There is no question that trusting people can be difficult. Almost all of us experience certain difficulties in trusting people at one time or another. Furthermore, almost all of us can imagine scenarios in which trusting certain types of people (for example, many of us have a hard time trusting a lawyer). None of these scenarios are significantly unhealthy. It is highly essential at times to be on guard. Obviously, you wouldn’t want to trust strangers with your credit card information.
However, some people experience trust issues to a far greater degree. These are people whose difficulty in trusting others is so pronounced, it negatively impacts other aspects of their lives. These are people with trust issues.
Defining Trust Issues
Having reservations about whom to trust, how much to trust them, and when to trust them are natural responses. However, if you display any of the following symptoms, then it might be possible that you have trust issues:
- A complete lack of intimacy with other people, due to an inability to trust them.
- A degree of mistrust that actually interferes with one’s ability to maintain intimacy and trust with their primary partner.
- Difficulty in establishing/maintaining relationships of any kind.
- Constant, racing suspicions and anxieties about friends and family members.
- A feeling of intense anxiety/terror during physical intimacy.
- The constant belief that other people are malevolent, cruel, and out to destroy you, without anything in the way of evidence to back up these feelings.
Do you experience any of these symptoms? Do you see someone you care about displaying them on a day to day basis? If you answered yes to either of these questions, then there is an excellent chance that you have trust issues. As you can imagine, this quality can have an extremely destructive series of consequences on the life of an individual. These consequences can include not being able to enjoy existing relationships, not being able to find new relationships, and not being able to move forward/succeed at work. It is also possible through trust issues for a person to not even be able to keep their jobs.
Trust issues can come from a variety of places. Generally speaking, trust issues can occur due to circumstances that occurred during the young, formative years of an individual’s life. An extremely traumatic event in adult life, such as a violent act, or perhaps an illness, can also lead to trust issues in the aftermath.
Therapy is one possibility for addressing these issues.