Let me sit with that for a moment, because “trust issues preventing intimacy” is one of those phrases that sounds simple but is actually carrying a lot of weight.
Here’s what I want you to know first: trust is not the starting point. It’s the destination. People come into my office saying “I can’t be intimate because I don’t trust them” as if trust is a prerequisite you need to have before you can show up. But actually, trust is what gets built through the small moments of showing up, even when it feels risky.
So the real question isn’t “do I trust this person?” The real question is: what happened that made it feel unsafe to be seen by them?
Because here’s what I’ve watched happen in my office for sixteen years. Intimacy doesn’t fail because someone is untrustworthy. It fails because at some point, one person reached toward the other and the other person wasn’t there. Maybe they were distracted. Maybe they got defensive. Maybe they minimized what mattered. And the person who reached out learned, quietly and in their body, that reaching out costs something.
So they stopped reaching.
And then we call that “trust issues.”
What I want to explore with you is this: when you imagine being truly known by your partner, what’s the fear underneath that? Is it that they’ll see something and leave? That they’ll use it against you? That they’ll try to fix you instead of just being with you?
That last one is something I see constantly. One partner opens up, and the other partner immediately goes into problem-solving mode. They’re trying to help, genuinely. But what the vulnerable partner experiences isn’t help. It’s like their pain got handed back to them with an instruction manual attached.
That person needed to be witnessed. Not rescued.
The path back to intimacy isn’t grand gestures or long conversations about trust. It’s small, repeated moments where you reach, and the other person turns toward you. And then you do it again. That accumulated evidence is what actually rebuilds trust in a real, felt way.
The work is slow. But it’s the right kind of slow.
Because here’s the thing about intimacy: it’s not actually about trusting that your partner will never hurt you. It’s about trusting that when hurt happens, you can work through it together. That’s the difference between a relationship that survives and one that thrives.
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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
