapped in a world in which you don’t feel like you belong.

Despair and depression are the likely results of this double bind.

Source:https://blogs.psychcentral.com