You want to know how to trust again. You’ve probably been told to “just let it go,” to “choose to trust,” or that “time heals all wounds.” And you’ve probably noticed that none of that advice has actually worked.
That’s not because something is wrong with you. It’s because trust doesn’t work the way most people think it does.
I’m Figs O’Sullivan, a licensed marriage and family therapist with over 16 years of experience working with couples. And one of the most common things I hear in my office is some version of: “I want to trust them. I just can’t.” Or: “I want to trust anyone. I just don’t know how anymore.”
This article is going to challenge some of what you’ve been told about trust. I’m going to explain why willpower doesn’t work, what’s actually happening in your nervous system when trust breaks down, and what the real pathway back to openness looks like. Whether you’re trying to trust the same partner after a betrayal, or you’re trying to open up with someone entirely new, the mechanism is the same.
Let’s get into it.
How to Trust Again Starts With Understanding Why You Can’t
Here’s the first thing you need to hear: you cannot think your way into trusting someone.
I know that’s frustrating. Because thinking is what you’re good at. You’ve analyzed the situation from every angle. You’ve read the articles. You’ve had the conversations. You’ve made the pros-and-cons lists. And your body still tightens when your partner walks through the door. Your stomach still drops when their phone buzzes. You still have that quiet, persistent voice in the back of your mind whispering, “Be careful.”
That voice isn’t coming from your rational brain. It’s coming from your nervous system. And your nervous system doesn’t respond to logic.
In my clinical work, I operate from the principle that you cannot think your way into a secure attachment. You have to experience it. Getting it cognitively is not enough. You can understand, intellectually, that your partner is sorry. That they’ve changed. That the new person you’re dating is nothing like the old one. But understanding is not the same as feeling safe.
Trust, at its foundation, is a nervous system state. It’s your body’s willingness to stay open and vulnerable with another person, even when there’s risk involved. When that willingness has been damaged, whether by infidelity, emotional neglect, a pattern of broken promises, or something from your childhood, no amount of reasoning can restore it. It has to be rebuilt through experience.
This is the part most therapy advice gets wrong. People treat trust like a decision. “I’ve decided to forgive.” “I’ve decided to give them another chance.” Decisions are cognitive. Trust is biological. And the gap between the two is where most people get stuck.
The Drawbridge, Not the Wall
When trust has been broken, most people do one of two things. They either try to force themselves to stay open (which feels terrifying and usually backfires), or they build a wall (which feels safe but slowly destroys their ability to connect).
Neither strategy works long-term.
I use a metaphor in my work that I think captures what healthy trust actually looks like. True relational sovereignty is not walls. Sovereignty is a drawbridge.
Think about a medieval castle. A wall is permanent. It keeps everything out, including the supplies and allies you need to survive. A drawbridge gives you something a wall never can: boundaries with connection. Autonomy without exile.
When your drawbridge is up, you’re protected. You can take a breath. You can assess the situation. But you haven’t sealed yourself off permanently. You retain the ability to lower it when the conditions are right.
The problem for many people who have been hurt is that their drawbridge got stuck in the “up” position. It’s not that they don’t want connection. It’s that their nervous system, having been burned, has defaulted to permanent protection mode. The drawbridge mechanism is frozen.
This is what people actually mean when they say they have “trust issues.” It’s not a character flaw. It’s not a commitment problem. It’s a drawbridge that’s stuck, and it got stuck for a very good reason.
The question isn’t whether you should lower your drawbridge. The question is: what makes the nervous system willing to lower it again?
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Corrective Emotional Experiences: The Only Thing That Actually Rebuilds Trust
If thinking your way to trust doesn’t work, what does?
The clinical answer is something called a corrective emotional experience. Let me break that down in plain language.
A corrective emotional experience happens when you bring your vulnerability into a relationship and, instead of being met with the pain you expected, you’re met with something different. Something safe. Something warm. Something that directly contradicts the old story your nervous system has been running.
Here’s an example. Let’s say you were in a relationship where, every time you expressed a need, your partner got angry or dismissive. Over time, your nervous system learned: expressing needs equals danger. So you stopped expressing them. You built the wall. You pulled the drawbridge up.
Now you’re in a new relationship. Or you’re trying to rebuild with the same partner. And someone tells you to “just be vulnerable.” But your body won’t let you. Because your nervous system still has the old file running: vulnerability equals pain.
A corrective emotional experience overwrites that file. It happens when you take the risk (even a small one) of expressing a need, and the other person responds with genuine care, curiosity, and presence. Not perfectly. Not robotically. But with enough warmth that your nervous system registers: “Oh. This is different. This is safe.”
That single moment, when it’s real and when it’s felt in the body, not just understood in the mind, effectively begins to overwrite old trauma and rewire the nervous system to feel securely bonded during future vulnerabilities.
This is not a one-time event. Trust isn’t rebuilt in a single conversation. It’s rebuilt through dozens, even hundreds, of these small moments over time. Each one is a deposit. Each one teaches the nervous system that the drawbridge can come down, and that what crosses the bridge will be friendly, not hostile.
The Proof of Work Framework
If you’re familiar with cryptocurrency, you’ve heard the term “proof of work.” It’s the mechanism that validates a transaction. You can’t just claim you did the work. The system requires you to demonstrate it.
Trust works the same way.
One of the biggest mistakes I see, whether it’s after an affair, after emotional neglect, or after years of disconnection, is the belief that an apology should be sufficient. “I said I was sorry. Why can’t we move on?”
Because a solution reached in the future does not work unless you do the emotional proof of work in the present.
What does proof of work look like in a relationship? It’s not grand gestures. It’s not expensive gifts. It’s not even the words “I’m sorry,” though those matter too. Proof of work is the ongoing, consistent demonstration that the conditions have actually changed. It’s showing up differently, not once but repeatedly. It’s tolerating your partner’s testing (because they will test you, and they should). It’s being present for the discomfort of their healing process without making it about you.
For the person who was hurt, proof of work means something different. It means allowing yourself to notice when something has changed, even when your nervous system wants to dismiss it. It means taking small risks. It means being honest about what you need instead of pretending everything is fine.
Proof of work is bilateral. Both people have to do it. The person who broke the trust has to earn it back through sustained, visible change. The person whose trust was broken has to be willing to let the evidence in, even when the protective part of them is screaming not to.
This is hard. It’s supposed to be hard. If it were easy, it wouldn’t mean anything.
Rupture and Repair: The Engine of Trust
Here’s something that surprises most of my clients: trust is not the absence of conflict. Trust is built through conflict, specifically through what clinicians call cycles of rupture and repair.
A rupture is any moment where the connection breaks. It can be huge (a discovered affair) or tiny (a dismissive comment at dinner). Ruptures are inevitable. You cannot be in a relationship with another human being and avoid them. The question is never “will there be ruptures?” The question is “what happens after?”
Repair is what happens when two people come back together after a rupture and do the work to reconnect. Not just “I’m sorry, let’s move on,” but real repair. The kind where one partner accesses their deepest vulnerability and essentially asks, “Will you please love this part of me?” And the other partner, instead of getting defensive or shutting down, leans in with genuine care.
That moment of being safely met while you are at your most vulnerable is, neurologically speaking, the most powerful trust-building event that exists. It creates what I call a “missing experience,” the experience your nervous system needed but never got. Maybe you needed a parent who could hold your fear without dismissing it. Maybe you needed a partner who could hear your pain without making it about themselves. Whatever the missing experience is, when it finally arrives, it doesn’t just feel good. It literally rewires neural pathways.
This is why couples who have weathered serious crises and done genuine repair work often report feeling more bonded than they did before the crisis. It’s not that the pain was “worth it.” It’s that the repair process gave them something they never had: proof that the relationship could survive a real blow and come out the other side. That kind of evidence is worth more than a thousand promises.
And this is also why avoidance, even well-intentioned avoidance, is so destructive to trust. If you never allow ruptures to surface, you never get the opportunity to repair. And without repair, trust stays theoretical. It never becomes embodied. Your nervous system never gets the data it needs to update its predictions about what happens when things go wrong.
The Shared Suffering Bubble
There’s a concept I use in my clinical work that I think is particularly relevant for anyone trying to figure out how to trust again. I call it merging two isolated suffering bubbles into one shared relationship suffering bubble.
Here’s what I mean. When trust has been broken, both people are suffering, but they’re suffering alone. The person who was hurt is in their bubble of pain, and the person who caused the hurt (assuming they care) is in their own bubble of guilt, shame, or frustration. These two bubbles exist side by side, but they never touch. Each person is locked inside their own experience, unable to reach the other.
This is what makes broken trust feel so isolating. You’re in the same room as another person, maybe even in the same bed, and you might as well be on different planets. You can see them. You can hear them. But you cannot feel them. The connection has been severed.
The repair process, when it works, is essentially the merging of those two bubbles. Both people step out of their isolated experience and into a shared one. They stop saying “you did this to me” and start saying “we are both hurting, we are both reacting, and this is happening because we matter so much to each other.” That shared acknowledgment, when it’s genuine and not just a script, is one of the most powerful things I’ve ever witnessed in a therapy room. It’s the moment when the drawbridge starts to lower, not because someone decided to lower it, but because the nervous system finally recognizes safety.
How to Trust Again When It’s a New Person
So far, I’ve been talking primarily about rebuilding trust within an existing relationship. But many of you reading this are in a different situation. You’ve been hurt before, perhaps badly, and now you’re wondering how to trust again with someone entirely new. Someone who didn’t do anything wrong. Someone who might be exactly right for you, if only you could let them in.
The mechanism is actually the same, but the challenge is slightly different.
When you carry unresolved trust wounds into a new relationship, you’re not really responding to the person in front of you. You’re responding to the person who hurt you. Your nervous system doesn’t differentiate very well between then and now. It just knows: “Last time I opened up, I got destroyed. I’m not doing that again.”
This is where most people make one of two mistakes:
Mistake #1: They test the new person unfairly. They create impossible loyalty tests. They interpret every minor inconsistency as proof of danger. They punish the new person for the old person’s crimes. And then, when the new person eventually gets exhausted and pulls away, they say, “See? I knew I couldn’t trust anyone.” It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Mistake #2: They pretend they’re fine. They jump into the new relationship acting completely open and available, while internally they’re terrified. They override their nervous system’s signals instead of listening to them. And then, months or years later, the suppressed fear comes roaring back, usually at the worst possible time.
The healthy path is neither of these. The healthy path is honesty. Telling the new person, “I’ve been hurt before, and I’m working through it. I might need some patience. I might need some extra reassurance. And I’m going to try to stay open, even when my instinct is to close down.”
That’s the drawbridge in action. You’re not building a wall. You’re not flinging the gate open recklessly. You’re lowering the bridge slowly, deliberately, while staying honest about what you need.
The “Versus Illusion” and Why It Keeps You Stuck
There’s another framework I want to introduce here because it’s one of the biggest hidden obstacles to rebuilding trust.
I call it the Versus Illusion.
When trust has been broken, whether in a current relationship or carried over from a past one, we naturally default to what I call “I-consciousness.” It’s me against you. I’m the one who was hurt. You’re the one who hurt me. I’m the good one. You’re the bad one.
This feels accurate. It feels justified. And in many cases, it IS accurate. Someone did betray you. Someone did lie. Someone did break a promise.
But here’s the problem: I-consciousness, while valid, will keep you stuck forever.
Because if you stay in the victim/villain framework, trust can never return. You’ll always be watching for the next betrayal. You’ll always be keeping score. You’ll always be one foot out the door.
The shift that has to happen, and this is perhaps the hardest part of the entire process, is a move from I-consciousness to we-consciousness. From “you did this to me” to “we are both hurting, we are both reacting, and it is only happening because we are so important to each other.”
This is NOT about excusing bad behavior. Let me be crystal clear about that. If someone cheated on you, they cheated on you. That’s their responsibility. Full stop.
But the SYSTEM that the two of you co-created, the pattern of disconnection that preceded the betrayal, the ways you both stopped turning toward each other, the tragic cycle you fell into together, that belongs to both of you. And repairing the system is different from assigning blame for the crisis.
Many people refuse to make this shift because it feels like letting the other person off the hook. It’s not. It’s actually the only way to get yourself off the hook. Because as long as you’re trapped in the Versus Illusion, you’re trapped in the story. And the story won’t let you heal.
A Practical Roadmap for How to Trust Again
Alright. You’ve been patient with the theory. Let me give you something concrete. Here’s the process I walk people through in my practice, adapted for you to begin on your own.
Step 1: Acknowledge that your nervous system is doing its job.
Stop pathologizing your inability to trust. Your drawbridge is up for a reason. Thank your nervous system for protecting you. Seriously. Say it out loud: “Thank you for keeping me safe. I needed that.” This isn’t woo-woo. It’s how you begin to work with your body instead of against it.
Step 2: Identify the old file.
What specific experience taught your nervous system that trust is dangerous? Was it a specific betrayal? A pattern of emotional neglect? Something from childhood? Name it. Not to relive it, but to make it conscious. Because as long as the old file is running in the background, it’s controlling your behavior without your awareness.
Step 3: Start impossibly small.
You don’t rebuild trust by making grand declarations. You rebuild it by taking tiny risks. Share one honest feeling with your partner or a close friend. Make one small request. Express one need. The key here is calibration: choose a risk that’s small enough that your nervous system can tolerate it, but real enough that it matters.
Step 4: Notice what happens.
When you take that small risk, pay attention to the response. Not just the words, but the energy. Did the other person lean in or pull away? Did they get defensive or curious? Did you feel more connected or more alone? This is data. Your nervous system is collecting it whether you’re aware of it or not. Make it conscious.
Step 5: Let the evidence accumulate.
If the response was positive, resist the urge to dismiss it. Your protective mechanisms will try to explain it away: “They were just being nice.” “It won’t last.” “They’re only doing this because I told them to.” Notice those thoughts. Let them be there. But also let the positive experience register in your body. Take a breath. Stay present. Let it land.
Step 6: Repeat. Increase gradually.
Each positive experience creates a new neural pathway. Each one loosens the drawbridge mechanism slightly. Over time, through consistent repetition, the old file gets overwritten. Not erased, nothing in the nervous system is ever fully erased, but overwritten with new data that says: “Vulnerability can lead to connection, not just pain.”
Step 7: Get help when you’re stuck.
If your drawbridge has been stuck for a long time, or if the original wound was severe (betrayal trauma, childhood attachment injuries, repeated relationship failures), doing this alone is like performing surgery on yourself. It can be done, technically, but the outcomes are much better with a skilled professional who knows how to guide the process. A good couples therapist (or individual therapist, depending on your situation) doesn’t just help you talk about the problem. They facilitate the corrective emotional experiences in real time, in the room, so you can feel the shift happening rather than just thinking about it.
What Trust Actually Feels Like When It Returns
I want to end with something that most articles on this topic never address: what trust actually feels like when it comes back.
It doesn’t feel like certainty. That’s the first thing people get wrong. They think trusting someone means knowing, with 100% confidence, that this person will never hurt them. That’s not trust. That’s fantasy.
Real trust feels like willingness. The willingness to be vulnerable even though you know you could get hurt. The willingness to stay open even though closure would feel safer. The willingness to let someone matter to you, deeply, knowing that mattering to someone always carries risk.
It feels like a drawbridge that moves freely. Not stuck open, not stuck closed, but responsive. Up when it needs to be. Down when the conditions are right. Controlled by you, not controlled by your trauma.
The people I’ve worked with who have successfully learned how to trust again, and there are many of them, didn’t get there by deciding to trust. They got there by having enough corrective experiences, enough proof of work, enough moments of being met with safety when they expected danger, that their nervous system gradually updated its predictions.
They didn’t arrive at a place where they were never afraid. They arrived at a place where they could be afraid and stay open anyway.
That’s trust. Not the absence of fear, but the presence of connection despite the fear.
How to Trust Again: The Short Version
If you take nothing else from this article, take this:
- Trust is not a decision. It’s a nervous system state. Stop blaming yourself for not being able to “just get over it.”
- Your protection mechanisms (the wall, the drawbridge stuck in the up position) are not pathology. They’re intelligent responses to real pain.
- The only thing that rebuilds trust is corrective emotional experience, moments where vulnerability is met with safety instead of danger.
- This requires proof of work from both people: the one who needs to earn trust and the one who needs to let the evidence in.
- You don’t have to do this alone. In fact, you probably shouldn’t.
Learning how to trust again is one of the bravest things a human being can do. It means choosing connection over comfort. It means lowering the drawbridge, even just a few inches, when every part of you wants to keep it sealed shut.
You can do it. Not by thinking your way there. But by experiencing your way there, one small, honest, terrifying, beautiful moment at a time.
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.
