How do I get over trust issues and stop ruining my relationships?
Spencer writes: “Why did I demolish my amazingly beautiful relationship with a gorgeous and devoted girlfriend who showed me unconditional love even though I repeatedly turned on her and kept her down with accusations I knew were far from true. I couldn’t accept that my intuition had been hindered by my paranoia; and in all reality, that she had really never done anything wrong. But I just could not bring myself to admit to her that I was wrong out of a fear that she would think less of me and then go on to never trust in my judgement on everything else. I really thought, then, that is how she would be. But hindsight is always 20/20, and I realize that negative assumption about her was just another ridiculous scenario I concocted in dysfunctional way of thinking when it comes to trusting woman. So my question is this: why, when i have full awareness and take complete responsibility for the sabotage of my awesome relationship, why do I still feel the same feelings and think the same thoughts in my present situation, even though I know they are wrong?? Please help me save my next relationship from my harmful repeats and the irreversible damage.”
Dear Spencer,
Have you ever noticed how much the advice on figuring out if there’s something going on in your relationship that you’re not aware of encourages you to trust your gut?
Sure, it’s important to trust your gut. Anyone who’s ever been betrayed in a relationship can look back and see where they should have listened to their gut, when it was insisting that something was not right.
The problem is, once you’ve already experienced betrayal or trauma in a relationship, this advice to trust your gut becomes a lot more complicated.
That’s because it’s really hard to tell the difference between genuine gut signals that something is off in your relationship and physical experience of anxiety and fear of being hurt like that again.
Being betrayed in a relationship is so incredibly painful that a part of us responds to this experience by saying: Never again. And that part of us takes it upon itself to become our fierce protector—constantly vigilant and on the lookout for any sign that we’re going to be betrayed again.
In other words, once we’ve been hurt by lies in a relationship, we’re no longer able to naïvely take things at face value. We’re no longer able to just trust appearances in the relationship. Sure, our partner seems wonderful and devoted … but is she really?
We become highly reactive to any potential red flag, no matter how small: She said she wasn’t feeling well but is she actually home in bed, or is she out with someone else? Why did he just close that browser window when I came into the room? Who are they texting right now? Who’s texting them at this hour?
In an effort to keep ourselves safe and protect ourselves from being hurt again, we’re constantly on guard, looking at everything in the relationship in the worst light possible.
We imagine every worst case scenario, inventing nightmarish possibilities that then torment us until they’re disproven. These imaginary stories haunt us, making it impossible to relax and truly enjoy our relationship.
We start feeling more than a little paranoid. We starting driving ourselves a little crazy with all the possibilities and unknowns and the inability to ever know the truth with perfect certainty.
So we seek out reassurance from our partner. We just want to feel better. We need to get some relief from the things we’re imagining. We need to know for sure that they’re not doing anything behind our back. Once we get reassurance, we’ll be able to finally relax and stop being so paranoid all the time.
So we try asking questions, but the only thing worse than feeling paranoid is letting our partner see us so vulnerable. We see how insecure we must seem, how jealous and weak. The whole thing is so upsetting, we start getting angry … even though we know we don’t have any reason to be angry (yet).
We just want to feel reassured. We want to feel better. But because we’re angry and upset, our requests for reassurance end up coming out as accusations and attacks. With our anger and suspicion and accusations, we push the other person away when what we’re actually wanting is to be close.
We simultaneously yearn to be reassured yet we don’t trust what our partner is telling us.
The worst part is that our partner can’t really reassure us. They can’t take away those inner nightmare images that have been generated by our past betrayals and pain. They have no way to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that there’s no cause for worry.
You write that you already recognize how your intuition was hindered by your fears, suspicions, and paranoia. It’s really difficult to tell the difference between our gut feelings and our fears. Our intuition and our fears can feel incredibly similar, which is what makes our intuition not particularly useful in situations where we already have a lot of fear.
I’m guessing your intuition probably functions just fine when it comes to other people in your life. You meet someone at a party who invites you to invest in a joint business venture and your intuition says very clearly: There’s something off about this person. Don’t do it. And you follow your intuition and you’re glad you did.
But when we’ve been betrayed and hurt in a past intimate relationship, it’s nearly impossible to listen to our intuition because our fears are so loud.
So what do you do when you can’t untangle the whisper of your intuition from the panicked insistence of your suspicions and paranoia?
The first thing to do is to normalize all the thoughts and feelings you’re having. They are absolutely predictable as a response to past betrayal. It’s entirely natural that these exact thoughts and feelings are going to come up when you start getting attached to someone new.
It would be nice if all it took to make these thoughts and feelings disappear was knowing that they aren’t true or accurate. But that’s not how it works, because there’s that part of you that’s determined to keep you safe and prevent you from getting hurt again, even if its defenses end up ruining your relationship.
I wish I could give you a secret recipe to make those thoughts go away—to stop them in their tracks so you never have to have another thought like this again. But unfortunately, that’s not how it works. You’re going to have these thoughts (at least for a while) even when you know they’re not true.
But just because you can’t stop having these thoughts and feelings immediately doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do.
What you can do is correctly attribute these thoughts and feelings when they come up.
Imagine you had two buckets for thoughts that pop into your head. One bucket is labeled past and one bucket is labeled present. Your job is to distinguish which bucket these paranoid thoughts go into. You put those thoughts into the bucket labeled past.
Let’s say you have the thought: What if she’s cheating on me with that coworker of hers? Perhaps your typical strategy has been to try to push away these kinds of thoughts and just ignore them. So you try to push away the thought, but then at dinner, when she mentions a funny story involving this coworker, all those fears and thoughts come right back up, even more intensely than before.
You don’t mean to but your feelings get the best of you in that moment and you snap at her: Why are you so obsessed with this guy? You talk about him all the time! And then she’s hurt and defensive and you’re frustrated and neither of you feel good about what’s just happened.
Labeling your thoughts and correctly attributing them to the past isn’t about ignoring or trying to suppress the thoughts. It’s about making sure you’re consciously connecting these thoughts and feelings to your past experiences, so you don’t act as though they’re related to your present experience.
Even though you can’t stop these thoughts and feelings from coming up, when you remind yourself where these thoughts and feelings are coming from, you can work toward not letting these old thoughts and feelings from the past control your behavior and choices in the present.
So for example, let’s say that you experienced betrayal in your first serious intimate relationship. It hurt—deeply. And since then, you’ve been plagued by this paranoia about your romantic partners … even when a larger part of you knows that there’s no reality behind your fears.
Instead of trying to push these thoughts and feelings away and instead of acting on these feelings by lashing out or making baseless accusations, what if you just acknowledged the feelings and thoughts when they came up? You might say something to yourself like: Ugh. Here comes the paranoia. Of course. Here I was feeling close to my partner a moment ago and that brought up all my fears about getting hurt again.
I’m probably making this sound easy, but I know it’s not easy. It’s actually really hard. These thoughts come up and they stir up a lot of fear and you naturally want to act on these thoughts and feelings to try to protect yourself from pain.
But because these thoughts and feelings relate to the past and not to your present relationship, any action you take now ends up being destructive to your current relationship.
Once we’ve been hurt in the past, we are keenly aware that being close with another person means that they’re close enough to us to really hurt us if they chose to. That’s why our attempts to protect ourselves from being hurt almost always involve pushing the other person away.
The reality is that your current partner can’t do anything to fix what happened to you in the past. She can’t be good enough and honest enough and upstanding enough to ever alleviate your fears. It’s not her job and she also doesn’t have that power.
You are the only one who actually has the power to shift these fears and old feelings. If you find that working with these feelings on your own and interrupting the destructive responses you have to these feelings is too much to try to do on your own, you might want to seek out some trauma-informed relationship counselings or coaching.
It’s difficult to re-learn how to trust in relationships after you’ve been hurt or betrayed. But it is possible to heal past betrayal trauma and learn how to relax and fully enjoy a good relationship without being on guard all the time.
And on that note, I’m wishing you the healing you need in order to experience the kind of loving, safe, trusting relationship you deserve to have.
~ Angela
Ask Angela is an advice column dedicated to the topic of having fulfilling relationships after trauma. Click HERE to submit a question for Angela.
DISCLAIMER: this content is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other licensed health care provider with any questions or concerns you may have regarding a medical condition.
about angela Amias, LCSW
Angela Amias, LCSW is a relationship therapist and nationally-recognized expert on trauma and relationships. She’s the co-founder of Alchemy of Love, which provides trauma-informed relationship programs and resources. She’s also the founder of the Institute for Trauma Informed Relationships, which provides training and education to therapists and coaches who want to help their clients heal past wounds and create more fulfilling relationships.
As an expert on trauma and relationships, Angela has been featured in numerous publications, including Today, Oprah, Cosmopolitan, The Independent, Well + Good, Inc., Forbes, Business Insider, Salon, MSN, Women’s Health and the Toronto Sun.
