Can EMDR Help You Trust Again After Being Hurt?

Trust can rebuild after being hurt, and real research on attachment and trust recovery backs that up, though no study has tested EMDR for “trust again” by that name. A small pilot trial found EMDR eased attachment insecurity, related territory. Bilateral stimulation can help settle today’s specific trust triggers as you rebuild; deeper wounds are safer with a trained therapist.

Maybe it’s a partner who hasn’t done anything wrong, and you still reread their texts twice anyway. Maybe it’s a new friend who seems genuinely kind, and some part of you is already waiting for the catch. You’d like to stop bracing. You just don’t know how to convince your body it’s safe to.

Why does one bad experience make it so hard to trust anyone?

Betrayal by someone you depended on doesn’t file away like an ordinary disappointment. Psychologist Jennifer Freyd’s betrayal trauma theory describes why: when someone you depend on for safety is also the source of harm, your mind has a stake in staying attached to them rather than fully registering the threat, a bind an ordinary disappointment doesn’t create. That bind doesn’t always stay contained to the one relationship. If a specific betrayal, like infidelity, is what brought you here, our page on getting over being cheated on goes deeper into that particular wound.

That generalizing shows up in the lab, not just in how it feels. A 2019 study in Psychological Medicine had people with PTSD from interpersonal trauma play a “trust game,” deciding how much of a small stake to hand a partner who could return it fairly or keep it. They extended measurably less trust than people without that history, even to partners who’d already played fairly, and the gap widened with how severe the trauma was. Your caution isn’t an overreaction — it’s a prediction your nervous system is still running on old evidence.

Can trust actually come back, or is the damage permanent?

Two separate lines of research say it can.

Developmental psychologists have a name for one path: “earned security.” Research following people from childhood into adulthood, including a 2002 study in Child Development, found that adults who lived through real early difficulty, but who could describe it honestly rather than minimizing it or staying flooded by it, went on to show relational functioning that looked like people who’d had an easier start. Your history doesn’t have to be clean for your present to be secure.

Trust itself can also recover after one specific breach, measurably. A 2013 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ran repeated trust-game experiments and found trust rebuilt more fully, and more easily, when it was backed by a longer track record of consistent, reliable behavior afterward, not one grand gesture. Trust tends to come back the way it broke: through real evidence, gathered slowly, not a decision you make once.

Do you have to forgive someone before you can trust them again?

No, and treating the two as the same thing tends to stall people. A 2020 editorial in Frontiers in Psychology on forgiveness research describes them as genuinely separate processes: forgiveness is something that happens inside you, letting go of resentment toward someone, while trust and reconciliation depend on their actual behavior over time and don’t have to follow at all. You can fully let go of a grudge and still, correctly, not hand someone your trust back yet. If self-blame is tangled up in this too, our page on forgiving yourself covers that separate question.

Does EMDR help with trust specifically?

Directly, not much yet, though a related signal exists. A 2023 pilot study in the Journal of EMDR Practice and Research found a course of EMDR eased attachment insecurity, the same broad territory trust issues live in. It’s one small study, encouraging but not proof EMDR resolves distrust on its own.

The theory behind the technique fits, too. EMDR’s Adaptive Information Processing model holds that a belief like “people always leave” can stay attached to an old, unprocessed experience, still shaping reactions today even with someone who’s never given you a reason for it. Our attachment wounds page goes deeper into that mechanism.

Before you try anything, go slow

Rebuilding trust touches old, tender material, so a few things matter first.

Stabilize before you start. Spend a minute somewhere calm before working with a trust trigger directly: picture a real or imagined calm, safe place, or simply feel your feet on the floor and slow your exhale.

Pick one small, recent moment, not the whole pattern. Work with today’s specific trigger, a vague answer, a canceled plan, not “everyone who’s ever hurt me.”

Know your stop point. If your distress rises above a 7 out of 10 and won’t settle, stop. Use grounding, and consider working with a professional instead of pushing further alone.

A bilateral-stimulation practice for a present-day trust trigger

With that in place, here’s a short practice for one wave of suspicion:

• Name the trigger. What actually happened, not the worst-case story: “they answered vaguely,” not “they’re definitely lying.”
• Rate the distress. On a 0–10 scale, how activated do you feel right now?
• Bring it lightly to mind. The moment, the feeling in your body. Touch it; don’t dive into the spiral.
• Add bilateral stimulation. Move your eyes slowly left and right for 20 to 30 seconds, tap alternating knees, or use an app with alternating tones.
• Pause and notice, then repeat 3 to 5 short rounds, checking your number each time.
• Log one piece of real evidence. Something true, and neutral or good, about this specific person. This is the slow accumulation the research above points to: trust rebuilds through repeated evidence, not a single decision.

EmEase, a self-guided EMDR app, offers this same technique in a guided, paced format, if you’d rather not track the timing yourself. It’s built for today’s version of this pattern, the suspicion, the urge to test someone, not a diagnosed condition or a wound rooted in childhood. You can practice at app.emease.com.

When does this need more than a self-guided practice?

This fits the everyday texture of rebuilding trust: today’s specific trigger, a wave of suspicion, the urge to check up on someone. It’s not enough on its own if your distrust traces back to childhood abuse or neglect, colors nearly every relationship rather than specific moments, comes tangled up with hopelessness, or if your distress won’t come back down during the practice above. A licensed therapist, ideally one trained in attachment-focused or EMDR approaches, is the safer path for any of those.

If you’re in crisis or having thoughts of harming yourself, please treat that as more urgent than anything on this page: visit our crisis resources page or call or text 988 (in the US).

None of this means you’re doing this wrong, or too slowly. Trust broke through real experience, and real experience, gathered patiently, is also how it tends to come back.