How to Overcome Trust Issues in a Relationship
If you find yourself constantly waiting for something to go wrong in a relationship, scanning your partner's words for hidden meaning, or pulling away right when things are going well, you're not being irrational. You're doing what a nervous system that has learned to be careful will do. Trust issues aren't a personality flaw. They're a response to something that happened, and they can be worked through.
Therapy for trust and relationship patterns. At Sagebrush Counseling, we work with individuals and couples navigating trust, attachment, and the kind of slow relational repair that lasts. Schedule a complimentary consultation to see if we're a fit.
Schedule a Complimentary Consult →This post walks through what trust issues are, where they tend to come from, what they look like in relationships, and how individual counseling and couples therapy can support real, lasting change.
What Are Trust Issues, Really?
Trust, at its core, is the belief that another person is reliable, safe, and genuinely concerned with your wellbeing. In romantic relationships, trust is what allows both people to be vulnerable without constantly bracing for the impact of that vulnerability. When trust is present, honesty and openness tend to follow. When it's absent or fractured, the relationship becomes a place to manage rather than a place to rest.1
Trust issues are not simply a matter of being suspicious or difficult. They're usually a learned response, shaped by experiences that taught a person, often at a very young age, that relationships weren't safe or consistent. Those lessons don't disappear when you enter a new relationship. They travel with you and show up in predictable, understandable ways.
Where trust issues come from
Attachment theory, developed by John Bowlby and elaborated by Mary Ainsworth, offers one of the most useful frameworks for understanding trust in adult relationships. The foundational idea is that early interactions with caregivers create internal models for how relationships work, whether they're safe, whether you're worthy of care, and whether other people can be counted on. Those models then guide how you relate to others throughout your life, including your romantic partners.2
If early caregiving was inconsistent, unavailable, or frightening, a person often develops an anxious or avoidant attachment style. Anxiously attached adults tend to crave closeness while simultaneously fearing abandonment, often seeking reassurance but struggling to feel genuinely settled by it. Avoidantly attached adults tend to protect themselves through emotional distance, keeping intimacy at arm's length even when they want connection.
Trust issues can also develop later in life, through betrayal by a romantic partner, experiences of infidelity or deception, or relationships where safety was repeatedly compromised. Past relational pain doesn't stay in the past. It shapes what you watch for, how you interpret ambiguous signals, and what your nervous system decides to prepare for.
What Trust Issues Can Look Like in a Relationship
Trust issues present differently depending on the person and the history behind them. Some patterns are easy to name. Others are subtle enough that they can look like something else entirely, including being overly independent, having high standards, or "just knowing" when something is wrong.
Trust issues don't always look like suspicion. Sometimes they look like keeping one foot out the door, finding reasons to stay distant, or feeling most comfortable when you're the one likely to leave first.
- Difficulty believing reassurance even when it's offered sincerely
- Scanning your partner's behavior for signs of withdrawal or betrayal
- Pulling away or picking fights when things feel too close or too good
- Strong reactions to perceived criticism, rejection, or being deprioritized
- Difficulty being vulnerable even with someone who has earned it
- Needing to know where your partner is, who they're with, or what they're thinking
- Feeling fundamentally alone even within a relationship
- A persistent sense that the other shoe is going to drop
Research on anxious attachment and trust has found that when people with higher attachment anxiety experience lower levels of trust in a partner, they are significantly more likely to report jealousy, emotional distress, and behaviors aimed at reassurance-seeking or monitoring.3 This isn't a moral failing. It's a cascade of responses that makes complete sense given the underlying fear driving them.
In relationships where one or both partners have trust difficulties, the patterns can become self-reinforcing. Anxious monitoring can push a partner toward withdrawal. Emotional distance can confirm the fear of abandonment. Both people end up stuck in a loop that neither of them chose and that neither alone can break.
Can Trust Issues Be Worked Through?
Yes. Attachment patterns are not fixed. Research consistently shows that people can move toward more secure attachment through new relational experiences, including therapy. While these patterns are deeply rooted, what makes them possible to shift is that they are learned responses, not hard limits on who you are or what's available to you in relationships.2
What that work requires is not simply deciding to trust more or trying harder to stay calm. It requires understanding the specific history that shaped your relational patterns, developing the capacity to distinguish between old fears and present reality, and having consistent experiences, whether with a partner, a therapist, or both, that gently update the internal model your nervous system has been operating from.
That process takes time. It's also genuinely possible. And the direction of change matters as much as the pace. Each small moment of allowing yourself to be seen and not punished for it, of receiving repair after a rupture and staying in the relationship, of noticing the fear and choosing to stay present anyway: these compound over time into something more durable.
Ready to start untangling this? We offer individual and couples sessions across Maine, Montana, and Texas.
Schedule a Complimentary Consult →How Therapy Can Help: Individual Counseling and Couples Therapy
When trust is a struggle, both individual counseling and couples therapy can help. They work in different ways and address different layers of the issue. Sometimes one is the right starting point. Sometimes both are happening at once. Understanding the difference can help you figure out where to begin.
Working through your own history
- Understand where your patterns came from
- Process past betrayal, loss, or relational trauma
- Build self-awareness around triggers and responses
- Develop emotional regulation skills
- Separate old fears from what's happening now
- Strengthen your own sense of security from the inside out
Rebuilding safety together
- Break cycles that keep both partners stuck
- Create space for the hurt partner to be fully heard
- Help both people understand each other's underlying fears
- Rebuild communication that doesn't escalate or shut down
- Work through specific ruptures or betrayals together
- Build a shared language for what trust means to each of you
Individual counseling for trust issues
Individual therapy is often where trust work begins, because so much of what plays out in relationships was shaped before the relationship started. A therapist working with you individually can help you trace the specific history behind your patterns, whether that's inconsistent caregiving, a painful breakup, infidelity, or something harder to name. They can also help you identify what's happening in your body and nervous system when trust feels threatened, and start to build the internal resources to respond rather than simply react.
This kind of work matters in relationship contexts even when your partner isn't in the room. When you understand your own triggers and can hold them with more compassion and less shame, you bring something different into your relationship. You create more space for yourself and for your partner to show up imperfectly without the whole dynamic collapsing.
Couples therapy for trust issues
Couples therapy addresses trust at the relational level, in the space between two people. A skilled couples therapist can help partners slow down the cycles that tend to make trust feel impossible: the pursue-withdraw pattern, the accusation-defensiveness loop, the silence that follows a rupture that neither person knows how to repair. By creating a structured, safe environment for that kind of conversation, therapy allows both people to hear and be heard in ways that rarely happen naturally when tension is high.
Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) is one well-researched approach to couples work that focuses specifically on attachment dynamics and the underlying emotional needs that tend to drive relational conflict. Rather than focusing on behaviors or communication scripts, EFT works to help partners access the more vulnerable feelings underneath their defensive responses. When those feelings become visible, it changes what the conversation is about and what becomes possible between two people.
Couples therapy is not only for relationships in crisis. Many couples come to therapy while things are functional but feel distant, stuck, or like they're having the same fight over and over. That's a meaningful reason to seek support, and often the right time, before patterns calcify further.
What Helps Over Time
Beyond formal therapy, there are things that tend to support the gradual rebuilding of trust, both in yourself and in a relationship. None of them are quick fixes, but they're worth naming because they reflect what research and clinical experience consistently point to.
Consistency matters more than grand gestures. Trust is rebuilt or built for the first time through repeated small moments of reliability. Showing up the way you said you would. Naming something difficult instead of letting it fester. Following through on small commitments. Over time, these moments form the evidence base that a nervous system needs before it can start to relax.
Repair matters as much as rupture prevention. No relationship, and no person, is consistently available, attuned, and safe. Conflict happens. Misattunements happen. What distinguishes relationships that build trust from those that erode it is often not the absence of those moments but what happens after them. Relationships where people can acknowledge what happened and come back to each other teach something that healthy attachment looks like.
Naming fear directly changes the dynamic. When the fear driving suspicious or protective behavior stays hidden, it tends to come out sideways, as anger, withdrawal, or escalation. When it can be said directly, even imperfectly, the conversation shifts. A partner who hears "I'm scared you're losing interest" can respond to that in a way they can't respond to "you never make time for me."
Working with a therapist directory like the AAMFT Therapist Locator can help you find a licensed marriage and family therapist in your area who specializes in relationship issues and attachment.
Trust and Relationship Therapy at Sagebrush Counseling
Trust issues are one of the most common and most meaningful things we work with at Sagebrush Counseling, whether that looks like an individual processing the weight of past relational pain, a couple navigating the aftermath of betrayal, or two people who love each other and keep ending up in the same stuck place.
We work with adults and couples in Maine, Montana, and Texas via telehealth. Our approach is relational, attachment-informed, and genuinely collaborative. We don't believe that having trust issues means something is fundamentally wrong with you. We believe it means something happened, and that with the right support, something different is possible.
Whether you're looking for individual counseling to understand your own patterns or couples therapy to rebuild something between you and a partner, we'd be glad to talk.
Individual & Couples Therapy in Maine · Individual & Couples Therapy in Montana · Individual & Couples Therapy in Texas
Therapy for Trust Issues in Relationships
Individual counseling and couples therapy are both available at Sagebrush Counseling. Telehealth sessions across Maine, Montana, and Texas.
Trust issues in a relationship aren't a verdict on the relationship or on you. They're a signal that something underneath needs attention. With the right support, that attention can lead somewhere real.
If you're in Maine, Montana, or Texas and looking for a therapist who works with trust, attachment, and relationship repair, we'd love to connect.
— Sagebrush Counseling
1. Rempel, J.K., Holmes, J.G., & Zanna, M.P. (1985). Trust in close relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49(1), 95–112. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.49.1.95
2. Bowlby, J. (1980). Attachment and loss, Vol. 3: Loss, sadness and depression. Basic Books. See also: Ainsworth, M.D.S., Blehar, M.C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment. Lawrence Erlbaum.
3. Rodriguez, L.M., DiBello, A.M., Øverup, C.S., & Neighbors, C. (2015). The price of distrust: Trust, anxious attachment, jealousy, and partner abuse. Partner Abuse, 6(3), 298–319. PMC: PMC5380380
