Look, I want to say something important right off the top here, because I think it matters how we frame this.
When you say your partner has “trust issues from childhood,” I hear you. But what I want you to understand is that what your partner is actually carrying is a set of very old files. Their brain built a story a long time ago, probably when they were small and someone who was supposed to show up didn’t. Or showed up in a way that hurt them. And that story didn’t stay in the past. It never does. It travels with them into every present moment, including the moments they share with you.
You keep trying to love someone who expects you to leave.
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So when you come home late, or you’re distracted, or you go quiet, their body is not just responding to what you did right now. Their body is responding to right now plus every time before that confirmed, “I don’t matter. I’m not safe. No one is coming.” The past merges with the present. That is not a metaphor. That is literally how the nervous system works.
Here is what I want you to sit with. Your partner is not broken. Their response makes complete sense given what they lived through. The part of them that doesn’t trust is the part that learned, early and painfully, that trusting leads to being hurt. That part is trying to protect them. It has been doing that job for a very long time.
Now, here is the harder truth. You cannot fix this for them. And trying to fix it, explaining it away, reassuring them over and over, getting frustrated that they won’t just believe you, that actually makes it worse. What that part of them needs is not a solution. It needs to be witnessed. It needs someone to say, in effect, “Of course you don’t trust easily. Of course this is hard. That makes complete sense given what happened to you.”
That witnessing, that is where the real work begins. Not the convincing. The witnessing.
The good news, and I mean this genuinely, is that the brain is not fixed. Those old files can be rewritten. Not erased, but changed. When your partner risks trusting you, really risks it, and you show up, and they let that in, something shifts. That moment becomes a new file. And over time, new files change what feels possible.
That is the work. And it is absolutely worth doing.
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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: Attachment Styles in Relationships: How Your Love Pattern Shapes Your Bond
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