Learning to Trust Again: Rebuilding Safety After Relational Trauma

Trust is a fragile thing. So easily broken, so slow to rebuild.

Whether the wounds happened in childhood or later in life, we’ve all known what it feels like to be let down, betrayed, or abandoned by someone we trusted, someone who should’ve stayed but didn’t. And when that kind of pain enters our nervous system, our body, our heart, it doesn’t just fade. It shapes the way we show up in the world.

I witness this regularly with my clients, but it’s also something I learned early in my life.

From Memory to Meaning

I was around five years old when I first met my father. I remember us playing, him on his knees and palms, me on his back, gripping the fabric of his shirt as he trotted around the room like a horse. I laughed and screamed, doing my best to keep my balance, wrapping my hands around his neck, inhaling an unfamiliar smell of his skin and sweat. He carried me home on his shoulders, my tiny hands disappearing inside his. In that moment, I felt I was on top of the world.

That memory stayed vividly imprinted in my mind. It created stories in my child’s brain, stories of possibilities and hope. But despite all the promises, the next time I saw my father, I was twelve. And then again at seventeen.

That kind of absence and inconsistency leaves a mark. I wouldn’t recognise it until much later, but I was already learning not just that people leave but that it must have something to do with me.

That’s what children do – interpret the world in self-referential ways. If a parent is angry, absent, distant, or depressed, they assume it’s their fault. That they are somehow “too much” or “not enough.” And unless it’s healed, that belief often travels with them into adulthood.

Trauma creates change you don’t choose. Healing is about creating change you do choose.

Michelle Rosenthall

What Is Relational Trauma?

Relational trauma isn’t always dramatic or obvious. Sometimes it’s the quiet, ongoing ache of being unseen, unheard, or emotionally unsafe in close relationships. It often starts in childhood through neglect, emotional abuse, inconsistent caregiving, or enmeshment. But it can also happen in adulthood through betrayal, manipulation, infidelity, or controlling relationships.

It gets into the wiring and becomes our sense of what’s normal. For me, love meant inconsistency, being drawn close and then left behind. And so I mirrored that. I loved, usually too much, too fast, and then suddenly not at all. I would lean in, lose myself, and when it felt unsafe, I’d retreat into isolation. Hyper-independence became my armour. “I need no one” became my mantra.

But in doing so, I wasn’t just protecting myself; I was recreating the very wound I was trying to avoid. I was abandoning myself.

Relational trauma can deeply affect:

• Our ability to trust others and ourselves
• Our sense of self-worth
• Our emotional regulation
• Our boundaries (either too porous or too rigid)
• Our attachment patterns (over-dependence or avoidance)
• Our ability to express vulnerability or ask for help
• Our choice in partners and the dynamics we tolerate

It often gets misread as “it’s just how I am.” But it’s not your personality. It’s your nervous system doing its best to protect you.

Trauma compromises our ability to engage with others by replacing patterns of connection with patterns of protection.

Stephen Porges

Why Rebuilding Trust Feels So Hard

After relational trauma, our nervous system is on high alert. Even in safe relationships, we scan for danger. We may overreact, pull away, freeze, or numb out, not because we don’t care, but because caring feels risky.

We tell ourselves we’re fine alone. That it’s safer not to rely on anyone. And sometimes, for a while, that is precisely what we need, to pull inward and find steadiness within. But eventually, we long for connection. We want to open again, even if every fibre of our being says, don’t.

So how do we begin?

Trust doesn’t require certainty. It asks only for consistency.

Rebuilding trust doesn’t happen all at once. It happens in the smallest moments. It’s not built through big declarations or sweeping promises but through steady presence. Through being seen and not judged. Through someone showing up, not once, but again and again, in ways that are calm, respectful, and safe. This way, our system slowly begins to settle, not because there’s no risk, but because our bodies learn that safety is possible again.

But most importantly, it starts with self-trust.

Rebuilding Trust, Step by Step

Reconnecting With Yourself

Healing begins within. Rebuilding trust starts with honouring your own needs, instincts, and emotions.

• Learn to listen to your body: notice what feels safe, what doesn’t.
• Honour your needs, even if they feel “too much.”
• Recognise your trauma patterns with compassion, not judgment.
• Begin to reframe limiting beliefs: “I’m hard to love” becomes “I am worthy of love that feels safe.”
• Build inner consistency through self-care routines, boundaries and practices that ground you.

Self-trust grows when you show up for yourself, daily, gently, consistently.

Building Trust in Relationships

Once your inner foundation is more stable, you can begin to explore connection with others.

• Start small. Trust is earned gradually through actions, not words.
• Be honest about your needs and boundaries, even if your voice shakes.
• Surround yourself with people who respect your pace and boundaries.
• Let people earn their place in your life through consistency, not charm.
• Consider therapy. A safe, attuned relationship with a therapist can be a powerful space to explore trust, repair old patterns, and experience what it feels like to be met with consistency and care. Sometimes, our nervous system needs to feel safety before it can believe in it again.

Recovery can take place only within the context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation.

Judith Lewis Herman 

The Healing Is Slow, But It’s Real

Healing from relational trauma isn’t linear. There will be setbacks. Times when it feels easier to shut down again or repeat the well-known pattern that you confuse with safety because it feels familiar.
Relational trauma may shape the way you protect yourself, but it doesn’t have to define how you connect. Every time you choose a new response, when you pause before reacting, when you speak instead of hiding, when you stay instead of fleeing, you are healing.

And little by little, trust begins to grow. Quietly. Gently. From the inside out.