Why Do I Have Such a Hard Time Trusting People After a Toxic Relationship?

IDENTITY, BOUNDARIES & PERSONAL GROWTH • April 12, 2026

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

When Your Guard Never Comes Down

Picture this: Megan is at a dinner party, sitting across from a woman she’s met three times and genuinely likes. They’re laughing, sharing stories, and for a moment it feels easy — the kind of warmth she used to take for granted. Then the woman reaches across the table and says, “I’m so glad we’re becoming friends. I feel like I can really talk to you.”

And Megan’s whole body goes cold.

Not because the words were unkind. Not because anything in the room shifted. But because somewhere underneath the dinner conversation, Megan’s nervous system registered a threat: someone is getting close. And getting close — in the place she’d learned it most — meant the beginning of something that would eventually hurt her.

She smiled, changed the subject, and spent the rest of the evening certain she’d said something wrong. She drove home alone feeling that familiar ache: the desire for connection and the terror of it, occupying the same body at the same time.

If you’ve left a toxic relationship and found yourself stuck in some version of this story, you’re not imagining it, and you’re not broken. What you’re experiencing has a name, a neurological basis, and — critically — a path through it. But that path probably isn’t the one you’ve been trying to take.

In my work with clients who’ve survived toxic relationships, I see this pattern consistently: women who are thoughtful, self-aware, and genuinely committed to healing — and who still can’t make themselves trust people, no matter how much they want to. They’ve read the books. They’ve done the journaling. They understand, intellectually, that not everyone is like their ex. And yet.

The body keeps the score — and it didn’t get the memo that you left.

This post is about why that happens. Why the hypervigilance that protected you inside a toxic relationship now sabotages your attempts at connection outside of it. How the trust deficit shows up at work, in friendships, in the quiet ways you test people and pull away before they can pull away first. And why rebuilding trust isn’t primarily a cognitive process — it’s a somatic one that starts not in your thinking mind, but in the felt sense of your body.

If you’ve been wondering whether something is fundamentally wrong with you, or whether you’ll ever feel safe with another human being again — this is for you.

What Is Betrayal Trauma?

Before we can talk about why trust feels so impossible after a toxic relationship, we need to name what actually happened to you — because the word “toxic” doesn’t fully capture the scope of the injury.

What makes betrayal trauma particularly insidious in the context of toxic relationships is that the betrayal was often gradual, cumulative, and systematically denied. Your partner may have dismissed your concerns, reframed your perceptions, or turned their violations into evidence of your instability. Over time, you stopped trusting your own read on reality — which is why so many women I work with describe feeling simultaneously hypervigilant toward others and chronically uncertain of their own judgment.

If this resonates, you might also find it worth reading the complete guide to betrayal trauma on this site, which goes deeper into the theory and its clinical implications. And if you’re still untangling why you stayed as long as you did, why you keep attracting toxic people addresses the repetition compulsion and fawn response patterns that often precede a trust injury like this one.

The point here is this: the trust deficit you’re living with isn’t a personality problem. It’s a predictable neurological consequence of a specific type of relational injury. Understanding that distinction matters — not so you’re let off the hook from doing the work, but so you stop treating yourself as the problem you need to fix.

The Neurobiology of the Trust Deficit

The reason you can’t simply decide to trust people — even people who are clearly safe, who’ve earned it, who’ve given you no reason not to — is that trust isn’t primarily a cognitive function. It’s a nervous system state. And your nervous system learned something in that toxic relationship that it hasn’t unlearned yet.

To understand why, it helps to know a little about how the threat-detection system works.

Stephen Porges, PhD, neuroscientist and developer of Polyvagal Theory, has spent decades studying how the autonomic nervous system regulates safety and connection. His research established that humans don’t first think their way into feeling safe — they feel their way into it, through a process called neuroception. (PMID: 7652107)

Here’s what happens in a toxic relationship at the neurological level: your nervous system is repeatedly activated into threat states — fear, hypervigilance, freeze, fawn — and then told that those responses are evidence of your dysfunction, not your partner’s. Over time, your threat-detection system gets recalibrated. It learns to fire earlier, more intensely, and in response to subtler cues. It learned that closeness equals danger. That warmth is often prelude to cruelty. That the moment you relax, something will go wrong.

This recalibration was adaptive. It kept you safe inside a relationship where those things were often true. The problem is that nervous systems don’t auto-update when circumstances change. You leave the relationship, but the threat detector you built inside it comes with you — faithfully scanning every new interaction for the danger it’s been trained to find.

John Gottman, PhD, psychologist and relationship researcher, co-founder of The Gottman Institute, whose decades of research include extensive study of how trust is built and destroyed in relationships, describes trust as a phenomenon that accumulates in small moments — what he calls “sliding door moments,” the micro-instances where a partner either turns toward or away from connection. In a toxic relationship, those moments are systematically corrupted. Your partner repeatedly turned away, minimized, or weaponized your attempts at connection. The result is that the neural pathways associated with reaching out to another person have been grooved with the expectation of rejection, dismissal, or exploitation. (PMID: 1403613)

Rebuilding those pathways isn’t a matter of deciding to trust. It requires new experiences of reaching and being met — experiences that happen slowly enough, and with enough felt-sense safety, that the nervous system can begin to revise its predictions. This is why trauma-informed therapy is so central to this process — it creates exactly that kind of corrective relational experience, in a space designed for it.

It’s also why you can’t think your way out of this. And why people who tell you to “just let your guard down” or “give people a chance” are — however well-intentioned — misunderstanding the nature of the problem.

How the Trust Deficit Shows Up in Driven Women

The trust deficit after a toxic relationship doesn’t always look the way people expect. It’s not always dramatic. It doesn’t always look like cowering or avoidance. In driven, ambitious women especially, it tends to show up in more subtle — and more socially acceptable — forms.

In my clinical work, I see the trust deficit manifest in four primary domains: professional settings, friendships, romantic attempts, and internal self-trust. And the professional and friendship presentations are often the most overlooked.

At work: You don’t delegate, even when you need to. Not because you’re a perfectionist (though maybe that’s also true), but because something in you can’t tolerate the vulnerability of being dependent on someone else doing something correctly. You assume that if you don’t control it, it will be used against you somehow. You second-guess compliments from colleagues, reading them for hidden motive. You interpret a manager’s direct feedback as a precursor to something worse. You struggle to advocate for yourself in negotiations because you’ve learned that asking for more sometimes results in punishment, not reward.

Megan — a director at a biotech firm who came to executive coaching six months after leaving a four-year relationship with a partner who chronically undermined her — described it this way: “I run a team of twelve people, and I trust exactly zero of them. Not because they’ve given me any reason not to. I just can’t. Every time someone tells me something went well, I’m already scanning for what’s about to go wrong.”

In friendships: You test people — often without realizing it. You share something small and vulnerable and wait to see what they do with it. If they use it against you (which people in healthy friendships rarely do), your nervous system files it as confirmation. If they don’t, your nervous system often can’t quite accept that as evidence of safety — it’s waiting for the eventual betrayal. You pull away at the first sign of conflict, because in your learned experience, conflict was the beginning of a cycle that always ended in your diminishment. You might be the friend who is always there for everyone else but who never actually lets anyone in.

Amy, a 38-year-old entrepreneur who survived an emotionally abusive marriage, described showing up to a close friend’s difficult moment with exactly the right support — and then, when that same friend later wanted to talk about something hard Amy was going through, finding herself unable to stay in the conversation. “I physically couldn’t receive it,” she said. “I kept deflecting, making jokes. I knew what I was doing, and I couldn’t stop.” The giving felt safe. The receiving — the vulnerability of being truly seen — did not.

In romantic attempts: Even when you meet someone who seems genuinely kind, there’s a part of you that treats their goodness as suspicious. You find yourself looking for the catch. You might unconsciously create distance — being unavailable, picking fights, pulling away when things get close — because proximity has come to feel dangerous. Or you might find yourself drawn to people who replicate the emotional temperature of the toxic relationship, because at least that’s familiar. (This is explored in depth in the companion post on why you keep attracting toxic people.)

In self-trust: Perhaps the most damaging consequence. After months or years of having your perceptions corrected, your feelings dismissed, and your reality rewritten, many women emerge from toxic relationships no longer able to trust their own read on situations. They over-rely on others’ opinions. They second-guess their instincts. They wonder whether their discomfort with a person or situation is legitimate information or just “their stuff.” If this resonates, how to trust your judgment again after a sociopath addresses this specifically.

Healthy Caution Versus Trauma-Driven Distrust

One question I hear often in this work is: “But isn’t some distrust healthy? Shouldn’t I be more careful about who I let in?”

Yes. Absolutely. Discernment — the ability to read people and situations accurately and calibrate your openness accordingly — is a genuine relational skill, and it’s one that many women who’ve survived toxic relationships didn’t have well-developed before they entered them. Part of post-toxic-relationship growth is developing that discernment intentionally.

But there’s a meaningful clinical difference between healthy caution and trauma-driven distrust. And it matters, because one is adaptive and the other keeps you stuck.

Here’s a practical way to distinguish them:

Healthy caution is proportionate, responsive to actual information, and allows for update. If a new colleague shares something you said in confidence and uses it in a meeting, healthy caution says: I’m going to be more careful with what I share with her. It doesn’t generalize to: I can never trust anyone at this company. It responds to specific data.

Trauma-driven distrust operates on a fixed belief system that predates the current interaction. It doesn’t need evidence. It generates its own. If a colleague is warm, it’s a setup. If someone is reliable, they must want something. If a friendship feels good, something must be wrong. The nervous system has been set to a hair trigger, and it fires at shadows.

The distinction also shows up in the body. Healthy caution tends to feel grounded — you can slow down, assess, decide. Trauma-driven distrust tends to feel urgent, flooding, or like a knowing-without-knowing-why. Your chest tightens before you’ve had a conscious thought. You find yourself withdrawing from a conversation and only later realize you did it.

Understanding that your distrust is trauma-driven rather than evidence-based doesn’t mean you dismiss it. It means you learn to work with it differently — not overriding it through force of will, but attending to what it’s trying to protect, and helping your nervous system discover, slowly, that the threat level in your current life is different from what it was. (PMID: 9384857)

And if you’re still in the process of understanding your sense of self after what you survived, rebuilding your identity after a sociopath may offer important context for why trust and self-concept are so deeply intertwined in this kind of recovery.

Both/And: You’re Wary and You Still Want to Connect

There’s a story that often gets told about women who’ve survived toxic relationships — that they’re either broken (unable to trust, damaged, closed off) or healed (warm, open, back to their old selves). I want to name that this binary is false and, frankly, unkind. Because what I see in the women I work with is something far more nuanced: the simultaneous and genuine coexistence of both.

You can be deeply wary of people and genuinely long for closeness. You can pull away at the moment of real connection and also be exhausted by your own isolation. You can test people and also hate yourself for testing them. You can feel safer alone and also grieve the version of you who trusted easily.

This isn’t inconsistency. It isn’t a sign that you’re “not really ready” to heal. It’s the accurate emotional experience of a person who has been through something real, and who is still here, still wanting.

Amy put it with an honesty that I think will resonate: “I would love nothing more than to have a person I can call when something falls apart. And every time someone gets close enough to be that person, I do something to create distance. Not because I don’t want it. Because part of me is completely convinced it will be taken away.” Both of those things are true for her, at the same time.

The Both/And frame matters clinically, too. When women try to override the wariness — to perform openness, to force themselves to trust before their nervous system is ready — they often end up either reenacting the toxic pattern (choosing people who don’t merit trust, because that’s what familiar warmth feels like) or collapsing into a shame spiral when the performance fails. The wariness isn’t the enemy. It’s a part of you that’s trying to keep you safe, and it deserves acknowledgment, not suppression.

What shifts things — what I see consistently in my clinical work and in the clients who do this through Fixing the Foundations — is learning to hold the wary part with compassion while gradually expanding the evidence base your nervous system is working from. Not replacing distrust with trust. Building, slowly, toward a more calibrated relationship with connection — one that’s informed by the past without being imprisoned by it.

This is the Both/And: you are wary because something real happened to you, and you are also someone who wants to be known. Both of those are true. Both of those are worth honoring.

The Systemic Lens: Why We Gaslight Survivors About Trust

I’d be doing you a disservice if I framed your difficulty trusting as solely an individual psychological problem without acknowledging the broader systems and narratives that make it worse.

Because here’s what happens to a lot of women who leave toxic relationships and try to heal: they’re told to “move on,” to “not let the past define them,” to “not all men” or “not all women” their way through their wariness. They’re told — sometimes by well-meaning friends, sometimes by pop-psychology content — that their distrust is a “wall” they’ve built that they need to “tear down.” That protection and openness are opposites. That healthy people trust freely.

This framing isn’t just unhelpful — it’s a second injury. It locates the problem entirely in the survivor, while erasing the relational and social context that produced the injury in the first place.

Jennifer Freyd, PhD, psychologist who coined betrayal trauma theory, has written extensively about what she calls “DARVO” — Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender — the pattern by which perpetrators and systems that protect them reframe the survivor’s legitimate responses as pathology. When a woman who was systematically manipulated by a partner is then told that her wariness is her problem to solve, that’s a structural echo of the original betrayal.

There is also a specifically gendered dimension to this. Women are socialized from girlhood to prioritize relational harmony, to extend trust as an act of goodwill, to treat their own suspicion or discomfort as evidence of irrationality rather than accurate perception. The cultural message — “don’t be so paranoid,” “you’re reading too much into it,” “give them the benefit of the doubt” — is often applied unevenly, and it creates conditions where women who are being harmed in relationships are continually told that their detection of that harm is the problem.

Recovery from a trust deficit isn’t just personal work. It also involves recognizing and pushing back against the social messages that tell you your wariness is a defect, that fast-forgiveness is a virtue, and that the goal of healing is to return to a pre-injury state of open trust. That state may not have been particularly healthy to begin with. It may, in fact, have been part of what made you vulnerable.

Real healing expands your capacity to be genuinely discerning — not to return to a baseline of uncritical openness, but to develop a richer, more grounded relationship with trust: one that includes your own perception, your body’s signals, and your hard-won knowledge of what harm actually looks like.

If you’re a driven woman navigating how relational trauma has shaped your leadership style and your capacity for professional trust, the work available through executive coaching addresses exactly that intersection.

How to Rebuild Trust — Starting With Your Body

If you’ve read this far, you’ve already noticed that every framework in this post points to the same conclusion: you cannot think your way into trusting again. The injury happened in the body — in the nervous system, in the accumulated neuroception of danger — and the healing has to happen there too.

That doesn’t mean there’s no cognitive component. Insight matters. Understanding what betrayal trauma is, recognizing the difference between hypervigilance and healthy caution, noticing your patterns in friendships and at work — all of that creates the conditions for change. But insight without somatic work tends to produce people who understand their trauma well and are still controlled by it.

Here’s what rebuilding trust actually looks like in practice:

1. Start with self-trust, not other-trust. The most foundational trust deficit in a toxic relationship isn’t toward others — it’s toward yourself. When your perceptions were systematically denied, your nervous system learned that its own signals couldn’t be counted on. Before you can extend trust outward, you need experiences of your own perception being accurate, your own discomfort being valid, your own instincts being worth listening to. This is why rebuilding self-trust is the clinical starting point. If you’re working through this, how to trust your judgment again after a sociopath lays out a practical framework for this specific work.

2. Notice your body, not just your thoughts. When you’re in a social interaction that triggers your trust deficit — a new friendship developing, a colleague offering support, a potential partner being kind — your body will respond before your mind does. That response is information. Not necessarily accurate information about the current situation, but important information about where your nervous system currently is. Learning to name that response — “my chest is tight,” “I want to leave this conversation,” “I just went flat” — is the beginning of working with it rather than being run by it.

3. Titrate exposure to connection. Your nervous system doesn’t build new safety pathways from big, dramatic leaps. It builds them through small, repeated experiences of reaching out and being met safely. This means starting with lower-stakes connections — a colleague you share a project with, an acquaintance at a community event — and allowing yourself to practice being slightly more open, then noticing what happens. Not forcing warmth. Not performing trust. Just watching for evidence that contradicts your current threat-model, and letting that evidence land.

4. Work with a trauma-informed therapist. The therapeutic relationship itself is one of the most powerful vehicles for rebuilding trust, because it provides a contained, consistent relationship in which you can experience reaching and being met — without the relational stakes of a friendship or romance. Trauma-informed therapy is specifically designed to create the kind of corrective relational experience that retrains the nervous system’s expectations. This is not optional for deep trust injuries — it’s foundational.

5. Grieve the loss of who you were before. This one often gets skipped, and it shouldn’t. Many women who’ve survived toxic relationships grieve the loss of the relationship itself, or the loss of the life they thought they’d have. But the grief that often goes unacknowledged is the loss of the version of yourself who trusted freely, who moved through the world without scanning, who didn’t know yet what betrayal by someone close felt like. That loss is real. It deserves to be mourned. And letting yourself grieve it is part of what makes space for something new.

6. Allow trust to be rebuilt in stages, not all at once. Healthy trust isn’t binary — it’s not “I trust you” or “I don’t trust you.” It’s a gradient: I trust you with this, not yet with that. I trust you in this domain, not in that one. Learning to extend partial trust — to let someone be reliable in a specific, limited way before opening further — is both a more realistic approach and a more nervous-system-friendly one. It gives you data. It gives you agency. And it allows the relationship to deepen incrementally, rather than requiring a full vulnerability leap that your nervous system can’t yet manage.

7. Stay connected to your community and support structures. Isolation is one of the most common consequences of a trust deficit, and it’s also one of the things that deepens it. The Strong & Stable newsletter was created partly for this reason — to give ambitious, driven women a weekly touchpoint that reminds them they’re not alone in this, and that healing is both possible and in progress for others who’ve been exactly where they are. Connection doesn’t always have to be high-vulnerability to be nourishing. Start with the low-stakes version and let it build.

Megan, eighteen months after that dinner party, described something she didn’t expect: “I was in a meeting and a colleague said something kind about my work in front of the whole team. And I noticed I didn’t immediately dismiss it. I just… let it in for a second. It sounds so small. But it was the biggest thing that had happened to me in two years.” It is small. And it is also everything — because it’s how the nervous system learns that it’s safe to be seen.

That’s what rebuilding trust actually looks like. Not a grand reopening. A small moment of letting something good be real.

If you’re somewhere in this process and wondering what the next right step looks like for your specific situation — whether that’s therapy, coaching, a course, or simply understanding yourself better — I’d invite you to reach out via a complimentary consultation. You don’t have to figure this out alone.

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I know this kind of distrust can feel like a life sentence. Like you’ve lost something essential about who you were, and you’re not sure you’ll get it back. What I want to say — from years of sitting with women who’ve been exactly where you are — is that the nervous system is genuinely plastic. It changes with experience. The wiring that was laid down in that relationship can be revised, slowly and carefully, through new experiences of connection that are safe enough and consistent enough for the body to start believing in them. That revision is not fast, and it’s not linear. But it is possible. And you deserve to experience it.

Related Reading

1. Freyd, Jennifer J. Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.
2. Porges, Stephen W. The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011.
3. Gottman, John M., and Nan Silver. The Science of Trust: Emotional Attunement for Couples. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011.
4. van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking, 2014.
5. Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence — From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1992.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer