Let me sit with that for a moment, because what you’re describing is one of the most common and most painful things I see in my office.
Here’s what I want you to understand first: trust issues from childhood are not character flaws. They are not proof that something is broken in you. They are proof that a very young part of you learned something true, at the time, about how the world worked. Maybe the people who were supposed to be safe, weren’t. Maybe love felt conditional, or unpredictable, or it disappeared without warning. And that young part of you built a whole operating system around that reality. A survival system.
You are still a child bracing for the ground to move.
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The problem is, you brought that operating system into your marriage. And it’s running in the background every single day.
So when your partner is late without texting, or when their voice shifts, or when they seem distracted, that young part of you doesn’t say “hm, interesting, I wonder what’s going on with them.” That part says “here we go. I knew it. This is exactly what I was afraid of.”
And that response feels completely real. Because for that young part of you, it IS real.
Here is what makes this so hard in a marriage specifically. Your partner is living with someone who sometimes reacts to them not as who they actually are, but as a stand-in for every person who ever let you down. That is exhausting for them. And it is exhausting for you too, because you are fighting a war on two fronts. You are trying to be present in your actual relationship, while also managing the alarm bells going off inside you from thirty or forty years ago.
You are still a child bracing for the ground to move.
Do you know you can get personalized answers to all your questions from the same wisdom that wrote this article, right now?
Ask anything about your own situation and get an answer immediately. Keep asking, think it through, work out what to do next.
No credit card required. Your first 10 messages are free.
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What I want to say to you directly is this: the work here is not about deciding to trust your partner more. Willpower does not fix this. The work is about helping that young wounded part of you learn, slowly, with real evidence, that the present moment is different from the past. That takes time. It takes your partner’s patience. And honestly, it takes a safe space to actually look at what happened to you and grieve it.
Because here is what I see in couples where one partner carries childhood trust wounds: the partner without the wound often starts to feel like they are on trial for crimes they did not commit. And the partner with the wound feels guilty for not being able to just trust someone who is probably doing their best. Both people are suffering. Neither person is the villain.
The goal I hold for couples in this situation is what I call Sovereign Us. That is the moment when you and your partner stop being on opposite sides of this problem and start facing it together. When your partner understands enough about your history that they can respond to your fear with curiosity instead of defensiveness. And when you can say to your partner, “this is my wound talking right now, not a verdict on you.”
That is the shift. That is what’s possible.
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Figs is a licensed marriage and family therapist with 16+ years of experience working with couples. He’s the co-founder of Empathi, host of the “Come Here to Me” podcast, and author of an upcoming book on relationships and the systems that shape how we love.
Read more: How to Rebuild Trust After Lying: What Actually Works
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