If you grew up in an environment where trust was betrayed, or love felt conditional, it’s no surprise that forming healthy relationships might feel hard. Your past experiences can teach you that love comes with strings attached and that trust is a risky gamble.
What makes this even harder is that your early relationships shape how you see yourself and the world. If those relationships were rooted in dysfunction, you might carry an unconscious belief that people will always let you down or that love is something you must earn.
Why It’s Hard to Trust and What You Can Do
It’s okay to admit that trusting people doesn’t come easy for you. If you’ve been hurt before, especially by the very people meant to care for you, it’s only natural to be cautious. After all, our instinct is to protect ourselves from further pain, and we are always ready to do that.
Unfortunately, this protective instinct can backfire, keeping you closed off from genuine, supportive connections. You might put up emotional walls so high that even those with the best intentions can’t get close to you. Or you may find yourself drawn to relationships that mirror your past, repeating old patterns because they feel familiar, even when they hurt.
Recognizing these behaviors is the first step to breaking free from them.
Starting With Yourself
Healing relationships begin with the most important one of all. The relationship you have with yourself! You have to love yourself first and foremost. If that sounds way too strange for you, know that it is a must for everyone on this planet to do!
If love and trust felt conditional in your family, it’s easy to believe you are not worthy of being loved fully and freely. But you can be if you want to be.
Building Trust Gradually
Trust isn’t something that just appears. It grows. So start by allowing yourself to take small risks with people you feel safe around. If they love you, they will listen, or accept your actions.
Maybe it’s sharing a vulnerable thought with a close friend or opening up a little more in your conversations. Perhaps, you show some emotions that you never dared show before. Pay attention to how they respond. Trustworthy people respect your boundaries, show empathy, and show this in their actions time and time again.
If someone breaks your trust, don’t blame yourself for opening up to them and wishing you hadn’t. Instead, use it as a learning curve and refine who you let into your inner circle of trusting friends. Healing isn’t about avoiding pain entirely. That’s often hard for anybody. It’s recognizing who you can spend time with and when to step away.
Learning to Love
Love after dysfunction can feel very strange indeed, especially if what you experienced before wasn’t genuine love but a form of control or obligation. Healthy love doesn’t demand that you constantly give without receiving. It’s a mutual exchange of care, respect, and kindness.
You can practice by observing how you feel in a relationship. Do you feel safe when you express yourself? Do your needs matter as much as the other person’s? Healthy relationships are built on equality, where both people can thrive as individuals while supporting each other as a team.
Forgiving Yourself for the Past
If you’ve been in relationships that mirrored the dysfunction you grew up with, it’s easy to beat yourself up. You might wonder why you stayed or why you repeated certain patterns.
Understand that you were doing the best you could with what you knew. Each experience, no matter how painful, has taught you something valuable about what you want and deserve in any of your relationships moving forward.
Rebuilding love and trust can be done and it can help you live a happier, loving, carefree life! The hurt you’ve endured doesn’t have to live in your heart any longer. You have the power to fill your heart with better things and create connections that lift you up rather than drag you down.
Take one small step today. Open your heart just a teeny-weeny little bit more and see what happens. Believe that love and trust are possible for you. Plus, here’s something for you to think about. The person that loves you the most right now, believes it is possible!
