Learning to Trust Again

Your girlfriend walked out on you. Your husband cheated on you. Your best friend told your deepest secret to everyone. You were betrayed and hurt, and you vow never to trust anyone again.

It happens to all of us that someone breaks our trust. Now and then our trust is broken by a really good con-man, someone whose intention is to hurt us, to steal from us, to get something from us while not having our best interest at heart.

Most of the time, however, when we have our trust broken, the other person did not do it necessarily with the intent to hurt us. Yes, the cheating husband should have known better and his behavior may well be unforgiveable, but if you look closely, you’ll see that the warning signs not to trust him were always there. When you were dating, you saw his roving eye; you always feared he might cheat on you; you knew he had cheated on one of his past girlfriends, so why did you let yourself get into that situation? He says he never meant to hurt you, and he probably didn’t; he just has a weakness that makes him unable to be faithful. And you don’t have to hurt yourself by putting up with that weakness.

How about your friend who told your secret? What indication did this person give you to make you think you could trust her in the first place? How long was she your friend? Long enough to know you could truly trust her? Had she ever told you someone else’s secret or gossiped about other people to you? Did she have anything to gain by revealing your secret—maybe nothing more than the thrill of popularity when she told everyone the secret, or the adrenaline rush of getting to gossip about you?

Yes, these people betrayed you, but only because you betrayed yourself by trusting them. The person you shouldn’t trust is yourself, and yet, not being able to trust yourself is the scariest of situations and one we don’t want to follow.

We can learn to trust others again when we learn to trust ourselves. We need to set firm boundaries with ourselves not to tell secrets to people until we are certain they will not betray us. We can do that by testing them in small ways with little things to see whether they break our trust or not. We can do that by observing how they treat and talk about others. We can also pay attention to our own behavior; we can ask ourselves whether we are being the kind of trustworthy friend we want others to be toward us?

We can learn to avoid situations where we might break someone else’s trust. We walk away or change the subject if someone tries to gossip with one of us about a mutual friend. We avoid being alone with our friend’s attractive spouse, whether it’s because we might be tempted or because he has a roving eye. We do not make excuses when our boyfriend doesn’t return our calls or claims, “She’s just a friend.” We learn to trust our instincts and our intuition rather than pretending to trust others to make them feel good.

The most important person in our lives is our self. That is the person whose trust must not be broken at any cost. Be the friend you need to yourself first by being trustworthy. Learn to trust your instincts, and in time, you will learn to trust again and find that you now attract trustworthy people because those who would betray your trust realize they can’t betray you any longer, whether they want to or not.