When your partner doesn’t trust you, it can be very painful and activate your own wounds. It can trigger anxiety because it feels like a threat to the relationship–if they don’t trust you, won’t they leave you?

This can lead you to try to prove your value and trustworthiness to them, to prove you are a good person. This can lead to exhaustion, resentment, burnout, and even open you up for exploitation or being taken for granted.

The path of growth here is to work with your own anxiety and learn to not take your partner’s trust or distrust personally. This is not easy to do, but the reality is that someone else’s stuff is theirs to work on and your stuff is yours to work on. In this situation, your work is to sit with the pain and fear you feel when they don’t trust you, and not act on it.

The problem with acting on it is that it actually does the opposite of encourage trust. Imagine you are trying to coax a stray cat to let you pet it. If you try to rush up to it and reach out eagerly, it will definitely run away. The only way to earn its trust is for you to be very stable and calm, and let it come to you when it’s ready. That will take as long as it takes, and some cats will never get there. That is reality. And coming to terms with reality is one of the hardest things to do when you are attached to reality being different.

The bottom line is that it’s not your partner’s job to affirm that you’re a good person. That’s your job, and you can do it.

Here are some questions to journal with:

• What am I making it mean about me if this person doesn’t trust me?
• Is it really true that their lack of trust reflects on me? Or could it have nothing to do with me at all?
• Have I been a trustworthy person in reality? If yes, why do I consider that not good enough? If no, what can I do to meet my own standards?
• Can I be OK if this person never trusts me?
• What happened to make me doubt that I’m a good person? Have I fully grieved that?
• Where else in my life do I struggle to know my own goodness?

When you have healed this pattern, your behavior will come from your own values, and you will not worry about how another person takes it. You will let them be where they are at, and not need them to be different so you can be OK. You will express care for them, but you won’t overstep boundaries and try to rescue them from issues that they need to work out for themselves.

Hi there! I'm Emma and I write about self-liberation. My writing is meant to share my process & inspire your own. If you want more frequent/current writing, visit my Substack Sparkly Dark, where I'm unpacking my neurodivergence.

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Thanks so much for reading! ~Emma