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trust issues with someone you love but don't really know trust with someone you "love" but don't really know   A client came in for consultation regarding anxiety and trust issues in her relationship. Almost the same day, an email from a similar young woman arrived in my email. The apparent issue in both situation was so similar, it seemed worth jotting down some notes here. the trust-anxious patient The young woman who came to me for assistance said she wanted help with her trust issues. She described being in a relationship with a man she had become very close to and felt she "loved." She described having in this relationship for over a year and said that the two had dated just over a month before they began living together. Once living together, however, she became increasingly upset with his drinking behavior which seemed both a daily occurence and very much related to "forgetting" promises and arranged time together. She described how he frequently would call from a tavern and say he was socializing and would be home at a certain time but would get home until hours after he promised to. She described some occasions when she and he were drinking together at a tavern and she witnessed him being overly physical with other women. She described becoming more and more suspicious and accusing -- and feeling paranoid about his behavior when out of her sight. She described having been in similar relationships before when she was increasingly unable to keep her suspicions to herself and she reported feeling she had serious trust issues that should be addressed in therapy. the response As also elaborated in other articles on this site, I think such situations do indicate trust and anxiety issues. However, I don't think such situations indicate difficulty trusting in one's loved ones as much as indicating difficulty trusting one's self sufficiently to take the time to do the work to get into a decent relationship worthy of trust. I asked this young woman to imagine a situation in which she was in Seattle and wanted very much to be in Miami. I asked her to imagine rushing out and purchasing the first car she came across that seemed easily within her budget and then to imagine hopping in the car and leaving for Miami. I then asked her to imagine hearing strange noises from her car as she was driving through the lonely, sparcely populated areas of the mountains during the first several hours of her trip. I asked her if under these circumstances she feel anxious -- and then I asked her if she thought this would indicate a deep seated trust issues related to cars. "No," she said, "that would be fear about finding myself stuck all alone in the wilderness." If you're in a love relationship with someone you don't really know and you experience anxiety about the stability of the relationship, this is not a problem trusting others -- this is a trust of self issue, misunderstood and mislabeled and likely to become worse until it is accurately identified and dealt with. This, then, is not a situation related to problems trusting others -- or loved ones -- though the issues inside are probably born of problems trusting others, especially parents, as a child. This kind of situation comes from not trusting one's self to be alone and independent. This kind of situation comes from jumping into a relationship with someone else who is also foolish enough to try to bond and live together before either party has done the work of slowly finding out who their potential partner really is. This is a trust of self issue, misunderstood and mislabeled as a trust of others issue. If an individual jumps into a relationship without doing their homework, it is far more likely that the relationship will ultimately fail on the basis of unforeseen incompatibilities than in situations wherein the individual takes the time to make sure of his or her investment in the relationship -- investing more and more slowly over time as more and more compatibility is established. This is, as it is in the situation of the car and the need to get to Miami, not an issue of trust in others (or trust in cars), this is a situation related to fears of being alone and lost in the wilderness. This is often related to feeling, in childhood, that you can't trust your caretakers to keep you safe and secure. By adulthood, this problem is manefested by fears about being alone and uncared for in a love relationship -- and, ironically, it is characterized by quick entry into relationships with others who are also in a panic about having someone to be in love who will be very difficult to trust because it is known that the relationship is only founded on immediate (and not long term) convenience. the trust-anxious emailer "I just finished reading your website, and it intrigued me because I believe that I have a trust issue.   I'm currently in a 1-year relationship with a man I love very much. Yet in the past I have only been in relationships where I have trusted my significant-other, and in return they have only cheated on me, and only used me for sex. This is the first relationship that has been different.   But I have a MAJOR problem trusting him. My trust issues weren't nearly as bad as they are now, but several months ago, he got drunk at a party and made-out with a girl that we both know. He never told me about it. Until I overheard him talking about it with someone else, months after the fact.   I still love him, and he told me it was a mistake, and that he didn't tell me because he knew I had been hurt in the past.   After that, every time I'm not with him, I have this overpowering feeling of worthlessness, and that I just KNOW he's going to do it again, or WORSE that he has ALREADY done it to me again.   "I'm so depressed, and I really REALLY want help. I always accuse him of cheating on me, but deep down, I know that I just don't trust him.   I don't know what will work best to help my situation, if I need to listen to tapes, or go talk to a therapist.   I want help. I want to be able to trust again. And not jump to conclusions. I always expect the worst.   I would really appreciate it if you wrote me back." answer - This dilemma you describe comes up a lot. I don't recommend using a hypnosis tape to put away your fears until you have really decided they are unfounded. Your brain has a lot of mechanisms that try to keep you from being hurt again. They're pretty simplistic and primitive so they can make mistakes at times, but the reason people are so thick on the planet is because overall we are built for survival. It would be one thing if you were paranoid about your boyfriend wearing a blue shirt because another boyfriend that cheated on you wore a blue shirt -- but being very anxious about your boyfriend because you found out that he is capable of getting drunk and then getting sexual with another woman is something that your brain is not going to easily put away. A complicated fact of life is that it takes quite some time to really figure out who someone really is, what they are capable of, how they handle promises and responsibilities, how they handle being with the same partner for a lengthy period of time, how they handle relationships when the relationships go into one of those "cool" periods, how they handle mistakes, how they deal with anger, etc. I usually advise people to figure on knowing someone for at least 3 years before they have a minimum amount of information needed to guess about whether they are truly likely to be partner material -- and that is assuming one doesn't have millions in the bank. (If you have millions, 3 years may be way too little time.) People do make mistakes. Sometimes they feel remorse and resolve never to make the same mistake again. Sometimes their resolve actually proves true. What you know about your boyfriend is that he can make a big mistake. What you don't know is how he handles big mistakes or how long he can keep promises. It is a big mistake for you to equate having difficulty finding a good guy with being worthless -- though it's pretty normal to react that way. Ask around. Most women find that relationships with men are difficult to establish and most often painful and of limited duration. I estimate (just based on my own experience with people) that about 3% of the guys out there are likely to make a good partner for any particular woman. This means that if you threw a rock into a stadium filled with guys and it hit and bounced off of about 10 or 15 heads, it's not likely any of the heads would be on the shoulders of guys that you'd want to partner with. My best advice is to sit down with a therapist and go over what your situation is, what your thinking is, what kinds of blind spots you have and how failures in the past have changed you. Hard times either strengthen and make you smarter, or weaken you and make you dumber about life. It can be very helpful to go over what you think you've learned from your troubles to date with a good therapist. What will likely come from a few hours going over your situation is a clearer awareness of whether you want to invest more time and worry in the relationship or less. If you ignore obvious indications that the relationship is not going to work out, you waste more time on it that could have been used to better ends. I once had a 39 year old woman come to me because she was dealing with all sorts of anxiety about her relationship not going well. "I just can't start over again, I just can't," she kept saying. In talking with her it became obvious to both of us that she had known the relationship was doomed after being in it only 6 months -- AND this was the third time she had kept going for 7 years in a relationship she knew was doomed within the first 6 or less months. She had spent 21 years of her life in these three relationships and had enjoyed 18 months and wasted more than 19 years of her life trying to keep obviously dead-end relationships from dying. That kind of tenacity is counterproductive, to say the least. She felt worthless and helpless, too. Imagine all she must have tried over the years to make something out of nothing. How could you not feel worthless and helpless after trying and failing so much? The problem is that if you really believe that you should be able to make any relationship with any male work, you're mistaken. (If you flap your arms for 20 years thinking you should be able to fly, you end up having wasted 20 years and feeling like a hopeless, worthless failure.) Finding the right relationship is trial and error. It's important to recognize when the trial is resulting in error messages. Sit down with a therapist and go over all that has happened and your fears and concerns -- and then, if it seems there is a chance that you're in a fixable relationship, your therapist will probably suggest meeting with both of you to talk about how to deal with the issue of the "lapses in judgment." At the very least, you and your boyfriend need to accept the fact that it will be many years before you can stop being hypervigilant and paranoid. This is the cost of such a mistake. If either of you believe that this should be something you can forget and forgive, you're dreaming. You'd need to be eating lead paint chips or something for breakfast for several months to achieve that level of brain damage. A decent therapist can help you both understand all the extra anxiety you will experience and all the extra time and sensitivity to your feelings your boyfriend will need to invest over the years for your relationship to work. You can assist my efforts to provide articles and other supports to the visitors to this site. Please support this site. other ways to support this site Your anxiety about your boyfriend cheating on you is not your "baggage" -- this is your learned knowledge of the dangers of life. Your boyfriend has reinforced your knowledge of the dangers. If you really want to trust again, you'll need a lot of time (years), maybe a new boyfriend and some serious luck. Trust is nice but not easily achieved. It is easily destroyed and should never be based on intentional blindness. Be watchful that you aren't so hungry for the feeling of trust that you put yourself in danger of big hurts just to try to achieve a fleeting feeling. If you really want to feel that you can trust, trust you -- trust that you can survive without a male. If you can do that you will be more likely to make the right choices with regards to your relationships. One last comment about your comment about love. Understand that you need to watch out for how feelings of love can clutter your logic. Even if you do love your boyfriend it doesn't mean much but a lot of potential for pain if he can't partner and be trusted. You can love a serial killer, a child molester, a bum, a drug addict, a philanderer, an abuser -- whatever. Love is only a small part of the picture and is almost never related to any sort of reality about whether a relationship will work. Tina Turner asked "what's love got to do with it?" and called love a "second-class emotion" -- referring to how she realized that even though she loved Ike Turner she could not endure his beatings, his unfaithfulness and his drug abuse and that in spite of years of apologies and promises of change, he could not and would not change. Not the most hope-filled, pleasant email you could read, I know. I do wish you good luck. It is wonderful to be in love and to have a partner you can trust. I bet it's also wonderful to be a genius, a movie star or a millionaire. Many people achieve these things but more seem to not. Many lose themselves and their wellbeing by letting the quest for love overshadow their sensibilities. Dr. J. - this and all other shrink rap articles are written by g. m. johnson, phd - see the head-cleaners home page for a link to more information on dr. johnson or for links to other shrink rap articles

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