How Can I Build Trust After Childhood Trauma?

Bandai Choi
Clinical Psychologist | Board-approved supervisor
Breathe-n-Smile Psychology, Essendon North, Footscray and telehealth across Australia

What can wanting closeness and distance at once feel like?

You want to know someone better. They ask how your week has been and you share a little, then worry you said too much. They remember a preference and you wonder whether you now owe them something. You might initiate contact one day and leave a kind message unanswered the next. This back-and-forth does not mean you are deliberately playing with someone, and it need not be assigned a particular attachment style. Notice when closeness feels welcome and when you need more space.

For some people, early experiences of care mixed with criticism or neglect may have made expressing a need feel risky. Research finds a modest group-level relationship between childhood maltreatment and adult attachment anxiety or avoidance. [1] That is not an inevitable outcome, and one urge to withdraw cannot reveal what happened in your childhood. Recent disappointment, the behaviour of the person you are with and the pace of this relationship can matter just as much in this moment.

Trust needs boundaries and attention to present behaviour

Trusting someone does not mean agreeing to every request or handing over your phone, friendships and time alone. More useful questions are: what happens when you say no? Can you disagree without fearing retaliation? When the person makes a mistake, do they acknowledge it and try to repair it? Healthy relationships make room for individual choices and boundaries. [3] A reassuring sentence is welcome, but it cannot replace a pattern of respectful behaviour.

If someone monitors you, restricts contact with friends, threatens you or makes you change yourself to avoid consequences, do not explain away those signs as your failure to trust. Ongoing control and isolation may be part of coercive control. [4] In that situation, safety and outside support come before an exercise in closeness. You are allowed to keep your judgement, even if you also know you have difficult experiences in your past.

How might you build trust in smaller, chosen steps?

Start by sharing something meaningful but not deeply private. Notice whether the other person listens and respects the part you are not ready to discuss. Next time, you can decide whether to say more. You do not owe anyone a complete childhood history. You get to choose the pace and content of disclosure. The other person also has their own boundaries; mutual trust leaves room for both people rather than expecting one to prove devotion through unlimited access.

You could also make one concrete request: ‘If plans change, earlier notice helps me organise my day.’ If they forget, watch how they acknowledge, explain and repair rather than demanding perfection. A person willing to listen and adjust gives you one piece of evidence about reliability. If every disagreement ends with you apologising or yielding, that is also information worth taking seriously. Small, repeated observations are more useful than testing whether anyone will promise never to disappoint you.

What can therapy add when old patterns keep returning?

Some people find it difficult to state a need even after many respectful responses. Others become highly alert or shut down as soon as there is disagreement. Complex trauma can involve relationship and emotion-regulation difficulties, but these reactions do not establish a diagnosis. [2] Therapy can help you examine present interactions alongside earlier experiences, clarify the boundaries you want to keep and practise a response that gives you more choice. You can start with a current problem rather than retelling everything at once.

A caring partner can offer respect, clarity and a willingness to repair. They do not have to become responsible for healing every earlier hurt. Deeper trauma work, if relevant, belongs in a professional relationship that can be paced and reviewed. You also do not have to wait until you find the ‘right’ partner before seeking help. If these patterns repeatedly affect daily life, our trauma and attachment therapy page explains how an initial conversation can begin.